Melbourne on Film Dossier

To coincide with the 2011 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), Senses of Cinema has commissioned a series of articles to accompany the “Melbourne on Film” season curated by the festival to help mark its 60th anniversary. These articles take a variety of approaches to the filmic representation of Melbourne over the last 60 years (and beyond), and range from analyses of large-scale international productions produced in the 1950s (the seminal On the Beach) and the 2000s (the not so seminal Ghost Rider) to a series of fascinating short documentaries that help chart shifting visions of and attitudes towards the city. These articles engage intimately with specific films being shown in the season (Malcolm Wallhead’s The Cleaners, Robin Boyd and Peter McIntryre’s Your House and Mine, John Dunkley-Smith’s Flinders Street, Colin Dean’s extraordinary documentary-musical Melbourne Wedding Bell), help chart the city’s continuities and changes across MIFF’s tenure, and provide a conceptual, philosophical, spatial, architectural and cinematic framework to place this work within. In the process, they provide a fascinating rejoinder to Ava Gardner’s infamous (and probably apocryphal) ode to Melbourne while making On the Beach: “I’m here to make a film about the end of the world… and this seems to be exactly the right place for it.”