Glenys Adams
Glenys.Adams@vu.edu.au

The aim of this paper is to investigate the Private Rooms of San Filippo Neri at the Santa Maria in Vallicella church in Rome. Building on current research on museums, collections and the cult of saints, the paper will seek to explain why such a privately venerated space has continued to exist from the time of Filippo Neri’s death in 1595, when such popular devotion of this saint created the need for public veneration, not only in Rome but throughout Italy.

In the sixteenth century Filippo Neri was considered to be a leading figure in the recovery of the Catholic spirituality and culture that is associated with the Counter Reformation period in Rome. Neri was known for his Christian humanism that embraced people from all walks of life and was extremely popular with the Romans of that period.

The private rooms of San Filippo Neri at the Vallicella are located well away from the public gaze and represent one of the few Baroque collection display areas that still maintain an exceptional degree of preservation. This site represents an opportunity to reconstruct the memorialization of this saint through the context of the physical spaces in this private suite of rooms.

Sofia Ahlberg
s.ahlberg@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

Fugitives in Art

This paper regards music and language in cultural texts as coexisting in states of dissonance and consonance. It examines the process of "crossing over" between the two art forms, from the late 19th to the beginning of the 20th centuries. Instead of an area of closure between the musical and literary, the "borderline" becomes an expression of artistic, psychological and political transmutation. The transgression attracts generic fugitives whose innovative characteristics suggest notions of ecstasy and abandonment of truth.

A prime example of music in literature as a marker of boundary violation is Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata - a novella centred around Beethoven's sonata. The "unspeakable" (madness) is given musical expression where language fails. Similarly, the African-American cartoonist George Herriman's humorous creation "A Katnip Kantata in the Key of K," (1922) that features companions Krazy Kat and Ignatz, is sexually, racially, and musically ambiguous. Through the literary interpretation of musical forms such as the religious cantata, the classical fugue and improvisational music, a countercultural "Roaring Twenties" comes into focus.

Supported by philosophical and psychoanalytical readings, as well as audio samples, this paper proposes that artistic mutiny encourages an actual "crossing over" between artists and their critics, listeners, and readers.

Mammad Aidani
maidani@vicnet.net.au

The Enigma- A new discourse of the other

This paper is situated within current debates in cultural studies, post colonial theory and psychology concerning the construction of the racial and cultural Other. The paper raises questions in relation to how the Other establishes a sense of ‘self’ in a society in which they are insidiously represented by their ‘difference’ and marginal ethnic status. It further raises questions as to whether an authentic conversation, relationship or dialogue could take place between the Other and those from the dominant cultural group.

Based on interviews with non European immigrants and refugees l explore their narratives of ‘Otherness’ and their experiences of the ‘first encounter’ with Europeans. The paper gives voice and visibility to the ‘Other’s’ experience of the European linguistic, philosophical cultural and psychological space and explores the nexus between the ‘informal’ psychological negotiation that takes place between the Other and the European in the construction of the ‘self’ of the non European Other.

Sue Angelatos
s.angelatos@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

The Papal Presence at the Venerable

Beneath the gory images of martyrdom and bloody executions of the late 16th century martyr-cycle frescoes painted by Niccolò Circignani at the Venerable English College, Rome, there lies a continuous thread of visual references to the Holy Roman See.

This paper will discuss the significance of this theme, and examine the contribution made by the then reigning pontiff, and founder of the College, Pope Gregory XIII.

Djoymi Baker
Djoymib@unimelb.edu.au

Opening and Closing: Teasers, Titles and Credits in Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Teasers in Buffy The Vampire Slayer present elements of the Buffyverse past in new combinations, and by doing so establish new narrative connections. This reworked version of the past is then linked to an immanent future to unfold in the episode. Title sequences are seemingly more static, but similarly re-piece the past in ways reworked between and sometimes within seasons. At the same time they provide a short-hand guide to the characters. Teasers and titles function metonymically in Buffy, with the parts standing in for the whole Buffyverse. The flux between past, present and future draws on the anticipatory function of the teaser, but operates in tension with the more usual function of title sequences: to firmly establish the parameters of the text and the viewer's relationship with it.

In television programs, voice-overs, song lyrics and text in teasers and title sequences also act as short-hand guides to the program, delivering information but also a particular point of view. In the case of Buffy, "Previously on Buffy The Vampire Slayer" is a disembodied voice-over that operates potentially as either the voic of the character or actor, most often Giles/Head. This slippage between character and actor connects with the self-reflexivity often displayed in Buffy itself. But as a 'voice-of-god' it further implies subjective view of the Buffyverse. Thus while seemingly banal aspects of the Buffyverse, titles, teasers and credits frame its episodes, situating the viewer while also reconfiguring the story-world.

Only a Simulacrum of the Void': Art & Text's Antipodality

If we look at the history of Australian art writing since the 1950s, we can easily locate the differences between succeeding types of nationalist agendas, noting their links to external, non-artistic agendas of nation and politics. In particular, Australian art criticism is marked by writers' acceptance of the apparent explanatory necessity of constructing appropriate nationalist discourses. This paper takes 'Antipodality', a special section of Art & Text 6 (Winter, 1982) as the starting point for an examination of how critics Paul Taylor, Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris and artist, Imants Tillers, confronted the problems caused for Australian art by the centre/periphery model and the 'provincialism problem'.

Patrycja Bieszk
pbieszk@hotmail.com

Vampire Hip: Style as Subcultural Expression in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

In my paper I will concentrate on the aesthetics promoted by the Buffy franchise and it’s particular appeal to the series’ audience, especially the role of style in the creation of Buffy’s cult following. My main interest lies in how subcultural meanings are filtered into mainstream television, how they are transformed and what is the specific effect that is achieved as a consequence. I will also analyze the nature of the cult interest generated by the series and its spinoffs.

Walter Burgess
walter.burgess@research.vu.edu.au

Media coverage of Cambodia 1975 to 1991FULL PAPER

The paper looks at how the media covered events during the April 1975 to January 1079 period under the Pol Pot regieme and also the following period until 1991 under the Vietnamese installed Heng Samrin/Hun Sen government.

The paper examines broadly, in generally non-specific terms, how the media covered Cambodia during the Pol Pot regieme. There were at least four non-communist newsmen who braved the dangers and crossed into Cambodia and recored material for publication in the western media. Most of the coverage either came from Bangkok, either from 'old Indochina hands' or by media arriving for a short trip and a quick story. Other material came through government sources, either US (usually CIA), Soviet (KGB) or Vietnamese, all of which was antagonistic towards the regieme in Phnom Penh and therefore dubious in accuracy.

The media had greater freedom of access to Cambodia following the Vietnamese invasion in December 1978 and the installation of the Heng Samrin givernment in Phnom Penh. The new government wanted to justify its existence and therefore, under the instructions of the Vietnamese, slowly begun to allow western newsmen into the country under strict conditions, and with a government appointed driver and interpreter. Some of the interpreters were prouting the 'government line' to the newsmen while others were actually ignorant of what had happened under the Lon Nol and Pol Pot regiemes. Some of the newsmen who went into Cambodia were 'old Indochina hands', and therefore knew of the conditions and history prior to 1975 and also 1979. Others were new to the region and had little knowledge of the country, its history and cilture and therefore many of their reports were inaccurate. Other newsmen had a political agenda, either of the right or left, to fulfil and therefore their material was also inaccurate. Some examples of the above have been included in the paper.

The main conclusion of the paper is that the majority of the reporting of Cambodia between 1975 and 1991 was negative and highly inaccurate.

Allan Cameron
bubblecaster@bigpond.com

The Detective and the Image: Hypermediacy and Narrative in the Cinema FULL PAPER

This paper will consider the relationship between "hypermediacy" (ie. the proliferation of conspicuous mediation) and narrative by looking at three films which use the interaction with images as a significant narrative element: Blow Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002).

In particular, the focus will be on Minority Report’s mobilization of issues of narrative, vision and identity in relation to interactive technologies. In this science fiction film, psychic premonitions of future murders are projected onto a large transparent screen at “Precrime” headquarters, allowing the police to intercept crimes before they are committed. Making sense of this chaotic assortment of visually intense images is Anderton (Tom Cruise), a Washington DC cop. Central to the analysis of this film will be the complex relationship between this hypermediated mosaic of images, and the film’s (and Anderton’s) need to turn the images into a narrative - that is, to create a temporal sequence out of a spatialized mosaic.

This relationship between hypermediacy and narrative will also be considered with regard to Blow Up, in which a fashion photographer examines photographs for evidence of a suspected murder, and Blade Runner, in which a detective uses advanced technology to scan an image for clues. All of these films “remediate” (Bolter and Grusin) or recontextualize the technology of their times, raising questions of what lies beneath the image, how we make narrative sense of images, and the role of images in constructing identity.

Lucian Chaffey
lucianchaffey@dodo.com.au

Doppelgängers and subjectivity in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

This paper will examine the use of the doppelgänger in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.The double is one of the most prominent recurring motifs in this popular television series. The Buffyverse's double characters draw on many traditional doppelgänger figures such as werewolves, Frankenstein's monster, Jekyll and Hyde, and many others, including, of course, Dracula. BtVS' doubles reflect different potential subjectivities, providing points of identification and catharsis, which explains much of the show's appeal. Using contemporary theories of subject relations I will examine BtVS' differing uses of doubles (particularly doppelgängers) and will provide a typology of double relationships. The double relationship represents a crisis of subjectivity linked to the violent breakdown of psychic, physical, and social boundaries, and the subsequent reinstatement of a conventional socially acceptable subjectivity. In spite of its playful and at times transgressive re-working of traditional double narratives, BtVS repeatedly reinforces conservative notions of subjectivity.

Katrina Grant
k.grant@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

The Theatrical Garden in the BaroqueFULL PAPER

This paper will examine the relationship between theatre, particularly opera, and gardens in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries and, therefore, enters into the debate over the interrelationship between theatre and the arts in the baroque. Discussions of the relationship between art and theatre, particularly in the baroque are fraught with contradiction and confusion. The term ‘theatrical’ is tossed around by many scholars, with everything from urban spaces to chapels and audiences with kings being described as ‘theatrical’. Although the existence of an interrelationship between theatre, art and life in the baroque is undeniable, the description ‘theatrical’ is often used in place of proper analysis. This paper will interrogate the terms ‘theatrical’ and ‘theatricality’ as they relate to the garden, identifying a number of key aspects of theatricality, but also essentially questioning their value as analytical terms.

In consideration of the aforementioned issues this paper will present a number of examples of how the garden was used as a performance space, both within real gardens as well as on stage as a set design. Also discussed will be one of the most confusing aspects of the relationship between garden and theatre, which is whether various garden designs were directly influenced by stage sets. To illustrate this point I will present a detailed study of the influence of eighteenth-century Italian architect Filippo Juvarra’s set designs, upon the English garden designs of William Kent which has previously been mentioned by both Kent and Juvarra scholars, but has never been adequately discussed.

Maree-Louise Hillcoat
m.hillcoat@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

Beneath Point of View: Historicising Point of View through the Effects of Cinematic Perception

Point of view is a cinematic device that is often interpreted by film theorists as "centering" the spectator in relation to the film's spatial and temporal world, in terms of character identification and narrative. In a number of recent films, including Mulholland Drive, The Others, The Sixth Sense and many more, point of view serves to disrupt these "centering" narrative strategies. The exact point of view, or frame of reference through which the audience is positioned, remains hidden until quite late in the films' narratives. By delaying the knowledge of this frame of reference, the preceding narrative and the representation of characters is altered and transformed. This delay brings into view the previously hidden limits of a particular character's perceptual viewpoint , producing a shock or jolt. This jolt, I will argue, functions not just in the service of narrative, but as a perceptual trick that disrupts the fictional world of the film, drawing attention to the function and effects of cinematic perception itself.

The films draw attention to the underlying (automatic) perceptual effects that are at work in the construction of point of view, effects that often remain beyond the audience's awareness (particularly in narrative film). By drawing attention to these effects, these films bear the traces of previous cinematic modes of address, especially in the context of early cinema, but also in relation to the perceptual viewpoints used in dream sequences, daydreams, flashbacks, drunken and dying visions, in which the gratuitoous exploitation of cinematic perception functioned as an effect for its own sake. The recurring use of the perceptual twist (described above)in recent films, opens it to an analysis of what lies beneath narrative point of view: the temporal and spatial disorientations of cinematic perception, as well as past cinematic modes of address.

MICROSTATECRAFT: Belonging and Difference in Imagined Communities

Fans are often widely distributed across time and space, forming multinational groups. They create, maintain and observe their dispersed communities through various highly visible and coded social practices, or microstatecrafts, and these communities are often placed in a certain kind of opposition to the 'hostland' in which they find themselves much in the way local sites and nationalities are defined against the global context. Given these traits, is it possible to use diasporic theory to help understand the underlying social forms seen in fan cultures and communities? Is there a certain exilic experience or kinship to be found in familiar concepts of the "the fan as extraterrestrial; the fan as excessive consumer; the fan as cultist; the fan as dangerous fanatic" (Jenkins & Tulloch, 1995)?

This paper proposes to examine these kinships between the fannish and the diasporic through contrasting their various forms of microstatecraft: performative practices that inscribe certain kinds of being. It will draw upon the analogous considerations by Alan Sinfield regarding the perhaps over-hasty application of an 'ethnicity-and-rights model' to diasporise the situation of gay people and also the concerns of Kachig Tololyan regarding the casual deployment of the term diaspora.

Adeline Kueh
adelinekueh@lasallesia.edu.sg

Pontianak and Her Sisters: Representations of Monstrosity in Southeast Asian Popular Culture FULL PAPER

My research aims to critically elaborate and delineate on the ways in which women are represented in Southeast Asian popular culture. To be specific, the various kinds of female ghosts in Southeast Asian popular imagination - from historical and discursive constructions and presentations of pontianak (female ghost/vampire) and her sisters - will be examined by looking at the various constructions/manifestations of monstrosity in visual culture (folklore, visual arts, and film).

The pontianak refers to a woman who had died during or after childbirth who then becomes a female vampire. She is cursed [by] being denied the promise of peace in the kingdom of God (Allah). She is considered unclean, impure as she cannot fulfil her duty as a mother. The curse of immortality descends on her of having to "live" by draining blood from human hosts and not being able to die with the accorded dignity of proper burial rites. The problematics of monsters as border-crossers or that which troubles/escapes categorisations is of particular interest here.

I shall also examine the issue of 'sightings' and 'hauntings' in relation to the functions of folktales, as well as the internalization of social and moral values. The scope will include the manifestations of female vampires from filmic representations of the 1950s and 1960s to the differing contemporary Southeast Asian depictions (in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines).

These themes will be further explored here as my on-going research in relation to how concepts of femininity and female sexuality are critiqued within semiotic and feminist analyses. The core question is whether these filmic representations of women ('fallen' or otherwise) reflect the cultural conventions of contemporary Southeast Asia. As female sexuality in predominantly Malay culture is often divided into the Virtuous versus the Fallen, the conceptual categories of fallen women will be examined in terms of the visual culture of particular societies and traditions.

Keely Macarow
keely.macarow@rmit.edu.au

The Disappearing Body

For artists working around issues connected with HIV/AIDS, the early 1990s was a time to advocate for and represent robust, sexual bodies. However, the representation of the diseased and disappearing body also figured as a major artistic and discursive response to the AIDS crisis prior to 1996, when HIV (for many in a first world context) became a manageable chronic illness due to advances in combination therapies treatments. Using Derek Jarman’s film "Blue", (1993) as a focal point to explore the disappearing body, this paper will examine the intersection between media arts practice and medical anthropology, and the representation of the diseased body of the artist living with HIV/AIDS.

I will examine the disembodied corporeality that is represented in Jarman’s film "Blue" as a means of exploring issues related to the sexual, diseased and medicalised body. A reading of the body as the core of the film "Blue", is my major interest in focusing this paper around a film which at first glance and hearing, merely contains one image (a blue leader) and a multi-layered elegiac soundtrack. The absence of visual images of the body in Jarman’s project, conceptualized the fragility of his corporeality, and exploded traditional narrative cinema1s preference for a montage of visual images. As a metaphor for the diseased body, "Blue" fluidly traverses through the lived experience of one who is losing their ocular vision. This paper, like Jarman’s film, will probe the visual and sonic vista of the body affected by HIV/AIDS.

Kate MacNeill
c.macneill@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

Judy Chicago and the layering of identity in the Australian Bicentennial year

In January 1988 over 1000 women attended a function at the Royal Exhibition Buildings in Melbourne to celebrate the staging of Judy Chicago’s monumental homage to women in history, The Dinner Party.

In this paper I use the debate surrounding The Dinner Party as a starting point for an examination of the layering of identity in Australian art of the late 20th century. Drawing on archival resources relating to the event and critical writings about the work I seek to illuminate the varying constraints and challenges facing an art of identity.

With the demand for an independent Australian culture at the forefront of public debate, and decades of resistance to the international art blockbuster, The Dinner Party would seem a strange choice in the Bicentennial year. As a work of art The Dinner Party has come under sustained criticism. Despite its resonance with a political constituency the work's reductive approach to female identity has been criticised and its effectiveness as a political intervention questioned.

The Dinner Party's presence in Melbourne in 1988 not only highlights the impossibility of articulating a singular national identity; it also provides an opportunity to consider the strategic usefulness of art that presents a static and inherent concept of identity.

Meredith Martin
martinma@unimelb.edu.au

All Sorts and Conditions of Men: The People's Palace and the Ecology of Informal Learning

This paper is drawn from my Phd 'The Contemporary Museum and the Public Sphere', which is concerned with the role of the museum in developing notions of the historical and mediatised public sphere. The thesis argues that the contemporary public museum is emerging as a key site for the negotiation of socio-spatial transformations and tensions around new technologies of communication and the transmission of public knowledge. A key historical reference point of the thesis is the People's Palace, which was opened in the late 1880's for the "intellectual improvement and rational recreation" of the urban poor of London's East End. In its attempts both to educate and amuse, the People's Palace played a central role in late nineteenth century public debate around education and social reform, emerging as a key historical instance of what Barbara Marie Stafford has termed the "dialectic of wonder and instruction." I will argue the significance of this early 'cultural centre' as a locus of fin de siecle anxieties concerning the intrusion of the pleasures of new forms of spectacular entertainment and sociability into the civilising realm of rational recreation.

The central historicist aim of the paper is to establish parallels between this nineteenth century model of popular education and social space, and a new museological conception of the public museum as a technological hub for democratised learning. The central proponent of the ecology of 'informal learning' is the influential exhibit designer, academic and museum director, Dr James Bradburne. Dr Bradburne is an outspoken critic of the pervasive American science centre museum model, and the key spokesman for the user driven learning embodied by European museums such as the NEMO Technology Centre, Ars Electronica Centrum and Museum für Angewandte Kunst.

Christian McCrea
sagoshi@hotmail.com

A Punch In the Face, A Kick In The Balls: The Forgotten Art of (Thinking About) The Threatening Gesture

We discuss the kinetic sequences. We discuss the balletic gun-play. We dissect the consequences of the simulation and presentation of violent death. Yet rarely do we involve the all-important prior moment, the gesture of the threat. Before the hot iron mouths of cinema’s ever-present firearms pour bloody murder onto celluloid, there is always a gesture to signal what is to come.

Genre aesthetics are saturated - from the right-cycle cinema of the 1970s, computer games, movie trailers and the entire traditions of rap, hip-hop and heavy metal - with the potentialities of the violent act. At the centre of these potentialities are the gestures of the threat; and while we claim to understand the causes, effects, politics and purposes of violence, with the greatest research occurring in the areas of gender and identity theory, little attention has been drawn to the specifics. How do we feel threatened, and how do we react? Why do some images resonate with violence, and what changes as aesthetics shift? Do ironic and academic readings of texts truly insulate against the fear of violence?

Perhaps because the culture of violence is seemingly beyond the pale, and certainly below the aesthetic radar of the academy, there has been a natural reluctance to approach the testosterone-driven, male youth orientated sphere of the threat. Using rather than ignoring this tendency, this presentation will revisit the major approaches to violence in cinema and cultural theory, and attempt to synthesize an admixture of genre and historical specifics with these existing academic traditions.

Aleks Michalewicz
a.michalewicz@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

Helen On The Edge - The Movement of Liminal Women and its Consequences in Early Greek Myth

This paper will discuss three mythological figures as presented in a selection of ancient Greek literary souces from the 8th-6th centuries BCE. These will be Helen, Pandora and Persephone; of
particular interest in that the sudden movement of each results in either an aetiological explanation for the state of the cosmos, or a new era for the human condition. Although the extent of the women's agency may differ within various texts, the general
implication is that when women undergo such movement either against or despite their will, this may have repercussions for her
family, society and the cosmos in general.

Pandora, Persephone and Helen are either made by, or descended from, the Olympian gods. Despite this, it is implicit in each of their myths that they will either die or live with death. We also witness a progression in the space from which these women are moved: Pandora is transferred from Olympus as a gift to Epimetheus. She is the first woman, and her presence accounts for the miserable fate of mortals. The maiden Persephone is seized from the realm of her mother andthrust into that of death, wife- and woman-hood. The consequent removal of Demeter will result in the seasons that mankind experiences. Helen, already married, is taken from the house of her husband and becomes consort to a foreign prince. The Trojan War ensues, and the age of heroes comes to an end.

In analysing the (re)moval of these women as described in Homer, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the Epic Fragments, it is hoped that such a discussion initiates a greater thematic exploration of a unique mythic type - the mortal child of divine heritage and the role that such individuals play in the mythic landscape of the ancient Greeks.

Rhadha O'Meara
r.o'meara@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

Soap Hybridity: How Elements of Soap Opera Function in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Soap opera has been so pigeon-holed and derided in popular discussion and theory, that the ways it interacts with other forms to create genre hybrids is rarely explored. As soap opera is largely understood as a genre for and about women, studies of it have focused heavily on gender representation, audiences and viewing pleasures for and about women. This has lead to arguments that soap is valuable and possibly ideologically progressive because it caters specifically to female viewers. This has seen the study of soap opera marked off as “different” from the study of other (male-dominated) genres of television. Therefore the similarities and differences between soap and other television genres have not been fully explored, and the function of soap conventions in hybrid forms has been largely ignored.

An outline of the dominant narrative structures of the soap opera genre focuses on “recurrent catastasis”, the cliffhanger, multiplot form, and hyper-mutable characters. It is interesting to analyse the ways in which these narrative strategies are employed in hybrid narrative forms such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

‘Recurrent catastasis’ is the term used by Dorothy Hobson (Soap Opera, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003) to describe the narrative form and drive of the soap opera: it refers to the multiple climaxes (and near-climaxes) of the serial form. This also relates to the use of the ‘cliffhanger’ to hook audiences into returning to future episodes. For example, the episode where Xander loses his virginity to Faith and deals with zombie ex-classmates, in which each character has a separate storyline and climax in the episode. Cliffhangers are important to episodes, such as Buffy’s revelation that she was in heaven in “Once More with Feeling”, and seasons, such as Buffy questioning her power and Dawn’s arrival in “Restless” at the end of season 4.

Multiplot form has been common in most television drama for some decades now, and is even used in some films. Whereas self-contained dramas such as Law and Order focus on one storyline per episode, soap opera includes the stories and perspectives of a range of characters. Multiple narratives are carried through most Buffy episodes and structure the story arcs of each season. For example, Season 5 develops several key story arcs: Dawn is the key, Glory is the evil of the season, Buffy discovers the source of her slayer power, Joyce’s health problems and death, Willow’s coming out to the wider world, Xander and Anja’s relationship develops to engagement. Throughout these stories in season five there is a shift in themes from Buffy’s relationship with Riley to a focus on the family and home.

The narrative imperative of soap opera is to develop continual change in long-term characters. The result is characters who are hyper-mutable: it is not uncommon for soap characters to have eventful histories in which they can marry, die, and have amnesia several times, or even come back as a different actor. Changes develop in response to the internal dynamics of the narrative drive, as well as external factors such as the desires of fans. Buffy the Vampire Slayer abounds with hyper-mutable characters including the quadriplegic, then brain-chipped and soul- infused Spike; the twice-dead Buffy; and her retrospectively invented sister Dawn. Most characters in Buffy have had an evil version of themselves at some time, and Buffy has been cloned by a robot. Particular attention will be paid to the mutability of Willow’s character, who has changed from teenage dork, through wicca nerd, to lesbian and powerful witch.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a rich hybrid of soap opera with fantasy, action and other genres. Consideration of how elements of soap function with elements of other genres in different episodes and seasons of Buffy helps us understand how contemporary television narratives operate.

Clare O'Donoghue
clareeileenod@hotmail.com

"Beautiful and Good, the Sappho of our Time" Images of Gaspara Stampa, Virtuosa, Poet and Courtesan?

In a sonnet commemorating her death the writer Benedetto Varchi described Gaspara Stampa [1523-54] as the Sappho of her day. This musical virtuosa and poet , a suppossed courtesan, is today best known for her love poetry, most of which was addressed to Count Collatino di Collalto. Earlier historians were fascinated by her unrequited love affair, her poet's lifestyle and her perceived immorality. This paper will examine what lies beneath this fascination and the ways in which it is reflected in the images that said to represent her. This paper examines, in particular, one group derived form an allegorical portait of Poesia [Poetry] by Guercino, painted almost a century after her death.

Narcissus and Echo at the movies FULL PAPER

The myth of Narcissus has figured prominently in psychoanalytic accounts of human psychosexual development as well as in psychoanalytically informed cinema studies. Film scholarship has drawn on the myth in a variety of contexts, most notably in theories of the cinematic apparatus, theories of the gaze and in explications of the phenomenon of the double. While clearly different, all these employments of the myth have at least one thing in common: none of them makes any mention of Echo, the equally fascinating and arguably even more complex female protagonist of the ancient story.

This paper seeks to demonstrate the importance of Echo in contemporary investigations of doubling in cinema. Without discrediting the relevance of Narcissus in explorations of the power of images and the fascination of phenomena such as doppelgängers, this paper argues that Echo can serve as an alternative and more fruitful paradigm for interpreting the doubling of contexts.

Antonia Pont
antoniapont@optusnet.com.au

Moving Listening A Poetic Cycle FULL PAPER

This work forms part of a larger, embodied study exploring the realm of aurality and its relationship to movement. Beginning with the simple question: Can moving facilitate listening?, the artist engaged in a series of workshop studies that were digitally videoed, and then later textually reinterpreted from (experiential) memory. The resultant writing - presented here - documents both the theoretical and kinaesthetic traces of these moving/listening processes, unpacking notions of listener and listened, the locality of perception, and the definition of sound itself.

Patrick Porter
p.porter@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

Secrets and Lies” “Retcon” and the Banal Resolution of Character Enigmas in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

‘Retcon’ (retroactive continuity), a term which originated in online comic book fandom, refers to the strategy in which ‘new’ histories are inserted into the diegetic past of a serial narrative, preserving continuity, but often profoundly effecting possible interpretation of the diegetic presents.

Within Buffy’s fan discourse two distinct concepts of retcon have merged. The first I have termed ‘retroactive continuity’ and has become an integral part of Angel and Buffy’s story-telling methodology, allowing the writers to create suspense and surprise from ‘old’ material. The condition, ‘retrospective continuity’ comes into play as an interpretive practice whereby fans construct their own ‘backdated’ narrative to fit in with their individual views of the Buffyverse.

This paper highlights retcon and character enigmas as two especially strong sites of temporality, suggesting these as possible sources of cult attraction tho these related but increasingly disparate television programs. In turn, this necessitates a rethinking of temporality in all its forms as a catalyst for loyal viewing practices.

Diana Sandars
d.sandars@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

The Reconciliations that Lie Beneath the Australian film Musicals: One Night the Moon and Moulin Rouge FULL PAPER

In writing about music video Will Straw defines music video as a “palimpsestic text: that is, one text which is written over another”. This description aptly defines both the production and our consumption of contemporary Australian musicals. Australian film theorist, Stuart Cunningham noted this in 1983, stating that through grafting onto a Hollywood musical tradition, we have “Australianised” the Hollywood musical . He further suggests that the musical “may well be the pre-eminent genre through which reconciliation is proposed.”

Whereas he was referring to reconciliation between the commercial and cultural oppositions that have dominated Australian cinema since the 1980s, I will extend this notion of reconciliation to the formal and stylistic reconciliation between, popular music genres, music video and the film musical. This hybridity is evident in Australian musicals from Gillian Armstrong’s Starstruck in 1982 to our most recent musical, Alex Proyas’ Garage Days, released last year.

A reconciliation of fantasy or desire with reality also thematically structures these films. An examination of two of our most recent musicals, both released in 2001, Moulin Rouge and One Night the Moon reveals these reconciliations in operation and how they negotiate an Australian identity in a global context through these structures.

Elaine Shaw
e.shaw@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

Constancy, Chastity and Suicide: Visual Recollection of Dido and Lucretia in Early Fifteenth-Century French Illuminated Manuscripts

Virgil speaks of those who ‘though innocent, laid deadly hands upon themselves, hating the light, and threw away their souls.’ And if they long to return to the overworld, ‘Fate bars the way, and the dismal swamp’s unlovely pools confine them.’ Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI.

This paper focuses on visual interpretations of narrative depicting suicide and the onlooker in several French illuminated manuscripts executed in Paris in the first quarter of the fifteenth century. In Boccaccio’s Des cleres femmes and Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, Dido and Lucretia are presented as exampla of constancy and chastity. Both, however, were considered controversial figures because of their self-destruction. Form a Christian point of view, pagan deaths by suicide were problematic. What was considered a noble end for the ancients, Augustine condemns as an act of self-murder. Lucretia’s motives, for example, are questioned by Augustine: if she was not guilty, why did she take her own life? Two very different accounts of Dido’s motives were known in the Renaissance. Boccaccio portrays her as a constant and chaste widow who killed herself so that she could join her dead husband in the underworld, and Virgil portrays her as a crazed queen who killed herself because she had been jilted by her lover.

Because voluntary death was seen not only as a violation of the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’, but also a crime against the state, these images of suicide, although used for didactic purposes, raised more problems than they solved.

Gary Simmons
g.simmons@acmi.net.au

Aussie Blokes Queers Folks

Mainstream Australian cinema, for all its celebration of national fictions, has perpetuated a raft of myths that surround the Australian male, supporting the status quo in terms of gender and nation. But there are slippages and disjunctures in gender and nation that I will explore in this paper.
Culturally and cinematically, a one-dimensional, limited, over-determined, yet self-conscious construction of masculinity has been privileged. There has been a paucity of models of masculinity in cinema. The stoic, the heroic, the 'lovable' larrikin, the sexually irresistible, the taciturn, the self-reliant, the autonomous, the aloof, the anti-intellectual have monopolised cinema. It is only recently that there has been an acceptance of more fluid codes of masculinity within culture and cinema. This paper will explore this trajectory. The myths of mateship and male bonhomie need to be challenged. This paper will use theorists such as Judith Butler, Homi K Bhabha and Eve Sedgwick to explore the cracks in the facade of Oz masculinity and the mateship myth.

Tim Smith
tghsmith@bigpond.com

Macassans in Marege - Photographed by Paul Foelsche

Two photographs taken by the Northern Territory photgrapher and Inspector of Police in 1875 portray the Iwaidja people standing with Macassan trepangers on a beach near the old settlement of Port Essington in the Cobourg Peninsular. What was the nature of this three-way encounter and what is the significance of these images today?

Remastering Metz: Aural Pleasure and the Cinematic Apparatus

The mechanics of cinematic experience find their theoretical space in considerations of the cinematic apparatus. Theories of the apparatus consider the relay of signification in the cinema, mediated as it is through the technology of the camera, microphone, projector, speaker and so forth. By implicating the spectator in the semiotic relay, this field of inquiry constructs an architectural and semantic space in which to appreciate and interrogate the cinematic system. As rigoruous as apparatus theory is, it has thus far been unable (or unwilling) to account for the affective power of sound in the cinema and the spectatorial pleasures it might account for.
In this paper I will examine the organisation of the apparatus to include the workings of the sound in cinema. Challenging the scopocentrism of film theory in order to wholly integrate an operative space for the distinctive behaviours of the soundtrack, I retrace a lineage of apparatus theories of spectatorship to uncover and undo the naturalised preoccupation with the image and the Gaze for the cinema and the spectator. By destabilising the instituted primacy of the image, it becomes possible to refigure spectatorship outside the singularity of the ocular, while developing and promoting the sonic regime of the cinema. The realisation of such a task allows for a re-theorisation of the apparatus as a whole, considering the peculiar pleasures open to the (aural) spectator and the enhancement of these pleasures through generic manipulation of the apparatus.

Christine Sun
sgoschni@bigpond.net.au

Looking into the Dark Side: Representation of New York City and Florence as “Old Cities” in Two Contemporary Crime Novels

This paper discusses the representation of New York City and Florence as “old cities” in Jeffery Deaver’s The Bone Collector (1997) and Thomas Harris’s Hannibal (1999). In The Bone Collector, old New York is portrayed as dark and evil, a past that is lost due to the powerful existence of the city today. The tension between the old and the new is depicted through the confrontation between the serial killer, a psychiatrist who is mesmerized by “old things”, and his patient, a quadriplegic forensic criminalist who lives on all kinds of high-tech medical machines. That the NYPD (instead of the FBI) eventually manages to solve the crime gives a hint to the author’s faith - and possibly the faith of his contemporary readers also - in the city’s present and future. On the other hand, in Hannibal, Florence is portrayed as full of style and taste, whereas the present of the city is corrupted and carelessly managed. The author’s high regard of “old things” is evident as he introduces Dr Hannibal Lector whose specializes in the architecture and literature of medieval and Renaissance Italy, then contrasts him with FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling whose talents are wasted by the bureaucrats of the United States government. The ending of the book (which is considerably different from that of the movie) in which Starling and Lector become a couple indulging in fine arts suggests the author’s disappointment of the present and his desire to have arts and music as the rescuer of the down-trodden human souls.

“Questions of genre” … and still no answers. Problems in genre criticism in cinema studiesFULL PAPER

This paper focuses on four questions, problems, or what I call in my thesis “pitfalls” in the analysis of genre, and tries to suggest solutions wherever possible and appropriate. The problems are:
1) Can we categorize genres and genre films?
2) Do genres go through an evolutionary process?
3) Is the Hollywood studio system the creator and producer of classic, pure genre films?
4) Are we using appropriate theoretical and methodological frameworks for genre criticism?

June Werrett
J.Werrett@latrobe.edu.au

"Satire and Cinema: Tensions and Tendencies in the Films of Robert Altman and Blake Edwards"FULL PAPER

What lies beneath depends upon the instability of shifting contexts and multiplicity of point-of-view: what one generation or culture may find meaningful or explicit may not be so for another. This paper will discuss a film of popular culture, a "romantic comedy" - Blind Date (Blake Edwards 1987). This film was seen in its time as simply another revisionist "romantic comedy". At the same time, the film has been admired for the way it places comic structure over theme. I will argue that beneath this "light" comic surface and structural prominence lies a bleak and satirical view. It is one that involves its audience in a complex double vision of morality and it is also one that implicates its audience in the perpetuation of the genre it expounds.