Author Stephen Gaunson

Esben Storm  and Haydn Keenan first crossed paths at University High School in Melbourne in a cohort that also included future luminaries of Australian cinema, Philippe Mora (who would go on to direct Mad Dog M...

Depending on whose narrative is believed, Gil Brealey, producer and director/chairman of the South Australian Film Corporation (SAFC), either saved or damaged Sunday Too Far Away (Ken Hannam, 1975). The film wa...

Having previously collaborated on twelve low-budget (short and feature) films together, by 1917 Raymond Longford and Lottie Lyell were now wanting to work on larger scale feature productions. Support for this a...

The Italian “Elvis” Adriano Celentano’s performance of the Little Richard song, “Ready Teddy” in La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960) is raucous, unrestrained and pure rock. Moments earlier, jaded journalist ...

The production of The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953) began with a story written by Robert Joseph, titled “The Persuader”, in which two ex-army buddies on a fishing road trip to Mexico pick up a shadowy male hit...

“Half social-realist drama about truckers, half women’s genre melodrama about a neurotic rich wife who murders her husband and makes a play for another man”, as Robert Sklar explains, even for a Raoul Walsh mov...

… Tasmanian Gothic cinema… tends to be a response to its dark and wet landscapes, which register a paradoxical sense of beauty and menace. The dramatic inclines of Tasmania’s topography, its volatile climate, t...

Bitter Springs is a 1950 Ealing Studios production shot around Quorn, South Australia. Financed in part by the South Australian Government, who contributed some of the funding as investment to promote the t...

In the days of early film production “scenics” or “gazettes” were seminal in establishing urban film-going as “big business”. Most popular between 1903 and 1912, they coincided with the development of city film...

The recent release of the Stones remastered early seventies album, Exile on Main Street, has occasioned the resurfacing of all manner of detritus from the era. Stephen Gaunson sifts through the intersecting careers of the band and fabled photographer/filmmaker Robert Frank.

From its original duration of 70 minutes, sadly, only 18 minutes of The Story of the Kelly Gang remains. Thankfully though, the final spectacular scene of bushranger Ned Kelly’s capture still exists, albeit in ...