Belinda Smaill

Online Personals and Narratives of the Self: Australia's RSVP

Abstact: Online personals, also known as internet dating sites, are a fast growing phenomena on the web. This article focuses on one Australian site, RSVP, and seeks to understand the modes of subjectivity that are engendered by the practices and discourses of this cultural form. Central to this discussion are the construction of personal profiles, the processes of contacting other users online and in real space, and the way users of the site negotiate the codes and systems that govern RSVP. The ways in which the self is narrated through the use of online personals is structured both by the spatiality and the ordering of everyday life and the increasing intimacy of the computer/user relationship. It is also fundamentally bound up with the ideologies of consumer culture and the interpellation of the self-actualising, or enterprising, individual. This analysis works to locate the self of online personals within the current phase of modernity and its articulation in cultural theory.

Narrating Community: Multiculturalism and Australia's SBS Television

Australias Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) Television is unique as a specifi cally multicultural public broadcaster. The manner in which SBS addresses and recognizes different modes of community is also distinctive. As a national broadcaster, SBS Television observes the uniformity of a nationally defined community through reflecting the interests of a dominant culture and audience. However, formations of community that are not as static or reified will also recognize themselves as communities through the way they respond to the address of SBS as a narrowcast television service. This article will examine not only the history and changing role of SBS Television within the shifting topography of Australian multiculturalism but also the differing notions of community that are rehearsed across SBS programming practices. It will then turn to the individual documentary texts in the Hybrid Life series to explore how community and collective identity can be narrated at the localized level of the subject.

Injured Identities: Pain, Politics and Documentary

Abstract This article explores the way marginalised identities in documentary frequently rely on a discourse of pain and injury when articulating social exclusion. Yet, as theorist Wendy Brown notes, claims made by and behalf of politicised identities can lead to a form of “self-subversion.” In attempting to contest marginalisation identities can become attached to this subordination, as it exists as an increasingly defining point of identification. This article investigates Browns notion of “wounded attachments” in regards to the efficacy of contemporary political documentary through two recent examples, Fix: The Story of an Addicted City (2002) by Canadian filmmaker Nettie Wild and Rize (2005) directed by David LaChappelle. It also extends the discussion of wounded attachments to account for the specific implications of a documentary address to the viewer that draws on an aesthetic of painful otherness.

Sofia Coppola: Reading the Director

Sofia Coppola is currently one of the most discussed female filmmakers in Hollywood and one of the most prominent “indie” directors working over the last decade. Coppola has also divided critics, especially with her third and fourth features, Marie Antoinette and Somewhere both drawing heavy criticism. This article draws on a range of popular and scholarly sources in order to chart the different narratives that construct Coppolas public image, including the style of her filmmaking. I focus on perspectives of Coppolas work, investigating how the directors biographical details have become bound up with the reception of her films in ways that dismiss her films as too preoccupied with frivolity and privilege. Coppolas important position as a female director of independent features, specifically her unique position as a successful woman working in the masculinized arena of independent Hollywood, and her place within a lineage of womens cinema, is frequently elided in discussions of her success and style. It is the question of Coppolas status as a female director, the ambivalent process by which this status is acknowledged and disavowed in the reception of her work, that is most compelling for feminist film theory.

Affective authorship: contemporary Asian Australian documentary

Abstract Documentary is a genre not widely understood through its capacity to engage the emotions. This article works to acknowledge the affective labour performed by documentary and, more specifically, the way emotions give meaning to documentary subjects. The analysis explores the production of Asian Australian subjects as documentary authors in four prominent films produced over the previous decade: Chinese Takeaway (Mitzi Goldman, 2002), Sadness: A Monologue by William Yang (Tony Ayres, 1999), The Finished People (Khoa Do, 2003) and Letters to Ali (Clara Law, 2004). These texts allow for a fruitful examination of the way the emotions that shape the expression of these author-subjects, such as mourning and care, might impact on the documentary representation of cultural otherness. Asian Australian subjectivity coalesces in and around these texts in a manner that is founded on the activity of mourning. Included here are not only the bereavements of loved ones, but also the losses that are bound to the movements of modernity, such as the lost fullness which is the promise of diaspora, the failure or absence of universal citizenship and the lack of safety in life lived in advanced capitalism. This article explores not only the absences suggested in these films, but also how these absences present a site of ethical encounter for the viewer that both resists reducing and assimilating the Asian Australian author to a devalued ethnic other while also addressing a community of viewers through a relation of reciprocity based in caring attachments to the social realm.

Asian Australian intercultural domesticity in Aya and The Home Song Stories

Abstract Interracial couples at home, within the bounds of domesticity and the nation, offer difficult or somehow troubled subject matter that is seldom confronted on screen in Australian cinema. This essay explores the representation of intercultural domesticity in Aya and The Home Song Stories. It draws on theorisations of melodrama and national cinema in order to examine the figure of the first generation Asian Australian woman. I argue that while focused on the domestic realm, the inter-personal relationships and character construction in the two examples formulate an historicised politics of disappointment that not only explores the position of migrant women in interracial marriages in the 1960s and 1970s, when the films were set, but also suggest a critique of the politics of ethnicity that were prevalent at the time of the production of the films.

Promoting Australia: post-war documentary and Asia

The Colombo Plan is a foreign relations agreement that has had a singularly significant impact on Australian diplomacy and the nations political image in the Asian region since the early 1950s. This article examines the promotion of the Colombo Plan by focusing on a handful of documentaries that were produced by government bodies, according to different requirements, representing the Colombo Plans aims and ideals for an international audience. It contextualizes this film in relation to the stylistic and industrial conditions of documentary production of the time and the diverse political sensibilities of post-war Australia. Not least amongst these is unease about the maintenance of the White Australia policy, also known as the Immigration Restriction Act. This article seeks to examine how, given their historical context, these documentaries express a narrative about Asia and Australia.

An ecocritical approach to documentary interactivity: spatial technologies in a film studies frame

ABSTRACT This essay examines two forms of data visualization freely available on the web, shark tracking technology and, to a lesser extent, projections of sea level rise. Through a discussion of two websites—the Ocearch Global Shark Tracker and Climate Central’s Surging Seas interface—I explore how, as manifestations of visual media, these websites might contribute to a documentary studies paradigm, and interactive documentary in particular. This essay is concerned with not only the contours and limits of documentary studies but also with how we perceive and engage with the nonhuman environment. Together, the two websites provide an avenue through which to evolve the ecocritical capacities of documentary studies to critique the media forms that shape our experience. This essay elaborates an ecocritical approach to these examples by understanding how they are integrally concerned with the performance and politics of not only space but also time.

A Guerra da Beatriz, Timor-Leste and the Women's Film

Abstract A Guerra da Beatriz (Beatrizs War 2013) has been heralded as the first feature film to be produced by Timor-Leste, a country with one of the smallest film industries in the world. The film provides a fictional account of the Indonesian occupation of Timor-Leste over a 28- year period. It is told from the perspective of Beatriz and, against the background of actual historical events, follows her story through three decades of occupation and resistance. In placing a female protagonist at the centre of narrative events, the film declares an affinity with a history of international cinema that privileges female experience. This essay identifies a relationship between A Guerra da Beatriz and the womens film, a subcategory of classical Hollywood melodrama, in order to survey the productive intersection between the two. Building on this reading of female point of view, this paper explores the context of A Guerra da Beatrizs production and its address to the audience. Central to this address is not only the emphasis on female experience, but the way this is rendered against the backdrop of actual past events.

Tasmanian tigers and polar bears: the documentary moving image and (species) loss

In this essay I explore how two divergent examples of the nonfiction moving image can be understood in relation to the problem of representing species loss. The species that provide the platform for this consideration are the thylacine, better known as the Tasmanian tiger, and the polar bear. They represent the two contingencies of species loss: endangerment and extinction. My analysis is structured around moving images from the 1930s of the last known thylacine and the very different example of Arctic Tale (Adam Ravetch, Sarah Robertson, 2007), a ‘Disneyfied’ film that dramatises climate change and its impact on the polar bear. Species loss is frequently perceived in a humanist sense, reflecting how we ‘imagine ourselves’ or anthropocentric charactersations of non-human others. I offer a close analysis of the two films, examining the problem of representing extinction through a consideration of the play of absence and presence, vitality and extinguishment, that characterises both the ontology of cinema and narratives about species loss.