Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009) Helen Goritsas March 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema “Don’t run after poetry. It penetrates unaided through the joins.” - Robert Bresson (1) Throughout human history from Euripides to J. K. Rowling the...
The Hunt: Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971) Andrew McCallum March 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Producers’ Note: Photography of the hunting scenes in this film took place during an actual kangaroo hunt conducted by licensed professional hunters. ...
One Night the Moon (Rachel Perkins, 2001) Georgina Wills March 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema In Rachel Perkins’ musical One Night the Moon the convention of the duet typical of the classical Hollywood musical is reconfigured. In the film, ther...
Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton, 2009) Tess Fisher March 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Silence. Punctuated by the insistent ringing of a public phone. Ringing. Ringing. Ringing. Unanswered. This leitmotif in Warwick Thornton’s Sam...
The Girlfriends (Peter Elliot, 1967) Geoff Gardner March 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Way back in 2003, Nigel Buesst did a solitary excavation of Melbourne filmmaking during the 1950s and ’60s. Those years were characterised by what see...
Return Home (Ray Argall, 1990) Adrian Danks March 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema The history of Australian cinema is littered with small-scale, unobtrusive and even intimate portraits of working and middle class life that are large...
“She Invited Herself”: Sunday Too Far Away (Ken Hannam, 1975) Wes Felton February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema “Friday night too tired; Saturday night too drunk; Sunday, too far away.” – “The Shearer’s Wife’s Lament” Sunday Too Far Away is a film that never q...
Living for the Moment: Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (Mark Hartley, 2008) Martyn Bamber February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema “If you like outrageous cinema, you live and breathe to wait for those weird moments that happen every once in a while in genre cinema, where it’s lik...
Moving Out (Michael Pattinson, 1983) Peter Hourigan February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema In a rundown school, a science-teacher, Mr Clarke (Ivar Kants), is at least able to keep trouble at bay in his class of bored, disengaged teenaged boy...
Aural Association and Sensory Affect in Snowtown (Justin Kurzel, 2011) Tara Judah February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Almost as extraordinary as Justin Kurzel’s feature film debut, Snowtown, about the 1999 “Bodies in Barrels” murders, is the often-baulking reception w...
A Star Revealed as Oceania’s Persistent Film Clichés Bite the Dust: A Look Back at the First Scene in Romper Stomper (Geoffrey Wright, 1992) Inge Fossen February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Where does one begin a piece on Russell Crowe, Oceania’s most precocious and visible film export after Nicole Kidman? Which scene or what image first ...
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) Darragh O’Donoghue February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema The opening frames of Peter Weir’s film contrast the natural permanence of Hanging Rock with the man-made elevation of Appleyard College. This has led...
Night of Fear (Terry Bourke, 1973) William “Bill” Blick February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Critics have often described Terry Bourke’s Night of Fear as a “curio”. It was also a seminal work in an emerging horror genre. The film can be catego...
The Empty Space in Letters to Ali (Clara Law, 2004) Roger Dawkins February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Clara Law’s Letters to Ali is a documentary about a family’s relationship with a 15-year-old Afghan refugee, “Ali”. Trish, her husband and children be...
Anger and Banality in Ghosts… of the Civil Dead (John Hillcoat, 1988) Thomas Caldwell February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema The anger that seethes throughout John Hillcoat’s debut feature film, Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, can be felt in almost every scene. Anger is explicitl...
The Death of Venus: Inside The Eye of the Storm (Fred Schepisi, 2011) David Melville February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Adapted from a 1973 novel by the Australian Nobel laureate Patrick White, The Eye of the Storm is a tale of disintegration. Of a family, of a culture,...
Looking for Captain Thunderbolt (Cecil Holmes, 1953) David Donaldson February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema The 1950s were not good years for feature filmmaking in Australia, still less so for Australians making films. There were two releases to exhibitors i...
Key Moments in Australian Cinema the editors September 2012 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Contents: Luke Buckmaster on Dead End Drive-In Kit Harvey on Red Hill Lesley Speed on Ants in His Pants Adrian Danks on The Overlanders Stephen...
Speaking Truth to Power in Everynight… Everynight (Alkinos Tsilimidos, 1994) Tim Groves September 2012 Key Moments in Australian Cinema When thinking about the history of Australian cinema, many people might associate 1994 with only The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Ste...
The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002) Robert Picking September 2012 Key Moments in Australian Cinema The sun-drenched, semi-arid and rugged ranges of the Arkaroola Sanctuary, in South Australia’s Flinders Rangers, are an appropriately desolate and inh...
Dead End Drive-In (Brian Trenchard-Smith, 1986) Luke Buckmaster September 2012 Key Moments in Australian Cinema The 1980s, forever recalled with a mixture of fondness and regret as that spandex-clad, white glove, tufted hair and jumpsuit riddled decade taste for...
Red Hill (Patrick Hughes, 2010) Kit Harvey September 2012 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Patrick Hughes is an established director of high-end commercials. He has made advertisements for clients including Cadbury, Ford, Honda and Vodafone....
“Scorched earth and space”: The Overlanders (Harry Watt, 1946) Adrian Danks September 2012 Key Moments in Australian Cinema The Overlanders is the first of five films made by Ealing Studios in Australia between the mid-1940s and the late 1950s. It provides a fascinating ins...
A Bitter Ending in Bitter Springs (Ralph Smart, 1950) Stephen Gaunson September 2012 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Bitter Springs is a 1950 Ealing Studios production shot around Quorn, South Australia. Financed in part by the South Australian Government, who co...
Evie Hayes in Ants in His Pants (William Freshman, 1939) Lesley Speed September 2012 Key Moments in Australian Cinema A key moment in Australian film is the screen debut of Evie Hayes in Ants in His Pants. An American-born comedian singer and actress, Hayes became...
“You and the earth, Cathy. That’s all I want.” Sons of Matthew (Charles Chauvel, 1949) Andrew Katsis March 2011 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Sons of Matthew was unquestionably Charles Chauvel’s most polished and assured effort to that point, despite a notoriously arduous production period t...
Marbuk Struts His Stuff: Jedda (Charles Chauvel, 1955) Peter H. Kemp March 2011 Key Moments in Australian Cinema “You silly lubras. All the time you talk about this new boy Marbuk. He’s the same as any other boy.” - Jedda (Ngarla Kunoth) to Aboriginal station wo...
“A pointed condemnation of an effete Western society”: The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (Bruce Beresford, 1972) Greg Dolgopolov March 2011 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Contemporary Australian cinema has lost any sense of spontaneity or carnivalesque excess in the prison house of worthiness and realism. Aside from gen...
Chicks Don’t Surf: Puberty Blues (Bruce Beresford, 1981) Rose Capp March 2011 Key Moments in Australian Cinema The penultimate scene in Puberty Blues is for most viewers including this writer, the defining moment in the film. Over the course of the narrative, s...
Bubby’s Cosmic Moment: Bad Boy Bubby (Rolf de Heer, 1993) Lindsay Coleman March 2011 Key Moments in Australian Cinema The annals of world cinema contain their share of anti-clericalism, atheism, and blasphemy. Yet the Australian film Bad Boy Bubby, directed by Rolf de...
Performance Anxiety: Shine (Scott Hicks, 1996) Fincina Hopgood March 2011 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Australian cinema rarely embraces the bold, hyperbolic flourish of full-blown melodrama; our family melodramas tend to remain grounded in a realist ae...
“It’s tangled”: Lantana (Ray Lawrence, 2001) Christie Long March 2011 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Ray Lawrence’s Lantana is a multi-strand narrative drawing four couples into a web of love, deceit, sex and death.This film adaptation of Andrew Bovel...
The Camera in the Iron Helmet: Ned Kelly (Gregor Jordan, 2003) Daniel Eisenberg March 2011 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Mark Juddery has claimed that, without film, Edward “Ned”Kelly could not be the national icon he is today (1). When viewing Kelly’s cinematic legacy, ...
The Story of the Kelly Gang (Charles Tait, 1906) Stephen Gaunson July 2010 Key Moments in Australian Cinema From its original duration of 70 minutes, sadly, only 18 minutes of The Story of the Kelly Gang remains. Thankfully though, the final spectacular scen...
Mike and Stefani (R. Maslyn Williams, 1952) Dirk de Bruyn July 2010 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Mike and Stefani is a neo-realist-style drama influenced, according to Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper (1), by the work of Roberto Rossellini and Robert F...
Not Quite 360-degree: Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971) and Australia (Baz Luhrmann, 2008) Hugh Marchant July 2010 Key Moments in Australian Cinema “If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.” - Billy Wilder A 360-degree pan is a virtuoso statement, acting to convinc...
