The film is as much about ourselves as it is about orang-utans […]. Nénette is a mystery. We don’t know what she thinks or if she thinks at all… She is a receptacle for our fantasies. She is a projection screen… The monkey house where she lives is almost like a confessional. When they talk [...]
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Louise Sheedy
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Louise Sheedy is the program coordinator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque and a PhD candidate in Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her thesis examines the interplay of politics and aesthetics in critical documentary on the Vietnam War.
Articles by Louise Sheedy:
Xin shu shan jian ke (Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain), Tsui Hark’s explosive fantasy epic, was made and released during an equally dynamic period of Hong Kong history. This dynamism also defines its complex and sometimes baffling narrative. Clashes of opposites characterise this high-powered reworking of the wuxia genre as Tsui plays with many [...]
Upon its release, Beginnings screened to “full houses over a week at [La Trobe University’s] Glenn College Lecture Hall, subsequently the Carlton Theatre and to various trade unions and peace groups” (1). This documentary initially provides an opportunity to see inside the workings of the campus politics of the time; a General Meeting of students [...]
The anxious, discordant strings that accompany the blackness that opens Arts Vietnam: A Protest to Stop the War set up an uneasy relationship between the film and the audience, a tension that remains throughout the 20-minute film. The structure of the work, dominated by cinematic collage, allows the film to operate on a number of [...]
If one of the benchmarks for the success of a historical analysis is its conceptual transferability onto contemporary situations, then Kevin Heffernan’s Ghouls, Gimmicks and Gold is very successful indeed. In a time where debates rage about how the industry should combat its ever-diminishing box office thanks to unauthorised downloads and the proliferation and normalisation [...]
Short films roam the Australian landscape in packs. While largely a nomadic species, their chosen habitats consist of festivals and specialist screenings in galleries or dimly lit bars, their numbers providing a protective shield from the slings and arrows of a harsh critical environment. In a festival like Tropfest, now the largest short film festival [...]
