Deane Williams

Reading across cultures towards a comparative documentary film studies: Eduardo Coutinho's documentary Jogo de Cena (2007)

Abstract This article examines Eduardo Coutinhos Jogo de Cena (2007) in relation to documentary spectatorship across cultures. Coutinhos documentary contains numerous culturally specific and localised references amongst the stories told by a cast of women actors. These stories and the figures that relate them make available a number of layers of knowledge production constituting a filmic experience that is multivalent and complex. In considering these complexities and their spectatorship, this article utilises Paul Willemens notion of comparative film studies as a springboard to begin a closer consideration of what is possible with a combination of Brazilian cultural knowledge and documentary film theory.

Before and after ACMI: a case study in the cultural history of Australia's State film centres

ABSTRACT The 2002 opening of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne reconfigured the State Film Centre of Victoria (SFCV) for a new millennial moment of cinema and media, and within the context of the new languages of post-production, media convergence, digitisation, and globalisation. This occasion, with its ongoing emphasis on immediacy and the future, urgently requires a substantial research project that looks backwards and forwards at the same time: that is, a project that at once provides an understanding of the historical underpinning that gave rise to the present institution, and also of the current context that will give shape to the institution as it evolves into the future. Like all public institutions, ACMI evolved from, and is currently made up of, a complex series of threads drawing on a host of ancillary organisations, events, locations, and individuals that have a similarly intricate history that stretches back to the immediate post-WWII period. This essay provides an outline of a larger research project that will investigate the ways in which these various forces have given rise to the character of ACMI, informing an ongoing understanding of the place of ACMI within Australias cultural profile. In this way the project will explain how ACMI has become – and can continue to be – an enormously successful model for government-supported, cultural institutions locally and internationally.

Introduction: Cinema at the End of the World

At the Southern Screens symposium—convened by Antonio Traverso at Curtin University, Perth, Australia, in October 2013, and subsequently documented in Critical Arts 29 (5) (2015)—it was decided that the symposium should be followed up with a broader conference. In November 2015, a collection of scholars from across the southern hemisphere, and some from the north whose interests are southern, gathered at Monash University, Melbourne, for the inaugural Cinema at the End of the World conference.1 With the Republic of South Africa, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, the USA, and the UK all represented, the conference proved wildly diverse in terms of topics and approaches, as well as sharing a common sense of camaraderie in one of the southernmost cities in the world. It was Chilean media academic and screen writer/producer Roberto Trejo who first suggested the title “El Cine del Fin del Mundo” (“Cinema of the End of the World”) when the idea of an international conference of this kind was being considered in Chile, around 2010. Trejo’s suggestion didn’t arise out of a vacuum, but drew on the well-established identity culture of the Southern Cone, particularly recognisable in the Patagonian region across southern Argentina and Chile. Indeed, in the southern Argentine region of Tierra del Fuego, the most diverse things are named after this imaginary of the extreme: there one can ride the historic Tren del Fin del Mundo (end-of-the-world train) from Ushuaia to the Tierra del Fuego National Park, read the Diario del Fin del Mundo (end-of-theworld newspaper), and even spend an evening listening to the Coro del Fin del Mundo (end-of-the-world choir). Similarly, one can appreciate artworks such as Argentine

The Maslyn Williams Network

ABSTRACT This paper provides some accounting for recent work by the authors on a cultural biography of Ron Maslyn Williams (20 February 1911 to 11 August 1999), an Australian photographer, writer, film-maker, and musician. An inveterate traveller and man of influence in many artistic and diplomatic spheres around the world, he became a leading Catholic figure, a kind of “cultural ambassador” promoting a worldview that far outreached “Anglican” constraints. Williams’s prodigious talent is mirrored in his multi-perspectival career, extensive travels, and numerous relationships with people on the world stage. In attempting to locate the most appropriate way in which to deal with the fragments and encounters in Williams’s life, as they inform the particular yet multifarious post-war culture in which he performed, the authors have taken an historicist approach to identify six nodes of a transnational cultural network in which Williams operated.

Pulling focus: intersubjective experience, narrative film, and ethics

Ever since its inception, the challenge for film studies in Australia, as in many other countries, is in dealing with the ever-present perception of the discipline’s inadequacies to deal with criticism from without. First, in the early 1970s, film studies had to emerge from the shadow of English, where Leavasite criticism battled it out with the resonances of the various new waves, in particular the French, where the attempts to elevate film theory and criticism to the realms of English literature were suspiciously viewed by curricula overseers in university settings. Second, in the mid 1980s, the initial moment of textual studies turns towards cultural studies where the particularity of film analysis shifted into a more general realm of textual analysis. More recently, in response to the rapid acceleration of global media technologies, communications and media studies has re-emerged from the mid 1960s to again contest the role of the discipline of film studies. With enormous enrolments and an enviable ability to present the discipline as wide ranging at the same time as it is relevant to the social world, communications and media studies has been able to incorporate the study of a range of media (as we used to say), including digital imagery, telecommunications, music, television, internet apparatus and film, even photography. While this may be understood as a boon for undergraduates where the range of media can be understood in relation to each other, in the same way that, increasingly, these media are being used, what is at stake here is the particularity, born of a long history of film theory and criticism, as well as the disciplines ability to draw on a myriad of ‘outside’ disciplines, everything from politics, to feminist studies, sociology, history, literature and visual arts. In this way it is possible to see a fraught relationship between film studies, historically and interdisciplinarily defined, and communications and media studies textually and technologically based. In many ways these two disciplines contend with each other, are suspicious of each other and rarely combine successfully. Jane Stadler’s latest book is a weirdly intriguing and fascinating film studies book because it so successfully bridges the film studies/communications and media studies divide. While the realm of documentary film studies has long been interested in issues of the ethical treatment of subjects in non-fiction, Stadler presents an intriguing take on the ways that mainstream, narrative films operate. Drawing on a philosophical base born of an engagement with the work of Paul Ricouer’s work on narrative, Vivian Sobchack on phenomenology and Martha Nussbaum’s on ethics and literature, Stadler utilizes close film analysis to refine a series of arguments to do with intersubjectivity and ethics in relation to narrative film. In this engagement Pulling Focus adapts the literary, yet imagistic research of Ricoeur and Nussbaum while drawing on the audio-visual and photographic research of Sobchack. Stadler sets up an intriguing case-study method by which to utilize what has been loosely termed ‘phenomenology’ to explore how meaning making by audio-visual means (films) influences spectators – yes, that oft-utilized term ‘affect’! But where Stadler’s

Contemporary Australian film theory and criticism

The discipline of film studies has, since the late 1960s and early 1970s, been a burgeoning academic and intellectual field of inquiry. This article seeks to provide a map of the local and international flows of Australian film theory and criticism. By tracing some key critical positions, personnel and institutions, it provides an account of the state of contemporary Australian film studies. The article falls into three parts. The first reflects upon the establishment of academic film studies in Australia, beginning with the 1970s and 1980s importation of screen theory. The second attends to a late 1980s and early 1990s recognition of the historical and cultural specificity of film (and television), and the associated turn to historical film studies. The third part looks at the institutionalisation of the discipline, to attend to some of the intellectual and pragmatic considerations shaping Australian film studies through the 1990s and beyond.