'Fresh from the lands of the Kulin Nations, welcome to Issue 105 of Senses of Cinema! Guest editor Xiang Fan has curated a dossier on Cinema and Piracy that honours the diversity of filmgoing experiences across a broad spectrum of geo-political contexts. In lieu of the binaries between property and ownership that normally frame these debates, what emerges is a critical reading of power in the seventh art. As Fan writes, “This dossier is dedicated to the heterogeneous piracy practices that are integral to an alternative film culture.”' (Editorial introduction)
'Borrowed, remixed, archival, or appropriated images and sounds that are used to build found footage montages have the potential to create counter narratives that disrupt the illusion of a dominant, homogenous sense of identity proposed by films representative of a nation. The creative process of researching, accessing, watching, selecting, cutting, and copying images from original sources have historically challenged the definitions and limitations of piracy. However, this approach to filmmaking can also be seen as one that is necessarily oppositional and defiant, one that reveals the illusion implicit in national cinema and speaks back to those forces that regulate the circulation of images and sounds under the guise of protecting intellectual property rights. This can be seen acutely in a tendency in post-celluloid filmmaking, particularly in films that draw from the archive with the aim of creatively revising film history and its deep connection to the national imaginary.' (Introduction)
'Those were the days, when you could have no income to speak of and still live in Collingwood. I managed it myself for a few years as a recovering arts student, when I moved with a couple of friends into a three-bedroom workers’ cottage off Smith St, total rent just over 200 dollars a week. The protagonists of Bill Mousoulis’ Lovesick (2002) would have been paying even less for their one-bedroom apartment further down the hill, upstairs in a red-brick six-pack, as inner-suburban Melbourne as it gets.' (Introduction)
