Published 01 December 2020
Beyond ethnicity, becoming Asian - Australian. How does one address issues of ethnicity? What is authenticity?
Independent cinema may have been diverse in form, but its practitioners had in common a position of difference and marginality, working outside the mainstream and in opposition to it.
Published March 1993
In 1993 in Australia less than 2 per cent of the population attends the cinema yet over 90 percent of households own a VCR....
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.
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
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.
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.
Looks at 3 Australian films: Romper Stomper Night Out and Resonance each of which brings masculinity, sexuality and violence together.
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.
Sydney's new Museum of Contemporary Art has actively integrated film, TV and videos into its programs since opening in 1991.
"I am not a TV show, this is not a TV show." These are the oft-spoken words of Tony Tjamu, Chairperson of the Mutitjulu Community at Uluru (Ayers Rock) in the Pitjantjatjara Lands of Central Australia. Their repetition reveals something of the exasperation born of the visibility of being Aboriginal in a predominantly white Australia.
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.
