AustLit

Kennedy Miller has been located in Sydney since the early 1980s, when its reputation as Australia’s most successful production house was established. But its origins and trajectory as a company are intimately tied to Melbourne. Drawing on textual, historical, and archival sources, I argue that Melbourne’s screen culture and industry at the time of the Australian film revival played a fundamental key role in shaping the abilities and sensibilities of the company’s founders, George Miller and Byron Kennedy.

In Proof (Jocelyn Moorhouse 1991), the photographs of blind central protagonist, Martin, construct multiple Melbournes. Martin’s compulsive photography is a product of a dysfunctional relationship with his mother and becomes his primary mechanism to document and regulate his world. Through this process, Martin’s Melbourne exists as a fossil; the preserved remains of his memories. In contrast, Martin’s burgeoning friendship with Andy introduces a Melbourne that exceeds the fossil image. This Melbourne is captured in shared photographs that reflect the promise of community abundance; a promise connected with 1990s Melbourne live music culture. The soundtrack by Melbourne band, Not Drowning, Waving, significantly contributes to this heterotopic representation of Melbourne, and their distinct musical style further evokes a lived Melbourne from this period. Proof’s soundtrack here combines with recognisable chronotopes of the inner city to re-fossilise this Melbourne for the present-day spectator for whom, like the film’s characters, Melbourne was their lived experience.

Stanley Kramer’s fizzingly apocalyptic On the Beach (1959) dominates and defines popular understandings of Melbourne’s cinematic representation in the 1950s. Shot in the city and its surroundings from January to March 1959, and released internationally towards the end of the year, both the film and Nevil Shute’s source novel have been highly influential in reinforcing and promoting specific understandings of 1950s Melbourne as a staid, sleepy, uneventful and architecturally conservative metropolis. This hard-to-shake view of Melbourne has been further compounded by the lack of comparative feature film images of the city (a brief view in 1952’s Road to Bali excepted) and its appearance in such international documentaries as The Melbourne Rendezvous (1957). But Melbourne does appear more dynamically in a range of less noted and disparate short films, mini-features and documentaries produced by government funded entities like the Australian National Film Board and the State Film Centre of Victoria, small production entities formed around the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Melbourne (often made by major Melbourne architects such as Robin Boyd and Peter McIntyre) and the Melbourne University Film Society, and such maverick independent filmmakers as Giorgio Mangiamele. Many of the works also provide a more critical, though at times celebratory, view of the changing cityscape of Melbourne (height limits for buildings were “exploded” by the completion of ICI House in 1958), the tentative embrace of modernity and internationalisation (e.g. the impact of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics) and the changing ethnicities of the inner city and suburbs. This essay maps and challenges broader understandings of Melbourne’s filmic representation in the 1950s by exploring the various ways in which the city is figured in unjustly forgotten or marginalised films like The Melbourne Wedding Belle (1953), Your House and Mine (1954) and Sunday in Melbourne (1958).

This paper examines the work of Australian experimental film legends, Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, who, over a fifty-year period, perfected a range of avant garde cinematic techniques including experiments with colour separation, repetition, exposure, and layered soundtracks. This ‘making wild’ or ‘becoming animal’ of the filmic medium is here given the term cinemal, whereby, in rearranging the viewer’s sensorium, the Cantrills’ re-enchant everyday life. Three aspects of their diverse oeuvre will be examined, as their disruptive techniques call for a re-figuring of the way we conceive of the Australian landscape, as well as cityscapes, in particular, the city of Melbourne, and finally, of the domestic sphere.