Stephen Gaunson
RMIT University, School of Media and Communication, Faculty Member
- Dr Stephen Gaunson is Senior Lecturer and Head of Cinema Studies in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT Uni... moreDr Stephen Gaunson is Senior Lecturer and Head of Cinema Studies in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. He has taught a number of Cinema and Creative Writing courses at undergraduate levels and is supervising numerous students at both MA and PhD levels in the areas of cinema and communication studies. In 2016 he was the recipient of the Teaching Excellence, Higher Education Award at RMIT University. He has co-edited a number of collections on the history of film exhibition and distribution, and written the book The Ned Kelly Films (2013, Intellect Books). His research interests include Australian cinema, film adaptation, silent cinema, film exhibition, and classical Hollywood. He has published widely in a range of books and journals and is currently writing a book on the history of adaptation in the Australian cinema.edit
In this chapter, Catherine Strong and Stephen Gaunson use rockumentaries with and by The Rolling Stones as a case study for a discussion of how women have been portrayed in rockumentaries about the band.
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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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In this chapter, Catherine Strong and Stephen Gaunson use rockumentaries with and by The Rolling Stones as a case study for a discussion of how women have been portrayed in rockumentaries about the band.
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Australian director Andrew Dominik has three feature films to his credit: Chopper (2000), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Killing Them Softly (2012). Having relocated to Hollywood since the... more
Australian director Andrew Dominik has three feature films to his credit: Chopper (2000), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Killing Them Softly (2012). Having relocated to Hollywood since the underground success of Chopper, he has continued as a writer/director auteur whose cinema essays America as a mythical and suspicious fiction of paranoia and doubt, crime plots and assassins. In the context of American audiences, however, Dominik's scornful meditations about America's hypocrisy has caused great trepidation for film funders and distribution companies, for he remains an unsafe bet; and although he likes the reputation of being the hubris outsider, with disastrous box-office openings for his previous two films, this article looks to investigate the circumstances and decisions that has him at a precarious moment of his career.
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This chapter explores the ways in which The Babadook (Jennifer Kent 2014), in its deft and complex intertextual weaving, is not so much a Gothic narrative, as a story of a mother and son trapped inside a Gothic milieu. The film starts at... more
This chapter explores the ways in which The Babadook (Jennifer Kent 2014), in its deft and complex intertextual weaving, is not so much a Gothic narrative, as a story of a mother and son trapped inside a Gothic milieu. The film starts at the beginning of the end. Jennifer Kent inserts the audience into central character, Amelias (Essie Davis) nightmare, which conveniently also provides vital backstory exposition for the drama that will manifest into the monstrous form of Mister Babadook. The dream repeats the fateful night (seven years earlier) when Amelias husband, Oskar (Benjamin Winspear), died in a car accident on the night when she would give birth to their son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman). The backstory establishes the reasons for Amelias deep mourning, as well as motivating the guilt and resentment she feels towards her son; yet the film withholds definitive answers about this widowed mother and her relationship to the murderous and monstrous impulses unleashed in the story.
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The following articles are framed around the assertion that cinema audiences can be as unwieldy, wild and dynamic as the films that play on the screen. In this Themed Section on the subject of cinema-going behaviour, etiquette and... more
The following articles are framed around the assertion that cinema audiences can be as unwieldy, wild and dynamic as the films that play on the screen. In this Themed Section on the subject of cinema-going behaviour, etiquette and decorum, we have sought to canvas a wide range of cultural contexts, technological innovations or disruptions and time periods. Throughout, our aim has been to continue the task of questioning just how cinema and screen culture broadly is experienced and engaged with day-today in-situ and, in the process, how it is reshaped and animated by the audience. Today, screen media are ubiquitous and very often experienced in relative isolation on laptops and hand-held devices within intimate, private spaces and virtual cocoons of seclusion carved out of public space-as when travelling on public transport, for instance. Yet, cinemas continue to operate despite ailing business models and screen media that is accessed online involves exciting new means of social inte...
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To broaden our idea of audiences, in this article I will posit how we need to examine the ways that audiences were being discussed in the news press during the formative period of the cinema exhibition industry. How, where and when were... more
To broaden our idea of audiences, in this article I will posit how we need to examine the ways that audiences were being discussed in the news press during the formative period of the cinema exhibition industry. How, where and when were audiences being written into the narrative of the cinema experience? By asking such questions, we can begin to appreciate the cinema's supposed bad influence on the impressionable including, for instance, children, and young women. In this article I am centrally interested in how the cinema audience was represented by the news reporters across the period of the silent cinema in Australia. How did silent audiences behave? How did this behaviour (and reportage on audience behaviour) establish a social context for cinema watching? Because different showmen had different methods of convincing audiences to attend their theatres, there was no single code of decorum when it came to cinema behaviour, and as this article will discuss, there were many diff...
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In the growing interest of Alfred Hitchcock adaptations, this article discusses not necessarily why the director chose to adapt Patricia Highsmith's debut novel, Strangers on a Train (1950, 1951), but how he adapted her. While this... more
In the growing interest of Alfred Hitchcock adaptations, this article discusses not necessarily why the director chose to adapt Patricia Highsmith's debut novel, Strangers on a Train (1950, 1951), but how he adapted her. While this dualistically reveals much about the creative process of both the director and the novelist, it further begins to pay some due to the ways in which Hitchcock's film is indebted to Highsmith's structure, miasma and characters. Notwithstanding the acclaim to which Highsmith's novel is now held within the fields of crime writing and the writer's oeuvre, notable scholars writing on the film have been too quick to dismiss the novel as a rough plot for what Hitchcock developed to become the finished film. This article will go some way towards challenging this assertion.
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John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (2005) is a critically acclaimed movie that has been widely lauded for its brutal and violent depictions of Australia’s colonial history. In film scholarship, questions regarding the film’s genre,... more
John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (2005) is a critically acclaimed movie that has been widely lauded for its brutal and violent depictions of Australia’s colonial history. In film scholarship, questions regarding the film’s genre, representation and its treatment of colonial history are far from settled. A key issue is that The Proposition avoids historical verisimilitude in favour of baroque allegory. Because the film invents a fictional history, some scholars have reconsidered the text in terms of film genre. Yet, as this chapter argues, the film’s attempt to develop a subversive depiction of colonial Australian violence is limited by the film’s formulaic approach to genre and an orthodox representation of settler Australia.
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While Australian film has tended to focus its sights on the bush, the desert and the road, there is another intrinsic aspect of white Australian identity—the beach. From the danger and dread associated with open spaces, exemplified by... more
While Australian film has tended to focus its sights on the bush, the desert and the road, there is another intrinsic aspect of white Australian identity—the beach. From the danger and dread associated with open spaces, exemplified by iconic characters, Australian filmmakers have sought a different type of representation. This chapter analyses how the beach is used in Australian film, from the specific perspective of screenwriting. Focusing on the core aspect of most screen narratives—the character arc—this chapter reads a selection of films, including Storm Boy (1976), Puberty Blues (1981) and The Coolangatta Gold (1984), through a lens of conflict and catharsis, as developed and plotted by the screenwriter to reveal that the beach as story world allows for deep thematic resonance.
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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Research Interests: Art and movie theater
This article investigates some of the visual images produced during the Ned Kelly Outbreak (1878–1880). While it discusses the historic Outbreak, more particularly it explores how the press imagery commodified Ned Kelly as a certain type... more
This article investigates some of the visual images produced during the Ned Kelly Outbreak (1878–1880). While it discusses the historic Outbreak, more particularly it explores how the press imagery commodified Ned Kelly as a certain type of bushranger.
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One of Australia's most notorious outlaws, Ned Kelly lived on the land from the time of his first arrest at age 14, until police captured him and his Kelly gang a decade later in 1880. Immortalized in a series of onscreen productions,... more
One of Australia's most notorious outlaws, Ned Kelly lived on the land from the time of his first arrest at age 14, until police captured him and his Kelly gang a decade later in 1880. Immortalized in a series of onscreen productions, he has since become one of the most resilient screen presences in the history of Australian cinema. Covering the nine feature films, three miniseries, and two TV movies that have been made about this controversial character, Stephen Gaunson illuminates a central irony: from novels to comics to the branding of the site where he was captured, most cultural representations of Kelly are decidedly lowbrow. But only the films have been condemned for not offering a more serious interpretation of this figure and his historical context. Asking what value we can place on such 'bad' historical cinema, Gaunson offers new insights about the textual characteristics of cinematic material and the conditions of film distribution, circulation, and reception.
Research Interests: Materials Science and Art
This chapter explores the ways in which The Babadook (Jennifer Kent 2014), in its deft and complex intertextual weaving, is not so much a Gothic narrative, as a story of a mother and son trapped inside a Gothic milieu. The film starts at... more
This chapter explores the ways in which The Babadook (Jennifer Kent 2014), in its deft and complex intertextual weaving, is not so much a Gothic narrative, as a story of a mother and son trapped inside a Gothic milieu. The film starts at the beginning of the end. Jennifer Kent inserts the audience into central character, Amelias (Essie Davis) nightmare, which conveniently also provides vital backstory exposition for the drama that will manifest into the monstrous form of Mister Babadook. The dream repeats the fateful night (seven years earlier) when Amelias husband, Oskar (Benjamin Winspear), died in a car accident on the night when she would give birth to their son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman). The backstory establishes the reasons for Amelias deep mourning, as well as motivating the guilt and resentment she feels towards her son; yet the film withholds definitive answers about this widowed mother and her relationship to the murderous and monstrous impulses unleashed in the story.
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"This paper challenges the traditional ideas of villainy through its exploration of Ned Kelly. In 1878, Ned Kelly led an ambush that saw the killing of three police officers. Two years - and several crimes - later... more
"This paper challenges the traditional ideas of villainy through its exploration of Ned Kelly. In 1878, Ned Kelly led an ambush that saw the killing of three police officers. Two years - and several crimes - later he was hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol. There is, however, an historical amnesia concerning Kelly that has allowed him to be rewritten, in popular history at least, as a noble villain. Cinematic interpretations of Kelly’s life have contributed to this amnesia. This paper also presents Ned Kelly’s own voice, as heard in the Jerilderie Letter, which was once suppressed and censored by the printed press."
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45:475 Animating Film Theory edited by Karen Beckman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014—$99.95/27.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-5640-0 hard, 978-0-8223-5652-3 paper, 376 pp., photos, notes, bibliography, index) explores how theory has been or... more
45:475 Animating Film Theory edited by Karen Beckman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014—$99.95/27.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-5640-0 hard, 978-0-8223-5652-3 paper, 376 pp., photos, notes, bibliography, index) explores how theory has been or can be applied to the animated film. Some 17 papers appear in one of three sections: time and space; cinema and animation; the experiment; and animation and the world. The contributors assess why there has been so little theoretical work in animation, and what theory can contribute to the genre. The editor teaches film and modern media at the University of Pennsylvania. (Chris Sterling)
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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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To cite this article: Gaunson, Stephen. The Jack Manning Trilogy: Face to Face, A Conversation and Charitable Intent [Book Review] [online]. Screen Education, No. 38, Autumn 2005: 140-141. Availability:... more
To cite this article: Gaunson, Stephen. The Jack Manning Trilogy: Face to Face, A Conversation and Charitable Intent [Book Review] [online]. Screen Education, No. 38, Autumn 2005: 140-141. Availability: <http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn= ...
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... Issue 36 (Spring 2004). Opening a Fuzzwollop's Frame of Mind [Book Review]. Gaunson, Stephen (Reviewed by) 1. Full Text PDF (87kb). To cite this article: Gaunson, Stephen. ... [cited 21 Sep 10]. Personal Author: Gaunson, Stephen.... more
... Issue 36 (Spring 2004). Opening a Fuzzwollop's Frame of Mind [Book Review]. Gaunson, Stephen (Reviewed by) 1. Full Text PDF (87kb). To cite this article: Gaunson, Stephen. ... [cited 21 Sep 10]. Personal Author: Gaunson, Stephen. Source: Screen Education, No. ...
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Despite Australia being one of the most robust and progressive film industries during the early years of moving pictures, it experienced a significant decline in film production from 1915. Whether this decline was a direct result of poor... more
Despite Australia being one of the most robust and progressive film industries during the early years of moving pictures, it experienced a significant decline in film production from 1915. Whether this decline was a direct result of poor government policy is something that the Royal Commission on the motion picture industry in Australia 1926–1928 investigated. Marking a significant, yet terribly neglected moment of Australian film history, the Commission surveyed a variety of issues which had stunted the development of the national Australian cinema. By surveying the early period of the Australian cinema, in this article I will discuss how the Royal Commission’s recommendations pushed for the national industry to become more active within the Hollywood world cinema model.
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By investigating the early Australian feature films, through the Australian Copyright Act 1905, begins a discussion on the emerging industrialisation of patent and copyright law, which did not recognise celluloid pictures as matter that... more
By investigating the early Australian feature films, through the Australian Copyright Act 1905, begins a discussion on the emerging industrialisation of patent and copyright law, which did not recognise celluloid pictures as matter that could be copyrighted. With the Act formed to provide authors greater powers to stop the proliferation of degraded versions of their work, film-makers came to adaptation as a strategy to legally protect their moving pictures from copyright infringements. By concentrating on the Australian cinema’s early tradition of adaptation, during the nascent period of film production (1906–1911), in this article, I will discuss how film-makers at, and outside of, the cinema were encouraged to engage with feature films as adaptation – and what this culturally meant. In a time of uncontrolled piracy and plagiarism ‘rip offs’, adaptations of popular works became a means for producers to copyright their films. And it was through this Act that the tradition of Australian adaptation began. By investigating the industrial factors behind where, why and how this tradition was culturally and socially shaped will identify by what means adaptation was spawned from the industry of copyright in a time where film-makers were trying to distinguish their works in a crowded field of film production and exhibition.
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The 1927–1928 Commonwealth Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry in Australia followed a series of public inquiries into the Australian cinema. One agenda of the Commission was to examine the dominance of American movies in... more
The 1927–1928 Commonwealth Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry in Australia followed a series of public inquiries into the Australian cinema. One agenda of the Commission was to examine the dominance of American movies in Australian film exhibition. By concentrating on how the Commission explored this issue, as it related to the exhibition and distribution of Hollywood movies in Australia, here I will consider the extent to which Australian exhibition has been guided by and dependent on American movies. With the Commission established, in part, to explore the accusation of an American combine ruling the exhibition industry, and stunting the local production sector, the real question was whether the Commissioners would be persuaded to make recommendations to wrest the powers from America, and consequently redirect the local exhibition industry&#39;s dependence on Hollywood movies.
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ABSTRACT This article examines British director Tony Richardson&amp;amp;#x27;s international version of Ned Kelly (1970) in the context of international Australian films and the national Australian cinema. Ever since Richardson was... more
ABSTRACT This article examines British director Tony Richardson&amp;amp;#x27;s international version of Ned Kelly (1970) in the context of international Australian films and the national Australian cinema. Ever since Richardson was given government assistance to produce a film about ...
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Despite Australia being one of the most robust and progressive film industries during the early years of moving pictures, it experienced a significant decline in film production from 1915. Whether this decline was a direct result of poor... more
Despite Australia being one of the most robust and progressive film industries during the early years of moving pictures, it experienced a significant decline in film production from 1915. Whether this decline was a direct result of poor government policy is something that the Royal Commission on the motion picture industry in Australia 1926–1928 investigated. Marking a significant, yet terribly neglected moment of Australian film history, the Commission surveyed a variety of issues which had stunted the development of the national Australian cinema. By surveying the early period of the Australian cinema, in this article I will discuss how the Royal Commission’s recommendations pushed for the national industry to become more active within the Hollywood world cinema model.
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This article addresses the dual topic of exhibition and production by exploring showman Cozens Spencer’s popular Australian documentary, Marvellous Melbourne: Queen City of the South (Spencer’s Pictures 1910). The story of this film is... more
This article addresses the dual topic of exhibition and production by exploring showman Cozens Spencer’s popular Australian documentary, Marvellous Melbourne: Queen City of the South (Spencer’s Pictures 1910). The story of this film is the role that women played – not just in the city, but in relation to the cinema: as filmgoers, workers and on-screen characters. And indeed, by focusing on Marvellous Melbourne, much can be drawn from the ways that Spencer’s on-screen moving pictures were speaking to his ‘movie mad’ filmgoers. Evidenced in a film such as this, I am suggesting that its modern narrative – which concentrates on the modern city, and modern women in motion within the city – is very much engaged with Spencer’s endeavour to provide his audience with a modern cinema experience, illuminating the fantasy and romance of a technocentric and cultured city. But before discussing how Marvellous Melbourne represented its target demographic on screen, it is equally important first to ask how it became central to the sort of city cinema programme that Spencer was attempting to create.
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&amp;amp;quot;In this paper, I will advance a critical perspective of some methodologies on appraising Indigenous films, in terms of their aesthetic as well as their cultural value. In doing this, I propose a cultural and textual... more
&amp;amp;quot;In this paper, I will advance a critical perspective of some methodologies on appraising Indigenous films, in terms of their aesthetic as well as their cultural value. In doing this, I propose a cultural and textual approach that gives the films a context for which they can be critically understood. With a heavy emphasis on the political content of many Indigenous films, here I argue for a more critical pedagogical evaluation that considers the challenges of Indigenous films and problems that arise when we ignore to discuss them as ‘cinema’. Through surveying a number of recent Indigenous films, and the criticism that surrounds them, I concentrate on how they can be better used as texts to enhance the study of world cinema and cultural issues of Aboriginality.&amp;amp;quot;
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The recent attention given to American B movies tends to overlook Australia's own industry of Badness. For devotees of Bad cinema, The Glenrowan Affair (Rupert Kathner, 1951) is a true gem. Based on the ex-ploits of bushranger Ned... more
The recent attention given to American B movies tends to overlook Australia's own industry of Badness. For devotees of Bad cinema, The Glenrowan Affair (Rupert Kathner, 1951) is a true gem. Based on the ex-ploits of bushranger Ned Kelly, and promoted as a serious ...