Dossier on Australian Exploitation
To celebrate the “Focus on Ozploitation” program screening of several important Australian exploitation films from the 1970s and ’80s at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), Senses of Cinema has delved back into the archives to find articles written at the time of each film’s production or release. These have been chosen to present a historical point of view in contrast with (but also to complement) the views expressed about these same films in Mark Hartley’s documentary, Not Quite Hollywood, which is having its world première at MIFF. “Focus on Ozploitation” is co-presented by MIFF and Australian Centre For the Moving Image (ACMI) and curated by Mark Hartley and ACMI.
An extensive interview originally published in 1980 with the director of the classic road-movie thriller
Roadgames. Written by Everett de Roche and starring Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis.
A 1984 interview with the director of the Aussie outback baroque thriller
Razorback.
Review of the Everett de Roche-scripted ecological thriller directed by Colin Eggleston.
Extract from a 1980 interview with the screenwriter of
Long Weekend.
Review of the now infamous 1982 violent hunter-versus-hunted film directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith and produced by Antony I. Ginnane.
Review of Brian Trenchard-Smith’s 1986 apocalyptic thriller. One of Quentin Tarantino’s favourite Aussie movies.
Combined review of Bruce Beresford’s two early seminal comedies of the grotesque,
The Adventures of Barry McKenzie and
Barry McKenzie Holds His Own.
Feature Articles
The esteemed director of this landmark movie looks back at his most controversial film.
The author of the forthcoming first English-language book devoted to the director,
Terror and Joy: The Films of Dušan Makavejev, dissects this most sensuously complex film.
For the West, the “Czech New Wave” label unintentionally elided what was in fact a productive mix of Czech and Slovak filmmakers. Recent DVD releases from the Slovak Film Institute help reclaim their cultural identity.
Though other titles loom larger in perceptions of David Lean’s career, John Orr makes a case for the significance of Lean’s collaboration with Ann Todd in
The Passionate Friends,
Madeleine and
The Sound Barrier.
What seems at first little more than a run-of-the-mill Hollywood heist movie of the 1960s is for Gonzalez a film that “allows us to re-discover, or re-event, the order of what Edmund Husserl has referred to as the lived-world of experience”.
A Spaghetti Western, a Brechtian gangster film and a stylised French crime film by, respectively, Damiani, Fassbinder and Melville are brought together in this perceptive look at the underlying dynamics of the male friendship movie.
The success of
Casino Royale has radically re-energised and redefined perceptions of the long-standing 007 franchise. The authors offer some unexpected insights about the ever-developing James Bond stories.
Autobiography and critical analysis blend together as the author looks back to his days as a boy in the flatlands of regional Australia and the Hammer films that shaped his imagination.
Taking up literary critic A. Alvarez’s notion of a “terminal æsthetic” (as first applied to Samuel Beckett’s work), Schenker discusses its relevance to a range of contemporary films.
A highly praised Indie success, but what is it actually saying about contemporary American culture?
The Chad-born director of
Bye Bye Africa,
Abouna and
Darratt discusses the significance of his films, and the broader context of African Cinema today.
