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

Media coverage of Cambodia 1975 to 1991

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...Full Paper

FULL PAPER

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

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).

FULL PAPER

The Theatrical Garden in the Baroque

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...

FULL PAPER

adeline Kueh
adelinekueh@lasallesia.edu.sg

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

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)

FULL PAPER

Narcissus and Echo at the movies

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

FULL PAPER

antonia Pont
antoniapont@optusnet.com.au

Moving Listening A Poetic Cycle

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

FULL PAPER

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

Since 1931, Australian musicals have replicated the Hollywood musical’s formal model, but have uniquely re-inscribed the Hollywood musical’s narrative themes with an Australian focus. Despite their seemingly antithetical style and narrative focus, Moulin Rouge and One Night the Moon both perpetuate this model and its contemporary hybridic palimpsestic configuration. A reconciliation of fantasy or desire with reality also thematically structures these films, whilst reconciliation between operatic structures, popular music genres, music video and the film musical reconciled in their film form.

FULL PAPER

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

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?

FULL PAPER

June Werrett
J.Werrett@latrobe.edu.au

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

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.

FULL PAPER