Pretty as a Picture: Women Artists and the Heidelberg Era

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.

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

Colonial Patterns Repeated: Robert Harrison

Review

Margaret Worth

Exhibition review Architecture without Walls Robert Harrison
University of South Australia Art Museum
10 September - 3 October 1992

Published March 1993

Floral Tributes: The Flower

Review

Peter Hill

Exhibition review The Flower
Curated by Paul Zika
Plimsoll Gallery, Centre for the Arts
Hobart Tasmania

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

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

Film and Video

Editorial

Annette Blonski

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....

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

A Golden Threat: Feminisms

Review

David Bromfield

Exhibition review Feminisms
Curated by Niki Miller
Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts
Western Australia
November 1 - 28 1992

Published March 1993

The Last Days of Chez Nous: Love Stories and Girls' Blouses

Feature

Leonie Naughton

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.

Published March 1993