Tagged Australian cinema

Introduction: Tasmania and the Cinema Van Diemen’s Land (2009) Tasmania’s intermittent relationship with the cinema dates back before the first feature film made on its rugged West Coast in 1925, Louise ...

As Tom O’ Regan states in his discussion of “Unities of Setting and Landscape” in Australian National Cinema, “It is a commonplace that landscape is central to Australian culture” (1). In order to explore the f...

Introduction Photo: from the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia “Why shouldn’t we have the moving-picture industry in Tasmania?” asked Tasmanian author Marie Bjelke Petersen at the Hobart premi...

… 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...

Credit: G. Hansen, John Honey Collection *Indigenous Australians please be aware that this article contains the name of an Aboriginal man who is now dead. In late 1977 I was offered a producer contract w...

I first heard the story of escaped convict Alexander Pearce when I was a teenager on the tour boat to Sarah Island in Macquarie Harbour. I’d been working with a theatre company in Strahan as an actor and it was...

“If colonialism can be said to have its own origin myths, none is more powerful than the suppression of the threatening ‘other’ – the disavowed animal rival, the cannibal gnawing at the human heart.” (1) ...

“I want to talk about epic poetry.” I still remember the shock when Scott Millwood opened a documentary masterclass in the bowels of the Bondi Pavilion with these words back in 2004. I was covering the class fo...

“The only real wives I have ever had have been my sailing ships. Up front, on the prow of the Zaca, there was painted, appropriately, a rooster, a crowing cock.” - Errol Flynn (1)   This article attem...

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 Gaunson on Bitter Springs Robert Picking on The Tracker T...

The 1980s, forever recalled with a mixture of fondness and regret as that spandex-clad, white glove, tufted hair and jumpsuit riddled decade taste forgot, was as much a transitional period for special effects c...

Patrick Hughes is an established director of high-end commercials. He has made advertisements for clients including Cadbury, Ford, Honda and Vodafone. Drawing from numerous long-established traditions, includin...

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 insight into the shifting policies, ideologies and practices of...

The first thing to say about Martha Ansara’s book is that it is a gorgeous object, perhaps the best argument against e-books that I have seen this year. With its large coffee-table format, glossy white type on ...

Coinciding with the emergence of documentary studies as a more or less distinct academic discipline over the last 20 years, broader interest in documentary films and the diversity of ways they engage with reali...

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...

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 a prominent figure in post-war Australian theatre and telev...

The Sapphires (Wayne Blair, 2012) opens in an idyllic rural setting. A group of young Aboriginal girls run home across the paddocks in the fading evening light to sing for a gathering of family and friends. But...

Australian screen classics are seminal for a range of reasons: whether it is a particular title’s popularity and impact upon popular culture, its cultural and textual meaning, or what the film tells us about th...

It needs real nerve to come out of a film based on a famous novel and declare unreservedly that you enjoyed the film much more than the book. I mean, books came first. Literature, as a study, preceded film by d...

Fred Schepisi has been labeled as a “major force in the Australian film industry” (1). Two of the three features he has made in Australia prior to this year – The Devil’s Playground (1976) and Evil Angels (aka ...

Barbarosa (1982) was the first feature to be made in America by any of the key figures of the Australian film “renaissance” of the 1970s. It sits alongside the initial American films of Gillian Armstrong, Bruce...

Six Degrees of Separation (1993) sits precisely mid-career in Fred Schepisi’s filmography. The third in a series of stage adaptations the filmmaker undertook in this period (Plenty and Roxanne ), the film has ...

People Make Papers (1965 Australia 16 mins) Source: ACMI Collections Prod Co: Cinesound Productions Dir: Fred Schepisi Phot: Peter Purvis Ed: Brian Kavanagh The very fact this 16-minute documentary is cal...

The inclusion of Pauline Kael’s 1980 New Yorker review of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith in An Australian Film Reader (1) has been credited with rehabilitating the film’s reputation in Australia, prompting Susa...

Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah has captured the world’s imagination in a way no Aboriginal film has done before. After a century of white filmmakers controlling (often by default) the cinematic presentation of Aboriginal culture, Therese Davis wonders whether Samson and Delilah marks the start of a new era.

Robert Connolly’s Balibo (2009) is one of the strongest and best Australian films of recent years, and a welcome, committed return to the territory and approach of such political thrillers of the 1980s as H...