Sound in the Aboriginal Australian Films of Rolf de Heer

Anna Hickey-Mody and Melissa Iocca invented a new name for the cinema-goer at "Bad Boy Bubby" (1993) when they wrote: "In de Heer's film, the viewer is primarily a listener, or aurator, and secondly a spectator" and I have argued the label 'aurator' can also be used for the person experiencing "Ten Canoes" (2006). This Aboriginal Australian Dreamtime fable features dialogue recorded entirely in the Ganalbingu language of the Indigenous people it stars, and is a prime example of what I would suggest can be labeled 'The Aboriginal Australian Films of Rolf de Heer'. "The Tracker" (2002) and "Dr. Plonk" (2007) have also included depictions of Aboriginal Australians and each of the trio utilizes Cat Hope's "innovative sound ideas" to present what I argue is an aural auteur's signature revealing a post-colonial Australian world-view that privileges the justice system and eco-spirituality of Aboriginal Australians.

Australian films at large: expanding the evidence about Australian cinema performance

International markets have in recent years become a critical component of the business model for Hollywood cinema, opening up a renewed interest in the global dimensions of film diffusion. Smaller film-producing nations such as Denmark have similarly emphasised global distribution as a key component of the industry's success. Typically, however, claims for Australian film industry success rely almost exclusively on a film's domestic box office performance. This paper considers the possibilities for an expanded approach to measuring success and failure in the Australian film industry. Adopting analytic methods from cinema studies, cultural economics and geo-spatial sciences, this paper will examine the international theatrical circulation of Australian films using a unique global database of cinema showtimes. This data set captures all formal film screenings in 47 countries over an 18-month period ending 1 June 2014 and enables detailed empirical study of the locations visited by Australian-produced films. In conjunction with relevant box office data and contextual critical commentary, we propose a revised and expanded ‘film impact rating’ for assessing the reported performance of Australian films.

From liberation to appropriation : corsets and eroticism in Australian film

The corset, with its laces and stays, appears to the modern eyes little more than a stylish torture device. However, the corset enjoyed a reputation among the most fashionable women of the nineteenth century. Since small waists were the primary measure of corporeal beauty, corsets were nearly universal among Western women of the middle class upwards. Wearing a corset was also a marker of decency; only lower classes and women of dubious reputation did not wear corsets. From instrument of torture and symbol of submission to its appropriation by women as a marker of sexual liberation, the corset has gone under a sartorial and symbolic transformation remaining the most erotic element of women’s dress. This paper discusses the corset in two Australian films, Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1974) and Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrman, 2001), arguing that the corset provides a counterpoint in each film signifying the tension between beauty and respectability, on the one hand, and desire and transgression, on the other. We argue that the corset is the primary prop around which the narrative revolves as well as the key signifying hook for the audience. The fact that erotic motifs are so rare in Australian films makes the centrality of the corset in these films even more powerful as a discursive trope

The "other" in film : exclusions of Aboriginal indentity from Australian cinema

Throughout the latter half of the past century, cinema 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 Aboriginal identity have been embedded. In this article,1 exclusionary practices in Australian narratives are analyzed 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 are illuminated. The various themes in the filmic narratives are examined in order to compare and contrast the ways in which Australian films display the operation of narrative closure and dualisms within the film texts.

Boom and bust in Australian screen policy: 10BA, the Film Finance Corporation, and Hollywood's 'race to the bottom'.

In recent years, a narrative has emerged in the Australian popular media about the box office 'unpopularity' of Australian feature films and the 'failure' of the domestic screen industry. This article explores the recent history of Australian screen policy with particular reference to the '10BA' tax incentive of the 1980s; the Film Finance Corporation of Australia (FFC), a government screen agency established in 1988 to bring investment bank-style portfolio management to Australia's screen industry; and local production incentive policies pursed by Australian state governments in a chase for Hollywood's runaway production.

We argue the 10BA incentive catalysed an unsustainable bubble in Australian production, while its policy successor, the FFC, fundamentally failed in its stated mission of 'commercial' screen financing (over its 20-year lifespan, the FFC invested 1.345 billion Australian dollars for 274.2 million Australian dollars recouped - a cumulative return of negative 80 percent). For their part, private investors in Australian films discovered that the screen production process involved high levels of risk.

Foreign-financed production also proved highly volatile, due to the vagaries of trade exposure, currency fluctuations and tax arbitrage. The result of these macro and micro-economic factors often structural and cross-border in nature was that Australia's screen industry failed to develop the local investment infrastructure required to finance a sustainable, non-subsidised local sector.

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.

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.

A shameful spectacle

The linguistics of violence in film and on television is a hotly debated topic, especially whenever outrageously violent crimes are committed in the community. The debate tends to proceed thus: was the perpetrator addicted to watching violent films and videos, and if so, did the language of mediated violence translate into the language of everyday action, blurring the boundaries between fantasy and reality? The cause—effect relationship between fantasies enacted on screen and horrific real-life crimes has never been proven scientifically, despite endless governmental inquiries and many attempts by academics to discover a causation formula. I will not be looking so much at the vexed question of the relationship between stylized violence on celluloid and real violence in a community. Rather, I wish to explore the nature of a particular form of mediated, gendered violence through an analysis of the language of several key films made in the past decade focusing on the violent crime of rape: Hollywood films The Accused (1988), Casualties of War (1989), Thelma and Louise (1991), Strange Days (1996), and the Australian films Shame (1988) and The Boys (1998). In this way, I wish to show how rape is depicted linguistically in film, and how such films may actually give solutions to this abhorrent kind of violence rather than thrill the viewer vicariously, or, in a worst case scenario, stimulate people to further violence.

On location : the imagined private interior in public life

This paper reveals the interior landscapes of selected contemporary Australian films, such as The Caterpillar Wish and Bad Boy Bubby, to develop a number of thematic influences on the manner in which domestic and private lives are constructed through filmic imagination. The research uncovers the conditions that contribute to particular scenographic representations of the humble interiors that act as both backdrop and performer to subtle and often troubled narratives. Such readings are informed by the theoretical works of writer Gertrude Stein, among others, who explore the relationships between the scenographic third dimension and the fourth dimensional performance in the representation of narrative space. A further theoretical thread lies in Giuliana Bruno’s work on the tension between private and public filmic space, which is explored through the public outing of intensely private spaces generated through narratives framed by the specificities of found interiors. Beyond the interrogation of qualities of imagined filmic space is the condition whereby locations, once transformed by the event of movie making are consequently forever revised. These altered conditions subsequently reinvest the lives of those who return to the location with layered narratives of occupation. Situationally, the now reconverted interior performs as contributor to subsequent private inhabitation, even if only as imagined space. The possibility here is that the qualities of the original may be superimposed and recontextualised to invest post-produced interiors with the qualities of the other space as imagined. This reading of film space explores new theoretical design scenarios for imagined and everyday interior landscapes.

Prison

The prison casts a long shadow over Australian cinema. This chapter discusses Australian films set in penal settlements and prisons in the past, present and future. Themes discussed include the fictional depiction of actual events and people, gender and the prison film, the outback as virtual prison, the cell, and stories of unjust imprisonment and systemic brutality.

Review : "For the Term of His Natural Life" -- Norman Dawn

Synopsis and review of For the Term of His Natural Life (Norman Dawn, 1927). Includes cast and credits. For the Term of His Natural Life was one of the last Australian silent films, and also one of the most significant in the history of Australian cinema. At the time of its production, controversy raged over its depiction of convict life, its scale and cost (which was reported to be around 50,000 pounds at a time when most Australian films had budgets of less than 2,000 pounds1) and the fact that the director, several of the crew and the leading cast members were American. Australasian Films launched a publicity campaign of unprecedented scale to counter opposition to the film’s subject matter and the charge that they were “seeking to make capital out of the drab and sordid days of Australia”.2 The film’s expense was turned into a virtue: hundreds of unemployed men were used as extras, while the film also provided work for many within the Australian film industry and, according to Australasian, enabled the establishment of new production companies. The American imports who earlier had been accused of being “party to the slaughtering” of the Australian film industry, were feted for their artistic contributions, and the concerns raised in federal parliament about an American “invasion” were deflected by claims about what the local industry could learn from those with Hollywood experience.3 The publicity campaign was successful, as the film proved enormously popular at the Australian box office in its initial run. But the coming of sound film in 1928 had a considerable impact on audiences for silent films like For the Term, and its early local success was not repeated in subsequent seasons or in overseas markets...

Review : "The Square" -- Nash Edgerton

Synopsis and review of the Australian crime film The Square (Nash Edgerton, 2009). Includes cast and credits. The Square is the feature film debut of director Nash Edgerton, well-known in Australian film circles not only for his award-winning music videos and short films Deadline (first prize winner at Tropfest in 1997) and Spider, but also for his work as an actor, editor, producer, writer and stuntman on countless Australian films and television programs. The film was co-written by Edgerton’s regular partner and brother Joel, who also plays the arsonist Billy. Joel is familiar to Australian and international audiences for his television work in The Secret Life of Us as well as numerous film roles...

Review : "The Adventures of Barry McKenzie" -- Bruce Beresford

Synopsis and review of the Australian ocker comedy The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (Bruce Beresford, 1972). Includes cast and credits. The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, adapted from a comic strip written by Barry Humphries, is a landmark film in the revival of Australian cinema. It was the first film to be fully funded by the new federal agency, the Australian Film Development Corporation (AFDC), and its unexpected success (in Britain as well as in Australia) both demonstrated that Australian films could be popular, and helped establish the ‘ocker comedy’ as the first indigenous (sub)genre of the Australian ‘new wave’. In common with other ocker comedies including Stork (Tim Burstall, 1971), and Alvin Purple (Tim Burstall, 1973), The Adventures of Barry McKenzie was derided by critics despite its popular success. But as Tom O’Regan has argued, these films were vitally important in developing a public profile for Australian films, for encouraging private investment in production, and for convincing exhibitors to screen Australian films...