Published 30 March 2022
Looks at 3 Australian films: Romper Stomper Night Out and Resonance each of which brings masculinity, sexuality and violence together.
In his discussion of male sexuality, it was Freud who asserted that men customarily distribute their libido with expedience. What psychical energies a man 'employs for cultural aims he to a great extent withdraws from women and sexual life'. But not so in the love story, a genre which disavows this predicament.
Published March 1993
Exhibition review Cultic Gloss: Shaun Kirby Contemporary Art Centre Adelaide, South Australia October 23 - November 24 1992
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.
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.
In 1993 in Australia less than 2 per cent of the population attends the cinema yet over 90 percent of households own a VCR....
Over 12 days in November 1992, the Melbourne based Modern Image Makers Association (MIMA) held the third Experimenta presenting nearly 200 works of film, video, installation and performance. It included work from Germany, Japan, England and the USA, thus providing an opportunity to assess the current state of 'avant garde' practice and discourse.
Beyond ethnicity, becoming Asian - Australian. How does one address issues of ethnicity? What is authenticity?
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.
The title of Monical Pellizari's recently completed short film has a characteristically wry double edge. 'Just Desserts (1993)' tempers an unfortunates Australian maxim with distinctive humour. This film is a delight, a consolidation of the stylistic and thematic concerns of her previous 3 films in 13 witty and evocative minutes.
Sydney's new Museum of Contemporary Art has actively integrated film, TV and videos into its programs since opening in 1991.
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.
The Third International symposium on Electronic Art (TISEA) which took place in 16 venues in Sydney from 9 -13 November 1992 converted the whole city into a massive hologram event.
