Tagged 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 discomfort experienced from the fear of the unknown, an ina...

Producers’ Note: Photography of the hunting scenes in this film took place during an actual kangaroo hunt conducted by licensed professional hunters. No kangaroos were expressly killed for this motion picture. ...

In Rachel Perkins’ musical One Night the Moon the convention of the duet typical of the classical Hollywood musical is reconfigured. In the film, there is a particular moment whereby Perkins employs a harmony w...

Silence. Punctuated by the insistent ringing of a public phone. Ringing. Ringing. Ringing.  Unanswered. This leitmotif in Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah embodies some of the biggest issues raised i...

For those of us with an interest in Australian film, the idea of Asian Australian cinema might evoke a short list of names and titles, all from the very recent past. Examples might include Clara Law’s SBSi-prod...

Way back in 2003, Nigel Buesst did a solitary excavation of Melbourne filmmaking during the 1950s and ’60s. Those years were characterised by what seemed like a rather large amount of naively optimistic filmmak...

The history of Australian cinema is littered with small-scale, unobtrusive and even intimate portraits of working and middle class life that are largely forgotten in many accounts of what is troubling called Au...

“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 quite settles on its identity or purpose. It begins with a ba...

“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 like, you can’t believe you’re seeing what you’re seeing.” - Q...

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 boys. His pupils are largely the sons of migrants from the post...

Almost as extraordinary as Justin Kurzel’s feature film debut, Snowtown, about the 1999 “Bodies in Barrels” murders, is the often-baulking reception with which it is met. Peter Bradshaw writing for The Guardian...

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 “made” him and encapsulated his particular qualities? The ma...

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 viewers to read the immutability of the Australian landscap...

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 categorised as part of the phenomena known as Ozploitation (a seri...

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 begin writing letters to Ali while he is being held at the Por...

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 explicitly articulated, acts of violence resulting from anger are dep...

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, of an entire social and psychological way of life. An upper...

The 1950s were not good years for feature filmmaking in Australia, still less so for Australians making films. There were two releases to exhibitors in 1950: Britsh company Ealing’s Bitter Springs (Ralph Smart)...

This dossier (the first of a projected series) on contemporary Australian filmmakers focuses on currently active directors who started making audiovisual work in the 1990s or 2000s. Although a number of these f...

Gregor Jordan (b. 1966, Sale, Victoria) is a versatile Australian director recognised for his capacity to work across multiple platforms (cinema, television, online, documentary, shorts and music video) and his...

Since her traineeship with the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association in 1988, Rachel Perkins has become an iconic figure of Australian Indigenous film and television. This article examines Perkins’ us...

plunge their characters into all kinds of darkness, where a sense of ultimate self may be found or, more disturbingly, lost. Audiences prepared to meet such daunting challenges would be right to think they are...

It’s all about creating doorways. This was the message of writer/director Scott Hicks, winner of the 2013 Don Dunstan Award for outstanding contribution to the Australian film industry, which was presented at t...

In Mark Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood (Mark Hartley, 2008), the writer/director explores a substantial group of underappreciated Australian genre films produced in the 1970s and 1980s. The genteel historicity o...

Albie Thoms, 1997 (Photo: Peter Mudie) Albie Thoms (1941-2012) was one of the most significant figures of Australian postwar film culture. In a peripatetic career that stretched from his adventurous work wi...

I. Where the Crocodiles Are: Mad Bastards I am really proud of this movie most of all because it does justice to the tough men of The Kimberley who have transformed their lives by tempering their wildness, and...

The Memorial Event – Thoms’ Resurrection On 17 December 2012, a large group of people came together in Paddington Town Hall to celebrate Albie Thoms’ life, and to launch his book, a memoir called My Generati...

By Danni Zuvela for OtherFilm Albie Thoms (1941-2012) led a remarkable life. Perhaps most well-known as a filmmaker and founder of the pioneering avant-garde film organisation Ubu Films (1965-1970), Thoms wa...

By Danni Zuvela for OtherFilm The scene is a screen, but split into three. A line, radiating from centre frame, separates the left trident (tinted green) from the top trident (magenta) and the right (violet)...

Albie Thoms at the Sydney Underground Film Festival One of the last things Albie Thoms did before he died late last year was organise a launch party for the book he was rushing to finish and see published. ...

Unlike any other, without a doubt. For everyone that knew Albie, had worked with him, had shared a laugh or had watched his films and read his writings – this man was a gentle articulate giant of that wonder...

I met Albie Thoms only once, in 2009, when the Australian Centre for the Moving Image revived his 1969 feature Marinetti – an avant-garde extravaganza described in Thoms’ 1978 essay collection Polemics For a Ne...

In the 1970s I was a regular reader of Albie Thoms’ articles on Australian cinema – with their emphasis on alternative filmmaking – in Filmnews, and appreciated him compiling the best of them for his book Polem...

“Another sacred fire has gone out…” That’s the opening line of the poem I recited at the wake for Shelton Lea in 2005. Now I want to say it again for Albie. As a filmnik (not the same as “film buff”) during ...

In 1988 Warner Roadshow Studios opened on the Gold Coast in south-east Queensland, with four soundstages and other facilities to support film and television production. It was a partnership between Warner Broth...

In her new book Jane Mills reinterprets and critiques one of Australia’s most controversial film classics, Jedda (Charles Chauvel, 1955).This book belongs to the Currency Press Australian Screen Classics series...