ABSTRACT In this article, we explore the orientation of queer bodies to the city – and to Lisa French’s (2013) motif of ‘looking from the largely industrialised west at the city’ in particular – in three films directed by Ana Kokkinos: Only the Brave (1994), Head On (1998), and Blessed (2009). In doing so, we take up Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenological approach to focus on Alex (played by Elena Mandalis)

ABSTRACT This article analyses the development of Wellington tourism film from 1991 to 2008, release years of Absolutely Positively Wellington and Spoil Yourself in Wellington TV commercials, respectively. While performing the textual analysis of five case studies released for domestic TV circulation, it examines their underlying tourism marketing and place-branding dynamics in the broader context

(2022). Power, identity and production: issue 1 introduction. Studies in Australasian Cinema: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 1-1.

ABSTRACT This article studies the carnivalesque subversion of oppressive systems using the narrative gaze of children in Taika Waititi’s three films, Boy (2010), Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), and Jojo Rabbit (2019). Waititi has a wide range of filmography to his assets and his films, while comically articulating his politics, incorporate new vocabularies to tackle various forms of oppression. The

ABSTRACT The first 20 years of the twenty-first century have seen a flourishing of research about women film and media creatives, their industrial positioning, and media output in industries around the globe, but overwhelmingly this research has focussed on the woman director. Women below-the-line workers, their workplace experiences, and their impression of their own creative contributions, particularly

(2022). Australian Genre Film. Studies in Australasian Cinema: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 49-51.

ABSTRACT This paper reports findings from interviews with key Australian stakeholders involved in Australian films with gender- and sexually-diverse (LGBTQ+) characters, themes and narratives. The paper found that directors, creative producers, screenwriters and actors involved stakeholders of Australian LGBTQ+ film expressed a desire to impact their audiences in ways that emphasise the value of entertainment

(2021). Beyond exploitation: preface to issue 3. Studies in Australasian Cinema: Vol. 15, Independent and Low Budget Filmmaking in Australia, pp. 83-84.

(2021). Introduction. Studies in Australasian Cinema: Vol. 15, Independent and Low Budget Filmmaking in Australia, pp. 85-86.

ABSTRACT Australian cinema is defined as simultaneously national, international and transnational. This paper takes these defined characteristics and applies them to the low budget, independent feature sector. It argues the sector mirrors the orientation of the wider industry. Given the instrumental role the national screen agency, Screen Australia, plays in influencing the direction of the industry

ABSTRACT This study investigates the impediments that Australian, female, independent filmmakers face in bringing female-centred stories onto the screen. In 2016, the federal screen funding agency Screen Australia launched Gender Matters to better understand the many barriers facing women filmmakers and create opportunities for female screen creatives to gain equity in the screen industries. But how

ABSTRACT The Five Provocations (2018), Angie Black’s debut low-budget, independent feature film, began production without a script. Free from the requirements of development funding and operating with what she described as a ‘no budget’ model, Black worked with her actors to develop characters and stories in an extended period of improvisation. While improvisation in low budget, independent cinema

ABSTRACT For independent Australian filmmakers working outside traditional funding sources, the script often provides the sole means of raising finance to take the film into production. In the case of the low budget Australian feature films Pimped ([2018], “Directed by David Barker. Playground Films.” Apple TV) and Watch the Sunset ([2017], “Directed by Tristan Barr and Michael Gosden.” Barr Lipp Productions

(2021). Moving forward: issue 1–2 introduction. Studies in Australasian Cinema: Vol. 15, No. 1-2, pp. 1-2.

ABSTRACT This article argues that Razorback’s self-aware play with cinematic Australian Gothic tropes infuses the aesthetic with an environmentalist sensibility that resonates in the Anthropocene. The limited scholarship addressing Razorback typically positions the film as a crude expression of the same anxieties found in New Wave Australian Gothic cinema. This interpretation misunderstands the role

ABSTRACT By relying on the textual analysis and on the examination of existing archival documents related to their production and circulation, this article analyses three documentaries produced in New Zealand in the 1965–1971 time frame while providing an overview of New Zealand film history as well as the examination of pre-existing modes of urban representation in New Zealand cinema. The author argues

ABSTRACT In recognition of the lack of female representation on screen, in 2015 Screen Australia launched the Gender Matters Program. However, it did not address the lack of representation of older women (defined as over 40 or ‘a woman of a certain age’). The research question addressed by this article is how to write older female characters over the age of 65 who are tough, capable, and complex. The

ABSTRACT This article investigates, through interviews, the script development processes of four female-identifying web series creators, contributing to scholarship around web series’ ability to serve diverse communities [Christian 2020. “Beyond Branding: The Value of Intersectionality on Streaming TV Channels.” Television & New Media 21 (5): 457–474; 2011. “Fandom as Industrial Response: Producing

ABSTRACT Recent work in Australian screen scholarship has been focused on expanding the limitations of our national cinema discourse. Terms like Deb Verhoeven’s ‘Industry 3’ or Ben Goldsmith’s ‘outward-looking Australian cinema’, and the discourse of ‘transnationality’ more generally, exemplify a contemporary tendency that seeks out new conceptual foundations from which to analyse Australian film as

(2020). Goodbye to 2020. Studies in Australasian Cinema: Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 161-161.

ABSTRACT ‘Gothic’ is identified as a prominent mode of Australian cinema since the 1970s. In commentary on Australian Gothic films, the aesthetic ancestry is often traced to literary conventions in colonial and pre-colonial British or European literatures. This article draws attention to the convergence of these literary and cinematic traditions and compares the prevalence of landscape as a Gothic

ABSTRACT This paper takes up Todd McGowan’s rethinking of psychoanalytic film theory to consider what such approaches might disclose in the work of a national cinema. I focus on Australia’s national cinema where it is caught, I argue, between the Imaginary gaze of an aestheticized nationalism and a traumatic ‘Real’ gaze that disturbs the field of cultural vision. I show how Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 Wake

ABSTRACT This article discusses the responses from people in Aotearoa/New Zealand and New Zealanders overseas to the online questionnaire of the World Hobbit Project, an international audience research project on the reception of the film trilogy The Hobbit involving 145 researchers from 46 countries. As the trilogy was filmed in their home country, New Zealand audiences were uniquely positioned to

ABSTRACT Screen production is risky business. Significant sums of money are invested in a process that is subject to myriad precarious variables. Effective completion of a screen project is achieved through the instigation and monitoring of strict parameters which bound its creative process. However, filmmaker David Lynch states that ‘any restriction is a sadness and can kill creativity’ (Stratton

ABSTRACT Public focus on screen business in Australia has been shaped by the information needs of the regulatory and content investment agencies that monitor and support screen content made under the creative control of Australians. This has meant that available data has concentrated on the types of content that have been deemed to require regulatory support – feature films, documentaries and television

ABSTRACT Although box office receipts for the theatrical release of movies have remained consistently high over the past decade, this tends to mask a slow erosion in the frequency of movie-going among the Australia population. Australians, it appears, are gradually losing the habit of going to the movies. This decline sits in marked contrast to increasing numbers of audiences preferring to engage with

ABSTRACT In the midst of drought in Central Queensland, the small town of Winton triples its population for the Vision Splendid Outback Film Festival. Even when facing challenges, the local community values the way the festival brings the community together, injects tourist dollars into the local economy and provides visibility to the local screen industry. However, staging a film festival in a regional

ABSTRACT This paper presents demonstrable insights from the creation of a microbudget feature-length narrative drama film with high production values. As a case study, I am using a feature film I have written and directed titled “Don't Read This on a Plane”, which was filmed in 10 countries, produced on a budget of A$125,000 including all post-production, fees, and deliverables, and has been acquired

ABSTRACT The presence in Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale of children, and of violence against them, has so far been little commented upon, as much commentary has focused on the film’s depiction of rape and colonial gender relations. Yet key plot points are articulated through violence against a child — and the exclamations at these points by the film’s antagonist, Lt. Hawkins, of “shut it up” and “I

ABSTRACT Set in mid-1820s Van Diemen’s Land, The Nightingale depicts a dark and disturbing Tasmanian past populated with redcoats, convicts, Aboriginal people, and a few free settlers. Controversial scenes include the repeated rape of a young female convict, the murders of her husband and infant, and the rape and murder of an Aboriginal woman. Uncanny parallels can be drawn between the on-screen experiences

ABSTRACT This article explores the marketing and non-Indigenous critical responses to the film The Nightingale (2018) by reading it alongside the reception and responses to a similar film, made over a decade earlier, a film that also studies the multi-layers of colonial violence. Using the film The Proposition (2005) as a foil this article considers the ways that violence figured by two non-Indigenous

ABSTRACT This article considers the convict/Aboriginal partnership at the heart of Jennifer Kent's The Nightingale. In doing so it locates Clare and Billy’s relationship within a broader representational history of convict/Aboriginal partnerships on screen. It explores how The Nightingale conforms to, or ruptures, the narrative patterns and tropes that have developed around such encounters. Furthermore

ABSTRACT Acclaimed Australian filmmaker Jennifer Kent’s film The Nightingale has generated intense debate since its premiere at the 2018 Venice Film Festival. Set during the Black War in Van Diemen’s Land in 1825, the film is an unflinching depiction of colonial and sexual violence. Kent told The Saturday Paper that she ‘wanted to tell a story that is relevant to my history and my country’. Her vision

ABSTRACT The symposium ‘The Nightingale: Gender, Race and Troubled Histories on Screen’ opened with a discussion between Jim Everett, the film’s associate producer and Aboriginal consultant, and Associate Professor Rebe Taylor, Senior Research Fellow in the College of Arts, Law and Education at the University of Tasmania. Rebe and Jim have known each other since 1999, when they met at a history conference:

ABSTRACT Since the beginning of the Twentieth Century tourism films have constituted a significant part of New Zealand film production. In fact, films made and/or used for tourism promotion have been released for domestic and overseas circulation by both government-led and private film production companies. Over the last 10 years the institutions in charge of Wellington tourism marketing have been

ABSTRACT The twenty-first century has seen an increase in scholarly interest in the discursive construction of women film practitioners, yet much of this literature focusses on women at the younger- or middle-aged ends of the spectrum, leaving the positioning of older women directors unexamined. Taking Jane Campion as an important case study, this paper explores how Campion is depicted in critical

ABSTRACT This essay looks at the critical reception of Australian queer cinema demonstrating the difference in reviews of queer Australian films. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Elliot, Stephan. 1994. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Sydney: Roadshow Distribution) and The Sum of Us (Dowling, Kevin, and Geoff Burton. 1994. The Sum of Us. Sydney: Southern Star) will

Welcome to the first issue of Studies in Australasian Cinema for 2019. This issue comprises two articles which deal with the paradoxical themes at work in politicised representations of gender and sexuality. In ‘Riding in cars as girls: discourses of victimhood, power and agency in Beneath Clouds and American Honey’, Samantha Cater places Australian film Beneath Clouds in a relationship with the US

ABSTRACT Following major film censorship reform in 1971 gay and lesbian Australians were, for the first time, able to see and tell their stories on screen. This change coincided with internationally revolutionary moments of gay and lesbian activism, which were largely centred around the notion of visibility. The new representational opportunities that gay and lesbian film offered quickly became tied

ABSTRACT While cars have long been associated with masculinity and youth within cinema – through a now long established tradition of the road movie – the representation of girls and/with cars is less common and often problematic. Here, I argue that an analysis of the ways in which girls are shown to interact with cars within two independent road movies can reveal much about discourses of victimhood

ABSTRACT The Australian Film Television and Radio School is a well-established training institution with an impressive track record in producing successful alumni. In 2016, an industry survey of the Australian media landscape heralded the need for more resilient creative entrepreneurs who are able to negotiate the rapid technological and industrial changes in the sector. As a result, creative practice

ABSTRACT Whilst filmmakers intuitively believe that the movie experience must be emotionally engaging, audience testing continues to follow traditional approaches involving questionnaires and focus groups with insights mainly at the level of overall movie satisfaction. In this paper, we outline a theoretical framework for how the idea of the cinematic moment can support an improved test screening process

ABSTRACT Detour Off the Superhighway is a feature-length documentary film produced as the creative practice element of a PhD which examined media, aura, and filmic practice. The project sought to answer the key research question, ‘What are the implications of a modern filmmaker utilising traditional media technologies ahead of contemporary equipment?’. The film uses evocative autoethnographic methods

This issue interrogates understandings of creative practice in screen production research within the framework of a broad range of activities that includes production and distribution of feature films to documentaries and to experimental audio-visual film genres. Screen production research here also includes enquiry into the education of future film and television professionals. The term ‘screen’ has

ABSTRACT Writing from the perspective of the peak body for screen production education and research in Australia, ASPERA, the authors report on a research symposium held in 2017 that brought together the academy and industry to explore strategies for what the engagement and impact agenda might mean for the ASPERA community. In this context they explore what engagement looks like and how it can be structured

ABSTRACT In today’s mass-mediated society the plethora of available media content has become a ubiquitous pool of potential knowledge that is sourced in the absence of first-person experience about particular issues, events, individual people and communities. The resulting dispositions that lead to corresponding attitudes and behaviour in the real world are shared by spectators, as well as filmmakers

ABSTRACT Electroacoustic music composer Tim Howle, Professor of Contemporary Music at the University of Kent and academic and filmmaker Dr. Nick Cope, have been engaged in an ongoing creative practice collaboration since 2002. The collaboration has seen the production of a series of short films exploring notions of what it means to compose with sound and moving image in works where the sonic and visual

ABSTRACT In my experience, teaching film editing has always presented a challenge in terms of aligning the creative with technical expertise. The technology, as a tangible commodity, is essentially taught in an experiential learning environment by engaging students in hands-on practical exercises to learn the software and basic editing technique. The challenge of teaching the creative editing practice

Abstracted/Indexed in: Film & Television Literature Index An examination of John Parham's stated thesis in his book, which is to consider the place that media and popular culture occupy in 'ecological theory, practice, and advocacy' (xvii). Overviews the theoretical approaches utilised for different media, and its application in genre-specific and age-specific audiences. Although Parham's text is mostly

ABSTRACT Australia has historically been an important market for American media exports. As far as film trade relations between the two countries go, there is an anecdotal perception that distributors follow a ‘10% rule’ to predict the popularity of Hollywood titles in Australia, expecting American films to earn around one-tenth of their domestic box office receipts when screened downunder. Nonetheless

ABSTRACT This article examines the role that locality, cultural specificity and authentic voice play within current television industry shifts and transnational developments. Focussing on Top of the Lake, I explore its thematic and aesthetic preoccupation with place, voice and nation by spotlighting issues of accent and vocal in/authenticity, detailing the controversy sparked when US star Elisabeth

ABSTRACT The 2002 opening of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne reconfigured the State Film Centre of Victoria (SFCV) for a new millennial moment of cinema and media, and within the context of the new languages of post-production, media convergence, digitisation, and globalisation. This occasion, with its ongoing emphasis on immediacy and the future, urgently requires a

ABSTRACT Australian screen studies courses, including ‘Australian Cinema’, ‘Australian National Cinema’, ‘Australian Film’, and ‘Australian Film and Television’, among others, have long been offered in the creative arts, education, humanities and social sciences in Australian higher education. At the core of these courses’ curricula is viewing and studying movies, documentaries, and television programmes

The essays gathered in this issue of Studies in Australasian Cinema are selected from, and broadly representative of, the methods and topics brought together at the inaugural SSAAANZ conference. Collectively, the essays speak to a broad conception of screen studies and diverse critical concerns across film and television exhibition and reception, documentary film, pedagogy and screen culture. Constantine

ABSTRACT This article analyses three documentary films that the National Film Unit (NFU) of New Zealand made between 1947 and 1962 when Samoa was administered as a United Nations trust territory by the New Zealand government. I argue that the films display a discursive and cinematic shift over that time: from depicting Samoa as an idyllic paradise that ‘time forgot’ to a more realistic documentary

ABSTRACT The use of high-speed broadband and internet-enabled television sets (smart TVs) for movies, news, documentaries, and television programs, amongst other services – for the convenience of the listener/viewer at a time chosen by them (on-demand) – is vital to television's survival through networked options for choice. Individuals engage with a variety of increasingly interconnected technological

ABSTRACT Much has been written about screen cities, and within this literature it is suggested that the city itself becomes screen language with its light, colour, and architecture. But there are fewer, if any, scholarly explorations on the practice of screenwriting the city, whereby this language must first be realised in words. Moreover, traditional screenwriting models emphasise the importance of