AustLit

'Australian cinema has travelled a varied trajectory since its initial development in the late 19th century. The cinema reflected the developing social and cultural tropes of its time, as the concept of a distinct Australian identity began to form. But it is clear that a colonial history of Australian film focuses very clearly and emphatically along lines of class and gender. Rose Lucas notes that there is a “cluster of dominant, recognisable images in our cinema” which consists of the bushman, the ocker, the ‘mate’, and the ‘battler’, a series of male coded tropes which are stubbornly pervasive within this national cinema. These archetypes have trained a concentrated gaze upon masculinity in Australian cinema, but there has been little space in this cultural landscape for the development of archetypical women in Australia’s cultural history with very few valued traits that are specifically coded female. This resolutely masculine perspective seems to have shaped the nation and the national cinema, and Lucas’s observation highlights the key archetypes as embodied as masculine. But these archetypes, long the sole domain of masculine representation, also have historically encompassed female experiences. In this paper we identify the need to broaden such a framework, and by taking the most Australian and most masculine of forms – the larrikin – we argue that the larrikin girl has been hiding in plain sight across Australian film history.'  (Introduction)

'It was rather poetic that my first IRL interaction with the festival, on the Sunday of the first weekend, was a much-anticipated, rarest-of-rare screening of The Afterlight (2021). Charlie Shackleton’s film was described in the program as something ephemeral, whose very existence as a single 35mm print only, is entwined with its deterioration. Introducing the film before its first screening, guest of the festival Shackleton noted that the film’s Australian distributors, Conor Bateman and Felix Hubble of Static Vision, had not even yet seen it. Starting with something that explicitly engaged with the ephemerality of cinema, and the cinematic experience, was apt. The Melbourne International Film Festival had been stalled by Covid restrictions not once but twice, thanks to Australia (in particular the festival’s home state, Victoria) having some of the most extensive periods of lockdown across the globe. This was impacted, particularly, by a snap lockdown in August 2021 that led to the cancellation of the entire in-person festival and its replacement in the lacklustre form of an online slate, made severely disappointing, at least for me, by an inadequate and often broken digital viewing platform that had not improved since 2020. With this being MIFF’s first return to an in-person festival with screenings, talks, events, and all other accoutrements since August 2019, my varied experience of it was, as with any other year, enriched by a memorable web of thematic connections between films and to life.' (Introduction) 

'Most discussion of the career of Cecil Holmes focuses, understandably, on the 30-year body of work he completed after migrating to Australia from New Zealand in 1949. Those who comment on Holmes’ much shorter stint in the New Zealand film industry are generally preoccupied with his infamous sacking from the National Film Unit (NFU) only three weeks after Weekly Review no. 374: The Coaster (1948) was released. Holmes became both persona non grata and a martyr to the leftist or socialist cause for his role in leading the first public service strike in New Zealand. Controversy over these events and the actions taken by the Labour Government of the time centred on the manner in which knowledge and evidence of Holmes’ involvement was attained and circulated. A satchel he’d left in one of the NFU’s cars contained both a letter of instruction to the leader of the union and Holmes’ Communist Party membership card. This was purloined by individuals close to the government and leaked to the press. Although Holmes was subsequently reinstated and back paid after a period of twelve months out of work, he quickly left his birth country for Australia, never to return again.'  (Introduction)