AustLit

'IN ARGUMENTS around movies, there will always be someone telling someone else to take the film on its own terms; don’t ask a Western to be a contemporary suburban soap, don’t ask the soap to be a documentary. But it’s not always that easy; people do read themselves into Neighbours, their neighbours into Kath and Kim; and the boundaries keep on blurring. There are still, and lucky for us, great examples of classical narrative (from the past year or so, The Painted Veil and Gran Torino); outside its field, drama, fiction, documentary and film-essay shade into each other. We go to all of them looking for strangeness, wanting to be surprised, and wanting also to have what’s familiar played back. When Jean-Luc Godard said that “cinema is truth twenty-four times a second” he wasn’t talking about the photographic registration of material facts, but about what the complex organisation and re-organisation of sounds and images makes possible for imagination, empathy, insight.' (Introduction)