Comedy has been a perpetual part of Australian film, in which humour reflects Australia’s adaptat... more Comedy has been a perpetual part of Australian film, in which humour reflects Australia’s adaptation in times of crisis, social change and technological advances. This was never more so than in the 1930s, when Australia produced more comedy feature films than in any other decade before 1970. These films of the 1930s embraced the new technology of sound, made local vaudeville performers into movie stars, offered escape from the Depression and revealed a diverse and international Australia. In these films, Australia moves further from Empire and the bush, forges the Digger legend, responds to cultural diversity and views itself as a modern, urban nation. Influenced by Hollywood, Australian comedies of the 1930s adapted international styles to local points of view. Based on research at the National Film and Sound Archive, Lesley Speed’s book provides new insight into Australian comedy films of the 1930s and the extraordinary period of social change in which they were produced.
Review(s) of: Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, Neale, Steve (ed.), BFI, London, 2002, ISBN 0 851... more Review(s) of: Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, Neale, Steve (ed.), BFI, London, 2002, ISBN 0 8517 0887 0, 328 pp.
Few protagonists of an Australian film are immediately as recognizable as that of 'The Wog Bo... more Few protagonists of an Australian film are immediately as recognizable as that of 'The Wog Boy' (Aleksi Vellis, 2000), who drives a 1969 Valiant Pacer and grew up watching 'Skippy' in a Greek-Australian villa.
Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series A complete listing of the books in this ser... more Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at http://wsupress. wayne. edu. GENERAL EDITOR Barry Keith Grant Brock University ADVISORY EDITORS Patricia B. ...
Depicting thirteen-year-old girls having sex, consuming alcohol, smoking marijuana and defying ad... more Depicting thirteen-year-old girls having sex, consuming alcohol, smoking marijuana and defying adult authorities, Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey's 1979 novel Puberty Blues caused a scandal upon its original publication.
... Phipps provokes Malik to prove that he is not a “dumb athlete.” In particular, he makes repea... more ... Phipps provokes Malik to prove that he is not a “dumb athlete.” In particular, he makes repeated allusions to the lat-ter's athletics ... with college is evident, for instance, when he has difficulty understanding the speech patterns of a South Asian student and of Jamal, a “wigger.” or ...
... For instance, Tony Hendra, in his history of American postwar comedy or boomer humor in the... more ... For instance, Tony Hendra, in his history of American postwar comedy or boomer humor in the 1960s and 1970s, sees 1980s teen films as having their origins in films such as Animal House (John Landis, 1978), a prime example of boomer humor. ...
... tive. Whereas most teen films empha-size an adolescent point of view, the nostalgic teen movi... more ... tive. Whereas most teen films empha-size an adolescent point of view, the nostalgic teen movie reveals tensions between youth and adulthood at the level of narration, which can be seen as the site of a quest to contain adoles-cence. The containment of youth's 24 ...
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, May 27, 2023
Video games with suburban settings offer distinctive experiences of quotidian environments. This ... more Video games with suburban settings offer distinctive experiences of quotidian environments. This article examines how Australian games set in homes or verdant residential neighbourhoods contribute to a global circulation of ideas about suburban life. It contributes to understanding the relationship between Australian games and Australian society by showing how gameworlds that represent everyday spatial environments exist at intersections of the global and the local. By using suburbia as a focal point for demonstrating how Australian games can be read on both international and local levels, the article explores an alternative to a cultural nationalist approach. The Australian games examined
Lesley Speed analyses five important films from one of Australia's great forgotten comedic pe... more Lesley Speed analyses five important films from one of Australia's great forgotten comedic personalities. More than simply entertaining, these films reveal much about the state of the Australian film industry in the 1930s, its relationship to Hollywood's output and the representation of national identity.
Comedy has been a perpetual part of Australian film, in which humour reflects Australia’s adaptat... more Comedy has been a perpetual part of Australian film, in which humour reflects Australia’s adaptation in times of crisis, social change and technological advances. This was never more so than in the 1930s, when Australia produced more comedy feature films than in any other decade before 1970. These films of the 1930s embraced the new technology of sound, made local vaudeville performers into movie stars, offered escape from the Depression and revealed a diverse and international Australia. In these films, Australia moves further from Empire and the bush, forges the Digger legend, responds to cultural diversity and views itself as a modern, urban nation. Influenced by Hollywood, Australian comedies of the 1930s adapted international styles to local points of view. Based on research at the National Film and Sound Archive, Lesley Speed’s book provides new insight into Australian comedy films of the 1930s and the extraordinary period of social change in which they were produced.
Review(s) of: Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, Neale, Steve (ed.), BFI, London, 2002, ISBN 0 851... more Review(s) of: Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, Neale, Steve (ed.), BFI, London, 2002, ISBN 0 8517 0887 0, 328 pp.
Few protagonists of an Australian film are immediately as recognizable as that of 'The Wog Bo... more Few protagonists of an Australian film are immediately as recognizable as that of 'The Wog Boy' (Aleksi Vellis, 2000), who drives a 1969 Valiant Pacer and grew up watching 'Skippy' in a Greek-Australian villa.
Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series A complete listing of the books in this ser... more Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at http://wsupress. wayne. edu. GENERAL EDITOR Barry Keith Grant Brock University ADVISORY EDITORS Patricia B. ...
Depicting thirteen-year-old girls having sex, consuming alcohol, smoking marijuana and defying ad... more Depicting thirteen-year-old girls having sex, consuming alcohol, smoking marijuana and defying adult authorities, Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey's 1979 novel Puberty Blues caused a scandal upon its original publication.
... Phipps provokes Malik to prove that he is not a “dumb athlete.” In particular, he makes repea... more ... Phipps provokes Malik to prove that he is not a “dumb athlete.” In particular, he makes repeated allusions to the lat-ter's athletics ... with college is evident, for instance, when he has difficulty understanding the speech patterns of a South Asian student and of Jamal, a “wigger.” or ...
... For instance, Tony Hendra, in his history of American postwar comedy or boomer humor in the... more ... For instance, Tony Hendra, in his history of American postwar comedy or boomer humor in the 1960s and 1970s, sees 1980s teen films as having their origins in films such as Animal House (John Landis, 1978), a prime example of boomer humor. ...
... tive. Whereas most teen films empha-size an adolescent point of view, the nostalgic teen movi... more ... tive. Whereas most teen films empha-size an adolescent point of view, the nostalgic teen movie reveals tensions between youth and adulthood at the level of narration, which can be seen as the site of a quest to contain adoles-cence. The containment of youth's 24 ...
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, May 27, 2023
Video games with suburban settings offer distinctive experiences of quotidian environments. This ... more Video games with suburban settings offer distinctive experiences of quotidian environments. This article examines how Australian games set in homes or verdant residential neighbourhoods contribute to a global circulation of ideas about suburban life. It contributes to understanding the relationship between Australian games and Australian society by showing how gameworlds that represent everyday spatial environments exist at intersections of the global and the local. By using suburbia as a focal point for demonstrating how Australian games can be read on both international and local levels, the article explores an alternative to a cultural nationalist approach. The Australian games examined
Lesley Speed analyses five important films from one of Australia's great forgotten comedic pe... more Lesley Speed analyses five important films from one of Australia's great forgotten comedic personalities. More than simply entertaining, these films reveal much about the state of the Australian film industry in the 1930s, its relationship to Hollywood's output and the representation of national identity.
The key aspects and features of a recent community program that taught basic video-making skills ... more The key aspects and features of a recent community program that taught basic video-making skills to rural young people with mental illness are discussed. The videos produced in the program imbue young people with mental illness with authority and reflect their interests in society and popular culture as well as mental health.
International Journal of Cultural Studies, Mar 1, 2002
... on to this demographic a 'dark, ironical, flip' world view that stems from ... more ... on to this demographic a 'dark, ironical, flip' world view that stems from a confrontation with 'the shakiness of civilization' (Fussell, 1982: 254 ... Natalie Zemon Davis likens 'Abbeys of Misrule' in 16th-century France to 'youth group[s]', the activities of which 'functioned rather like rites ...
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2023
Video games with suburban settings offer distinctive experiences of quotidian environments. This ... more Video games with suburban settings offer distinctive experiences of quotidian environments. This article examines how Australian games set in homes or verdant residential neighbourhoods contribute to a global circulation of ideas about suburban life. It contributes to understanding the relationship between Australian games and Australian society by showing how gameworlds that represent everyday spatial environments exist at intersections of the global and the local. By using suburbia as a focal point for demonstrating how Australian games can be read on both international and local levels, the article explores an alternative to a cultural nationalist approach. The Australian games examined
In an era in which comedians have been positioned as public
commentators, a cycle of Australian ... more In an era in which comedians have been positioned as public
commentators, a cycle of Australian television documentaries centres
on the premise of a comedian’s investigation of a theme of
existential significance. Produced for the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation, these series are Lawrence Leung’s Choose Your Own
Adventure (2009), Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey (2011), Judith Lucy is
All Woman (2015) and Luke Warm Sex (2016). This article examines
the relationship between genre-mixing and cultural commentary in
this cycle, which explores themes of life goals and identity, spirituality,
gender and sex. Employing conventions of personalized
documentary, these docucomedies use performance reflexively to
highlight spectacle and explore the humour of awkward situations
and contemporary and changing cultural values. Central to each
series is the positioning of the comedian as commentator, central
participant, therapeutic subject and performer. Using humour to
address uncertainties about what is acceptable in today’s society,
these docucomedies draw on traditions of Australian screen
comedy and non-fiction representation to serve as public pedagogy
about twenty-first-century concerns, from spirituality and
mediated intimacy to pornography.
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2019
Produced for SBS Television, Kelrick Martin’s Prison Songs is unusual as
a documentary in which t... more Produced for SBS Television, Kelrick Martin’s Prison Songs is unusual as a documentary in which the participants convey their stories through songs that were written for the film. Centring on inmates of Darwin Correctional Centre, known as Berrimah Prison, and described in its press kit as ‘Australia’s first ever documentary musical’, Prison Songs involved a collaborative production process in which inmates contributed to writing the musical numbers. As a documusical, the film belongs to a documentary subgenre that originated in the United Kingdomand forms part of a wider landscape of convergence between non-fiction and fictional television. Prison Songs expands Australian documentary, contemporary Indigenous film-making and stories about incarceration. The film’s presentation of participants’ experiences through music, story, dance and humour can be situated within the performative documentarymode, in which orthodox screen discourses of sobriety are supplanted by poetic expression. Its use of songs and musical performance as partial alternatives to interviews and narration traverses boundaries between avant-garde and television forms, expression and information, and prison and the wider society.
Australian exploitation films that were made since the 1960s have received considerable attention... more Australian exploitation films that were made since the 1960s have received considerable attention in Mark Hartley’s 2008 documentary, Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! However, Hartley’s film and much of the subsequent interest in Ozploitation overlooks the fact that exploitation films existed in Australia since at least the 1910s. In its most basic definition, an exploitation film centres on a topic that is forbidden, such as sex or vice, while purporting to educate the public about it. This article examines the significance of two early Australian sex hygiene films, Remorse, a Story of the Red Plague (John E. Mathews, 1917) [1] and Should a Doctor Tell? (P. J. Ramster, 1923). Although these films do not survive, the information available about them reveals affinities with contemporaneous American and British exploitation films. They also form a precedent for the role of exploitation in the revival of the Australian film industry in the early 1970s. Purporting to explore the issue of sexually-transmitted disease while appealing to audience prurience, early sex hygiene films courted controversy in a manner that prefigures The Naked Bunyip: A Survey of Sex in Australia (John B. Murray, 1970), a significant early film in the revival and one of a cycle of local sexploitation films. Early Australian sex hygiene films expand understanding of Ozploitation by providing a glimpse of the diversity of early Australian film-making and forming a precedent for the role of exploitation in the development of Australian film.
When the Hollywood silent movie actress Claire Adams married Australian grazier Donald “Scobie” M... more When the Hollywood silent movie actress Claire Adams married Australian grazier Donald “Scobie” Mackinnon in 1937, the Australian press embraced the event as a glamorous love story. [1] After the couple moved to his property, Mooramong, near Skipton in the Western District of Victoria, Claire Mackinnon became part of the emergent, modern Australia of the mid-twentieth century. Remodelled by the Mackinnons in a style influenced by Beverly Hills homes, Mooramong brought modernity and distinctive glamour to rural Victoria. The Mackinnons also documented their lifestyle in home movies that include some of the earliest Australian amateur colour films. This article explores the ways in which Mooramong, now owned by the National Trust of Australia (Victoria), provides insight into the significance of Claire Adams in Hollywood, Australian society in the mid-twentieth century and the historical value of home movies. Although the story of Claire Adams is linked to Australia’s history of being dazzled by imported American commodities, ironically a full understanding of her story derives much from the preservation of Mooramong rather than from the United States. Mooramong provides insight into the complexity of the relationship between Australia and Hollywood in the mid-twentieth century, forming a contrast with the then commonplace notion that imported American entities were incompatible with and a threat to local culture.
"Comedy". Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand. Ed. Ben Goldsmith and Geoff Lealand... more "Comedy". Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand. Ed. Ben Goldsmith and Geoff Lealand. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2010. 159–162. eISBN 9781841503424, ISBN 9781841503738
"Way Hilarious: Amy Heckerling as a Female Comedy Director, Writer, and Producer". Refocus: The F... more "Way Hilarious: Amy Heckerling as a Female Comedy Director, Writer, and Producer". Refocus: The Films of Amy Heckerling. Ed. Frances Smith and Timothy Shary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016. ISBN 9781474404617
"Director: Ken G. Hall (1901–1994)". Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand 2. Ed. Be... more "Director: Ken G. Hall (1901–1994)". Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand 2. Ed. Ben Goldsmith, Mark David Ryan and Geoff Lealand. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2015. 41–44. ISBN 9781841506340
"Comedian comedy". Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand 2. Ed. Ben Goldsmith, Mark ... more "Comedian comedy". Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand 2. Ed. Ben Goldsmith, Mark David Ryan and Geoff Lealand. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2015. 79–81. ISBN 9781841506340
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commentators, a cycle of Australian television documentaries centres
on the premise of a comedian’s investigation of a theme of
existential significance. Produced for the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation, these series are Lawrence Leung’s Choose Your Own
Adventure (2009), Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey (2011), Judith Lucy is
All Woman (2015) and Luke Warm Sex (2016). This article examines
the relationship between genre-mixing and cultural commentary in
this cycle, which explores themes of life goals and identity, spirituality,
gender and sex. Employing conventions of personalized
documentary, these docucomedies use performance reflexively to
highlight spectacle and explore the humour of awkward situations
and contemporary and changing cultural values. Central to each
series is the positioning of the comedian as commentator, central
participant, therapeutic subject and performer. Using humour to
address uncertainties about what is acceptable in today’s society,
these docucomedies draw on traditions of Australian screen
comedy and non-fiction representation to serve as public pedagogy
about twenty-first-century concerns, from spirituality and
mediated intimacy to pornography.
Download an eprint of this article at https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/IQKTTX4ZI3XYCMD4HIT3/full?target=10.1080/10304312.2020.1782838
a documentary in which the participants convey their stories through
songs that were written for the film. Centring on inmates of Darwin
Correctional Centre, known as Berrimah Prison, and described in its
press kit as ‘Australia’s first ever documentary musical’, Prison Songs
involved a collaborative production process in which inmates contributed
to writing the musical numbers. As a documusical, the film
belongs to a documentary subgenre that originated in the United
Kingdomand forms part of a wider landscape of convergence between
non-fiction and fictional television. Prison Songs expands Australian
documentary, contemporary Indigenous film-making and stories
about incarceration. The film’s presentation of participants’ experiences
through music, story, dance and humour can be situated within the
performative documentarymode, in which orthodox screen discourses
of sobriety are supplanted by poetic expression. Its use of songs and
musical performance as partial alternatives to interviews and narration
traverses boundaries between avant-garde and television forms,
expression and information, and prison and the wider society.