Bulletin

Issue: September/October 2007

News

Books for independent movie buffs

Australia’s film directors have been able to fashion a distinctive place somewhere between the ‘poetic’ realism of the European art film and the narrative demands of classical Hollywood cinema, according to a new book on the film industry.

The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand, published by Wallflower Press (UK), is co-edited by La Trobe academic Dr Geoff Mayer, and many of its 24 chapters have been written by staff members and postgraduates.

It will be launched in November by Associate Professor Brian McFarlane from Monash University.

The book tracks the history of the industry by focusing on movies that illustrate the significance of this positioning between commercial blockbuster and arthouse.

‘The industry had to find a niche,’ says Dr Mayer. ‘Hollywood has been a dominating shadow for more than 50 years. For its mere survival, it required an audience.’

The films selected are not iconic, he says, yet all have found an audience without being clones of those made in the US or Europe. They should appeal to the independent movie buff.

‘A film like Chopper is unique in many ways. It’s the same with most of the other films. Moulin Rouge is a very different musical. It is original in terms of its special effects and characters. The Year of Living Dangerously tells an Australian story and The Phantom Stockman is within the US Western genre, but with Aboriginal input.’ Another title for the library of film enthusiasts is Encyclopedia of Film Noir, published by Greenwood Press, and also co-written by Dr Mayer. It contains five essays on the genre and entries on films, actors and directors.

The genre has its inception in the black and white American films of the 1940s which were bathed in distinctive dark shadows and offered a dark mirror to American society. Since then critics and scholars have argued about its various definitions and the influences of hardboiled fiction from pulp magazines and crime novels.

The city is a major focus, the word appearing in the title of dozens of films – Dark City, The Naked City, City of Shadows and so on. The tone is pessimistic, the inhabitants solitary, usually seen scurrying furtively beneath streetlights or along wet alleyways.
‘Most film noir protagonists expressed varying degrees of vulnerable interiority as they battled not only a hostile world, but their own doubts and anxieties,’ says Dr Mayer.