Greetings, faithful readers! We’re very excited to announce a pre-release look at the exciting new Australian film, Cedar Boys, due for release on July 30.
The trailer presents us with a vision of a classic crime film, complete with an 8 Mile-esque soundtrack and premise, but when we dig deeper we see it offers us much more than another tale about youth embroiled in crime. Tarek, played by Les Chantery, is a young Lebanese-Australian man who is stuck in a rut and a dead-end job as a panel beater. When presented with an opportunity to steal a vast quantity of pills from a drug-dealer’s apartment, he seizes it as an obvious chance to make a vast quantity of money and set himself up for life. Despite the trailer’s marketing itself to a younger generation with needlessly flashy editing and an overtly gritty sensibility, the film itself presents an interesting synthesis of the gangster film and that most steadfast of Australian cinematic traditions, the Australian ethnic drama. Read the rest of this entry »
If there is one truth to the art of theatre in the age of Shakespeare and the period directly following it (the Jacobean era, during which Ben Jonson ascended to the literary throne left empty by the Bard’s death), it is that boundaries, borders and segregating lines of distinction are not what they seem. They are, in fact, in a constant state of flux despite their apparent and implicit immutability, and this is never truer then when it comes to the depiction of what might perhaps be referred to as tertiary characteristics of gender and sexuality (that is, those characteristics of behaviour, dress and appearance that are entirely socially constructed rather than reliant on biological imperatives). However, this truth, much like the borders it describes, is itself subject to change and exceptions, and only through comparison with other forms of Shakespearean drama can these be truly appreciated or defined.
Author’s Note: This short review-cum-analytical-overview was penned several years ago, and having been touched up in places appears to pass muster sufficient to be posted to dear old Wonderbread, but remains above all a kind of brief conceptual summary of the issues at stake in post-colonial, globalised literature, the ever-evolving canon of which Massey’s The Floating Girl is certainly (if only tangentially) a part of. That said, the book functions, by and large, as a relatively simple and straight-forwardly told detective story and not as a self-consciously ‘literary’ text, and in its dedication to an unabashedly minimalist aesthetic such as befits serial fiction the book defeats any attempts at more in-depth treatises on its structure and contents through its sheer brevity. Perhaps more would be gleaned by analysing the series in its ten-book entirety, a task to which I am happily not equal. — Martin Kingsley
Homi K. Bhabha’s poststructural theory of cultural hybridity (specifically to do with hybridity in the wake of colonial incursion) highlights that, following the highly aggressive encounters between colonising cultures and those who inhabit the place to be colonised, a “third place” is created, inhabited by an entirely different people to either of those that contributed to its creation yet owing much to both. These “third places” are geographical as well as cultural hybrids, composed both of equal trades of social practice, ritual and theory as well as the products of nationalist resistance, and may tend to produce cultural hybrids to inhabit more easily these new and largely constructed places. Read the rest of this entry »
Denying that the period retrospectively known as the New Hollywood (often bookmarked for the sake of conceptual bookkeeping with the release of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde [1967]) produced some of the greatest American films of all time is the worst kind of anathema to most students of the silver screen, and for good reason. For a brief, shining moment, it was possible to be both an artist (an artiste, in fact, or even an auteur if it so pleased you to be) whose work was celebrated in locally circulated underground film journals and, simultaneously, a commercially successful director who was, metaphorically, invited to all the best parties, and under these conditions young, ambitious directors could genuinely thrive. Read the rest of this entry »
Cumulatively, the period that began in the late 1940s and proceeded all throughout the ’50s and ’60s was one of unprecedented legal, industrial, ideological, methodological and artistic upheaval for the movie-making industry in the United States. Not since the very dawn of industrialized movie making and the subsequent birth of the major studios (RKO, Universal, Warner Brothers, United Artists and so on) had so much suddenly seemed both so tangible and so possible to so many, particularly those who had previously been shut out of the business by the big hitters. Kevin Heffernan, in his terrifyingly comprehensive article Inner-City Exhibition and the Genre Film: Distributing Night of the Living Dead (1968), describes the period as one “during which issues of audience, text, and industrial context intersected.” (p. 75)
The Paramount Decision (United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., 334 US 131) of 1948 played no small part in this aforementioned upheaval, as Bill Osgerby indicates at length in his article, Sleazy Riders: Exploitation, “Otherness,” and Transgression in the 1960s Biker Movie. Specifically, he writes that the Paramount Decision smashed the majors’ “‘vertical’ monopoly of distribution and exhibition” by ruling against “the major studios’ ownership of cinema chains” (p. 2). Read the rest of this entry »
Critical couple David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, in their jointly authored textbook Film Art, argue that the concept and physical actualization of ’setting’ is key to the art of film-making. Far more so, in fact (they claim), than in the realm of the theatre to which they so directly compare and contrast the cinematic, in doing so arriving at the conclusion that “[cinema settings] need not only be a container for human events but can dynamically enter the narrative action.” (pg. 179)
It is ironic, then, that the methodology of the ‘restricted field’ of action or setting is, if anything, based on an explicitly theatrical convention that plays to the limitations of the stage: many famous plays are set entirely in one room or area so as to capitalize on the intimate and generally static nature of the stage area, including Archibald MacLeish’s Pulitzer-winning 1958 play J.B. (set entirely in a circus ring), Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men (adapted into a single-set Academy Award-nominated ensemble film, directed by Sidney Lumet) and Patrick Hamilton’s Rope’s End (adapted into the single-set film Rope, famously directed by Alfred Hitchcock), to simply name a few. Establishing a restricted field to mean the restriction of the narrative to the fewest possible settings and the least amount of physical space, why, then, does a restricted field of action still work in a cinematic context? Read the rest of this entry »
Traditionally, New York and Los Angeles have formed (and informed, with their distinctive architectural sensibilities) the environmental backbones for any number of films noir. Chicago, too, has had at least a little exposure in its time, on account of the masses of gangster lore directly associated with the Windy City. Boston, however? Read the rest of this entry »
Obsessed as it so openly is with the “grey” space between worlds, sub-cultures and people, it seems overly fitting that The Grey Space, the debut release from Elefant Traks-backed Sydney-side duo Horrorshow, should happen to be both the very definition of a out-of-left-field, “indie gem” release that fuels its exploits with a combination of sheer hi-octane musical moxy, a vision verging concurrently on the deeply personal and the joyously irreverent, and that raw, devil-may-care spirit peculiar to those with nothing to lose, while being simultaneously an LP possessing of such deft polish and a meticulous eye for detail as one might otherwise have only come to expect from a well-established and tour-honed act. Read the rest of this entry »
“We sat two hours in front of the room where the censors were looking at the film…and finally they came out and they said, ‘Mr Lang, this film has practically everything about which we disagree and which we cannot accept but it is done with such integrity that we don’t want to make any cuts.’” — Fritz Lang, interviewed by Powers, Reed and Chase in 1973 – (“Fritz Lang: Interviews”, 171 [note that, unless otherwise indicated, all references to interviews with Lang come from this text, being as it is the authoritative compilation])
When one tracks the progress of the German Expressionist movement as it relates to the development and refinement of means of cinematic expression, the progression unearthed is undeniably one that trends towards integration and consolidation with more classical and conventional forms of aesthetic articulation as they directly related to the medium of celluloid: augmentation, rather than demonstration, discretion rather than ostentation. Read the rest of this entry »
Pool hustling, state-sanctioned deathmatches between heavily armed Japanese teenagers, and high-octane hybridised football/roller-skating skirmishes undertaken as a foil for the violent desires of the masses all may not, initially, appear to have an awful lot in common. Appearances being, as they are, deceptive, it’s important to note that all three cinematic narratives (respectively, Robert Rossen’s The Hustler [1961], Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale [2000] and Norman Jewison’s Rollerball [1975]) are ostensibly and verifiably films with game-based narratives, in which there are ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, points to be scored and sanctified sets of rules to obey or to break. They only vary in the degree to which they are willing to take and to run with the definition of the word ‘game’. Read the rest of this entry »
