Australian Film Theory and Criticism

Description

The third part of a three-volume work devoted to mapping the transnational history of Australian film studies, Volume 3: Documents concludes the project by gathering together the documents that were produced during the rise of film studies in Australian academia from 1975–85. Through these sources we see the development of the particularities of Australian film theory and criticism, its relationship to its international counterparts and the establishment of key positions and the directions in which they develop. Editors Deane Williams and Constantine Verevis here collect key articles, including the works of Paul Willemen, Sam Rohdie, Ross Gibson and Meaghan Morris, among many others, in order to conclude this pioneering historiographic account of Australian film studies.

Acknowledgements

Introduction: ‘Notes for a History of Contexts’

Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams

1972

Experimentalists 1

Sylvia Lawson

1974

Francis Birtles: Cyclist, Explorer, Kodaker

Ina Bertrand

1975

Feminist Critique

Meaghan Morris

1976

Corsetway to Heaven: Looking Back at Picnic at Hanging Rock

Ian Hunter

Editorial Article

John Tulloch

1978

Gilda: Images of Women – Notes for Discussion

Lesley Stern

1979

Fetishism in Film ‘Theory’ and ‘Practice’

Ian Hunter

Towards Decolonization: Some Problems and Issues for Film History in Australia

Sylvia Lawson

The Australian Journal of Screen Theory

Adrian Martin

Independent Feminist Filmmaking in Australia

Lesley Stern

Oedipal Opera: The Restless Years

Lesley Stern

1980

Editorial

Robert Rothols [as R.R.]

1981

Stock Shock and Schlock

Stuart Cunningham

Film and History: Canberra Conference

Anna Grieve

Recent ‘Political’ Documentary: Notes on Union Maids and Harlan County USA

Noel King

The Second Australian Film Conference: Theory Weary

Adrian Martin

The Second Australian Film Conference, or A Long Way from Lana Turner

Brian McFarlane

Editorial

John Nicoll

On Screen

Tom O’Regan

1982

Feminist Film Theory: Reading the Text

Barbara Creed

‘The Public Wants Features!’: The (Creative?) Underdevelopment of Australian Independent Film Since the 1960s

Helen Grace

1983

Super 8: The Phenomenon Turned Eventful

Ted Colless

Independent Feminist Filmmaking and the Black Hole

Felicity Collins

Pornography and Pleasure: The Female Spectator

Barbara Creed

The Australian Film Industry and the Holy Roman Empire

Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka

Camera Natura: Landscape in Australian Feature Films

Ross Gibson

Changing the Curriculum: The Place of Film in a Department of English

Noel King

Australian Documentary Cinema

Albert Moran

The Practice of Reviewing

Meaghan Morris

Australian Filmmaking: Its Public Circulation

Tom O’Regan

A National Cinema: The Role of the State

Sam Rohdie

‘Murder, Murder, Dangerous Crime’

Bill Routt [as Bill Gent]

Remarks on Screen: Introductory Notes for a History of Contexts

Paul Willemen

1984

‘National Identity’ / ‘National History’ / ‘National Film’: The Australian Experience

Ina Bertrand

The Australian Journal of Screen Theory

Felicity Collins

After Futur◊Fall 

Ross Gibson

Second History and Film Conference Report

Sally Stockbridge

1985

Glimpses of the Present

Philip Brophy

Don Ranvaud: Of Framework and Festivals

Rolando Caputo

Yondering: A Reading of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

Ross Gibson

1987

Charles Chauvel: The Last Decade

Stuart Cunningham

About the Editors

Sujets

• Media Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Película fotográfica
• General officer
• History of film
• General
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783208395
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2018 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2018 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2018 Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover images: Zentropa interior. Photo Sophie Bech; Paradox interior.     Photo Eva Bakøy; Aardman exterior. Photo Simon Dowling; JVtv exterior.     Photo Roel Puijk.
Production manager: Matthew Floyd
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-837-1
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-838-8
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-839-5
Printed and bound by TJ International Ltd
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Acknowledgement
Introduction: ‘Notes for a History of Contexts’
Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams
1972
Experimentalists
Sylvia Lawson
1974
Francis Birtles: Cyclist, Explorer, Kodaker
Ina Bertrand
1975
Feminist Critique
Meaghan Morris
1976
Corsetway to Heaven: Looking Back at Picnic at Hanging Rock
Ian Hunter
Editorial Article
John Tulloch
1978
Gilda: Images of Women – Notes for Discussion
Lesley Stern
1979
Fetishism in Film ‘Theory’ and ‘Practice’
Ian Hunter
Towards Decolonization: Some Problems and Issues for Film History in Australia
Sylvia Lawson
The Australian Journal of Screen Theory
Adrian Martin
Independent Feminist Filmmaking in Australia
Lesley Stern
Oedipal Opera: The Restless Years
Lesley Stern
1980
Editorial
Robert Rothols [as R.R.]
1981
Stock Shock and Schlock
Stuart Cunningham
Film and History: Canberra Conference
Anna Grieve
Recent ‘Political’ Documentary: Notes on Union Maids and Harlan County USA
Noel King
The Second Australian Film Conference: Theory Weary
Adrian Martin
The Second Australian Film Conference, or A Long Way from Lana Turner
Brian McFarlane
Editorial
John Nicoll
On Screen
Tom O’Regan
1982
Feminist Film Theory: Reading the Text
Barbara Creed
‘The Public Wants Features!’: The (Creative?) Underdevelopment of Australian Independent Film Since the 1960s
Helen Grace
1983
Super 8: The Phenomenon Turned Eventful
Ted Colless
Independent Feminist Filmmaking and the Black Hole
Felicity Collins
Pornography and Pleasure: The Female Spectator
Barbara Creed
The Australian Film Industry and the Holy Roman Empire
Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka
Camera Natura: Landscape in Australian Feature Films
Ross Gibson
Changing the Curriculum: The Place of Film in a Department of English
Noel King
Australian Documentary Cinema
Albert Moran
The Practice of Reviewing
Meaghan Morris
Australian Filmmaking: Its Public Circulation
Tom O’Regan
A National Cinema: The Role of the State
Sam Rohdie
‘Murder, Murder, Dangerous Crime’
Bill Routt [as Bill Gent]
Remarks on Screen: Introductory Notes for a History of Contexts
Paul Willemen
1984
‘National Identity’ / ‘National History’ / ‘National Film’: The Australian Experience
Ina Bertrand
The Australian Journal of Screen Theory
Felicity Collins
After Futur◊Fall
Ross Gibson
Second History and Film Conference Report
Sally Stockbridge
1985
Glimpses of the Present
Philip Brophy
Don Ranvaud: Of Framework and Festivals
Rolando Caputo
Yondering: A Reading of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
Ross Gibson
1987
Charles Chauvel: The Last Decade
Stuart Cunningham
About the Editors
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank the Australian Research Council for financial support provided by an ARC Discovery Grant for this project. At Intellect, we thank Jelena Stanovnik for her initial interest in, and ongoing support for, this and other volumes in the Australian Film Theory and Criticism series. Special thanks to Roberto Letizi and Shweta Kishore for their research assistance in preparing this volume, and to Lesley Stern for making available a copy of her notes, ‘ Gilda : Images of Women’.
Introduction
‘Notes for a History of Contexts’
Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams
I n ‘Remarks on Screen ’, his snapshot of the cultures of the British film journal (republished in this volume), Paul Willemen writes:
As institution, Screen is a space holding contradictions, promoting some discourses, excluding others, closing off potential areas of productivity, and opening up others. The criteria for (and the determinations on) that dynamic of discourses in movement are many and complex and cannot simply be ‘read’ on the pages of the journal, nor can they be reconstructed by means of an immanent reading of the Screen text. The account of the magazine presented in this paper offers reference-points for a possible way of understanding the magazine’s trajectory in relation to the various forces that determine the conjuncture within which it is caught, and which impress themselves on the way internal contradictions evolve.
(Willemen 307)
Without diminishing the import of what follows, borrowing Willemen’s subtitle for our own, and as has been the focus of the previous two volumes – Critical Positions and Interviews – of this Australian Film Theory and Criticism ( AFTC ) project, we have taken some direction from the kind of approach proposed by Willemen. As we (King, Verevis and Williams) suggested in the Introduction to volume 1, this project of tracing the academicization of film studies in Australia in the period 1975−85 cannot be read simply from the surface of the text – the collected ‘Documents’ of this third volume – but is dealt with, in our formation, as an unwieldy intersection of institutions, personnel and critical positions. For us, the particularity of film studies in the academy can only be understood in relation to the innumerable ‘discourses in movement’ during this period. Following Willemen, we have proposed across these three volumes that Australian Film Theory and Criticism , in this period (and we would also point to the impact of preceding years and the resonances of those that follow), cannot be contained in three volumes. As we (King and Williams) suggested in the Introduction to volume 2, we look forward to responses to this project, to people addressing its shortcomings and lacunae and following up on its suggestions (10), but would also emphasize that these volumes do go some way towards mapping out a series of networks around which Australian film theory and criticism circulated.
While we have republished Willemen’s ‘Remarks on Screen ’ here, some further accounting for these networks was initiated by Willemen in his editing (and ‘Presentation’) of a special Australian Film Culture dossier in Framework issues 22/23 (1983) and 24 (1984), where he collected articles (in issue 22/23) by Sam Rohdie, Tom O’Regan, Noel King and Tim Rowse, Albert Moran, Ross Gibson and Meaghan Morris and (in issue 24) Jan McSweeney, Felicity Collins, Sylvia Lawson, and Helen Grace and Erika Addis. Many of these authors are represented in this volume, as are five of the key articles from Willemen’s dossier (some in versions that predate those published in Framework ): Collins, ‘ The Australian Journal of Screen Theory ’, Gibson, ‘Camera Natura: Landscape in Australian Feature Films’ (from On the Beach ), Rohdie, ‘The Australian State: A National Cinema’ (from Arena ), O’Regan, ‘Australian Film Making: Its Public Circulation’ and Morris, ‘The Practice of Film Reviewing’.
Preceding Willemen’s garnering of Australian articles for Framework was Noel King’s ‘Recent “Political” Documentary: Notes on Union Maids and Harlan County USA ’, which, we think, is the first article by an Australian academic to be published in Screen . Originally presented at the Second Australian Film Conference in Perth (1980), its publication was facilitated by international guest, Manuel Alvarado. At the time, King’s piece was not so much a controversial critique of canonical feminist film works – Jim Klein, Julia Reichert and Miles Mogulescu’s Union Maids (1976) and Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County USA (1976) – as it was an examination of the discourses of film criticism in relation to political documentary. Following on the heels of E. Ann Kaplan’s chapter, ‘The Realist Debate in the Feminist Film: A Historical Overview of Theories and Strategies in Realism and the Avant-Garde Theory Film (1971−81)’ from her Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (1983) and prefigured by Julia Lesage’s ‘The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film’ (from Quarterly Review of Film Studies , 1978), King’s (white Australian male) intervention attends more to the two films’ reception – in Cineaste (Linda Gordon) and Jump Cut (Ruth McCormick) – and follows the work of Roland Barthes, Christian Metz and Paul Willemen to ‘attempt to read these documentaries against the grain, to refuse the reading it is the work of their textual systems to secure. In seeking to refuse these films in their current form a step is taken towards thinking what might be put in their place’ (9).
Screen was, of course, among the highest profile international film journals, but in his AFTC volume 2 interview, Dana Polan talks about his encounter with Australian film (and other) publications during a visit to the 1985 Screen Studies of Australia conference in Sydney. Polan mentions Continuum , The Australian Journal of Screen Theory and Art & Text as some of the local publications he already knew about, and of going to Glebe Books in Sydney to buy
all these small press little editions of things that you couldn’t find elsewhere [...] and that was the one thing that really impressed me, the amount of publ