What is the effect on film when the maker's background is utterly different from the culture in which he now works. Anna Epstein talked to a film-maker who brings fresh vision to the Australian film industry.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
To begin this discussion of Ross Gibson's new film 'Wild' it may be useful to trace its origins to his 1984 film 'Camera Natura'. The earlier film employed an essay mode to deconstruct the discourses around non-Aboriginal imaging of the landscape.
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.