Tag: Australian cinema

Online Public Talk at University of St Andrews

November 5, 2021

EDIT (11/11): If you missed my talk, but still want to catch it, you can access a recording here.

I have been invited to deliver an online research seminar as part of the Film Studies Departmental Speaker Series at the University of St Andrews next Wednesday, November 10. I’m particularly excited to be sharing some new work on the intersections of cinematic, geological, and colonial timescales in Nic Roeg’s Walkabout, which will eventually feature in the edited collection Screening Australia: Culture and Media in Context, a long overdue book project that I’ve been working on with Dr Peter Kilroy (to be published by Peter Lang next year).

Special thanks to Dr Zöe Shacklock and everyone at St Andrews Film Studies for the invite – full details and booking link below.

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Menzies Screenings (2021/22)

November 5, 2021

The first of the 2021/22 Menzies Screenings is already under our belt – a timely, pre-COP26 screening of Nic Wrathall’s vital documentary Undermined: Tales from the Kimberley (2018) in October – and we have two more brilliant films coming up to round out 2021.

The 2021/22 Menzies Screening series comprises three screenings that once again speak to the Menzies Australia Institute’s ongoing theme of ‘Bearing Witness’. From films focusing on issues of vital importance to 21st century Australia, to explorations of its history, and personal journeys of discovery, this series offers a unique range of perspectives on the contemporary nation.

In ‘Bearing Witness’ to the contemporary moment, this screening series – and the accompanying Q&A sessions – offer a chance to re-evaluate our approaches to narratives of historical and contemporary importance to Australia and its place in the world.

Further info on the three screenings can be found below,
but virtual bookings are now open: https://watch.eventive.org/menzies/

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FORTHCOMING: Ealing Abroad to be published by BFI/Bloomsbury in 2023

September 17, 2021

Having finally bitten the bullet and gotten a proposal together earlier this year, I’m pleased to say that my first monograph, Ealing Abroad: Post-War British Cinema, Settler Colonialism and Ealing Studios in Australia, will be published in 2023 by BFI/Bloomsbury.

This will be the first book-length study dedicated to the five features that Ealing made in Australia between 1945 and 1960, and seeks to position them as part of a broader trend in post-war British cinema that both embraced, and complicated, Britain’s imperial links in the 1940s and 50s, particularly as it relates to Britain’s former Dominions.

More to follow…

NEW PUBLICATION: An international production but ‘not much Australian’: authenticity and Australianness in Under Capricorn (Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism)

June 18, 2021
Presenting my paper at Under Capricorn + 70 (King’s College London, 5-6 September 2019). [Photo credit: @FilmStudiesFF]

Way back in September 2019, I was invited to participate in a symposium, organised by Prof. Charles Barr and Dr Stéphane Duckett, celebrating the 70th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s much maligned, Australian-set melodrama, Under Capricorn (1949).

Tasked with offering a perspective on the film’s Australian connections, I presented a paper entitled ‘An international production but ‘not much Australian’: authenticity and Australianness in Under Capricorn’, and I’m pleased to say that an extended and revised version of that paper has now been published as part of a special dossier on the film, Under Capricorn: 70 Years On, published by Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism (open access).

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Video Essay: David Gulpilil, settler cinema, and the Indigenous body

April 1, 2021

Coronavirus has somehow allowed me to avoid conference presentations for over a year now, whilst also opening up the opportunity to attend online versions of conferences I’ve never been able to attend in person (such as the SSAAANZ conference back in December).

The theme of this year’s online BAFTSS conference – ‘time and the body’ – got me pondering ‘bodies’ in Australian cinema, and how the body politic of national cinema has shifted since the film revival of the 1970s. The result is a ten minute video essay entitled David Gulpilil, settler cinema, and the Indigenous body, below, which is really just a sketch towards some recent thinking about Australia’s settler cinema/s, and the potential problems of absorbing Indigenous cinema (and Indigenous bodies) within a national-cultural framework that still actively excludes (or harms) First Nations communities and individuals.

At this year’s conference – hosted by the University of Southampton – I’ll be discussing the video essay, and some of these ideas, in Session F, Panel 1 – ‘Postcoloniality and Indigeneity’ – on Thursday April 8, alongside my fellow panellists Patrick Adamson and Paul Janman.

Further information on this year’s BAFTSS conference (April 7-9), including registration details, can be found on the association’s website.

David Stratton’s Stories of Australian Cinema – A Watch List

May 18, 2020

DS

 

Every Sunday evening, for the last few weeks, I’ve been live-tweeting along to David Stratton’s Stories of Australian Cinema (you can revisit the threads here: episode 1 / episode 2 / episode 3).

While the theatrical cut played at the BFI London Film Festival back in 2016 (and again at a London Australian Film event in 2017), only now has the full, three-part documentary series – produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation – finally got an airing on BBC Four in the UK. If you missed it, you can catch up via BBC iPlayer where it will remain for the next twelve months.

In the series, David Stratton – Australia’s leading British-born film critic and long-standing fixture of the Sydney Film Festival (for which he served as director from 1966-1983) – presents a fascinating and jolly (if, understandably patchy) jaunt through Australian cinema, with episodes themed around ‘Game Changers’, ‘Outsiders’, and ‘Family’.

In conversations about the series on social media, quite a few people have lamented the fact that – unlike other shows of this ilk – the BBC have elected not to show a relevant film after each episode. Others have noted that Stratton’s documentary has given them a whole new bunch of films to add to their watch-lists, especially since the UK remains on lockdown due to Covid-19.

So, without further ado, and to help you on your way to (re)discovering some of the delights that Australian cinema has to offer, here is my brief round-up of how British audiences might go about tracking down some of the films featured in the series.

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