Cirrus@Austlit

'A personal appreciation of the work and legacy of Tom O’Regan, focusing on his 1994 essay “Two or Three Things I Know About Meaning”. Although O’Regan’s work is often described as being concerned primarily with social discourses and institutional contexts in the landscape of audiovisual media, he also paid close attention to the mechanisms of film and TV texts. His view of meaning was complex and multi-factorial, reflecting both his intellectual approach and his personal temperament.' (Publication abstract)

'The major essays of the distinguished and prolific Australian-born film critic Adrian Martin have long been difficult to access, so this anthology, which collects highlights of his work in one volume, will be welcomed throughout film studies. Martin offers in-depth analysis of many genres of films while providing a broad understanding of the history of cinema and the history of film criticism and culture. These vibrant, highly personal essays, written between 1982 and 2016, balance breadth across cinema theory with almost encyclopedic detail, ranging between aesthetics, cinephilia, film genre, criticism, philosophy, and cultural politics.

'Mysteries of Cinema circumscribes a special cultural period that began with the dream of critique as a form of poetic writing, and today arrives at collaborative experiments in audiovisual essays. Throughout these essays, Martin pursues a particular vision of what cinema has been, what it is, and what it still could be.' (Publication summary)

'I am writing from another country, far away; I no longer live in Australia. Meaghan Morris is partly responsible for this. Let me explain.

'At the end of 2011, I found myself reading the transcript of a long interview with Meaghan conducted by a Melbourne-based researcher, Lauren Bliss. In this discussion, Meaghan comments on the move, in the course of her professional life, to Hong Kong:

'What I really wanted to do was what lots of students from Asia had been doing for decades, which is go and just live an everyday life in another country, have a job, and not go and study the society there as an academic specialty. Just go and know what it’s like to live as a foreigner working in a Chinese society.' 

(Introduction)

'Australian exploitation cinema of the 1970s and 1980s has swiftly become a fashionable topic for analysis, rehabilitation and celebration, especially in the wake of the popular documentary Not Quite Hollywood featuring Quentin Tarantino. Is this Australian cinema's ‘return of the repressed’, at last, in the form of tough, vulgar, anarchic genre pictures – and does this show the way forward for our national cinema? This essay questions many aspects of the ‘Ozploitation’ craze, including its exclusion of art, intellectual or experimental cinema, and its peculiar streamlining of an extremely variegated and still obfuscated national film history. In particular, I argue for a comparative approach to national film cultures – which, in this case, would compel us to ask other, more stringent questions about the ultimate value of the currently baptized Ozploitation ‘classics’.'

Source: Abstract.