Anthony Lambert

Imaging religion and spirituality: An introduction

At the scholarly nexus of religion and screen culture resides an insistent and age-old question that shapes the examination of both content and practice in image making: ‘Is seeing believing?’ In The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice, David Morgan (2005) argues that the two are inseparable. Certainly one might say, as Morgan does, that spirituality, and more specifically, ‘religious belief’ is mediated, which facilitates the critical imperative ‘to know how religious belief takes shape in the history of visual media’:

Journal editing and ethical research practice: perspectives of journal editors

This article offers perspectives from academics with recent journal editing experience on a range of ethical issues and dilemmas that regularly pose challenges for those in editorial roles. Each contributing author has provided commentary and reflection on a select topic that was identified in the research literature concerning academic publishing and journal editing. Topics discussed include the ethical responsibilities of working with international and early career contributors to develop work for publication, balancing influence and responsibility to a journals disciplinary field while maintaining the integrity of editorial and review processes, and the challenges of promoting scholarly research that pushes epistemological, methodological, and political boundaries in an increasingly competitive publishing climate. This article aims to stimulate discussion concerning the roles, responsibilities, and ethical challenges faced by journal editors, and the implications of these for ethical practices in academic publishing today.

Editing (for) Elizaveta: talking Svilova, Vertov and ‘responsive creativity’ with Karen Pearlman

In the past few years, Studies in Australasian Cinema has both witnessed and facilitated rigorous critical scholarship with respect to film production. This illuminating and invigorating aspect of contemporary screen studies necessarily foregrounds an explicitly theoretical awareness in filmmaking and specific production practices. At the same time, this nexus awakens historical figures, production roles, and stylistic developments that offer new, creative and politicised responses to the ways in which film history is documented and understood. Karen Pearlman’s short filmWoman with an Editing Bench, first exhibited in 2016, celebrates the lesser known and even less acknowledged editing style and oeuvre of Elizaveta Svilova (who edited Vertov’s iconic 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera and many others), whilst exploring her relationship with Vertov against Stalin’s censorship of cinema in the late 1920s. What follows is an interview with Pearlman, who wrote, directed and edited the film.

Screen culture in a reflective mood

As the year comes to an end, this double issue of Studies in Australasian Cinema both represents, and is produced within, an air of reflection, remembrance, critique and appreciation. With the recent death of one of Australia’s most revered and transformative leaders, E. G. ‘Gough’ Whitlam (prime minister from 1972 to 1975), screen culture in Australia/Australasia reflects on the particular impact and continuing influence of the Whitlam government on film and television scholarship, policy and production:

An Australasian lens

The uses and understandings of the category ‘Australasian’ seem to shift and vary within the multiple contexts of the term’s application. Each new volume of Studies in Australasian Cinema, for example, not only negotiates the elasticity of screen culture, production, and scholarship as critical ‘objects’, but also speaks simultaneously (often in the broadest and even tangential senses) to regional experiences of, or responses to, all of these. As a geographical category Australasia can be both specific and porous. As a cultural category of course it is frequently troubling and problematized. In the footnotes of a response to arguments about the ‘origins and continuity’ of the modern Australian vocabulary, Wierzbicka (2001: 205–06) uses Ramson’s (1970) book English Transported to question the usefulness of the category:

‘Modern’ cinematic encounters: Border crossing and environmental transformation in some recent Australian films

ABSTRACT In Australia (and globally), refugees and ‘the environment’ are major sources of anxiety that define the experience of living in modern times. Contemporary social policy is then a representational technology that speaks to environmental and cross-cultural transactions within ‘modern’ Australian cinematic texts. This article tracks the conversational contours between policy on climate change and border control in Australia and representations of self-other and self-environment relations in Australian film produced in the latter period of the Howard era (1996–2007). Films have frequently sought to mobilize a range of visions and understandings of both security and sustainability, and of the associated productions of policy, identity and space. Such exchanges necessitate critical scrutiny of the politicized cultural contexts that produce them—and an awareness of the normative reassertions that accompany these cinematic mediations of modern Australian experience.

(Re)Producing Country: Mapping Multiple Australian Spaces

This article offers an analysis and description of the notion of Australian space as a country within historical and critical-cultural imaginaries. By moving through Australian spaces as produced, heterotopic spaces and places, country becomes the shorthand for multiple Australias. From the bar to the beach, maps to icons, city to suburbs and beyond, “country” is at once the discursive staging of homogeneity in a postmodern Australia, but at the same time a relationship between nature and human obligation.