AustLit

'This article frames Baz Luhrmann's Australia (2008) in terms of the texture of the image and its mode of acting. Through this twofold movement it elaborates on the compositional features of the image and theorizes the mode of acting as a variant of burlesque performance: acting in strobe. Through this framing, some of the unique features of Bazmark's camp aesthetic are mapped out and Catherine Martin's contribution to it is also acknowledged. Through these aesthetic strategies, Luhrmann is able to address the historical archive of Australia, and its popular memory bank in its own flexible camp epic idiom. Thereby the film is able to free itself from being enslaved to chronological articulation of time and history. Instead, it creates for itself mechanisms and devices that enable acts of storytelling that deflect the arrow of time.'

Source: Abstract.