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.
Despite my distrust of the postmodern, the possibility of disruption, the disturbance of vision that postmodernity is capable of providing within the cultural framework needs to be investigated. That such disturbances fail to deliver the most popular short films may be because they unsettle the comfortable fictions with which we seek to live....
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.
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.
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 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.
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.