The emphasis in this collection has been on the films and videos themselves rather than the structures which support their production and circulation but they have not been overlooked....
In matters of technology, as in matters of sex, it is easy to assume one's own preferences are universal and normal, and to regard other's tastes as somehow debased or improper.
It is diversity, and the celebration of the marginal which makes Australian film innovative. Diversity provides the opportunity for people in Australia to enjoy and reflect on the cultural heterogeneity rather than on the alienating myth with which we are so familiar.
Surely one of the powers of cinema is the aesthetic redemption of everyday reality, a poetics in motion that can distill and energise mundane objects, be they tiles on a kitchen wall, the fluorescent facade of an airport terminal, a luminously white T-shirt being twisted and tugged or the compact shapeliness of Y-fronts on a young body emerging from bed.
In the decades prior to the expansion of art-house cinemas and television programming, 'independent distribution and exhibition' denoted a more specific activity than it does in the 1990s.
Aleksi Vellis announced his arrival in the turmoil of early 90s Australian cinema with his debut feature 'Nirvana Street Murder' a restlessly energetic film with cavalier camera moves that are almost as swish as the director himself.
Blotting paper, alchemy or potent cocktail. When radical European film-makers in the 1950s with the Nagra sound recorder and noiseless, hand held camera, the Eclair, launched what they called Cinema Verite, they thought they had discovered a way to film truth on the move.
Lesbians do not exist in mainstream Australian cinema. Apart from a brief sequence representing youthful lesbian desire in 'The Getting of Wisdom (1977)' and the undercurrent of adolescent homoeroticism in 'Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)' Australian cinema has remained mute - perhaps dumbstruck might be a more appropriate term - in relation to the issue of desire between women.