y separately published work icon Studies in Australasian Cinema periodical issue   peer reviewed assertion
Alternative title: Compulsory Screening
Issue Details: First known date: 2009... vol. 3 no. 1 2009 of Studies in Australasian Cinema est. 2007 Studies in Australasian Cinema
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Contents

* Contents derived from the , 2009 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Travelling towards Ourselves : Rights and Recognition in Clara Law's 'Letters to Ali', Bernadette Brennan , single work criticism (p. 15-28)
Doing 'the Other' Over : Narrative Conservatism in Radical Popular Culture, Susanne Gannon , single work criticism

'Tom Zubrycki's documentary film Molly and Mobarak (2003) and John Doyle's television mini-series Marking Time (2003) were both released during the most vehement anti-refugee governmental regime of contemporary Australian history. Whilst the Howard government and the Ruddock and Vanstone ministries were intent on dehumanizing refugees, these film-makers - amongst other Australian artists - were intent on humanizing them. Afghani refugees were portrayed in these films attempting to create viable lives in rural Australia, as thousands of Afghani asylum seekers were detained by government policy in remote and offshore detention centres. This article considers Zubrycki's and Doyle's portrayals of Afghani refugees as political and aesthetic interventions into official discourses distancing the interests of 'Australians' from those of the refugee 'others' (Gannon and Saltmarsh 2006, 2007). At the same time as applauding these interventions, this article also attempts to map their limits by asking in particular whether the conventions of film narrative inevitably contain and tame. Does narrative carry with it, in these instances at least, a conservatism where empathy becomes most possible when the other is made over to become like 'us'?' (Publisher's abstract)

(p. 29-45)
Domesticating Refugees: The Border-Crossing Other in Marking Time, Kristen Phillips , single work criticism

'John Doyle's mini-series Marking Time, which screened on the ABC in 2003, tells the story of a white Australian boy, Hal, who falls in love with an Afghan refugee girl, Randa. The mini-series was publicized as a narrative about Australian tolerance and multiculturalism, set against the backdrop of events from 2001 such as the Tampa incident. But we can read it as a fantasy of white multiculturalism in which white Australians are central to the nation and must order multiculturalism by facilitating the entry of non-white migrants into the nation. Within this fantasy, Hal and Randa's relationship functions as an idealized interaction between the white, male national subject and the peripheral figure of the female, non-white refugee. The non-white woman's body comes to symbolize the space where the white nation may be reproduced under the control of white men. Appearing in Australian culture at a watershed moment when the acceptability of even conservative white multiculturalism was being questioned, Marking Time's fantasy of the appropriation of the non-white woman highlights the precarious status of women (white and non-white) within the nation, and the need to reconceptualize belonging and borders.'

(p. 47-59)
Borders of the National Family in King of the Coral Sea, Jane Landman , single work criticism

'This article examines the genial 1950s matinee-styled adventure, King of the Coral Sea, a film set on Thursday Island. With Chips Rafferty playing pearling lugger captain Ted King, the film extends Rafferty's previous iconic national repertoire of digger, drover and bushman in an unprecedented (in entertainment cinema) imaginative 'nationalization' of the Torres Strait. The article proposes that the narrative - concerning the protection of the nation's daughters and borders from the threat of shadowy European illegal migration - can be read as a fantastic reversal of power relations in the post-war Pacific, where Australian multiracial enterprise is ably supported by American muscle. It locates the production and reception of the film within the discursive habitat of popular illustrated magazines, focusing on the visual deployment of race and gender in respect to assimilationist anxieties that form part of the imagining of a modern 'Australian way of life'. It further considers how this discourse shapes the deployment of the Torres Strait in a diegetic and extradiegetic relay, in order to imagine an established nationhood for Australia.'

(p. 61-73)
Stowaways on Their Father's Ships : European Immigration and Australian Film, Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , single work criticism
'In the 1940s and 1950s the Department of the Interior's Film Unit made a number of films designed to win the support of a sceptical Australian public for the large-scale intake of migrants, including refugees, from Europe. Migrants, it was argued, addressed the most pressing shortage in Australia at the time, 'manpower'. Since then, there has remained an emphasis on the vitalizing effects of immigration upon Australian society, although this has broadened to include cultural richness as well as labour. The more recent films dealing with the children of migrants have, however, dramatized a concern that the migrant's experience delivered to them as their 'heritage' could no longer carry the weight of optimism that both migrant and host had invested in the enterprise.'
(p. 75-92)
A Cultural Affair to Remember : Nostalgia, Whiteness and Migration in Love's Brother, Jessica Carniel , single work criticism
'Caught in what one reviewer described as an 'Italo-Australian Brigadoon' (Hall 2004), Love's Brother is largely removed from the socio-political context in which it is set and also that in which it was made. By placing Love's Brother back into this context, this article analyses the film's problematic representation of Australia's migrant past and its relationship to current issues regarding migration, memory, race and ethnicity. It focuses upon the political implications of nostalgia in imagining migrant narratives of the past, arguing that this reveals more about current attitudes to migrants and migration. Specifically, it examines how the film 'white-washes' elements of Italian Australian history in order to reflect the ethnic group's current standing in broader Australian society, as well as the possibilities and problems this may hold for newer migrant and refugee communities in contemporary Australia.'
(p. 93-105)
Giving Spaces/Spaces of Giving : Accommodation in Floating Life, Lee-Von Kim , single work criticism
'While the rhetoric of border security and protection has always been present in public debates about immigration in Australia, the Tampa crisis in 2001 appears to have amplified its significance. What I propose here is a shift from the rhetoric of border protection to the rhetoric of hospitality, from the borders of nation and national identity to the borders (or limits) of hospitality. I argue that the discussions about immigration in the Australian context need to be reconfigured: to move away from immigration as a 'problem' that threatens Australia's border security and national identity towards extending the possibilities of hospitality and its implications for relations between migrant subjects and their 'host' nations. This article examines these debates in relation to the film Floating Life (Clara Law, 1996), which charts the transnational journeys and border crossings of a Hong Kong Chinese family, shifting between Australia, Hong Kong and Germany. Floating Life suggests that the hospitality offered to Asian migrants in Australia is haunted by the historical conditions in which Asian migration was encouraged in the years following the abolition of the White Australia policy. I argue that accommodation might be a productive means by which hospitality can be reconfigured. Floating Life explores how practices of accommodation are negotiated and performed in the shadow of official discourses of hospitality. The film's representation of communication technologies demonstrates how, in spite of spatial boundaries, relationships between diasporic communities can be nurtured and maintained.'
(p. 107-119)
Gunpowder and Gardens : Reading Women in The Proposition, Tanya Dalziell , single work criticism

'The John Hillcoat-directed, Nick Cave-penned film, The Proposition (2005), is most instantly recognizable as one recent reinterpretation of 'the western' cinematic genre, which makes the focus of this article on its representation of the garden and female corporeality unlikely. Yet, The Proposition is not a stock transferral of 'the western' to contemporary imaginings of late nineteenth-century colonial Queensland, and an attentiveness to the peripheral interest of The Proposition in the garden and female bodies, rather than the climactic show-down in the main street (which never occurs in Hillcoat's film), raises tangential but telling issues about borders and migration in a settler context that are perhaps not the anticipated subject of a film that ostensibly turns around its eponymous proposal: the murder of one outlaw brother by another to save the life of a third male sibling.'

(p. 121-131)
Law and Identity at the Fence, Kieran Dolin , single work criticism
'This article analyses the leitmotif of the fence in two Australian films from around the turn of the twenty-first century, Rabbit-Proof Fence and One Night the Moon. Drawing on the work of theorists such as Bhabha, Certeau and Morson it argues that in the aftermath of the landmark decisions acknowledging Aboriginal title to land in Australia these films revisit the legal past to make new claims with regard to sovereignty and to address the possibilities and barriers for reconciliation. In these contrasting films, the fence functions as a border, a 'space in-between' where new identities and visions of property are adumbrated.'
(p. 133-146)
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