The Film Reviewing of Kenneth Slessor : A Cine-aesthetics of the Sound Cinema single work   criticism  
Issue Details: First known date: 2016... 2016 The Film Reviewing of Kenneth Slessor : A Cine-aesthetics of the Sound Cinema
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'This paper examines the film reviews of Kenneth Slessor, an Australian poet, journalist and war correspondent best known for his contributions to Australian poetry between the two world wars. His film reviews of early Hollywood, British, and Australian sound cinema were an important part of his journalism at Smith’s Weekly from 1931 to 1940. Mostly overlooked until recently these reviews reveal a sophisticated approach towards the new (sound) cinema. The criteria he advanced for evaluating film and the range of qualities he discerned, criticised and celebrated in films were based on appreciating film as a unique artform with its own formal repertoire and modes of production. While such standpoints are now familiar in film reviewing, at the time he was writing such standpoints were just coming into being. Close attention to Slessor’s film reviewing discloses a fecund critical imagination attuned to cinema’s range. He deserves wider recognition as a distinctive voice on the cinema in general and Australian cinema in particular.' (Publication abstract)

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Capturing Spectral Beasts : Marsupial Performances of the Cinematic Undead Ben Dibley , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , December no. 67 2020;

'The ‘double movement of animal (dis)appearance’ has been a long standing and defining trope of the critical literature on the exhibition of animals in zoos and cinema (McMahon and Lawrence 9). This movement rests on the paradox that modern technologies of vision and exhibition have spectacularly increased the visibility of animals in a period in which they have dramatically vanished from the wild and from everyday life. John Berger is no doubt the most well-known and influential critic to elaborate this paradox. For Berger, the proliferation of animal representations coincided with the advent of a modernity that not only increasingly encroached on wildlife but also dis-embedded agrarian populations, dislodging the everyday animal-human relations of rural life. In this context Berger contends: ‘Public zoos came into existence at the beginning of the period which was to see the disappearance of animals’ (Berger 30). Zoo animals, he continues, ‘constitute the living monument to their own disappearance’.' (Introduction)
Capturing Spectral Beasts : Marsupial Performances of the Cinematic Undead Ben Dibley , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , December no. 67 2020;

'The ‘double movement of animal (dis)appearance’ has been a long standing and defining trope of the critical literature on the exhibition of animals in zoos and cinema (McMahon and Lawrence 9). This movement rests on the paradox that modern technologies of vision and exhibition have spectacularly increased the visibility of animals in a period in which they have dramatically vanished from the wild and from everyday life. John Berger is no doubt the most well-known and influential critic to elaborate this paradox. For Berger, the proliferation of animal representations coincided with the advent of a modernity that not only increasingly encroached on wildlife but also dis-embedded agrarian populations, dislodging the everyday animal-human relations of rural life. In this context Berger contends: ‘Public zoos came into existence at the beginning of the period which was to see the disappearance of animals’ (Berger 30). Zoo animals, he continues, ‘constitute the living monument to their own disappearance’.' (Introduction)
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