AustLit

'It was rather poetic that my first IRL interaction with the festival, on the Sunday of the first weekend, was a much-anticipated, rarest-of-rare screening of The Afterlight (2021). Charlie Shackleton’s film was described in the program as something ephemeral, whose very existence as a single 35mm print only, is entwined with its deterioration. Introducing the film before its first screening, guest of the festival Shackleton noted that the film’s Australian distributors, Conor Bateman and Felix Hubble of Static Vision, had not even yet seen it. Starting with something that explicitly engaged with the ephemerality of cinema, and the cinematic experience, was apt. The Melbourne International Film Festival had been stalled by Covid restrictions not once but twice, thanks to Australia (in particular the festival’s home state, Victoria) having some of the most extensive periods of lockdown across the globe. This was impacted, particularly, by a snap lockdown in August 2021 that led to the cancellation of the entire in-person festival and its replacement in the lacklustre form of an online slate, made severely disappointing, at least for me, by an inadequate and often broken digital viewing platform that had not improved since 2020. With this being MIFF’s first return to an in-person festival with screenings, talks, events, and all other accoutrements since August 2019, my varied experience of it was, as with any other year, enriched by a memorable web of thematic connections between films and to life.' (Introduction) 

'Australian cinema has travelled a varied trajectory since its initial development in the late 19th century. The cinema reflected the developing social and cultural tropes of its time, as the concept of a distinct Australian identity began to form. But it is clear that a colonial history of Australian film focuses very clearly and emphatically along lines of class and gender. Rose Lucas notes that there is a “cluster of dominant, recognisable images in our cinema” which consists of the bushman, the ocker, the ‘mate’, and the ‘battler’, a series of male coded tropes which are stubbornly pervasive within this national cinema. These archetypes have trained a concentrated gaze upon masculinity in Australian cinema, but there has been little space in this cultural landscape for the development of archetypical women in Australia’s cultural history with very few valued traits that are specifically coded female. This resolutely masculine perspective seems to have shaped the nation and the national cinema, and Lucas’s observation highlights the key archetypes as embodied as masculine. But these archetypes, long the sole domain of masculine representation, also have historically encompassed female experiences. In this paper we identify the need to broaden such a framework, and by taking the most Australian and most masculine of forms – the larrikin – we argue that the larrikin girl has been hiding in plain sight across Australian film history.'  (Introduction)

'As with many fine Australian films, Looking For Grace opens with arid, spectacular landscape. Aerial shots of remote two-lane highways highlight expanses of blonde dirt, granite, and shrubbery across the Western Australian wheat belt, where the film was shot on location. These colours are rare in Australian cinema, which often favours vibrant red desert sand. But there is nothing unusual about the fact that Brooks focuses on long stretches of road leading nowhere. They are flanked by barren expanses whose immensity becomes a motif for discovery and loss.' (Introduction)

'The first time that I really took notice of Orry-Kelly’s name was when I began researching the 1933 pre-code film Baby Face a number of years ago. I became obsessed with Barbara Stanwyck’s sharp Manhattan business attire, her intricate gloves, and the fur-draped costumes she later wore as a kept woman. That the costumes were, at heart, Australian made them seem only more glamorous. For me, then, Orry-Kelly became a name as synonymous with Golden Age Hollywood fashion as Edith Head had always been.'  (Introduction)