Innehållsförteckning för No. 200 från Metro

GLENN DUNKS Contributor, Metro (2013–present) I don’t know who said it first, but there is a popular self-help meme that says you are a writer as long as you write. It doesn’t matter whether you’re afforded the opportunity to write what you wish to write for a living, or whether you partake as nothing more than a hobby or on the side. Fictional novels, investigative journalism, personal blog or whatever other form, it doesn’t matter as you sit down at your keyboard or notebook – you are a writer as long as you write. However, what if what you want to write is film criticism on Australian cinema? And, even further down the cinematic family tree, Australian queer cinema at that? It’s hard to paint a rosy picture when you…

»»ANTHONY CAREW Contributor, Metro (2011–present) Three minutes into Now Sound: Melbourne’s Listening (Tobias Willis, 2018), I saw myself – unexpectedly – on screen. It was both a little unnerving and not entirely surprising: this was, after all, a documentary about Melbourne’s music scene, a film filled with friends and foes and fellow Triple R broadcasters, in which my face was certainly not out of place. This is a very personal example of representation, especially as it reflects on Australia’s film industry: people being able to see their stories, their culture, their town reflected back at them. The presence of Metro in Melbourne has added another, important layer to that experience: not just seeing your town on screen, but having films set therein thoughtfully, critically discussed – the relationship between local…

Over a decade on from its first episode, Underbelly remains the last scripted piece of Australian television to become a true phenomenon. Even before it aired, the series dominated discussion around Australian popular culture. Its first season, which was broadcast from February to May 2008 and was adapted from John Silvester and Andrew Rule’s Leadbelly: Inside Australia’s Underworld Wars, chronicles the wheeling, dealing and, most of all, killing that occurred between Melbourne’s organised crime factions from 1995 to 2004. The success of the franchise – which aired a spin-off miniseries, Underbelly Files: Chopper, as recently as last year – is testament both to our baser desires as viewers (with sex and violence ubiquitous throughout) and a distinctively Australian fascination with the darker aspects of our recent history. What made Underbelly…

Having made an impact following its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2018, Pietra Brettkelly’s Yellow Is Forbidden cements the New Zealand filmmaker’s reputation for taking audiences on fascinating cross-cultural journeys. This documentary is the result of nearly two years spent with Chinese fashion designer Guo Pei across six countries, chronicling the couturier’s quest to gain the ultimate respect in the fashion world: an invitation to Paris’ Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture. As well as being an exquisite visual spectacle that showcases the intricacy and beauty of Guo’s creations, the film explores the interactions between Eastern and Western cultures in the world of high fashion. Brettkelly pays respect to her subject’s Chinese heritage through explorations of the sociohistorical and cultural references in Guo’s work, while allowing us…

After a life lived fighting for queer and women’s liberation as well as championing other marginalised voices, including those of Australia’s Indigenous peoples, 78-year-old Pink Floyd fan and former police officer Nance Peck refuses to be disappeared. Embracing a non-binary gender identity in recent years, after a life lived largely as a lesbian, she’s just as happy being called ‘mate’ as she is going by female pronouns. What she won’t accept, however, is being pushed out of the way by oblivious pedestrians. It’s a red line she clearly demarcates with candour in Sue Thomson’s gloriously life-affirming 2018 documentary The Coming Back Out Ball Movie (TCBOBM). Debuting on the closing night of last year’s Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), it follows eleven elders spanning the gender and sexuality spectrums as they…

The screen was lit with Weaving, Geneviève Picot, and an unknown Russell Crowe. We agreed on how good Proof was and that now Australia had at least three outstanding women directors, that Jocelyn Moorhouse was on a par with Gillian Armstrong and Jane Campion.– Mark Rudman1 MAIN CAST Martin Hugo Weaving Celia Geneviève Picot Andy Russell Crowe Mother Heather Mitchell Young Martin Jeffrey Walker PRINCIPAL CREDITS Year of release 1991 Length 90 mins Writer/Director Jocelyn Moorhouse Producer Lynda House 1st Assistant Director Tony Mahood Director of Photography Martin McGrath Sound Recordist Lloyd Carrick Production Designer Patrick Reardon Editor Ken Sallows Music Not Drowning, Waving When Jocelyn Moorhouse released Proof as her debut film in 1991, its success marked an exciting new direction for Australian cinema. This was an intriguing narrative,…

GREG DOLGOPOLOV (UNSW) Associate Editor, Metro (2015–present) Contributor, Metro (2003–present) Australian Indigenous cinema has come a long way over the past sixty years, and there are multiple factors behind the transformation. These include the emergence of immense creative and technical talent, education, recognition, institutional support and funding, and various forms of critical discourse, discussion and support. The history of mainstream recognition and the popularisation of Indigenous cinemas is one yet to be written, but it is safe to say that the work done by Metro over some forty years has been instrumental in promoting, discussing and celebrating the incredible achievements in this field. Indigenous cinematic representations have moved from an absence in Australian feature films (save for a few trustworthy sidekicks of bushranging heroes), to, now, continually dominating the awards…

DAN GOLDING Contributing Editor, Metro (2014–present) You couldn’t have chosen a better date to start a magazine about media than 1963. If chronicling revolutionary shifts in media technology and culture was the goal, then the 1960s was the date to begin. When Metro (under its previous title, Film Appreciation Newsletter) was founded, digital technology was taking its first steps towards the transition from high-tech Cold War curio to believable part of everyday culture. Cassette tapes – used for transporting then-huge amounts of data, not 1980s pop songs – were around a year old, and ASCII, the standard that underpins how text could be shown on computer screens, had just been developed. The impact that such fledgling technologies would have on media, and daily life, was still the stuff of science…

»»HANNA SCHENKEL Contributor, Metro (2014–present) ‘Critic’ is not a descriptor inherently laden with goodwill in many circles. There remains a pervasive stereotype of the failed artist, the bitter miser who would rather tear down than build up. Whenever a work is shunned by critics yet popular with audiences, questions arise about what the point of critics really is: what do they know, anyway? Of course, good film criticism reaches far beyond what is popular, and a good critic will never approach their work with the goal of finding fault. In fact, long-form criticism is often far less about assigning value, and more about exploring a filmmaker’s approach to a particular subject or genre, or the film’s context in cinematic history. It’s a search for the hidden meanings and themes only…

»»NICHOLAS GODFREY Contributor, Metro (2011–present) The past achievements of the South Australian film industry have long burdened, and threatened to occlude, its present. Writing in Metro in 2006 of 1970s premier Don Dunstan’s ‘Medici-like inspiration’ in establishing the South Australian Film Corporation (SAFC), Russell Porter mused that, ‘we didn’t realize it at the time, but the people drawn to the SAFC in the mid-seventies were to become among the most influential in the following decades of the Australian film and television industries’ (M150). From Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975; M35, M149, M193) to Breaker Morant (Bruce Beresford, 1980; M51, M159), the early SAFC films have exerted considerable legacies. Over the years, Metro has reappraised and recontextualised these films with carefully historicised evaluations. Belinda Smaill analysed Gillian Armstrong’s documentaries…

Under the Cover of Cloud (2018) begins with its protagonist returning home on the trusty Spirit of Tasmania ferry. Having lost his job, he is on his way to visit his family in Tasmania, in the hope that he might start writing a new book, ‘something bigger’. His mellow voiceover notes: ‘I want to write something beautiful about cricket – a piece of literary nonfiction. It will, in some sense, be about Tasmanian batsmen, and it will be from the heart.’ Starring writer/director Ted Wilson as himself, and his family as themselves, and Tasmania’s cricket legend David Boon as himself, Under the Cover of Cloud is a film about itself but also not about itself; it is a film about cricket but not about cricket. It is a fiction that…

What would a president see in Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018)? When, at the end of 2018, Barack Obama made like any self-respecting cinephile and posted a films-of-the-year list on his socials,1 he showed plenty of cred, listing acclaimed arthouse and indie movies, like Burning, alongside the all-conquering Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018). It’s interesting to contemplate what a man who once occupied a seat of such supreme power would love in Lee’s drifting 148-minute tone poem. Its central device, the disappearance of a young woman, Hae-mi (Jun Jong-seo), is never resolved; instead, it’s a mystery that, in staying unsolved, leaves everything about the film mysterious. The thematic subtext of the screenplay, economic inequality, definitely gives it universal resonance. But it was nonetheless surprising, upon scanning the former US president’s faves,…

‘How are we, as Australians, letting our country be developed [and for] whose benefit?’ This is the question posed in voiceover in the opening sequence of feature documentary Undermined: Tales from the Kimberley (Nicholas Wrathall), which premiered at the 2018 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) and was financed by the MIFF Premiere Fund. It’s the urgent question at the heart of a complex and complicated collection of stories that are at times inspiring, disturbing and baffling. An Australian filmmaker who has spent many years living and working in New York, Wrathall is best known for the 2013 political and literary portrait documentary Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia. He is also a writer and producer on Undermined, alongside Stephanie King, an award-winning campaigner around welfare and sustainability. While Wrathall…

BRIAN MCFARLANE Series Editor, NFSA essay series (2007–present) Contributor, Metro (1993–present) The original aim of the essays in Metro’s National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) series was to provide definitive accounts of Australian films that were important during the ‘revival’ of the 1970s and 1980s, but it has now gone well beyond any such parameter. The series was set in train after Kodak and Atlab issued remastered prints of the films in the early 2000s; since its beginnings in Metro 152, forty-four titles have been explored to date. The standard of the essays has been consistently high: thorough in research, written in prose that makes them accessible to a wide readership and providing a first port of call for anyone wanting to pursue any of the films discussed…

LIZ GIUFFRE Contributing Editor, Metro (2011–present) Contributor, Metro (2010–present) One of the things I love, as a Sydney-based screen fan and analyst, is seeing how the negotiation between place, media form and content has played out over the time Metro has been in existence. Sydney has at times been a leader, at other times a follower, and at other times again merely one place in a chain contributing to a larger screen landscape. In 1985, Metro ran an interview by John Hill with Ian Muir, who had written a Master’s thesis at UNSW on the changing role of Sydney television. Hill, himself an academic at the University of Newcastle at the time, asked about how television in a region like Sydney attracted and maintained viewers across different stations and with…

»»MIKE WALSH (FLINDERS UNIVERSITY) Associate Editor, Metro (1998–present) Contributor, Metro (1997–present) As I work my way through each new edition of Metro, I see the contents grouped first into articles on Australian cinema and then into a focus on Asia. This suggests some sort of intellectual urgency or specificity of interest for Australians – a claim that Asian cinema ranks, or should rank, high on our cultural agenda. Given this auspicious occasion for Metro, it is appropriate to pause and examine that assumption. The major pathway many Australians have taken to Asian cinema has been the fan route. Martial arts, anime and hero-gangster films have long led young moviegoers to seek out protagonists with big eyes and heroes who can kick their adversaries in the chest or mow down an…

»»ANDREW PIKE (RONIN FILMS) Long-time supporter of ATOM The education market for films is traditionally not the place for gala openings, red carpets, glitz and champagne. It’s a market that focuses on function, content and access, not media hype, and it often operates below the radar of the mainstream industry. It’s often ignored when industry reviews or assessments are undertaken, or when marketing workshops are conducted by government agencies. In some countries, it is not even recognised as a market at all, but rather lumped in broadly with ‘non-theatrical’ or home entertainment. ATOM – in all of its activities, including the publication of Metro and its antecedent journal, Film Appreciation Newsletter – has fought valiantly to encourage and facilitate the informed and appropriate use of films in educational contexts (at…

Sword-wielding warriors, lofty, dramatic flights and epic historical backdrops are hallmarks of Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s striking wuxia films: Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004) and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006). Building worlds with ornate finesse, these films conjure emotive forces through vibrant, eye-popping colours and heightened choreography. His latest film, Shadow (2018), marks a lavish return to form, but he subverts the motifs audiences have come to expect by employing almost monochromatic cinematography and carefully crafted movement. Here, a muted palette instils the film with the elegance of Chinese ink-brush paintings, bringing forth starker depictions of violence that provoke more severe questions about the consequences of a destructive gluttony for power. Shadow opens on a quivering Madam (Sun Li) peering through the keyhole of a high-scaling royal-palace…

Life isn’t easy for the residents of Argokhi, Georgia. Their small rural village huddles in the foothills of the imposing Caucasus mountain range, where the natural beauty of the terrain is mostly untouched by modern intervention. This is a place that seems to resist the pull of technology and the other trappings of contemporary life. Most villagers live hand-to-mouth, working the land to produce food for themselves and their neighbours. Animals are either slaughtered for meals or sold on for profit. The land itself is diligently tended using agricultural practices that date back to the Middle Ages; as one resident explains, ‘We all grow our own wheat and mill it into flour. You can’t make a living out of working in the village. We work just to live.’ In the…

A young woman, clad in loose white fabric, stands with her back to a wall, her attention devoted to the iPhone in her hand. Everything around her is sparse: a window faces onto the peeling weatherboard of the neighbouring property, its horizontal wooden slats contrasting with the vertically panelled interior. Nothing within the frame suggests the possibility of colour; only the woman’s achromatic skin definitively reveals the shot to be black-and-white. This first, stationary, shot of Grace, Who Waits Alone (Georgia Temple, 2016), which lingers for over a minute, is both representative of one of the film’s recurring visual motifs – detached depictions of a human body and technological device encased together in mausoleum-like interiors – and indicative of its status as an underground film. Such rigorous minimalism has its…