Pretty as a Picture: Women Artists and the Heidelberg Era

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

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

"I Am Not A TV Show"

Feature

Marion Benjamin

"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.

Published March 1993

More Bangs for Bucks: Male Sexuality and Violence in Australian Film

Feature

Chris Berry

Looks at 3 Australian films: Romper Stomper Night Out and Resonance each of which brings masculinity, sexuality and violence together.

Published March 1993

The 7th International Video Festival

Feature

Jan Birmingham

Blotting paper, alchemy or potent cocktail. When radical European film-makers in the 1950s with the Nagra sound recorder and noiseless, hand held camera, the Eclair, launched what they called Cinema Verite, they thought they had discovered a way to film truth on the move.

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

Cinema or Death

Feature

Anna Epstein

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

Who Told You We Wanted To Make Our Own TV?

Feature

Philip Batty

The broadcasting in remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme and the failure of policy.

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

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