Australian Autofiction: A Filmmaker Roundtable by Chris Luscri Chris Luscri July 2021 Australian Autofiction Outside of small research studies and articles that have appeared in academic journals, there is an absence of in-depth contextual work around personal filmmaking in Australia. This roundtable, featuring six ke...
Corinne Cantrill’s In this Life’s Body – A Personal Experience Margot Nash July 2021 Australian Autofiction I first saw Corinne Cantrill’s feature-length essay documentary In This Life’s Body in the old Valhalla Cinema in the Sydney suburb of Glebe. It must have been around 1985 and Corinne and her husband, Arthur, h...
Breathing Under Water: a film by Susan Murphy Dermody Felicity Collins July 2021 Australian Autofiction A chook enters the frame. A black cat evades the lens. An animated panther won’t be denied. In 2021, these are the figures that lurk on the outskirts of conscious thought in the days after I eject Ronin’s DVD o...
The Dissolution of Self Dirk de Bruyn July 2021 Australian Autofiction Saidin Salkic is a Bosnian-Australian filmmaker whose recent prolific output includes Waiting for Sevdah (2017, 40 mins), Silence’s Crescendo (2018, 41 mins), The Shocking (2019, 27 mins) and The Human (2020, 4...
Action and Reflection: Autobiography, Film History and the Australian Independent Documentary Adrian Danks July 2021 Australian Autofiction “The time for action is over… The time for reflection begins.” In Margot Nash’s deeply personal essay film The Silences (2015), she mines her own past, memory, history and previous filmmaking practice to tell ...
Singing songs of sevdalinka in Saidin Salkic’s The Shells Exploding Gently Chris Luscri July 2021 Australian Autofiction Saidin Salkic’s new film The Shells Exploding Gently (2020) begins, characteristically, as a work in extremis. A face, a voice, the camera held close, the corner of a door, the sound of lapping waves. At first,...
Structures of Obsession: A Partial Appreciation of Philip Tyndall’s Words and Silk Jack Rowland July 2021 Australian Autofiction “Every two or three years I watch a film, but I’m always sorry afterwards that I’ve watched it. The images in films never seem real to me.” Gerald Murnane – Words and Silk I’m standing in a long line waiti...
Fear of the Dark Dirk de Bruyn July 2021 Australian Autofiction Peter Tammer’s Fear of the Dark (1985) is partly a fictional exploration and re-enactment of the process of murder and violent intent. It is also part Cinéma vérité documentary of actor Robert Ratti’s daily lif...
My Life Without Steve Philippa Hawker July 2021 Australian Autofiction Gillian Leahy’s 1986 film, My Life Without Steve, is a story of solitude, pain and obsession, of raw emotions elegantly presented and endlessly interrogated. It begins with an exterior perspective, an image of ...
Some notes on My Blessings Fiona Villella July 2021 Australian Autofiction As this dossier shows, there is a rich and long history of personal filmmaking in Australian independent cinema. The films that belong to this tradition are disparate in many ways, but all are sincere in their ...
On Filming the Unimaginable: Memory, Silence and Time in Allison Chhorn’s The Plastic House Julia Flaster July 2021 Australian Autofiction How do you represent the ‘unrepresentable’, or even the ‘unimaginable’? This question has been at the heart of a wave of post-Khmer Rouge cinema by second and third generation filmmakers both in Cambodia and in...
