Adrian Danks
RMIT University, School of Media and Communication, Faculty Member
- Adrian is Associate Professor, Cinema Studies and Media, at RMIT. He is also co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque... moreAdrian is Associate Professor, Cinema Studies and Media, at RMIT. He is also co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque, was an editor of Senses of Cinema between 2000 to 2014, and is the author of Australian International Pictures, 1946-1975 (with Con Verevis, Edinburgh UP, 2023) and the edited collections A Companion to Robert Altman (Wiley, 2015) and American-Australian Cinema (Palgrave, 2018, with Steve Gaunson and Peter Kunze). He has published widely in a range of books and journals including: Senses of Cinema, Metro, Screening the Past, Studies in Documentary Film, Studies in Australasian Cinema, Australian Book Review, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, Traditions in World Cinema, Go! Melbourne in the 60s, B is for Bad Cinema, Howard Hawks: New Perspectives, Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave, The Eisenstein Universe and Australian Cinema in the 2000s.edit
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Petulia (1968) sits at a crucial juncture in American/British director Richard Lester's career. Some elements of its filigreed and somewhat hyperactive style relate it clearly to the often kinetic films that precede it - such as A... more
Petulia (1968) sits at a crucial juncture in American/British director Richard Lester's career. Some elements of its filigreed and somewhat hyperactive style relate it clearly to the often kinetic films that precede it - such as A Hard Day's Night (1964), The Knack... and how to get it (1965), Help! (1965), and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) - but the often innovative, integrated, substantive and novel use of these elements also suggests a series of other thematic and aesthetic possibilities and developments that Lester and his collaborators were only then beginning to explore (and only managed to return to intermittently afterwards).
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Although “Nick Cave” has been a common if intermittent presence in both mainstream and alternative contemporary cinema his contribution to the medium has seldom been discussed in any substantive fashion. This essay looks at Cave’s... more
Although “Nick Cave” has been a common if intermittent presence in both mainstream and alternative contemporary cinema his contribution to the medium has seldom been discussed in any substantive fashion. This essay looks at Cave’s relationship to the cinema from a number of different perspectives by discussing Cave’s role as an actor, writer, composer and collaborator on a range of films including The Proposition, Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, Wings of Desire and The Road to God Knows Where. It also highlights the broader cinematic qualities of Cave’s oeuvre and discuss the importance of revisionist approaches to genre in his work.
Research Interests: Art and movie theater
Australian cinema’s relationship with the United States has remained intricate, multifaceted and complicated. While film production and policy have expanded and become more complex, Australian cinema has remained an important exhibition... more
Australian cinema’s relationship with the United States has remained intricate, multifaceted and complicated. While film production and policy have expanded and become more complex, Australian cinema has remained an important exhibition and production network for the United States for over a hundred years. In the Introduction, we trace some of the material and expansive histories of this relationship by exploring the dynamic and shifting interactions between the two cinemas over time. As we argue, Australian cinema, largely through the practices of feature film production, distribution, exhibition and reception, has continued to be indebted and attached to US cinema as well as to a more broadly defined Hollywood style of filmmaking. This Introduction is informed by the notion that Australian cinema has a deep, rich and complicated set of historical, economic and cultural relationships with the US that requires further acknowledgement and more detailed interrogation and discussion.
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The Picture Show Man is one of only a small number of Australian films that deal directly with aspects of local and national film history, and which draw extensively on the archival research undertaken by one of its key creative... more
The Picture Show Man is one of only a small number of Australian films that deal directly with aspects of local and national film history, and which draw extensively on the archival research undertaken by one of its key creative personnel, writer/producer Joan Long. The film's reputation may have suffered in comparison to the more audacious, ambitious, technically brilliant and truly seminal Newsfront (Philip Noyce), a similarly cinema history-focused, but more filmically dynamic, opus released to much fanfare the following year. As this essays demonstrates, however, The Picture Show Man does deserve to be re-evaluated in relation to the writing and rewriting of Australia's film history in the 1970s and 1980s, the much-derided 'AFC genre' (referring to the Australian Film Commission) or period film, the increasing importance and invaluable contribution of key female production personnel to the Australian feature-film industry, and the model and example it offers for ...
Research Interests: Physics and Metrologia
Jia Zhang-ke's evocative description of Beijing's World Park serves well, perhaps too much so, as both a summing up of the central preoccupations of his most recent and most accessible film, 'The World', and the overriding... more
Jia Zhang-ke's evocative description of Beijing's World Park serves well, perhaps too much so, as both a summing up of the central preoccupations of his most recent and most accessible film, 'The World', and the overriding experience of such an event as the 2005 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF).
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Danks, Adrian, Verevis, Con, Williams, Deane and Verhoeven, Deb 2006, Telling stories : cinema, history, experience : Papers of the XIIIth Biennial Conference of the Film and History Association Melbourne, November 16-19, 2006, FHAANZ... more
Danks, Adrian, Verevis, Con, Williams, Deane and Verhoeven, Deb 2006, Telling stories : cinema, history, experience : Papers of the XIIIth Biennial Conference of the Film and History Association Melbourne, November 16-19, 2006, FHAANZ 2006 : Telling stories : cinema, ...
Research Interests: History and Film History
Stanley Kramer's whimperingly apocalyptic On the Beach dominates popular understandings of Melbourne's cinematic representation in the 1950s and beyond; including the call for papers for the "Screening Melbourne"... more
Stanley Kramer's whimperingly apocalyptic On the Beach dominates popular understandings of Melbourne's cinematic representation in the 1950s and beyond; including the call for papers for the "Screening Melbourne" symposium (2017) that led to this special dossier. Both the 1959 Hollywood film, featuring a glittering array of stars including Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire, and Nevil Shute's 1957 source novel have been highly influential in reinforcing particular notions of 1950s Melbourne as a staid, sleepy, uneventful, self-satisfied, uncritical, monocultural, overwhelmingly Western and architecturally conservative non-metropolis. The film's traversal of inner urban, hinterland, outer suburban and beachside terrain also plays into Shute's vision of Melbourne as an "every city", a relatively indistinct, almost mid-Western town that could be easily recognised by international audiences. These images are reinforced by the marked depopu...
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This chapter examines the ways in which many of Hawks' films - though always in reality the result of collaborations with a range of writers, actors and technicians - create a largely hermetic world that embraces the heightened... more
This chapter examines the ways in which many of Hawks' films - though always in reality the result of collaborations with a range of writers, actors and technicians - create a largely hermetic world that embraces the heightened artificiality of classical Hollywood cinema. Although Hawks is often celebrated as a masculine action director who utilises exterior locations, his work is more correctly defined by a circumscribed and highly constructed sense of space. For example, the ambulatory characters in The Big Sleep seem to move through various landscapes but remain blissfully entrapped within an interiority marked by the extensive use of such elements as sets and rear-projection: "It is an interior film, without sunlight, fresh air or real nature", argues David Thomson. This emblematic Hawksian film even plays games with the absence of reality. Towards the end, Bogart's Marlowe is finally shown to be leaving the familiar surrounds of his studio-built Los Angeles ci...
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This essay revisits and reframes The Sundowners as a key work in the 'transnational' phase of director Fred Zinnemann's career, while also re-examining the film's production and reception, representation of place or... more
This essay revisits and reframes The Sundowners as a key work in the 'transnational' phase of director Fred Zinnemann's career, while also re-examining the film's production and reception, representation of place or geography, position within international film production models of the period, and direct influence on seminal works of the 1970s Australian feature-film revival such as Sunday Too Far Away (Ken Hannam, 1975). It also explores the place of The Sundowners within various discourses of Australian national cinema.
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Australian cinema is generally under-populated by feature films and documentaries exploring its film history. A small number of works were produced between the 1960s and 1990s—including Forgotten Cinema (1967), Newsfront (1978) and The... more
Australian cinema is generally under-populated by feature films and documentaries exploring its film history. A small number of works were produced between the 1960s and 1990s—including Forgotten Cinema (1967), Newsfront (1978) and The Celluloid Heroes (1995)—that acted to recognise a forgotten, if broadly conceptualised, history of Australian cinema and make claims for the resurgence and continuity of its ‘revival’. This chapter looks at a range of contemporary feature-length documentaries and feature films, including John Hughes’ The Archive Project (2006) and Mark Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood (2008), that question, revise and fragment this representation of Australian film history and its national cinema through the documentation of marginalised filmmakers and areas of film practice; specific case studies; and the direct or indirect citation of canonical examples of television, documentary and feature filmmaking.
Editor buku ini adalah Direktur Penelitian Tingkat Tinggi di Sekolah Media dan Komunikasi, University Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology dan sebagai co-kurator dari Melbourne Cinematheque dan co-editor Senses of Cinema. Buku ini... more
Editor buku ini adalah Direktur Penelitian Tingkat Tinggi di Sekolah Media dan Komunikasi, University Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology dan sebagai co-kurator dari Melbourne Cinematheque dan co-editor Senses of Cinema. Buku ini berisi 23 esai tentang Robert Altman karya para penulis yang membahas Robert Altman dari berbagai pengalamannya sebagai ahli di lapangan dan memberikan laporan lengkap tentang kariernya di dunia perfilman. Isinya menyediakan diskusi dan analisis Altman termasuk signifikansi karyanya di televisi dan industri film, pentingnya kolaborasi dan inovasi estetikanya. Selain itu isinya juga menawarkan spesifikasi ke dalam aspek tertentu dari gaya film dan aplikasinya, sejarah TV dan bidang-bidang tertentu seperti teori ruang, tempat, kepenulisan dan gender.
For Truffaut scholars, The Bride Wore Black is often regarded as a misguided amalgam of Hitchcock, film noir and the nouvelle vague. But it also features one of the most extraordinary and mercurial performances by Jeanne Moreau as the... more
For Truffaut scholars, The Bride Wore Black is often regarded as a misguided amalgam of Hitchcock, film noir and the nouvelle vague. But it also features one of the most extraordinary and mercurial performances by Jeanne Moreau as the avenging angel of the title, the summation of a series of extraordinary roles in films such as Jules et Jim and Eva. This chapter examines Moreau's star image and acting in The Bride Wore Black in terms of her ever-shifting, mysterious, oblique and transnational persona and how she uses these elements to create a formidably concrete but elusive performance.
Sunday Too Far Away (Ken Hannam, 1975) is undoubtedly one of the key works in Australian film history. It is a richly resonant film that draws on the dominant traditions and forms of Australia's piecemeal pre-1975 cinema and the... more
Sunday Too Far Away (Ken Hannam, 1975) is undoubtedly one of the key works in Australian film history. It is a richly resonant film that draws on the dominant traditions and forms of Australia's piecemeal pre-1975 cinema and the preoccupation with history, masculinity and ideas of national identity that mark the full flourishing of the so-called feature film 'revival'.
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Editor buku ini adalah Direktur Penelitian Tingkat Tinggi di Sekolah Media dan Komunikasi, University Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology dan sebagai co-kurator dari Melbourne Cinematheque dan co-editor Senses of Cinema. Buku ini... more
Editor buku ini adalah Direktur Penelitian Tingkat Tinggi di Sekolah Media dan Komunikasi, University Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology dan sebagai co-kurator dari Melbourne Cinematheque dan co-editor Senses of Cinema. Buku ini berisi 23 esai tentang Robert Altman karya para penulis yang membahas Robert Altman dari berbagai pengalamannya sebagai ahli di lapangan dan memberikan laporan lengkap tentang kariernya di dunia perfilman. Isinya menyediakan diskusi dan analisis Altman termasuk signifikansi karyanya di televisi dan industri film, pentingnya kolaborasi dan inovasi estetikanya. Selain itu isinya juga menawarkan spesifikasi ke dalam aspek tertentu dari gaya film dan aplikasinya, sejarah TV dan bidang-bidang tertentu seperti teori ruang, tempat, kepenulisan dan gender.
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Abbas Kiarostami's cinema has been rightly discussed as a "cinema of questions". It is a formally rigorous but open cinema that allows a considerable degree of audience activity and interpretation. When watching a Kiarostami film we often... more
Abbas Kiarostami's cinema has been rightly discussed as a "cinema of questions". It is a formally rigorous but open cinema that allows a considerable degree of audience activity and interpretation. When watching a Kiarostami film we often ask about, and notice, the function and composition of particular frames (often due to the self-conscious composition of a frame-within-the-frame), particular shot choices and of more philosophical or metaphysical dimensions like ethics and duration. His cinema is commonly contemplative in nature, giving us time and drawing heavily on rearranged and carefully framed fragments or slices of everyday life. These particular qualities have been present in Kiarostami's work since 1970, when he first started making films for the Centre for the Intellectual Development of Young Children and Adults. Kiarostami's work, at least until the last decade, is remarkable for its consistency across different periods of Iranian cultural, political and religious history, and the various regime and ideological changes associated with each. He has always moved between documentary and fiction, often blurring clear distinctions between each in a single work. Although some of his films were shown outside of Iran in the 1970s, his international reputation only gathered steam in the late 1980s, roughly coinciding with his move into what might be considered a more self-conscious phase of his career, a phase that incorporates the first film in what is often called the "Koker" trilogy, Where is the Friend's House? (Iran 1987),and Close-Up (Iran 1990). Kiarostami's work within this realm includes a number of films that focus on the act of filmmaking and the broader film culture, providing an important impetus and influential example for what became a significant indigenous genre of the "new" Iranian cinema.
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By exploring the critical, journalistic and popular reception of Ingmar Bergman’s films in Australia in the late 1950s and ’60s, as well as tracing their patterns of exhibition and distribution, this essay examines how particular... more
By exploring the critical, journalistic and popular reception of Ingmar Bergman’s films in Australia in the late 1950s and ’60s, as well as tracing their patterns of exhibition and distribution, this essay examines how particular discourses and approaches to Bergman were already well and truly in place by the early ’60s and prior to the arrival of most of the director’s films in the country. Although the critical response to and release of Bergman’s work does reveal minor antipodean variations and is an important staging ground for an emerging and quickly evolving screen culture, as well as debates around film as “art”, it is also highly referential and reverential to received opinion from overseas and evidences the truly global reach of Bergman’s cinema and reputation during this period. This essay will examine the appearance of a range of Bergman films in Australia starting with Smiles of a Summer Night in 1957 and concluding with the controversial release of the heavily censored The Silence in 1965, fashioning evidence for a boom in “Bergmania” that reaches a peak in 1961-62 and provides an important test case for the rise of “foreign”-film distribution in Australia.
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Bliss (Ray Lawrence, 1985) is a film no one quite knows what to do with. Despite winning many of the major categories at the 1985 Australian Film Institute Awards, it’s a movie that doesn’t fit neatly within accounts of Australian cinema... more
Bliss (Ray Lawrence, 1985) is a film no one quite knows what to do with. Despite winning many of the major categories at the 1985 Australian Film Institute Awards, it’s a movie that doesn’t fit neatly within accounts of Australian cinema history. While some prominent critics such as Paul Byrnes have been fulsome and consistent in their praise over time, Bliss is still not widely discussed in generalist accounts of Australian cinema, even those that focus on the production boom and increasingly disparate output of the 1980s. Susan Dermody provides passingly positive commentary while positioning it within an ‘eccentric’, low-key strand of production largely centred in Melbourne; though Bliss, of course, is a profoundly Sydney film and less constrained in its form and sensibility than its sisters in this category. But even she regards Bliss as an anomaly, seeing it as a film – alongside the rag-tag bunch of Mouth to Mouth (John Duigan, 1978), Malcolm (Nadia Tass, 1986) and The Year My Voice Broke (John Duigan, 1987) – ‘that got away in another sense, into the mainstream marketplace’. Tom O’Regan positions it as an ‘art’ film in his quadripartite categorisation of the Australian cinema of this period. Scott Murray, less predictably, questions Bliss’s ‘fractured approach’ as its moves between ‘odd moments of successful shock, and others of plain silliness’, while lamenting that its director Ray Lawrence is often ‘unable to stop his film jerking along, and often just dying’. Despite this, Murray also praises the movie for offering ‘one of the finest romantic resolutions in Australian cinema’. David Stratton is characteristically more thorough in his accounting of the film’s inception, production, and commercial and critical fate, but his analysis of the text itself is limited in scope, inexactly and hyperbolically emphasising its ‘extremely audacious’ mix of ‘astonishing beauty, black humour, and the genuinely bizarre in almost equal proportions’. Nevertheless, Stratton’s discussion does start to get at the curious, even mercurial qualities of Bliss, but he can’t adequately account for its disarming mix of tones, styles, genres and modes of performance. Based on the Miles Franklin Award-winning novel by Peter Carey about an advertising man (Harry Joy) whose world is turned upside down after he “survives” a heart attack, it remains a singular fusion of tragedy and farce, social realism and surrealism, magic realism and family melodrama, the grotesque and the poetic, life and death, dream and reality, ecological critique and rhapsodic pastoral, heaven and hell, the postmodern and the prelapsarian. It also stands triumphantly as an allegedly ‘unfilmable’ though widely celebrated literary source that has been successfully adapted to the screen.
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... The last of these cartoons, made by Warner Bros. ... In this regard, Bugs' trips to Australia should also be seen alongside his visits to the stereotypical realms of places like Scotland (My Bunny Lies Over the Sea,... more
... The last of these cartoons, made by Warner Bros. ... In this regard, Bugs' trips to Australia should also be seen alongside his visits to the stereotypical realms of places like Scotland (My Bunny Lies Over the Sea, 1948), the South Pole (Frigid Hare, 1949), Iraq (Ali Baba Bunny, 1957 ...
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The five films made in Australia by Ealing Studios in the 1940s and 1950s have largely been analysed and "reclaimed" (by figures such as Bruce Molloy) as key works of Australian National Cinema, movies that occupy and populate a period of... more
The five films made in Australia by Ealing Studios in the 1940s and 1950s have largely been analysed and "reclaimed" (by figures such as Bruce Molloy) as key works of Australian National Cinema, movies that occupy and populate a period of meagre feature film production while reworking popular genres such as the Western and the crime film. Although these films can be read symptomatically in terms of their "localised" renderings of landscape, character and narrative situation, they have seldom been discussed in relation to the broader patterns of Ealing film production, the studio's preoccupation with interiorised communities, work, Britishness, and small- scale settlements on the geographic fringes of Britain and the Empire, and the various other films (such as the Kenya shot and set Where No Vultures Fly and West of Zanzibar) that light upon far-flung or peripheral locations and settlements. This essay re-examines the Ealing "adventure" through a transnational lens that focuses attention on the unacknowledged parallels between such films as Eureka Stockade and Passport to Pimlico, The Siege of Pinchgut and The Blue Lamp, The Overlanders and various movies set on the outskirts of the British Isles (Whisky Galore!, Another Shore), as well as places these five films (The Overlanders, Eureka Stockade, Bitter Springs, The Shiralee, The Siege of Pinchgut) in relation to the broader fate of the studio throughout the late 1940s and 1950s.
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Sunday too Far Away is undoubtedly one of the key works in Australian film history. It is a richly resonant film that draws on the dominant traditions and forms of Australia’s piecemeal pre-1975 cinema and the preoccupations with history,... more
Sunday too Far Away is undoubtedly one of the key works in Australian film history. It is a richly resonant film that draws on the dominant traditions and forms of Australia’s piecemeal pre-1975 cinema and the preoccupations with history, masculinity and ideas of national identity that mark the full flourishing of the so-called feature film ‘revival’. It is a profoundly ‘in-between’ work that draws upon the landscape traditions of much Australian cinema, and the nation’s broader visual art, while also pointing towards elements of the early 1970s ‘ocker’ comedy (but with a more questioning approach to the place of masculinity and mateship in widespread perceptions and definitions of the Australian character). It also leads the way, along with the previous year’s considerably more muted and underwhelming Between Wars (Michael Thornhill, 1974), for what is often called the ‘AFC genre’, a raft of films concerned with presenting and sometimes interrogating Australian history that characterise dominant perceptions of the sensibility and form of the post-1975 film ‘renaissance’. Neil Rattigan has gone so far as to claim that ‘[e]xcept for Gallipoli, Sunday Too Far Away is a strong contender for the most Australian film of the New Australian Cinema’. But Sunday is actually a less strident and jingoistic film than these comparisons and statements might suggest. It is ultimately a deeply emblematic, humorous, authentic and bittersweet work that is difficult to categorise. Sunday is also a truly collaborative film, relying heavily on the joint contributions of its director (Ken Hannam), writer (John Dingwall), cinematographer (Geoff Burton), actors (a wonderful ensemble featuring Jack Thompson, John Ewart, Max Cullen, Jerry Thomas, Reg Lye, amongst others) and, more controversially, its producers (Gil Brealey, who was also Head of the South Australian Film Corporation, and Matt Carroll).
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Danks, Adrian, Verevis, Con, Williams, Deane and Verhoeven, Deb 2006, Telling stories : cinema, history, experience : Papers of the XIIIth Biennial Conference of the Film and History Association Melbourne, November 16-19, 2006, FHAANZ... more
Danks, Adrian, Verevis, Con, Williams, Deane and Verhoeven, Deb 2006, Telling stories : cinema, history, experience : Papers of the XIIIth Biennial Conference of the Film and History Association Melbourne, November 16-19, 2006, FHAANZ 2006 : Telling stories : cinema, ...
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An essential reading for understanding the aesthetics and contexts of found footage filmmaking and handmade cinema in contemporary moving image culture.
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By assessing the historical and contemporary relationships between American and Australian cinemas, this collection sets out to encourage future studies on a growing field of inquiry. Its concentration on the complex historical and... more
By assessing the historical and contemporary relationships between American and Australian cinemas, this collection sets out to encourage future studies on a growing field of inquiry. Its concentration on the complex historical and contemporary relationships between these two cinemas taps directly into discussions of national cinema, transnationalism and global Hollywood. While most equivalent studies aim to define national cinema as independent from or in competition with Hollywood, this collection explores a more porous set of relationships through the varied production, distribution and exhibition associations between Hollywood and Australia. To explore this idea, a range of chapters investigate the influence that Australia has had on US cinema through the exportation of its stars, directors and other production personnel to Hollywood; while many of the other chapters chart the sustained influence of US cinema on Australia over the last 100 years. The authors represented in this book re-examine the concept and definition of Australian cinema in regard to a range of local, international and global practices and trends that blur neat categorizations of Australian national cinema. Although this concentration on US production, or influence, is particularly acute in relation to such developments as the opening of international film studios in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and the Gold Coast over the last 30 years, this book also examines a range of Hollywood financed and/or conceived films shot in Australia since the 1920s. Furthermore it surveys Hollywood models of production and genre, as well as American distribution and exhibition networks, that have altered the way Australians go to the cinema, the type of films they watch, and the kinds of movies they make. This book takes two key points in time - the 1920s and 1930s and the last 20 years - to chart the ongoing, shifting, resistant and dependent relationships between Australian and US cinema and how particular patterns of localism, nationalism, colonialism, transnationalism and globalization have shaped its course over the last century.
Research Interests: American Studies, Reception Studies, Globalization, Australian Studies, Transnationalism, and 16 moreNational Cinemas, Audience and Reception Studies, Australia, Australian and New Zealand Cinema, American Cinema, Film Production, Australian History, Film Distribution, Classical Hollywood, Contemporary Hollywood, Transnational Cinema, Hollywood, World Cinema, Film Exhibition, Australian Cinema, and New Hollywood Cinema
Found Footage Magazine is an independent semi-annual publication distributed worldwide and printed both in English and Spanish. It offers theoretical, analytical and informative contents related to found footage film-making practices.
Research Interests: Avant-Garde Cinema, Film Studies, Film Theory, Documentary (Film Studies), Walter Benjamin, and 13 moreMashups, Film Aesthetics, Experimental Film, Film and Media Studies, Remix Culture, Found Footage, Archival Film, Archive Footage, Found Film, Detournement, Experimental Cinema, Found Footage, Appropriation Art, Cultural appropriation, and Collage Film
Found footage, compilation, collage or ‘archival’ cinema is a broad filmmaking practice encompassing the use of file footage in documentary cinema, stock footage in fictional cinema, home movie footage in some feminist cinema and the... more
Found footage, compilation, collage or ‘archival’ cinema is a broad filmmaking practice encompassing the use of file footage in documentary cinema, stock footage in fictional cinema, home movie footage in some feminist cinema and the often radical recontextualisation of a vast array of images and sounds in examples of avant-garde cinema. This chapter explores the practice of found footage cinema across a number of national ‘industries’ and forms of cinema (including Soviet montage, the post-war American avant-garde and post-1960s feminist filmmaking), while focusing on specific avant-garde films that use ‘found’ images and sounds as their key ‘raw’ materials or sources, often fashioning new and explicitly critical works out of the bric-a-brac of other films.
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This chapter examines the ways in which many of Howard Hawks’s films – though always the result of collaborations with a range of writers, actors and technicians – create a largely hermetic world that embraces the heightened artificiality... more
This chapter examines the ways in which many of Howard Hawks’s films – though always the result of collaborations with a range of writers, actors and technicians – create a largely hermetic world that embraces the heightened artificiality of classical Hollywood cinema. Although Hawks is often celebrated as a masculine action director who utilises exterior locations, his work is more accurately defined by a circumscribed and highly constructed sense of space. For example, the ambulatory characters in The Big Sleep seem to move through various landscapes but remain blissfully entrapped within an interiority marked by the extensive use of such elements as sets and rear-projection: ‘It is an interior film, without sunlight, fresh air or real nature’, argues David Thomson. This emblematic Hawksian film even plays games with the absence of reality. Towards the end, Bogart’s Marlowe is finally shown to be leaving the familiar surrounds of his studio-built Los Angeles city playground. He journeys to Realito, ‘a name to tease detectives and scholars’. Although amongst the most violent scenes in the film, the conflation of studio-bound mist, workshop built rustic exteriors and chiaroscuro lighting (as well as the largely unmotivated and magical appearance of Bacall’s Vivian) belie the promise embedded in that location’s name. Through the exploration of such moments in Hawks’s work, this chapter presents a re-examination of particular elements of the director’s style in relation to the construction and representation of space and place.
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Back or rear projection is routinely regarded as an inauthentic and outdated technical device that has garnered very little critical attention. It is often ridiculed as a necessary but inferior or “bad” technique that belongs in the... more
Back or rear projection is routinely regarded as an inauthentic and outdated technical device that has garnered very little critical attention. It is often ridiculed as a necessary but inferior or “bad” technique that belongs in the “dustbin” of history. This paper will examine back projection as both a technical and aesthetic device that creates its own peculiar and often bifurcated sense of space (both enclosed and open), form (both documentary and fiction), place (both here and there), time (both now and then) and mobility (both stationary and moving), examining how its often potent inauthenticity creates a challenge to the regimes of cinematic realism and continuity, as well as the tastes associated with them. It traces the history of rear projection from the late 1920s, partly through its expressive and far from “invisible” use in the films of such directors as Alfred Hitchcock (Marnie, for which the director was widely criticised, and Torn Curtain), Frank Borzage, and Max Ophuls (Letter from an Unknown Woman), as well as examines its problematic reappearance as a marker of period, overt homage or self-consciousness. A key focus of this chapter is the examination of the kinds of “worlds” and discordant viewing experiences facilitated by this once ubiquitous device, particularly its use of stock and found footage within specific films and its capacity for “inventing” striking representations of existing places.
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Adrian Danks points out that, although it is relatively common to examine the collaborations between various actors and directors working in the 1950s Western – John Wayne/John Ford, James Stewart/Anthony Mann, etc. – the series of three... more
Adrian Danks points out that, although it is relatively common to examine the collaborations between various actors and directors working in the 1950s Western – John Wayne/John Ford, James Stewart/Anthony Mann, etc. – the series of three varied films made by Daves and Glenn Ford between 1956 and 1958 – Jubal, 3:10 to Yuma, and Cowboy – have seldom attracted attention. While at least one of these films, 3:10 to Yuma, has been championed in terms of Daves’ spatially and tonally expressive direction and of Ford’s morally ambiguous but effortlessly genial characterisation, this extraordinary trio of films have seldom been examined in relation to one another. Danks reads the collaboration between Ford and Daves as symptomatic of the work of both actor and director, and their sympathetic, subtle, ‘benevolent’, and relatively unadorned approach to various subjects and character types. In the process, he helps pinpoint some of the key reasons why both of these important but workaday figures...
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The biopic has been a present if intermittent genre across the history of Australian film and television. Australia’s first feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang (Charles Tait, 1906), can be partly classified as a biopic of the... more
The biopic has been a present if intermittent genre across the history of Australian film and television. Australia’s first feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang (Charles Tait, 1906), can be partly classified as a biopic of the nation’s most famous outlaw, while contemporary television has produced a virtual flotilla of 1970s and 1980s obsessed TV-movies and mini-series about entertainment figures, politicians, sports people, and media barons over the last 15 years. The Australian biopic is also dominated by movies about iconoclastic and larrikin-like figures whose lives are marked by a range of factors including conflict, adversity, ‘criminality’, identity, and diversity. This chapter examines the Australian biopic in relation to the processes of adaptation, its complex connection to the historical record, dominant trends both locally and overseas, shifts in terms of the diversity of subject matter and voices over time, and its association with the historical film more broadly. It discusses the genre’s relationship to the much-derided ‘AFC genre’, as well as the contrast between its peripatetic cinematic form and its pre-eminence in contemporary television. In the process, this chapter focuses on five key twenty-first century examples of the Australian biopic: from Chopper (Andrew Dominik, 2000), Red Dog (Kriv Stenders, 2011), and Tracks (John Curran, 2013) to Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, 2002) and the TV-movie, Mabo (Rachel Perkins, 2012). In doing so, this chapter considers how these films reinforce, recast, and deepen the genre’s relationship to history, cinema, subjectivity, and nationalism and embrace particular individual, cultural, racial, and socio-political components.