Cirrus@Austlit

'Cate Blanchett, the celebrated Australian actor, has recently received several prestigious awards including the Golden Globe for Best Actress, for playing Lydia Tár, the American genius, lesbian conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, in Todd Field’s Tár (2022). However, it failed to win any Oscars in 2023, along with Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (2022). At first glance though there appears to be no basis for comparing the two films on structural aesthetic grounds, I will demonstrate how one might think the two films together in terms of analysing the crafting of a character type or persona in the script and the related choice of styles of acting to embody it. Critically, Tár was largely a success. But Luhrmann’s Elvis was either loved or vehemently loathed by critics in Australia and internationally too.' (Introduction) 

'With just six films over thirty years (1992-2022), Baz Luhrmann and his creative and marital partner Catherin Martin have successfully created their globally marketable brand, BAZMARK, from an Australian production base, with major American studio finance and distribution. Critically, their films, including ELVIS, sharply polarize opinion unfailingly, so much so that now one expects it. Certainly, the director does so, sanguinely. ' (Introduction)

'“…I am dispended”, says Dujuan Hoosan, the Arrente/Garrwa little Aboriginal boy at the centre of the documentary, In My Blood it Runs (2020). “… suspended”, corrects his mother. But “dispended” like “Desperance”, could well be a coinage in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria about a town that disappears. Though Dujuan got the word wrong, what we saw of his experience in the class-room at his Alice Springs public school certainly made him feel dispensable. The vicissitudes of Dujuan’s education are at the centre of this ambitious film, directed by Maya Newell, in collaboration with the boy’s kin group of elders and First Nations educators both local and international, developed over a period of more than three and a half years. Here, I want to explore the fictional child Nullah in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008), together with Dujuan (the former about 7 or 8 and the latter 10 years old), in terms of how theses films present their effective experience of pedagogy. In a volatile social field such as ours is now, with the global Black Lives Matter Movement demanding fundamental changes to entrenched institutional racism, it’s easier and indeed desirable to think together an activist film with an experimental attitude to lived reality, and Australia with its playful high-camp attitude to history as story, by focusing on their common ambition of placing an Indigenous child at the centre of the action. Equally, the imaginative power of these films (qua film), to become agents of pedagogy will be considered, elaborated for our social context.' (Introduction)

1. I will focus on the praxis of Meaghan’s voice as teacher and film critic. I first met Meaghan in 1979 in the Media Studies degree at the NSW Institute of Technology, now University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). She had just returned from her studies in Paris. She taught courses in Semiotics and Avant-Garde cinema. Her seminars had a remarkable atmosphere and intensity not only because people smoked in the classroom. She introduced us to some heady ideas like the Linguistic Sign as well as the importance of non-linguistic semiotic systems, Benveniste and a concept of discourse. It was the dynamics of her teaching praxis that was incomparable. There were moments of enchantment, certainly, and of heightened perception and affect too. What I also remember is Meaghan rushing between the blackboard (remember the blackboard?), and the chair, all covered in chalk and getting up on a chair to write stuff on it—ideas—diagrams of intellectual rigour. The ethos of the classroom was marked by an ethic of speech—a tremendous capacity to listen carefully and then return one’s embryonic thought amplified and made clearer. Learning became exhilarating, irresistible.'  (Introduction)

'This article frames Baz Luhrmann's Australia (2008) in terms of the texture of the image and its mode of acting. Through this twofold movement it elaborates on the compositional features of the image and theorizes the mode of acting as a variant of burlesque performance: acting in strobe. Through this framing, some of the unique features of Bazmark's camp aesthetic are mapped out and Catherine Martin's contribution to it is also acknowledged. Through these aesthetic strategies, Luhrmann is able to address the historical archive of Australia, and its popular memory bank in its own flexible camp epic idiom. Thereby the film is able to free itself from being enslaved to chronological articulation of time and history. Instead, it creates for itself mechanisms and devices that enable acts of storytelling that deflect the arrow of time.'

Source: Abstract.