'Welcome to the first issue of Studies in Australasian Cinema for 2019.
'This issue comprises two articles which deal with the paradoxical themes at work in politicised representations of gender and sexuality. In ‘Riding in cars as girls: discourses of victimhood, power and agency in Beneath Clouds and American Honey’, Samantha Cater places Australian film Beneath Clouds in a relationship with the US road movie American Honey. In doing so, the article foregrounds the overlapping themes of passivity, victimisation and objectification of young women on the one hand, and notions of resilience agency and self-determination on the other. Likewise, in charting the visibility of gay and lesbian representation/production in Australian film in the 1970s, Jessie Matheson’s ‘“about gays by gays”: The politics of representation in early Australian gay film culture, 1971–1982’, reveals the twin imperatives of developing queer film culture: challenging and subversive, on the one hand, but bound in many ways by aesthetic and industrial demands of acceptability and intelligibility.' (Editor's Introduction)
'Following major film censorship reform in 1971 gay and lesbian Australians were, for the first time, able to see and tell their stories on screen. This change coincided with internationally revolutionary moments of gay and lesbian activism, which were largely centred around the notion of visibility. The new representational opportunities that gay and lesbian film offered quickly became tied to the political imperatives of the Australian iteration of this activist movement. A film sensibility also soon developed that was both particularly queer and particularly Australian. This article explores the extent to which the question of film audience became politicised in Australia following censorship reform in 1971, until the early 1980s, and the implications this had for gay and lesbian representation in film. It fills a gap in the scholarship on the film communities of this period, by interrogating the role gay and lesbian filmmaking groups played in creating a national gay and lesbian cinema culture, and raises questions about how the political and social are expressed through filmmaking within marginalised communities. By exploring the experience of two gay and lesbian filmmaking groups, it will show the ways in which questions of audience and representation influenced the political and aesthetic style of early Australian gay and lesbian film culture.' (Publication abstract)
'While cars have long been associated with masculinity and youth within cinema – through a now long established tradition of the road movie – the representation of girls and/with cars is less common and often problematic. Here, I argue that an analysis of the ways in which girls are shown to interact with cars within two independent road movies can reveal much about discourses of victimhood, power and agency. In these films, girls are rarely shown to be at the wheel themselves, instead they are driven by men; these experiences as passengers are shown to be complex and fraught with danger. However, through these representations the audience are invited to recognise and acknowledge pervasive discourses of victimhood and, in so doing, a new space is created. This new discourse is one which both acknowledges victimhood, but at the same time recognises the resilience and agency of young women.' (Publication abstract)
