More from this Issue
Selected Shorts: Oppositionality, Postmodernity and the Australian Short Film
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....
Who Told You We Wanted To Make Our Own TV?
The broadcasting in remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme and the failure of policy.
A Tale of Reproduction and Dependency
The interface between film and video education and the Independent film and video production.
"I Am Not A TV Show"
"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.
Lesbian Independent Cinema and Queer Theory
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.
Cinema or Death
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.
The End of Independence? Women's Film and Video in the 1990s
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.
Independent Distribution and Exhibition
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 Last Days of Chez Nous: Love Stories and Girls' Blouses
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.
Museum Screen Dreams
Sydney's new Museum of Contemporary Art has actively integrated film, TV and videos into its programs since opening in 1991.
Domestic Noir Night Out
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.
The Pure and The Impure: Shaun Kirby
Exhibition review Cultic Gloss: Shaun Kirby
Contemporary Art Centre
Adelaide, South Australia
October 23 - November 24 1992