Published 01 December 2020
Looks at 3 Australian films: Romper Stomper Night Out and Resonance each of which brings masculinity, sexuality and violence together.
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.
Published March 1993
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.
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.
Tracey Moffatt offers her personal insights on the making of 'Bedevil' made in 1992 with Film Finance Corporation Trust funds. Due for release in 1993.
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.
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.
Expressionism and modernism. Two old fashioned words in these days of post modernism.
John Hughes independent documentary film on Walter Benjamin One Way Street was screened on ABC television in December 1992, the centenary year of Benjamin's birth. The film has been released to festival audiences in the US and Europe and will theatrical release in Sydney and Melbourne in 1993. Here John Hughe slips into pause and explores an opening on certain scenes.
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.
In the incredible shrinking space between 1984 and 2001 the distinction between social-issue documentary and surreal fiction is collapsing - almost as fast as Australian capitalism or Soviet communism.
Exhibition review Crossings Mary Knott: Drawings and Sculptures 1988 - 1992 Curated by Tony Geddes The Art Gallery of Western Australia October 3 - December 13 1992 Geraldton Regional Gallery December 18 -January 21 1993 Bunbury Art Galleries January 30 - March 7 1993
