Twice born : Dionysos films and the establishment of Greek film circuit in Australia

From the late 1940s until the late 1970s Melbourne was home to a dynamic Greek cinema circuit made up of some 30 different inner-city and suburban venues operated by a handful of vertically integrated exhibition/distribution businesses. Dionysos Films was amongst the first Greek film exhibition/distribution companies to form in Australia and from 1949 until 1956 it operated with little significant competition, establishing the parameters for a diasporic Greek film circuit that stretched across regional and metropolitan Australia and into New Zealand. This article measures the shadow cast by Dionysos Films (and its charismatic proprietor Stathis Raftopoulos) over the history of Antipodean Greek film experiences and the implications that this neglected aspect of Australian and Greek film history has for our understanding of the national cinemas in both countries.

Alt.film.au(2) : Blogging at the margins in Australian retrospective 2012

In 1972 Albie Thoms wrote: ‘In Australia it has been impossible to elicit much sympathetic appraisal from critics who seem distressed by the relation of personal film to amateur movies. Even those proselytizing for the New cinema have underrated the personal film as a worthy antidote to the market assumptions of Hollywood.’ (Thoms 1978, p. 146) The question now is, of course, is anything different in 2012? The answer is of course yes and no. Although the politics remains frustratingly familiar the digital has progressed further to the point that where in the 60s every one picked up a guitar, now we pick up a video camera. A postscript relates those films in the program not available for inclusion in the original 90s rant- (i.e. they did not exist) I have further annotated this re-play of old wounds and victories with commentary on some of the films in the screening program.

Myths and absent signifiers in representations of Aboriginal identity in Australian cinema

This article examines how meaning is always articulated in the ideological and political structures of society. This becomes apparent when evidencing articulated Aboriginal representation in Australian cinema, which signifies a representation on screen expressive of the ideological and political structures of the historical time periods in which the films were produced. Meaning, which is the relationship between the signifier and its signified, includes both denotation and connotation. Specific connotators can load a sign with multiple meanings leading to a chain of connotations.  The connotations of Aboriginal identity in Australian filmic narratives are influenced by a chain of additional signified, those of: socio-cultural variables and dominant discourses. This article analyses these chains of connotations through an examination of myths and absent signifiers in filmic representations of Aboriginal identity. The films investigated are: Jedda (Charles Chauvel 1955), Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg 1971), Night Cries (Tracey Moffatt 1990) and Rabbit Proof Fence (Philip Noyce 2002).

Film, representation and the exclusion of Aboriginal identity: examples from Australian cinema

Throughout the latter half of the past century cinema has played a significant role in the shaping of the core narratives of Australia. Films express and implicitly shape national images and symbolic representations of cultural fictions in which ideas about Indigenous identity have been embedded. In this paper, exclusionary practices in Australian narratives are analysed through examples of films representing Aboriginal identity. Through these filmic narratives the articulation, interrogation, and contestation of views about filmic representations of Aboriginal identity in Australia is illuminated. The various themes in the filmic narratives are examined in order to compare and contrast the ways in which the films display the operation of narrative closure and dualisms within the film texts.

Bollywood’s Australian yarn

 It’s 101 years since the birth of Bollywood, the world’s largest and most vibrant movie industry and, of course, that’s more than enough time to mature and alter, to grow arms and legs. For some time, but since the 1990s particularly, the connections between Australia and Bollywood have really taken hold. So sit back and enjoy a cinematic journey that’s sure to entertain. As a genre Bollywood has grown and developed over a period of 100 years, coloured by India’s history, politics, socio-economic conditions, culture, sensibilities, dreams, fantasies, hopes and expectations. The ever-increasing presence of the Indian diaspora in different parts of the world has helped to realise what we might think of as Bollywood’s cultural diplomacy project. Various Australian state tourism bodies have since supported Indian productions and used Bollywood stars as ambassadors to promote Australia as a welcoming nation. The 1996 film Indian has been credited for featuring the first appearance of kangaroos in Indian cinema. But I have noticed that as early as 1974, a Hindi film Majboor made first reference to Australia and its iconic boxing kangaroo. It featured Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan with a poster captioned: ‘Just hop, skip and jump every Thursday to Perth Sydney’. Australia is now a hot destination for Bollywood as well as regional language film-makers, with a successful foray of films from Soldier (1998) to Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013). Over the past two decades, Australian films such as Holy Smoke! (1999), The Waiting City (2009), Save Your Legs! (2012), feature India, not just as a background location but as an integral part of the plot. Bollywood’s influence on Australia can be gauged by the direction of Australian film careers. Be it the Indian-Australian actress Pallavi Sharda (Besharam) or Australia’s bowling sensation Brett Lee (Asha and Friends), Mary Ann Evans – AKA Fearless Nadia, Louise Lightfoot, Tom Cowan, Bob Christo, Tania Zaetta (Salaam Namaste), Nicholas Brown (Kites), Tabrett Bethell (Dhoom 3), Rebecca Breeds (Bhaag Milkha Bhaag), Kristina Akheeva (Yamla Pagla Deewana 2), Emma Brown Garett (Yamala Pagla Deewana), Vimala Raman (Mumbai Mirror), Anusha Dandekar (Delhi Belly), and Maheep Sandhu (Shivam). In this paper I would focus on the journeys and stories of actors, chiefly Fearless Nadia, Bob Christo, and Pallavi Sharda; and also compare a few Bollywood films, particularly Kya Kehna (2000) and Salaam Namaste (2005) made on same theme but set in India and Australia respectively, to show how Australia as has been presented as sexually liberating, visually romantic, and fantastical land of beaches and beauties.

The films of John Hughes: a history of independent screen production in Australia

ABSTRACTIn The Films of John Hughes: A history of independent screen production in Australia filmmaker and academic John Cumming tells the ongoing story of Hughes’ work illustrating the delicate balance of individual, collective and corporate agendas that many contemporary artists need to negotiate. This story begins in the 1960s with a generation of intelligent, socially engaged young people who challenge established power structures, conventions and stereotypes in art, politics and the media. Experiments were being made with grassroots democracy, with new social formations and new ways of seeing and communicating. The book also pays attention to earlier periods of cultural and political activism that captured Hughes’ imagination in the 1970s and became the subject of a number of his films over a period of nearly forty years. Through these films Cumming traces the outline of post-war film culture and production in Melbourne from the 1940s and sets this history within the context of international trends in independent filmmaking throughout the 20th Century and into the 21st.The work of an independent filmmaker has always included a great deal more than directing films. Working in an artisanal mode, he or she often performs, or has a hand in, every aspect of craft at the same time as engaging in discussion and organisation around the wider sphere of screen culture and industry. In addition to having proficiency as a producer, photographer, sound recordist, editor, distributor and exhibitor of films, there is research, organisation, lobbying, entrepreneurship and mentoring to be done. As an independent producer-director, John Hughes has engaged in all of these activities – often simultaneously. He is also a scholar, writer, organiser, activist and teacher. As a television bureaucrat he was both eminent and innovative, and through his filmmaking he has become a leading historian of Australian documentary cinema. ‘… that view – that art and politics are inherently at odds – is still lurking around. It is at the heart of cultural conservatism; and John Hughes’s film-making, from the 1970s to the present, confounds its proponents. His cinema is at once crowded, detailed, elegant and absolutely lucid; at the same time, it is shot through with political and historical understandings.’ Sylvia Lawson, ‘Such a Bloody Wonderful Place’, Inside Story, 28 April 2013.

Lynsey Martin: A case study in 1970s Australian experimental animation

Lynsey Martin’s short experimental Animations remain largely unknown internationally. His graphic 16mm films Approximately Water (4 minutes 1972), Whitewash (1973, 4 minutes), Interview (25 minutes 1973) and Leading Ladies (1975 5 minutes) are analysed for their technique and cultural position, artifacts of a productive if marginalized period of artist made films. These graphic films stand as critical works at the heart experimental filmmaking in Australia and speak through their design and production method to current trends in digital media. Martin’s work includes the use of collage and its erasure, the grain of the photographic image and handpainting and drawing imagery directly on the film surface. Martin deals with the graphic and material elements of the filmstrip, the nature of filmic movement and the nature of photography in public space. For martin his films deal with films deal abstraction and illusionism, elements of chance, the deconstruction of film language, the diary film and process as content. These films stand as historic aesthetic traces of an immediate hands-on approach to image making that came into crisis in Australia through the disappearance of technical education in the 1980s when Martin taught graphic design in technical schools.

Produções discursivas do horror: materialidade fílmica e memória na trilogia de Zé do Caixão

Pós-graduação em Linguística e Língua Portuguesa - FCLAR

Elementi postmoderni nell'horror americano contemporaneo. Forme testuali e culturali della mutazione 1968-1998

This research argues for an analysis of textual and cultural forms in the American horror film (1968- 1998), by defining the so-called postmodern characters. The “postmodern” term will not mean a period of the history of cinema, but a series of forms and strategies recognizable in many American films. From a bipolar re-mediation and cognitive point of view, the postmodern phenomenon is been considered as a formal and epistemological re-configuration of the cultural “modern” system. The first section of the work examines theoretical problems about the “postmodern phenomenon” by defining its cultural and formal constants in different areas (epistemology, economy, mass-media): the character of convergence, fragmentation, manipulation and immersion represent the first ones, while the “excess” is the morphology of the change, by realizing the “fluctuation” of the previous consolidated system. The second section classifies the textual and cultural forms of American postmodern film, generally non-horror. The “classic narrative” structure – coherent and consequent chain of causal cues toward a conclusion – is scattered by the postmodern constant of “fragmentation”. New textual models arise, fragmenting the narrative ones into the aggregations of data without causal-temporal logics. Considering the process of “transcoding”1 and “remediation”2 between media, and the principle of “convergence” in the phenomenon, the essay aims to define these structures in postmodern film as “database forms” and “navigable space forms.” The third section applies this classification to American horror film (1968-1998). The formal constant of “excess” in the horror genre works on the paradigm of “vision”: if postmodern film shows a crisis of the “truth” in the vision, in horror movies the excess of vision becomes “hyper-vision” – that is “multiplication” of the death/blood/torture visions – and “intra-vision”, that shows the impossibility of recognizing the “real” vision from the virtual/imaginary. In this perspective, the textual and cultural forms and strategies of postmodern horror film are predominantly: the “database-accumulation” forms, where the events result from a very simple “remote cause” serving as a pretext (like in Night of the Living Dead); the “database-catalogue” forms, where the events follow one another displaying a “central” character or theme. In the first case, the catalogue syntagms are connected by “consecutive” elements, building stories linked by the actions of a single character (usually the killer), or connected by non-consecutive episodes about a general theme: examples of the first kind are built on the model of The Wizard of Gore; the second ones, on the films such as Mario Bava’s I tre volti della paura. The “navigable space” forms are defined: hyperlink a, where one universe is fluctuating between reality and dream, as in Rosemary’s Baby; hyperlink b (where two non-hierarchical universes are convergent, the first one real and the other one fictional, as in the Nightmare series); hyperlink c (where more worlds are separated but contiguous in the last sequence, as in Targets); the last form, navigable-loop, includes a textual line which suddenly stops and starts again, reflecting the pattern of a “loop” (as in Lost Highway). This essay analyses in detail the organization of “visual space” into the postmodern horror film by tracing representative patterns. It concludes by examining the “convergence”3 of technologies and cognitive structures of cinema and new media.

New Myths of OZ: The Australian Beach and the Negotiation of National Belonging by Refugee Background Youth

In this article we consider the Australian beach as a material, imaginary and social arena in which different versions of national belonging are performed and contested. Focusing on two short films produced by young people from refugee backgrounds, we explore the negotiation of national belonging on the beach by people who occupy identity categories that are typically excluded from idealising Australian beach mythologies. We argue that both the production and distribution of these films contribute to a reimagining of the Australian beach that creates new opportunities for people from migrant backgrounds to engage in the co-production of Australian identities in their own terms.

Don't talk about me . . . like I'm not here: Disability in Australian national cinema

The article analyzes the representation of disability in Australian national cinema. Disability has been an enduring topic in Australian films and it has got occasional mentions in film and cultural criticism. An important pioneering treatment in this field is film critic Elizabeth Ferrier's examination of the trope of creative disabilities. Ferrier draws attention to disability in Australian film. She provides a stimulating and nuanced reading in light of the thematics of Australian cultural anxieties. "My One Legged Dream Lover," is one of the few productions that features a disabled lead character, Kath Duncan, played by disabled performer, Kath Duncan.

Streaming Italian horror cinema in the UK: Lovefilm Instant.

This article investigates the distribution of Italian horror cinema in the age of video streaming, analyzing its presence and categorization on the platform Lovefilm Instant UK, in order to investigate the importance of ‘niche’ in what is known as the long tail of online distribution and the online availability of exploitation films. I argue that looking at the streaming presence of Italian horror and comparing it to its prior distribution on home video formats (in particular VHS and DVD) we can grasp how distribution and access have shaped the understanding of the genre. In particular, I address the question of the categorization of the films made by the S-VOD services and the limits of streaming distribution, such as lack of persistency in availability and the need of enhanced curatorship.

Dirk de Bruyn: Australian master + Q&A

Dirk de Bruyn is one of Australia’s most successful and acclaimed abstract animators. It may be too soon to truly call this program a ‘retrospective’ but de Bruyn’s career none-the-less spans a significant portion of the history of abstract and experimental animation in Australia. His films are as addictive as they are bold and uncompromising examples of the genre. He displays a remarkable ability to learn the lessons gifted us by earlier greats and yet produce a flowing, beautifully realised river of imagery that is all his own. His film contain, in many instances, the spirit and ghost-narratives of his own life. MIAF is thrilled to be able to present this program and the chance to have him discuss these works in person will be one of the festival highlights.