Deb Verhoeven

Twice born: Dionysos Films and the establishment of a Greek film circuit in Australia

Abstract From the late 1940s until the late 1970s Melbourne was home to a dynamic Greek cinema circuit made up of some 30 different inner-city and suburban venues operated by a handful of vertically integrated exhibition/distribution businesses. Dionysos Films was amongst the first Greek film exhibition/distribution companies to form in Australia and from 1949 until 1956 it operated with little significant competition, establishing the parameters for a diasporic Greek film circuit that stretched across regional and metropolitan Australia and into New Zealand. This article measures the shadow cast by Dionysos Films (and its charismatic proprietor Stathis Raftopoulos) over the history of Antipodean Greek film experiences and the implications that this neglected aspect of Australian and Greek film history has for our understanding of the national cinemas in both countries.

Australian films at large: expanding the evidence about Australian cinema performance

International markets have in recent years become a critical component of the business model for Hollywood cinema, opening up a renewed interest in the global dimensions of film diffusion. Smaller film-producing nations such as Denmark have similarly emphasised global distribution as a key component of the industrys success. Typically, however, claims for Australian film industry success rely almost exclusively on a films domestic box office performance. This paper considers the possibilities for an expanded approach to measuring success and failure in the Australian film industry. Adopting analytic methods from cinema studies, cultural economics and geo-spatial sciences, this paper will examine the international theatrical circulation of Australian films using a unique global database of cinema showtimes. This data set captures all formal film screenings in 47 countries over an 18-month period ending 1 June 2014 and enables detailed empirical study of the locations visited by Australian-produced films. In conjunction with relevant box office data and contextual critical commentary, we propose a revised and expanded ‘film impact rating’ for assessing the reported performance of Australian films.

Coming Soon (to a Theatre near You): The Temporality of Global Film Distribution to Australia

This article explores the changing contexts of international film exhibition in Australia over a 20-year period (1989–2009) by examining in some empirical detail Australias position in the global flow of films during this time. It argues that, at the most abstract level, distributors are engaged in the management and mediation of time and space in the field of global communications. It is proposed that distributors, through the organisation of temporal differentiation, are explicitly active in the creation of both cultural and commodity value. This is particularly apparent as film distributors explore and engage new methodologies of film release, which emphasise overlapping, intersecting and contradictory temporalities in the cinema experience.

Feature Film Diversity on Australian Cinema Screens: Implications for Cultural Diversity Studies Using Big Data

Like in much of the world, cinema screens in Australia are dominated by feature films from the US. Drawing on the Kinomatics Global Showtime Dataset, a big cultural dataset of cinema screenings, this chapter considers the diversity of films screened in Australian cinemas by examining not only the broad range of film titles on offer, but also what titles cinemagoers have practical access to, represented by films’ screen-shares. Results of this analysis reveal that despite substantial growth in the volume of first-release feature films on Australian cinema screens, for most cinema audiences, this has not translated into an increase in the diversity of films viewed, since the onus for the provision of diversity rests with smaller cinemas that do not belong to major chains.

The Cinema Cities Index: comparing urban cinema cultures around the world

[Cinema culture varies markedly around the globe and between cities. While this is obvious, the drivers of cinema culture are complex and interact in different ways across different locations and often give rise to a distinct character of localised cinema. This can be witnessed at different scales: across countries, between cities and, on a more granular level, based on localised neighbourhoods. In this article, we apply quantitative methods to investigate cities’ ability to support cinema-going, or what we term ‘cinemability’. We focus on four inter-related aspects that we argue contribute to a city’s cinemability. These include the physical infrastructure of cinemas, the number and variety of films available, the presence of film festivals as a form of cultural signalling and the average cost of cinema admissions. In this article, we construct a ranked index of ‘cinemability’ based on data sourced from the Kinomatics Screen Dataset in order to facilitate a global comparison of contemporary cinema-going across 311 world cities. Our Cinema Cities Index is then compared with public contributions on the Cinema Cities website, http://www.cinemacities.com, where users can generate their own version of the index by assigning weights to the different variables based on their personal preferences. The results of our analysis reveal that the public place emphasis on factors such as the diversity of films offered and the affordability of cinema admission as key contributors to what makes a particular city amendable to ‘cinemability’.

Doing the Sheep Good

In the mid-1960s, with support from the National Science Foundation, Sol Worth (a communications scholar and documentary filmmaker) and John Adair (an anthropologist) took the unprecedented step of providing movie cameras to the Navajo community they were studying. This act is now regarded as one of the pivotal moments in the development of visual anthropology and more specifically the emergence of ‘participant visual media research’. Worth and Adair hoped to glean new insights into Navajo culture through formal and thematic analyses of the films produced by members of the Pine Springs Reservation community. From the specific representations made, they expected to deduce defining cultural differences between themselves and the community under scrutiny.

Exhibiting the Exhibitors: Spatial Visualization for Heterogeneous Cinema Venue Data

Abstract Cinema data is characteristically complex, heterogeneous and interlinked. Rather than relying on simple information retrieval techniques, researchers are increasingly turning to the creative exploration and reapplication of data in order to more fully explore the meaning of newly available and diverse data sets. In this context, the cinema historian becomes the creator of visual texts which can be assessed for both their interpretive insight and their aesthetic qualities. This paper presents four research projects that use different spatio-temporal visualization techniques to understand the industrial dynamics of post-war film exhibition and distribution in Australia. The research integrates work by a group of inter-disciplinary investigators into the effectiveness of techniques such as dendritic mapping, Circos circular visualizations, animation, cartogram mapping, and multivariate visualization for the study of cinema circuits and operations at a number of scales.

A Method for the Visual Representation of Historic Multivariate Point Data

The visual representation of multivariate spatial and temporal data is important for interpreting and analysing historical geographic patterns that change over time. The introduction of geospatial technologies in historical scholarship has challenged the suitability of current visual representations due to the need for greater temporal emphasis and the tracking of historical events over time. This research presents a holistic multivariate approach to historical visual representation for point based historical data. The method has been developed through extending the spatial presence in information graphics and through meaningful spatial classification. This paper demonstrates the benefits gained from integrating historical, geographic, temporal, and attribute data through the development of a case study on the history of Melbourne’s cinema venues between 1946 and 1986.

Understanding the dynamics between the United States and Australian film markets: testing the ‘10% rule’

ABSTRACT Australia has historically been an important market for American media exports. As far as film trade relations between the two countries go, there is an anecdotal perception that distributors follow a ‘10% rule’ to predict the popularity of Hollywood titles in Australia, expecting American films to earn around one-tenth of their domestic box office receipts when screened downunder. Nonetheless, as prevalent as this ‘rule’ has been in the industry, it has not been seriously tested. This article addresses the gap in both scholarship and business practices and uses the ‘10% rule’ as a starting point to discuss various facets of the relationship between the two markets. We measure the popularity of American films among Australian audiences as well as contrast the differences that emerge in terms of distribution and exhibition in these markets. The article compares box office revenues, screening counts, life length in theatres and release delay in both markets. In addition, we examine how Australian exhibitors and audiences differ from the US in terms of preference towards genre, distribution company and production origin. The discussion is informed by a large dataset of global film screenings from the Kinomatics Project in conjunction with box office data compiled by Rentrak. We find no support for the ‘10% rule’ but strong evidence that audience tastes as well as distribution and exhibition practices differ across regions.

A ‘natural experiment’ in Australian cultural policy: Australian Government funding cuts disproportionately affect companies that produce more new work and have larger audiences

Abstract In Australia, cultural policy settings differentiate between purported ‘small-to-medium’ and ‘major’ performing arts organisations, primarily in relation to their revenue size and institutional stability. This article publishes a quantitative analysis of the relative creative outputs of these Australian performing arts organisations, focusing primarily on the production of so-called ‘new works’: original cultural texts, created and performed recently. Using survey data from 21 Australian performing arts organisations, as well as aggregated government data regarding 173 performing arts organisations, and repertoire data for 8 symphony orchestras, across 7 years, we set out to determine the relationship (if any) of organisational scale and artform to the amount of new work in the Australian publicly subsidised performing arts sector. We find that the majority of the new work is produced by the small-to-medium sector. Smaller organisations are more likely to produce new work than larger ones, and large organisations produce relatively little new work. The small-to-medium sector has, in aggregate, larger audiences than the major companies. These findings have specific implications for Australia’s lively cultural policy debate.