Pretty as a Picture: Women Artists and the Heidelberg Era

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.

Published March 1993

Lesbian Independent Cinema and Queer Theory

Feature

Barbara Creed

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

Independent Distribution and Exhibition

Feature

Paul Kalina

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.

Published March 1993

"I Am Like You, I Am Different" - Beyond Ethnicity, Becoming Asian-Australian

Feature

Audrey Yue

Beyond ethnicity, becoming Asian - Australian. How does one address issues of ethnicity? What is authenticity?

Published March 1993

A Tale of Reproduction and Dependency

Feature

Annabelle Sheehan

The interface between film and video education and the Independent film and video production.

Published March 1993

Domestic Noir Night Out

Feature

Peter Kemp

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.

Published March 1993

Brother Can You Spare a SP Betacam

Feature

Russell Edwards

Discussion with George Mannix. If there is any form of expression that eats money it is the feature length movie. Camera, lights and actors all cost big bucks and many ideas have stopped at the drawing board simply because there wasn't enough money. Independent Producer George Mannix had other ideas.

Published March 1993

Wild: Beyond the Deconstruction

Feature

Deane Williams

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.

Published March 1993

One Way Street

Feature

John Hughes

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.

Published March 1993

Aleksi Vellis

Feature

Deb Verhoeven

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.

Published March 1993

Come Again: Aldo Lacobelli

Review

John Neylon

Exhibition review Souvenirs Aldo Iacobelli
Experimental Art Foundation
South Australia
22 October - 15 November 1992

Published March 1993

Selected Shorts: Oppositionality, Postmodernity and the Australian Short Film

Feature

John McConchie

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....

Published March 1993