Allison Craven

Dual occupancy: Melbourne and the feminist drama of dwelling in Monkey Grip

ABSTRACT Monkey Grip is viewed as a film that evokes the sexual politics of feminism and of city life, and can thus be seen as both a feminist film and a ‘Melbourne film’, a convergence that emerges in other films made and set in Melbourne, including Love and Other Catastrophes. The city appears as a centre of dwelling and habitation, with attention drawn to the spectacle of the interiors of the residences, in which much of the action occurs, and with reflection on the conditions and values of production. Bachelards notion of the house image is applied to distinguish the performances of gender from those in films in non-urban settings.

Abroad: Production Tracks and Narrative Trajectories in Films About Australians in Asia

The Waiting City (2009) and Wish You Were Here (2012) are amongst a number of twenty-first century Australian films made, wholly or partly, offshore, in India and Cambodia respectively; therefore, they form part of the corpus of ‘Asian Australian cinema’. The filmmakers’ experiences and the film narratives are discussed using Jane Mills’ (2014) concept of ‘sojourner cinema’. Comparison is made with earlier Asian Australian films, tracing the ambivalent paradigm of Asia as both threat and opportunity, described by Khoo, Smaill and Yue (2013), and reflecting on the productions with regard to the role outlined for the creative industries in the Australian Government White Paper, Australians in the Asian Century.

Fairy tale interrupted : Feminism, Masculinity, Wonder Cinema

Feminism, masculinity and fairy tale figure within an extended analysis of Disneys Beauty and the Beast (1991), in light of the live-action remake, Beauty and the Beast (2017). The history of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast is compared with Disneys adaptation which centralises the figure of the Beast rather than the heroine, Belle. A flagship during a key period of Disneys corporate expansion in the early 1990s, in the first section of the book, the production is situated with respect to gender histories in the corresponding period: the rise of post-feminism, and its implicit disavowal of feminism, the mythopoetic mens movement and the crisis of masculinity. The following section canvasses views of masculinity in second wave feminism and the role of myth and fairy in key works of feminism. A critical discussion ensues of twenty-first century wonder cinema in which the influence of feminist ideas is seen to circulate within the pastiche treatments of fairy tales and enchantment.

Heritage enigmatic: The silence of the dubbed in Jedda and The Irishman

ABSTRACT The dubbing of the voices of Aboriginal actors in The Irishman (Crombie, 1978) and Jedda (Chauvel, [1955] 2004) is discussed, first in a general context of the prevalence of post-sychronization of cinema sound in past and contemporary practices. The Irishman is thereafter considered through the spectacle of DVD packaging with commentary, a para-cinematic device that works—through a similar mechanism to dubbing—to influence the reception of the feature film; then Jedda is approached with reference to the various accounts that have emerged of the dubbed voices, none of which seem to conclusively indicate the grounds or status. Concluding reflections on these histories are drawn to wider institutional and industrial conditions, and also to contemporary films that address the voices and silences of Indigenous people.