AustLit

'Cinema studies scholarship has recently turned its attention to the ‘utilitarian film’; the industrial, training and ‘data-film’; Rick Prelinger’s ‘vernacular archive’. An Australian study mapping this territory has been initiated. Australia’s largest repository of audio-visual records is the National Archives of Australia (NAA), where a variety of collections derived from Commonwealth agencies (CAs) are housed and preserved. Diminishing resources allocated by governments to collecting institutions in Australia compound the degree of difficulty faced by moving image archives at a time when an exponential growth in digital acquisitions, crisis around the preservation of video-originated archives and citizen’s needs and expectations of access to records, including moving image archives, increases. This article offers an overview of the NAA’s Audio-visual Preservation projects and collections.' (Publication abstract)

'An essential story of late 20th century Australia; the rise, fall and afterlife of the Filmmakers’ Co-operative movement in Australia is an untold story linking social movements of the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s with an ‘underground’ cinema that fostered alternative filmmaking enterprise in production, distribution and exhibition. An extraordinary diversity of creative ambition converged with a ground swell of social change, as the Co-ops became a forum and a vehicle for ‘minority’ voices denied expression in mainstream media. The Co-ops themselves changed radically during their lifetimes, charting transitions from 1960s avant-garde film, through militant opposition to authoritarianism, capitalism and patriarchy, to engagement and critical collaboration with a market driven film industry. Australia’s best-known, and lesser-known filmmakers passed through the excitements, disasters and ordeals of the Filmmakers Co-ops. The project contributes to a broad appreciation of engaged filmmaking in Australian cultural history; in particular the work celebrates the commitment of concerned and active citizens, engaged with independent film work, both production and distribution, in campaigns for social equity, human rights and intellectual freedom. The project also explores the constraints and conflicts generated by agencies of government aligned more often with markets than audiences, and with prestige rather than social and cultural impact. ' (Source: Documentary Australia Foundation website)

'Narrated by Ramona Koval, with Helen Morse and Paul English reading from the letters of Judith Wright and ‘Nugget’ Coombs, Love & Fury explores the relationship and shared passions of these two remarkable Australians. Their clandestine relationship over 25 years has been one of the best-kept secrets in Australian literary and political public life.'

'Judith Wright, among Australia’s foremost literary figures, poet, essayist, activist, dedicated herself to writing and fighting for a more humane Australia. Her passion was the land and the first Australians; she was often furious about what she saw as the betrayal of both. ‘Nugget’ Coombs, policy intellectual, ‘sage’, advisor to governments from Curtin to Whitlam, devoted the last decades of his life to the most rigorous commitment to Indigenous Australia. They met in the early 1970s –Nugget was 66 and Judith 57 –at a moment when their shared ambitions for a new kind of Australia seemed achievable. This is a story of two people whose love, work and knowledge have much to tell us still.' (Source: Early Works Australian Documentary Film and Television website)

What I Have Written explores masculinity, spectatorship, and the pornographic imagination. After Christopher Houghton suffers a stroke from which he is not expected to recover, his wife Sorel Atherton receives the manuscript of a novella written by her husband and 'leaked' to her by her husband's friend and university colleague, Jeremy Fayrfax. Sorel finds in these pages evidence of a life betrayed. While Christopher Houghton stares speechless and uncomprehending from his death bed, Fayrfax seeks a moment of truth.