AustLit

'This article examines some aspects of the West German reception of a series of Australian films about Aborigines - including Peter Weir's The Last Wave (1977), Phillip Noyce's Backroads (1977) and Michael Edols' Lalai and Floating (1973 and 1975) - which were shown in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in 1978 and 1979. It explains how these films came to be shown in Europe, how and why they caught the imagination of German reviewers and film-makers at the time, and how they themselves contributed to the begetting of several German films on Aboriginal themes - including Nina Gladitz's documentary Das Uran gehört der Regenbogenschlange (The Uranium Belongs to the Rainbow Serpent) (1979), Werner Herzog's Where the Green Ants Dream (1984) and Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World (1991).' (Author's abstract)

'John Hillcoat's film The Proposition (2005), written by Nick Cave and set in a late 1880s Australian outback, is a colonial ballad of rape, murder, revenge and fratricide. The central narrative arc is concerned with relations between men, the English Captain Stanley and the Irish Burns gang representing, respectively, the law and the lawless, civilizing imperialists and wild colonials. Drawing on Richard Dyer's White, this article explores the gender-coded white racial imagery of the film and argues that the figure of the white woman signifies what is really at stake: a cultural and racial logic of whiteness as definitive of the 'Australian'.' (Author's abstract)

This article looks into the uncertain cultural politics of Ray Lawrence's 1985 film adaptation of Peter Carey's Bliss (1981) perhaps one reason for critical reticence about it to examine the functioning of the film as a critique of the options aesthetic, commercial and political within the inherited aesthetic force field of the period. The film is considered in two ways: first, with regard to the question of why Bliss has come to be regarded as a key film in the story of the Australian movies, as a kind of liberation point a leap away from naturalism and the historical realism of the new wave of the 1970s (Byrnes 2008); and second, with regard to its main theme, the satiric treatment of advertising, American consumerism and commodity culture. What lies at the heart of this is the complex relationship between representation and power, and this will be considered in terms of the paradox that Bliss criticizes consumerism while being aware of its own aspirations as a commercial feature film, and therefore a commodity. This is what is meant by the film's uncertain cultural politics: the paradox arises from the fact that cinema is both an artistic and a commercial medium; as a culture-industry, it seeks to criticize the commercial processes in which it is itself embedded (Author's abstract).

'This article offers a reconsideration of the films and career of Ray Lawrence, a critically acclaimed Australian director whose most recent film Jindabyne was a national and international successes in 2006. Although to date his output consists of just three feature films completed since 1985, Lawrence's work can be seen to embody, unite and typify several disparate ideals, debates and tendencies present within Australian film-making over the past twenty years.' (Author's abstract)

'This article suggests that Dead End Drive-In (1986), Brian Trenchard-Smith's little-known Ozploitation film, deserves reconsideration from Australasian film scholars because it offers a valuable contribution to discussions about Australian masculinity, car culture, phobic narratives and the White Australia Policy. It is argued that the drive-in as detention centre foreshadows later Australian anxieties about immigration and border protection. Clearly a 'phobic narrative' full of 'white panic' (Morris, 1989, 1998), it exhibits many of the anxieties about Australians and 'auto-immobility' that Catherine Simpson (2006) discusses, and fits neatly into Tranter's (2003) discussion of cars and governance and Bode's (2006a) arguments about whiteness and Australian masculinity in crisis.' (Author's abstract)