Senses of Cinema - Issue 28 Sept-Oct 2003

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Issue No. 28, Sept-Oct 2003
editorial for Issue 28

Topics In This Issue

Australian Cinema Peter Tscherkassky & the Austrian Avant-Garde Cinema and Music Features Cinema and the Gallery David Thomson - Two Takes Deleuze and Cinema Book Reviews Film Festivals CTEQ Annotations

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Australian Cinema

Crocodile Dundee

Nice 'N' Easy: Speaking Frankly about The Night We Called it a Day by Adrian Danks
Despite an intriguing fact-based premise and Dennis Hopper, this new comedy about Frank Sinatra's visit to Australia lacks wit or resonance.
Translations of the Flesh: International Relations as Romantic Comedy in Recent Australian and British Film by Arthur Lindley
From Crocodile Dundee to Hugh Grant, how are the misadventures and rapprochements of characters from different countries used to convey larger, political meanings?

Freeze Frame

Super-8 Lives! The Sydney Moving Image Coalition by Lucas Ihlein
This group of Australian independent filmmakers continues to produce and screen experimental work in a variety of formats.

Peter Tscherkassky & the Austrian Avant-Garde

Singing in the Rain - Supercinematography by Peter Tscherkassky by Alexander Horwath
Tscherkassky's career, which ranges from work on Super 8 to 35mm, is distinctly post avant-garde, characterised by a unique approach to traditions of filmmaking, film theory, the physicality of film, the self and the history of cinema.

Leda mit dem Schwan

Found Face: on Outer Space by Christa Blümlinger
Re-reading found footage in an original way, Outer Space moves between emotion and analysis, figuration and abstraction.
Counting the Waves: A Summary of Activity by Mark Webber
Webber provides an overview of Austrian avant-garde cinema from the 1950s to the present.
Arnold, Brehm, Deutsch and Tscherkassky: Four Contemporary Austrian Avant-garde Filmmakers by George Clark
Analysing in turn the aesthetics, thematics and politics of each of these filmmakers' work, Clark presents a comprehensive view of contemporary Austrian avant-garde cinema.

Expanded Cinema as Expanded Reality by Valie Export

In this lecture, the "Expanded Cinema" pioneer discusses her radically materialist, anti-authoritarian work, in which "the deconstruction of dominant reality" allows new ways of seeing and perceiving.

Cinema and Music
Ophuls Conducting: Music and Musicality in Letter from an Unknown Woman by Alexander Dhoest
Music is not only a crucial formal element of Letter from an Unknown Woman, but also a suggestive metaphor for the film's artistry in general, as this detailed analysis shows.

Film ist 7-12

David Bowie

"Do Not Forsake Me: The Ballad of High Noon" and the Rise of the Movie Theme Song by Deborah Allison
How the hugely successful theme song for High Noon changed musical conventions in Hollywood.

"Well, I Wouldn't Buy the Merchandise": David Bowie as Postmodern Auteur by Adam Trainer
Can a pop star be an auteur? Focusing on David Bowie's film roles of the 1980s, this essay argues that consistent themes and techniques recur in his work across a variety of media.

Features

Dancing with Myself, Drifting with My Camera: The Emotional Vagabonds of China's New Documentary by Bérénice Reynaud
A sweeping analysis of the rise and history of documentary filmmaking in China, its significance as a formally innovative medium and a voice for the marginalised.

Mango Yellow

The Cliff and the Flume by Bill Krohn
A "great poet of space", Hollywood director Allan Dwan pursued consistent formal interests across 50 years, multiple genres and hundreds of films. Krohn provides a partial map of the territory.

The Rise of the Mandacaru: Brazilian Cinema Renewed by Jorge Didaco
An account of Brazilian cinema post-1992 that interweaves the country's politics and temperament with its cinema.

Orchestration of Tears: The Politics of Crying and Reclaiming Women's Public Sphere by Saito Ayako
Examining the 1953 Japanese film Twenty-Four Eyes, Ayako unravels how affective discourses such as crying have been appropriated for "higher" purposes in Japanese history, making women's tears rarely their own.
Against the Grain: On the Cinematic Vision of Manoel de Oliveira by Randal Johnson
This discussion of Oliveira focuses on his '70s work and its interest in the specificity of cinema in relation to theatre, literature and the other arts.
Acting "Genius": Judy Davis by Lesley Chow

Manhandled

How can an actor convincingly suggest "genius" in a character? Judy Davis' stylised, self-conscious performances approach this problem in an unusual way.

Le Soulier de Satin

The Swine who Rewrote F. Scott Fitzgerald: Joseph L. Mankiewicz as Producer by Tag Gallagher
As a producer for MGM, Mankiewicz put his signature on films by a variety of directors – not necessarily for the better.

Cinema and the Gallery

The Last Picture Show: Film and Video Installation in the Late '60s and Early '70s by Genevieve Yue
Yue looks at the late '60s, early '70s moment when cinema and video intermingled in the gallery space; in particular, she examines Anthony McCall's Line Describing a Cone and Bruce Nauman's Live-Taped Video Corridor as exemplars.

Thriller

Gleaning the Future from the Gallery Floor by Chris Dercon
Writing in 2002, Dercon discusses the trends and principles which underlie work by a younger generation of gallery-based film and video artists – a "tertiary cinema" which may prefigure new developments in the medium as a whole.

Cinema in the Gallery - Discontinuity and Potential Space in Salla Tykkä's Trilogy by Maria Walsh
Examining Salla Tykkä's trilogy, exhibited earlier this year, Walsh argues it's far removed from the deconstructionist mode of film installation, and that it instead explores ideas of spectatorship and emotion, narrative and genre in ways conducive to feminist aesthetics.

Science and its Signs: An Interview with Ken McMullen by James Leahy
Ken McMullen's varied career has taken him from gallery art to feature filmmaking and back again. This 2001 interview focuses on his exhibited video projection Signatures, a response to the technology and ideas of modern physics.

Line Describing a Cone

David Thomson - Two Takes

Confessions of a Film Hater by Dan Harper
David Thomson's film criticism continues to incite passion and debate. Harper takes a chilly view of the latest edition of his New Biographical Dictionary of Film...

Speed and Light: David Thomson on Film by Lesley Chow
...but this second assessment argues that despite his foibles, Thomson remains unrivalled as a describer of the film-viewing experience.

Deleuze and Cinema
Antonioni's L'avventura and Deleuze's Time-image by Hamish Ford
Deleuze's concept of the "time-image" offers insights into Antonioni's still-radical treatment of time and space.
"La Loïe" as Pre-Cinematic Performance - Descriptive Continuity of Movement by Erin Brannigan
Establishing a connection between the techniques of turn-of-the-century dancer Loïe Fuller and theories of movement emerging at the time, Brannigan argues for the place of Fuller's dancefilm in the development of the cinematic apparatus.