Journal articles on the topic 'Feminist film criticism Australia'

This paper considers some problems with text-centered psychoanalytic and semiotic approaches to film that have dominated feminist film criticism, and develops an alternative contextual approach. I claim that a contextual approach should explore the interaction of film texts with viewers' culturally formed sensibilities and should attempt to render visible the plurality of meaning in art. I argue that the latter approach will allow us to see the virtues of some classical Hollywood films that the former approach has overlooked, and I demonstrate this thesis with an analysis of the film Christopher Strong.,

In this article, I provide a scholarly introduction to the cinema of contemporary British director Joanna Hogg that stands in direct contravention to existing auteurist and concomitantly phallogocentric critical discourses on her work. Thus I establish an alternative, feminist theoretical framework for analysis of Hogg’s films, synthesising feminist and structuralist methodologies. Via close textual analysis of each of Hogg’s three feature films, emphasising their implicit critique of phallogocentric narrativisation vis-à-vis the deployment of certain “melodramatic” conventions, I argue that the director creates a filmic space both literal and conceptual for “the female”. Significantly, this contravenes the inherently phallogocentric theoretical framework by which auteurist film criticism has (up until now) largely attempted to “package” Hogg’s work. I thus conclude the cinema of Joanna Hogg represents a subversive challenge to phallogocentric metanarrative, within which auteurist film criticism has traditionally been imbricated.

The Feminist criticism theory, which originated in the 1960s, is a literary criticism theory that interprets literary and cultural phenomena with female gender consciousness as its focus. The theory of criticism has gradually penetrated from political life to all aspects of culture, economy and social life, and has exerted a profound influence in the field of film. Film hidden figure depicts three women from 7 to revolt, from weak to strong career growth process, in the male-dominated field of science and technology have the courage to explore and create our own a piece of heaven and earth, through the career women are the epitome of difficulties and resistance, shows the wisdom of women dried fruits and individual consciousness. From the perspective of feminist criticism, Text Tong explores the self-worth construction process and important influence of the three women in Hidden Figures.

A feminist analysis of the repertoire written and directed by women within mainstream Australian theatre at the end of the millennium reveals that, in spite of thirty years of active feminism in Australia, as well as feminist theatre criticism and practice, the mainstream has only partially absorbed the influence of feminist ideas. A survey of all the mainland state theatre companies reveals the number of women making work for the mainstream and discusses the production politics that frames their representation as repertoire. Although theatre has become increasingly feminized, closer analysis reveals that women's theatre is either contained or diminished by its presence within the mainstream or utilizes conventional theatrical genres and dramatic narratives. Feminist theatre criticism, thus, needs to become more concerned with the material politics of mainstream culture, in which gender relations are being reconstructed under the power of a new economic and social order.

Reviewed is a selection of works composed by woman artist composer and songstress Maria Sadowska. These include songs from the “Women's Day” record and from a film of the same title, as well as “Revolution” from the “Table of Contents” album. Due to the method of interpretation I use, the criticism is feminist. I selected precisely these said works for study mainly because the artist has been largely inspired by mothers of feminist thought, such as Susan Sontag, Barbara Kruger and Simone de Beauvoir. The topics touched upon by the artist definitely fall within the interests of feminist criticism. And I hope that taking up the subject of feminism in this context is a timely response to current public interest.

This article traces the Bechdel test in Swedish journalistic discourse, showing how the A-rating campaign – sometimes described as a movement – popularized the concept in Sweden in 2013. In addition, criticism of the Bechdel test and A-rating is linked to criticism of recent Swedish cultural policy on film through the common denominator of contrasting quantification with quality. Finally, the article shows how the Bechdel test has inspired computer-based analytical approaches to gender on-screen that would merit further explorations in feminist film scholarship.

The text addresses the issue of feminist film criticism in Poland in the 1980s, represented by the book by Maria Kornatowska Eros i film [Eros and Film, 1986]. In her analysis Kornatowska focused mostly on Polish cinema, examined through a feminist and psychoanalytic lens. As a film critic, she followed international cinematic offerings and the latest trends in film studies, which is why she decided to fill the gap in Polish writings on gender and sexuality in cinema, and share her knowledge and ideas on the relationship between Eros and Film. The purpose of the text on Kornatowska’s book was to present her individual interpretations of the approach of Polish and foreign filmmakers to the body, sexuality, gender identity, eroticism, the question of violence and death. Secondly, it was important to emphasize her skills and creative potential as a film critic who was able to use many diverse repositories of thought (including feminist theories, philosophy and anthropology) to create a multi-faceted lens, which she then uses to perform a subjective, critical analysis of selected films.

Daises by Věra Chytilová is one of the most important films of the Czechoslovak New Wave, from which the image of a rebellious female figure emerges. Due to its complex nature, aesthetic and semantic diversity, this surreal image can be interpreted on many levels, often extremely different. It is both a criticism of consumerism and nihilism, and a feminist manifesto in the Central and Eastern European edition. The communism that dominated this area tended to institutionalize the inequalities between women and men. Due to the complexity of the problem and the multitude of possible interpretations, the film analysis is based on various methodologies oscillating between feminist criticism and Laura Mulvey’s reflections on the categories of corporeality, gender, and the masculinization of the viewer in narrative cinema.

Stephen Dwoskin was a prolific experimental filmmaker from the mid-1960s until his death in 2012. Commonly associated with the New York underground film scene and the London Filmmakers’ Co-Op, which he co-founded in 1966, Jewish-American Dwoskin was also a childhood survivor of polio and a disability rights activist. Though an enduring oral legacy of feminist criticism of Dwoskin’s work remains since the 1980s, Dwoskin’s later work from the 1990s and 2000s is acutely understudied. In this article, I recontextualize earlier feminist positions in light of the ‘cripping’ of sexuality and gender proposed by recent critical disability studies, applied to two of Dwoskin’s later works. Adopting archival evidence of feminist critique, feminist art histories and Crip approaches to sexuality, I examine androgyny and genderqueerness in Dwoskin’s photomontages from Ha, Ha! La Solution Imaginaire (1993) and conflations of critical medical and BDSM-structured care in the film Intoxicated by My Illness (2001). I conclude that Dwoskin’s work invites rich epistemological re-evaluation of both feminist critique and entrenched sociocultural conceptions of gendered subjectivity, intimacy and sexual agency.

This paper seeks to explore the strategies Hollywood utilizes to capitalize on feminist social movements through replacing hegemonic male characters with female ones or updating traditional stories through a more “feminist” retelling. By analyzing both 2017’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Beauty and the Beast as representative of this corporate trend, we critique the ways in which these pseudo-feminist texts not only contribute little to the social conversation surrounding the evolving roles of women and their representations in media through the lenses of critical political economy, feminist political economy, and feminist film criticism. We conclude that creating “feminist” reimaginings of classic narratives ultimately serves to uphold the existing economic structures that maintain social and financial capital within the largest Hollywood studios. Thus, little to no social progress is made through the creation of these retellings.

AbstractThe rise of new musicology and feminist music criticism in the 1980s prompted a rethinking of gender in Australian art music spheres and resulted in over a decade of advocacy on behalf of women music makers. Local musicological publications began to cover feminist concerns from the late 1980s, with a focus on composing women. Catalysed by the proliferation of feminist musicology internationally in the 1990s, a series of women's music festivals were held around Australia from 1991–2001 and accompanied by conferences, symposia and special-issue publications. Aesthetic concerns were at the forefront of this debate as women musicologists and practitioners were divided on the existence of a gendered aesthetic and the implications this might have. This article examines the major feminist aesthetic contributions and debates at the time and how these considerations have impacted music-making practices, with particular reference to women composers of new music.

Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, I’m Thinking of Ending Things recently metwith viewers of Netflix and brought the controversy. The film is in the focus of criticism as wellas the likes, praise, and applause. The film is an adaptation from the Canadian writer Iain Reid’sbestselling namesake novel. Neither the book nor the film is not intended to be a feminist study,although it argues to show the existential crisis and the inner-voices of a young woman character.Instead, this piece reflects the subjective interpretations of dreams, memories, and a man’s life,Jake. What makes this piece a subject of feminist critique is the promised story of the movieand the starting point of the movie. This movie promises the audience to hear the voice of ayoung woman going through an existential crisis, making her wonder about her story.

Although transnational surrogacy has received much criticism owing to racial and class issues, the U.S. media portrays domestic surrogacy with overwhelming positive languages by employing specific narrative frameworks. Accompanying this shift, it is not so surprising that the number of gestational carrier cycles have skyrocketed from 727 to 3,423 over the last decade. (Note 1) In particular, increase in the number of gay and single men looking for surrogacy has yielded more controversies. This paper asks the following questions: How does the documentary Made in Boise present surrogacy in the context of a broader debate over feminist and LGBT’s positions? How are gay parents used in the altruism narrative framework to downplay exploitation of surrogacy? By providing insight into the intricate economic and power relationships between surrogate and a new emerging group of intended parents, my case study prompts broader questions such as: How to best document the most authentic narratives of the surrogates? How can feminist and LGBT scholars reconcile their viewpoints over surrogacy? These are pertinent questions concerning exploitation and coercion in the industry, thus influencing future feminists’ studies on reproductive technology and politics.

This article examines the origin myth of the feminist film journal Close Up, namely, an excursion by its founders Bryher and H.D. to see G. W. Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925) in a small cinema in Montreux, Switzerland. Throughout the essay, I use Joyless Street as a case study to analyze the ways in which theories of trauma can be effectively brought to bear on melodramas of the post–World War I era and, in the process, demonstrate the appeal Pabst’s works held for the Close Up editors, who shared his interest in trauma, psychoanalysis, and healing. By analyzing Joyless Street through the lens of Close Up, I demonstrate how Bryher and H.D. anticipate the development of trauma theory, which emerged in the early 1990s. Unlike traditional, often totalizing, applications of psychoanalysis (which emphasize notions of spectator desire and lack), the Close Up writers’ engagement of psychoanalysis focuses on issues of history, memory, and the response of spectators to historically specific situations. Their theory further suggests that in addition to surrogate fantasy fulfillment, film—in its recurring representation of trauma—might aid in mastering shared cultural symptoms, which women often experienced in isolation. Through their sustained analysis of film melodrama, the Close Up writers demonstrate that the war, beyond its devastating effects on combatants, also impacted the (female) civilian population—resulting in Close Up’s call for a critical film culture that speaks to that experience.

The following article is an exploration of the non-linear and non-unified identities that make up Australian feminism. The main premise is that the divergent strands of rational and romantic thought, central to the project of liberalism, are inherent in the characterization of Australian feminisms. As a result, there have always been tensions between feminists, centred around politics of self-identification. These tensions continue to exist, but to be articulated in different ways in different decades as a result of the ever changing relationships between feminist, state and media/public discourses. These ideas are explored through comparing two key moments in our recent past in which differences between feminisms were declared. These two events – the Mary Daly visit to Australia to promote Gyn/Ecology in 1981, and the debate engendered by Helen Garner's The First Stone in 1995 – are taken to be performative metaphors through which the continuities and discontinuities of the nature of Australian feminisms can be subjectively explored.

Adrian Parr is a transdisciplinary scholar who brings the design disciplines into conversation with the humanities, social sciences, and science. Rather than work within the clearly defined boundaries of a specialized discipline, her writings and movies create ethical montages consisting of theoretical criticism, poetics, imagery, and sound. The daughter and niece of two of Australia's most well-known contemporary artists, she has a sensitivity toward the affective potential of thought and ethical reflection. Her writings encompass a journey through the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Deleuze, feminism, contemporary art, sustainability culture, urbanism, climate change, policy, collective memory, trauma theory, and Marxist thinking. Her films set out to humanize the water and sanitation statistics driving national and international policy. In this interview Adrian Parr talks about the environmental and water problems in different parts of the world under a vision in which humanism, education, ethics, awareness and leadership play a transcendental role.

AbstractThis essay seeks to unsettle feminist philosophy through an encounter with Aboriginal artist Tracey Moffatt, whose perspectives on intergenerational relationships between (older) white women and (younger) Indigenous women are shaped by her experiences as the Aboriginal child of a white foster mother growing up in Brisbane, Australia during the 1960s. Moffatt's short experimental film Night Cries provides an important glimpse into the violent intersections of gender, race, and power in intimate life and, in so doing, invites us to see how colonial and neocolonial policies are carried out through women's domestic labor. Seeing cross-generational and cross-racial intimacy through Moffatt's lens, I suggest, helps us to unsettle both feminist theories of motherhood and feminist practices of mentoring.

Nowadays, without films, we can't really imagine contemporary India society. Although this is Unable to conceptualize a film without a 'story.' A film must 'tell' and 'show' Story, unravelling layer by layer, introducing the magic of the silver narrative on the screen. The stories rooted in culture are praised by the viewer. More so, if they are widely acknowledged in oral or written form, right from the beginning, there has been an indelible connection between literature and films. The policy begins with depictions of women protagonists in mainstream Bollywood films. This topic is considered appropriate because women are a large part of the population of the country and their on-screen representation is thus critical in deciding the promotion of current stereotypes in the country in the society . The paper begins with a discussion on the field of feminist film criticism and how mainstream Hindi Cinema has restricted itself to defined sketches of womanhood. Cinema has limited itself to established sketches of femininity

[CENSORED] (2018) is a feature-length collage of clips excised from international films by the Australian Film Censorship Board between 1958 and 1971, which historian and artist Sari Braithwaite uncovered in the National Archives of Australia. While the censored clips were archived alphabetically, Braithwaite curates them by motif, capturing the numbness generated by archivists’ and censors’ processes through repetitive bombardment of similar imagery in various categories of sex and violence. Compiling and re-categorising this trove of censored fragments produces a new perspective not only into past practices of censorship but more insightfully, into patterns of gendered dynamics and action in narrative cinema. Through feminist critical practice, Braithwaite deploys a ‘layered gaze’ and expands a critique of censorship to a critique of cinema. Braithwaite’s film mobilizes ‘productive misuse’ (Baron 2020), not for her original goal of damning censorship, but to reflect on cinematic fixations (including female nudity and sexual violence) and spectatorial implication. By suturing the censors’ excisions, Braithwaite draws attention to her own growing feminist ‘disenchantment’ (Elsaesser 2005) with cinema culture as she engages with the censors’ offcuts. [CENSORED] documents an awakening of – and from – the censors’ archive. The film evolves through sensory engagement with this archive, and in doing so, provides insight into the comparable – and sometimes complicit – processes of film spectatorship, censorship, and audio-visual archival research.

Feministisen elokuvatutkimuksen teoria miehisestä katseesta (male gaze) on levinnyt laajalle niin akateemisen tutkimuksen kuin yleistajuisenkin puheen piirissä. Feministisessä tutkimuksessa miehisellä katseella viitataan niihin elokuvan muotoihin ja keinoihin, joiden nähdään toimivan patriarkaalisen vallan ja kontrollin mekanismeina. Usein feministinen elokuvatutkimus tarkastelee miesten tekemää, naisiin kohdistuvaa symbolista ja rakenteellista väkivaltaa, joka on elokuvissa yleistä.Viime vuosina naistekijät ovat ottaneet enemmän tilaa elokuvan kentällä. Näin tarve ymmärtää elokuvan sukupuolittavaa logiikkaa naisista ja naisisuudesta lähtöisin on myös kasvanut. Tämä näkyy myös siinä, että käsitteen naisinen katse (female gaze) käyttö on lisääntynyt yleisessä kulttuuripuheessa. Tässä artikkelissa tutkin sitä, miten naisinen katse on tänä päivänä mielekästä ymmärtää feministisessä elokuvatutkimuksessa.Tutkin artikkelissa ensin naisisen katseen käsitteen historiaa. Naisinen katse on feministisen elokuvatutkimuksen piirissä enemminkin kattotermi. Eri näkemyksiä yhdistää feministisen elokuvateorian viitekehys ja ymmärrys siitä, että naisinen katse on vastaus tai reaktio miehisen katseen teoriaan. Käsitteen historiallisen paikantamisen jälkeen tutkin naisista katsetta tänä päivänä aineistonani kolme naistekijän draamaelokuvaa – Jennifer Kentin The Nightingale (Australia 2018), Céline Sciamman Nuoren naisen muotokuva (Portrait de la Jeune Fille en Feu, Ranska 2019) ja Kelly Reichardtin First Cow (Yhdysvallat 2020) – metodinani elokuvissa ilmenevien katsomisen, näkemisen ja näyttämisen suhteiden muodon ja kerronnan analyysi.Tarkastelukohteissani naisinen katse keskustelee patriarkaalisen hegemonian tuottaman rakenteellisen ja symbolisen väkivallan kehyksen kanssa ja pyrkii sellaisiin muotoihin ja rakenteisiin, jotka eivät toisinna tätä väkivaltaa kritiikittömästi elokuvan kuvastoissa. Ehdotan, että naisinen katse on elokuvassa mielekäs käsittää naisisesta asemasta puhumisena, katsomisena ja olemisena, joka neuvottelee elokuvakulttuurin konventioiden kanssa feminististen esteettisten strategioiden avulla.Avainsanat: naiskatse, mieskatse, miehinen katse, feministinen elokuva, symbolinen väkivaltaFeminist fantasies and reluctant witnessing – the female gaze in cinemaThe feminist film theory of the male gaze is widespread both in academic and lay contexts. In feminist film studies male gaze is understood as a cinematic form and a narrative technique that functions as a patriarchal technology of control. As a result, feminist film studies often employ a critical lens to the study of the symbolic and structural violence towards women by men in cinema.Recently, female filmmakers have started gaining more space in cinema. Thus, the need to understand the gendering logic of cinema from a female perspective has increased. The concept of the female gaze has appeared in lay contexts to designate this. In this article, I examine how the female gaze could best be conceptualised today in feminist film studies.The article explores the genealogy of the concept of the female gaze from Mulvey onwards. It analyses the manifestation of the female gaze in three films by female auteurs, The Nightingale (2018, Australia), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, Portrait de la Jeune Fille en Feu, France) and First Cow (2020, USA), using as a method the formal and narrative analysis of looking relations. Based on this study, the female gaze is conceptualised as a female mode of address that, through feminist aesthetic strategies, critically engages with the structural and symbolic violence embedded in cinema that is produced by the patriarchal hegemony.Keywords: female gaze, male gaze, Laura Mulvey, feminist film, symbolic violence

While hotly debated in political contexts, abortion has seldom figured in explicit terms in either literature or film in the United States. An exception is John Irving’s 1985 novel The Cider House Rules, which treats abortion insistently and explicitly. Although soon thirty years old, The Cider House Rules still functions as an important voice in the ongoing discussion about reproductive rights, responsibilities, and politics. Irving represents abortion as primarily a women’s health issue and a political issue, but also stresses the power and responsibility of men in abortion policy and debate. The novel rejects a “prolife” stance in favor of a women’s rights perspective, and clearly illustrates that abortion does not preclude or negate motherhood. This article discusses Irving’s novel in order to address abortion as a political issue, the gender politics of fictional representations of abortion, and the uses of such representations in critical practice. A brief introduction to the abortion issue in American cultural representation and in recent US history offers context to the abortion issue in Irving’s novel. The analysis focuses on abortion as it figures in the novel, and on how abortion figures in the criticism of the novel that explicitly focuses on this issue. The article argues that twentyfirst century criticism of Irving’s text, by feminist scholars as well as explicitly anti-feminist pro-life advocates, demonstrate the pervasive influence of antiabortion discourses illustrates, since these readings of Irving’s novel include, or reactively respond to, the fetal rights discourse and the “awfulization of abortion.” The article further proposes that the novel’s representations of reproductive rights issues – especially abortion – are still relevant today, and that critical readings of fictional and nonfictional representations of reproductive rights issues are central to feminist poli-tics.

Recent African American film scholarship has called for an attention to the structures of black representation on screen. This work echoes the calls made in the 1990s by black feminist film and cultural scholars to resist the allure of reading for racial realism and to develop more appropriate critical tools and terms to acknowledge black artistic innovations. This essay takes up and reiterates that call, drawing attention to the problems of film interpretation that attend to a version of historical analysis without an understanding of form and medium. Foregrounding film as a terrain of struggle, the essay mobilizes an analysis of the 2014 film Selma to illuminate the multiple resonances of the concept representation. Focusing on the film’s representation of women and girl characters, the essay argues that cinematic play with the terms and conditions of representation comment powerfully on the limitations of cinematic and historical discourses to speak about the black femme as a political subject. Analysis of Selma exposes the key problems of reception and criticism facing contemporary African American film. The film speaks to the failure of de jure representational regimes in post–civil rights movement America and offers up the cinematic terrain as an important twenty-first-century site of African American struggle.

In this essay, I discuss Darren Aronofsky’s 2017 feature film mother! in the context of an intersectional approach to ecofeminism and the American gothic genre. By exploring the histories of ecofeminism, the significances of the ecogothic, and the Puritan origins of American gothic fiction, I read the movie as a reiteration of both a global ecophobic and an American national narrative, whose biblical symbolism is rooted in the patriarchal logic of Christian theology, American history, female suffering, and environmental crisis. mother! emerges as an example of a distinctly American ecofeminist gothic through its focus on and subversion of the essentialist equation of women and nature as feminized others, by dipping into the archives of feminist literary criticism, and by raising ecocritical awareness of the dangers of climate change across socio-cultural and anthropocentric categories. Situating Aronofsky’s film within traditions of American gothic and ecofeminist literatures from colonial times to the present moment, I show how mother! moves beyond a maternalist fantasy rooted in the past and towards a critique of the androcentric ideologies at the core of the 21st-century Anthropocene.

Purpose of the study: This work explores feminism as a conceptual framework for viewing society and its impact on women by analyzing the changes in women’s life and attitude through the film Pink. Methodology: The study is descriptive research and is analyzed through the content and follows interpretive methods for critical analysis. Main Findings: An amazing, valiant movie that spotlights on real young women who live genuine lives and manage thorny routine issues, which every young woman faces all over the world and relates with. Applications of this study: The present work is interpreted in the light of feminist theory and criticism which has paved path for many solutions all over the world through not only writings but also by various means, in which films play a vital role where the struggles have been brought out in the screen so that women could relate themselves with the characters portrayed in the films which are not only imaginative; but the real face of many unknown women in the society. Novelty/Originality of this study: The present work differs and deals with the co-existence that this society should abide by, be it a man or women both have equal roles in the society and through the lead actor this bold issue has been dealt in the film Pink.

The creation of the devolved Scottish parliament in 1999, argues Adrienne Scullion, has the potential to change everything that has been understood and imagined or thought and speculated about Scotland. The devolved parliament shifts the governance of the country, resets financial provisions and socio-economic management, recreates Scottish politics and Scottish society – and affects how Scotland is represented and imagined by artists of all kinds. The radical context of devolution should also afford Scottish criticism an unprecedented opportunity to rethink its more rigid paradigms and structures. Specifically, this article questions what impact political devolution might have on the rhetoric of Scottish cultural criticism by paralleling feminist analysis of three plays by women premiered in Scotland in 2000 with the flexible, even hybrid, model of the nation afford by devolution, resetting identity within Scottish culture as much less predictable and much more inclusive than has previously been understood. An earlier versions was delivered by the author on 5 March 2001 to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in receipt of the biennial RSE/BP Prize Lectureship in the Humanities. Adrienne Scullion teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, where she is also the academic director of the Centre for Cultural Policy Research.

The contemporary challenges of culture and gender in consumer society are numerous. Through critical reflections on certain aspects of women's representation in popular culture, we will re-examine her role in society, seeking explicit and subliminal sexist messages embedded in literary and film language. Exploring the hegemony of the body, through the objectification of women and sexism, the cultural shackles of normative femininity, we will try to find gender asymmetry in the media representation and note the relationship with the ideology of consumerism and mass culture. Decoding the gender stereotypes, on the one hand, and the contemporary post-feminist transformations of femininity, on the other, we will re-examine the gender roles in popular culture by asking questions: To what extent do books and films about Bridget Jonesand The Stepford Wivesoppose the macho, sexist and patriarchal culture? Are they a rebellion against gender and structural discrimination against women? Is the criticism in those works clear and explicit or, in the attempt to detect gender stereotypes, do they in fact legitimize and strengthen them? Is it a matter of subversion, resistance or acceptance, or is it a reconciliation with the dominant values of popular culture and masculine society? Through the polysemic reading of the texts we will seek for the new meanings that are created through the juxtaposition of the code and the decoder, in the interaction between the text, the meaning, the context, the recipient and the discourse. The production of meanings extends far beyond the processes of fabrication, exchange and reproduction of culture

Jessie Matthews’ post-war tours to Australia were part of a sequence of commercially successful imported productions then heralded as a great boom era in Australian theatre. However, Matthews’ waning popularity in Britain since the 1940s meant that she was no longer recognizable as the screen darling of the 1930s. Indeed, the Australian press had to remind its readers of ‘evergreen Jessie’s’ succession of British film hits such as The Good Companions (1933) and Evergreen (1934). This article examines the critical and public reception of Matthews’ tours with a focus on the strategic management of her star persona, both on and off stage, including her public criticism of Australian theatre management and employment opportunities for Australian theatre performers. Martina Lipton is an Honorary Associate Lecturer at the University of Queensland and was recently the Research Fellow (Australia) on the Leverhulme Research Project ‘British-Australian Cultural Exchange: Live Performance 1880–1960’. Her publications include the chapter ‘Localism and British Modern Pantomime’ in A World of Popular Entertainments (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) and articles for Australasian Drama Studies, Contemporary Theatre Review, New Theatre Quarterly, and Popular Entertainment Studies.

Liberal feminism is a movement that focuses on individual freedom. This idea reflects women's liberation: women should have the same rights and opportunities as men in education, economy, politics, rights, and other gender inequality issues. The research aims to analyse Beauty and the Beast film's script through liberal feminism's lenses. This research uses a library research method that applied feminist criticism. Reading and selecting data techniques were used to collect the data. The film script of Beauty and the Beast used the data. To analyse the patriarchal society in the script, theories by Hooks and Beauvoir were used. The analysis results show that men have control and power to dominate people, especially women, and women do not enjoy the dignity of being a person; they do not have anything unless they are part of men's patrimony. To analyse the rejection done by Belle, theory by Freedman was used. The result shows that Belle rejects the social convention by reflecting the value of liberal feminism and individual autonomy. The implication in the story that insists on the voice of equality between gender, women deserve the right to get a proper education, liberty, justice, and the same rights as men.

AbstractThis article considers the significance of dirt to three Western texts: Lonesome Land, Mudbound, and Brokeback Mountain. The overall argument is that the more complicated and ambiguous dirt is permitted to be, the more imaginative and critical potential it has for the iconography of the contemporary Western. Taking B.M. Bower’s 1912 Western Romance as a model, it is argued that the dirt aesthetic is crucial to how Westerns construct the myth of the American character. This is further complicated by intersections between representations of the White rural poor, women (as for both Lonesome Land and Mudbound, there are connotations of sexual impurity in the dirty White female body), and representations of queerness. In the two versions of Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx’s short story and Ang Lee’s film, we see the ambiguity of dirt: it can be read as an essential part of the American land, or as polluting waste matter. The critical framework draws on feminist history and criticism via Kathleen Healey and Phyllis Palmer; sociological theories of imagining poverty in North America via Kate Cairns and Winfried Fluck; and queer theory via Christopher Schmidt.

Louise Page was born in London in 1955, but lived in Sheffield from the age of five until a short while ago. She read drama at Birmingham University, and took a postgraduate diploma in playwriting, then returned to Sheffield in 1979 as Fellow in Drama and Television. In 1982–83 she was resident writer at the Royal Court, and in 1985 was awarded the first J. T. Grein Prize by the Critics’ Circle. With a string of widely-produced plays from the early Tissue through Salonika and Golden Girls to the more recent Beauty and the Beast and Diplomatic Wives, Louise Page is now firmly established as one of the leading playwrights of her generation. The present interview was recorded while she was in Greece in September 1988 to prepare the film adaptation of Salonika. The interviewer, Elizabeth Sakellaridou, is Senior Lecturer in Modern English Drama in the University of Thessaloniki. Her publications include Pinter's Female Portraits (Macmillan, 1988), and several articles on modern English drama and feminist criticism. She is currently preparing a study of contemporary British women dramatists. Her ‘NTQ Checklist’ of Louise Page's work follows this interview.

Representation of the female body has been one of the most emphasized issues in gender debates. To refrain from reproducing the patriarchal ideology, it is important to be careful with the distinction between the body being tabooed and covered or transformed into an object of consumption under the name of freedom. The sexualization and objectification of the female body has taken place in the historical process. In many products from works of art to mass media, the woman, who is a passive object in front of the man who is the active/subject, is presented to the consumption of the male gaze. In almost every branch of art, from photography to cinema, the female body has been the object of the gaze and has been turned into an object of desire by being removed from the subject identity. Even in films that are claimed to be made with a woman's point of view and against gender discourses, the female body is sometimes objectified with elements such as the stage order, lighting, and perspective preferences. In this study, which aims to reveal how cinematographic elements can change the world of meaning, the first film of Deniz Gamze Ergüven, Mustang (2015), was discussed with feminist criticism in the axis of object-body by giving examples from various art branches in terms of cinematographic preferences. As a result of the study, it has been determined that the film, which claims to have set out with critical point of view, reproduces the discourses it tries to criticize. The reason for this is that the film falls into the traps of patriarchal ideology.

Allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein, co-owner of US entertainment company Miramax Films, which led to the revitalized #MeToo movement of October 2017, gave global recognition to the sexual violence (sexism, misogyny, sexual harassment, assault and rape) that women experience in the creative industries. As a spin-off, the #MeNoMore campaign in December 2017 resulted in more than 400 women working in the Australian music industry speaking out against similar behavior. Despite having a reputation for sexual violence, the local music press played a minor role in this hashtag development, claiming that its practices are tied to radical, liberal and progressive values. In the post-Weinstein, #MeToo and #MeNoMore era, this contradiction signifies that the Australian music press is fertile ground for a feminist investigation. However, to date minimal local research has examined the link between sexual violence and music journalism. As a literature review to a larger empirical case study, this article draws on a critical discourse analysis from the post-feminist wave of media research into rockism, poptimism, punk, rap, hip hop, dubstep and electronic dance music genres, mainly conducted in the United States and United Kingdom. Derived from this analysis, the article argues that there are four framing techniques associated with music journalism practice in Australia: gendered music press, a masculine attitude towards music reporting, gendered musical tastes and gendered sexual harassment.

In the age of all "post" and "meta" things, when there has been more and more debates about the death of traditional categories, feminism makes no exception. Postfeminism has been discussed since the last decade of the twentieth century, when feminism was pronounced dead (by analogy with the many deaths that were pronounced in the period), or else it was noted as suffering from an "identity crisis." The multifaceted nature of the term depends on its uses in literary studies, academia, politics, and popular culture, respectively. It is part of the vocabulary and theories of feminist scholars working in the fields of gender studies, film studies and media criticism. Traditional feminism gives way to postfeminism. That is why the article deals with today's debates about the distinctions that postfeminism makes, declaring either that traditional feminism has failed or, on the contrary, that it has achieved all goals of its struggle and today there is no place for the topic of women's rights. The text also focuses on the links between postfeminism and popular culture, media, cinema, defending the ideology of successful women, of eternally young women. With its frequent emphasis on luxurious lifestyle, everyday pleasures and the small things in life, postfeminism is fully integrated into economic discourses and new market niches in Western societies.

Until 2017, the most recent disqualification of a member of the Australian Parliament under section 44(i) of the Australian Constitution (‘Constitution’) was Senator Heather Hill in 1998. Remarkably, since 2017, almost twenty years after Sue v Hill, ten parliamentarians have resigned or been disqualified, triggering a series of by-elections. The catalyst for this flurry of activity occurred in July 2017, when Greens senator Scott Ludlam announced that at the time of his election, he was a citizen of New Zealand and was incapable of sitting in parliament under section 44(i). He was the first of ten senators and members of parliament to be referred to the High Court of Australia in the cases of Re Canavan and later Re Gallagher on questions of eligibility under section 44(i). Eight of these parliamentarians were disqualified, sparking national debate around parliamentary representation and membership within the Australian community. Since Re Canavan and Re Gallagher and indeed well before those cases, the section had and has continued to attract popular, journalistic, parliamentary and academic criticism. Consequently, there have been calls for a referendum on section 44(i) for a significant period of time. While the authors support this call, this article reflects on the cases and develops a different interpretive approach to section 44(i) which if argued by the parties and adopted by the Court, would have rendered a referendum unnecessary. By drawing on the earlier section 41 of the Australian Constitution case of R v Pearson; Ex parte Sipka and its majority judgment, as well as drawing upon the minority judgment of Murphy J and a more recent feminist judgment written by Kim Rubenstein, one of the authors of this article, we argue that the principles of representative democracy and the sovereignty of the people could have acted as a frame to read down section 44(i). Had this approach been adopted, the Court could have effectively placed the decision around disqualification of parliamentarians around the issue of dual citizenship, back into the hands of the elected representatives

The article focuses on the first period in the history of Australian cinema. It is well-known that the present is always rooted in the past. This is true of any national cinema, and the Australian one is no exception. This subject is relevant in the light of the fact that, in the first place, the reasons for the contemporary boom in Australian cinema are impossible to understand and analyze unless they are derived from the awareness of the first steps of Australian cinema. It was in the very first years of the existence of Australian cinema that there emerged a special worldview, inherent in the cinematographic messages of this nation, that would later become iconic of Australian cinema: addressing the reality of Australia, love for its wild and beautiful nature and for the people who civilize this severe land. In their works the filmmakers of the Green Continent have almost always unflaggingly introduced two protagonists, an animate one, a manly, daring human being, and an inanimate one, the nature, magnificent, powerful, unexplored... At the same time, there was formed an image of a Hero: a fair, proud man, for whom honor and dignity are closely linked to striving for freedom. A conflict between the Individual and a soulless system is manifested in the early bushranger films and in the contemporary ones alike, now that the films by the Australian filmmakers come out again and again featuring the Individuals attempts at breaking his bondage. The novelty of this research lies in the fact that while the contemporary period of Australian cinema is well-covered in the global film criticism, the past of this national cinema is almost unknown. Considering the interest in the phenomenon of the contemporary cinema of the Green Continent, the author concludes that the global success of the Australian films today is largely linked to the accomplishments of the cinema pioneers, who against tough competition from American and English films, have laid a foundation for the future victories of this special national cinema.

This theme, The Portrait of the American Woman in Margaret Mitchell's Novel " Gone With The Wind " is broad, challenging, interesting and among many contradictory to one another's point of view, at different social grounds , periods of time simply or merely of the fact that a female writer of this tremendous saga read mostly by women represents multi dimensional themes. It is an interweave of tradition, history , war, social classes, Reconstruction, transition and more. All these and many other themes written with a masterful disciplined imagination put in the longest novel in history. A masterpiece of 1037 pages published in 1939 and subsequently in the greatest and longest motion picture on screen. Piling up records and building it's own history and legends. The novel has sold in more than 25 million copies in at least 27 languages in thirty countries and in more than 185 editions according to the research conducted in 2004. These figures continue to increase, not to mention that the film is seen by more individuals than the total population of the USA. GWTW has grown and conflated into a phenomenon of American and later into a phenomenon of levels of basic appreciation after international popular culture. Thus criticism was attested at the levels of basic appreciation , often in the opposite poles of love and /or hate , the evaluation again in bipolar terms of praise and / or scorn. On the popular level the book was lauded and in the literary world it was defamed. Mitchell's novel " Gone With The Wind " was seen as important symbols of American culture forces. A serious biography in 1965 sparked reconsiderations simply by the assumption of Mitchell's importance as a writer. Other re- evaluations followed which asserted the literary quality of the work, notably in feminist terms. Attesting the qualities that critics wrote such as Michener who said: " The spiritual history of a region". Many other scholarly papers have been undertaken to attack it and completed to praise it. Because of the enormous popularity , readability , embodiment of the heroine woman character Scarlett O'Hara with many other women who saw themselves in those situations or experienced the same then or even nowadays. These multi themes to discuss about, issues primarily of women, the novel is defined as a woman's literary artistic achievement, seen through the eyes off a woman Scarlett herself and many other women characters. Is seen the distinction of the past and present of the old and new society. Mitchell herself says it is about courage and gumption to change as a necessity in order to survive war, reconstruction and transition. The search of survival by poor and nearly defeated young women who had no control or capacity to understand these tensions. Indeed this novel has become an icon of the US culture.

It was always based on a teenage love story between the two kids. One is a sniffer and one is not. It was designed for Central Australia because we do write these kids off there. Not only in town, where the headlines for the newspapers every second day is about ‘the problem,’ ‘the teenager problem of kids wandering the streets’ and ‘why don’t we send them back to their communities’ and that sort of stuff. Then there’s the other side of it. Elders in Aboriginal communities have been taught that kids who sniff get brain damage, so as soon as they see a kid sniffing they think ‘well they’re rubbish now, they’re brain damaged.’ So the elders are writing these kids off as well, as in ‘they are brain damaged so they’re no use now, they’ll be in wheelchairs for the rest of their lives.’ This is not true, it’s just information for elders that hasn’t been given to them. That is the world I was working with. I wanted to show two incredibly beautiful children who have fought all their lives just to breathe and how incredibly strong they are and how we should be celebrating them and backing them up. I wanted to show that to Central Australia, and if the rest of Australia or the world get involved that’s fantastic. (Thornton in interview)Warwick Thornton’s 2009 film Samson and Delilah won the hearts of Australians as well as a bag of awards — and rightly so. It is a breathtaking film that, as review after review will tell you, is about the bravery, hopelessness, optimism and struggles of two Indigenous youths. In telling this story, the film extends, inverts and challenges notions of waste: wasted youths, wasted memory, wasted history, wasted opportunities, getting wasted and wasted voices. The narrative and the film as a cultural object raise questions about being discarded and “the inescapable fact that the experience of catastrophe in the past century can only be articulated from its remains, our history sifted from among these storied deposits.” (Neville and Villeneuve 2). The purpose of this paper is to examine reaction to the film, and where this reaction has positioned the film in Australian filmmaking history. In reading the reception of the film, I want to consider the film’s contribution to dialogical cultural representations by applying Marcia Langton’s idea of intersubjectivity.In his review, Sean Gorman argues thatThe main reason for the film’s importance is it enables white Australians who cannot be bothered reading books or engaging with Indigenous Australians in any way (other than watching them play football perhaps) the smallest sliver of a world that they have no idea about. The danger however in an engagement by settler society with a film like Samson and Delilah is that the potential shock of it may be too great, as the world which it portrays is, for many, an unknown Australia. Hence, for the settler filmgoer, the issues that the film discusses may be just too hard, too unreal, and their reaction will be limited to perhaps a brief bout of anger or astonishment followed by indifference. (81.1)It is this “engagement by settler society” that I wish to consider: how the voices that we hear speaking about the film are shifting attention from the ‘Other’ to more dialogical cultural representations, that is, non-Indigenous Australia’s emerging awareness of what has previously been wasted, discarded and positioned as valueless. I find Gorman’s surmise of white Australia’s shock with a world they know nothing about, and their potential power to return to a state of indifference about it, to be an interesting notion. Colonisation has created the world that Samson and Delilah live in, and the white community is as involved as the Indigenous one in the struggles of Samson and Delilah. If “settler” society is unaware, that unawareness comes from a history of non-Indigenous power that denies, excludes, and ignores. For this reason, Samson and Delilah is a dialogical cultural representation: it forces a space where the mainstream doesn’t just critique the Aborigine, but their own identity and involvement in the construction of that critique.Wasted VoicesWaste is a subjective notion. Items that some discard and perceive as valueless can be of importance to others, and then it also becomes a waste not to acknowledge or use that item. Rather than only focusing on the concept of “waste” as items or materials that are abandoned, I wish to consider the value in what is wasted. Centring my discussion of ‘waste’ on Thornton’s film provides the opportunity to view a wasteland of dispossession from another cultural and social perspective. Reaction to the film has constructed what could be perceived as an exceptional moment of engagement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous voices in dialogic intercultural dialogue. By revisiting early examples of ethnographic collaboration, and re-examining contemporary reactions to Samson and Delilah, I hope to forge a space for intervention in Australian film criticism that focuses on how ‘non-Aboriginality’ depends on ‘Aboriginality’ in a vast wasteland of colonial dispossession and appropriation.Many of the reviews of Thornton’s film (Buckmaster; Collins; Davis; Gorman; Hall; Isaac; Ravier; Redwood; Rennie; Simpson) pay attention to the emotional reaction of non-Indigenous viewers. Langton states that historically non-Indigenous audiences know ‘the Aborigine’ through non-Indigenous representations and monologues about Aboriginality: “In film, as in other media, there is a dense history of racist, distorted and often offensive representation of Aboriginal people” (24). The power to define has meant that ethnographic discourses in the early days of colonisation established their need to record Indigenous peoples, knowledges and traditions before they ‘wasted away.’ At the 1966 Round Table on Ethnographic Film in the Pacific Area, Stanley Hawes recounts how Ian Dunlop, an Australian documentary filmmaker, commented that “someone ought to film the aborigines of the Western Desert before it was too late. They had already almost all disappeared or gone to live on Mission stations” (69). This popular belief was one of the main motivations for research on Indigenous peoples and led to the notion of “smoothing the dying pillow,” which maintained that since Aborigines were a dying race, they should be allowed to all die out peacefully (Chandra-Shekeran 120). It was only the ‘real’ Aborigine that was valued: the mission Black, the urban Black, the assimilated Black, was a waste (Cowlishaw 108). These representations of Aboriginality depended on non-Indigenous people speaking about Aboriginality to non-Indigenous people. Yet, the impetus to speak, as well as what was being spoken about, and the knowledge being discussed and used, relied on Indigenous voices and presences. When Australia made its “important contribution to ethnographic films of its Aborigines” (McCarthy 81), it could not have done so without the involvement of Indigenous peoples. In her work on intersubjectivity, Langton describes “Aboriginality” as a “social thing” that is continually remade through dialogue, imagination, representation and interpretation. She describes three broad categories of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal intersubjectivity: when Aboriginal people interact with other Aboriginal people; when non-Aboriginal people stereotype, iconise, and mythologise Aboriginal people without any Aboriginal contact; and when Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people engage in dialogue (81). Since W. Baldwin Spencer’s first ethnographic film, made between 1901 and 1912, which recorded the customs of the Aranda and neighbouring Central Australian tribes (McCarthy 80), the development of Australian cinema depended on these categories of intersubjectivity. While the success of Samson and Delilah could be interpreted as opening mainstream eyes to the waste that Indigenous communities have experienced since colonisation — wasted knowledge, wasted youths, wasted communities — it could also signify that what was once perceived by dominant non-Indigenous society as trash is now viewed as treasure. Much like the dot paintings which Delilah and her nana paint in exchange for a few bucks, and which the white man then sells for thousands of dollars, Aboriginal stories come to us out of context and filtered through appropriation and misinterpretation.Beyond its undeniable worth as a piece of top-notch filmmaking, Samson and Delilah’s value also resides in its ability to share with a wide audience, and in a language we can all understand, a largely untold story steeped in the painful truth of this country’s bloody history. (Ravier)In reading the many reviews of Samson and Delilah, it is apparent there is an underlying notion of such a story being secret, and that mainstream Australia chose to engage with the film’s dialogical representation because it was sharing this secret. When Ravier states that Aboriginal stories are distorted by appropriation and misinterpretation, I would add that such stories are examples of Langton’s second category of intersubjectivity: they reveal more about the processes of non-Indigenous constructions of ‘the Aborigine’ and the need to stereotype, iconise and mythologise. These processes have usually involved judgements about what is to be retained as ‘valuable’ in Indigenous cultures and knowledges, and what can be discarded — in the same way that the film’s characters Samson and Delilah are discarded. The secret that Samson and Delilah is sharing with white Australia has never been a secret: it is that non-Indigenous Australia chooses what it wants to see or hear. Wasted SilencesIn 1976 Michael Edols directed and produced Floating about the Mowanjum communities experiences of colonisation, mission life and resistance. That same year Alessandro Cavadini directed and Carolyn Strachan produced Protected, a dramatised documentary about life on the Queensland Aboriginal reserve of Palm Island — “a dumping ground for unwanted persons or those deemed to be in need of ‘protection’” (Treole 38). Phillip Noyce’s Backroads, a story about the hardships facing a young man from a reserve in outback New South Wales, was released in 1977. In 1979, Essie Coffey produced and directed My Survival as an Aboriginal, where she documented her community’s struggles living under white domination. Two Laws, a feature film made by four of the language groups around Borroloola in 1981, examines the communities’ histories of massacre, dispossession and institutionalisation. These are just some of many films that have dealt with the ‘secrets’ about Indigenous peoples. In more recent times the work of Noyce, Rolf de Heer, Stephen Johnson, Iven Sen, Rachel Perkins and Romaine Moreton, to name only a few, have inspired mainstream engagement with films representing Indigenous experiences and knowledges. “We live in a world in which, increasingly, people learn of their own and other cultures and histories through a range of visual media — film, television, and video,” writes Faye Ginsburg (5). Changing understandings of culture and representation means that there appears to be a shift away from the “monologic, observational and privileged Western gaze” towards more dialogic, reflexive and imaginative mediation. Perhaps Samson and Delilah’s success is partly due to its contribution to social action through compelling the non-Indigenous viewer to “revise our comfortable and taken for granted narrative conventions that fetishise the text and reify ‘culture’ and ‘cultural difference.’ Instead, we — as producers, audiences, and ethnographers — are challenged to comprehend the multiple ways that media operate as a site where culture is produced, contested, mediated and continually re-imagined” (Ginsburg 14). In his review, Tom Redwood writes about the filmLike life in the desert, everything is kept to a minimum here and nothing is wasted. ... Perhaps it took an Indigenous filmmaker from Alice Springs to do this, to lead the way in reinstating meaningfulness and honesty as core values in Australian cinema. But, whatever the case, Thornton's Indigenous heritage won't make his difficult vision any easier for local audiences to swallow. Most Australians aren't used to this degree of seriousness at the movies and though many here will embrace Samson and Delilah, there will no doubt also be a minority who, unable to reject the film as a cultural curiosity, will resist its uncompromising nature with cries of 'pessimism!' or even 'reverse-racism!’ (28-29)Perhaps the film’s success has to do with the way the story is told? — “everything kept to a minimum” and “nothing is wasted.” In attempts to construct Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal intersubjectivity in previous representations perhaps language, words, English got in the way of communication? For mainstream white Australian society’s engagement in dialogic representations, for Indigenous voices to speak and be heard, for non-Indigenous monologues to be challenged, perhaps silence was called for? As the reviews for the film have emphasised, non-Indigenous reactions contribute to the dialogic nature of the film, its story, as well as its positioning as a site of cultural meaning, social relations, and power. Yet even while critiquing constructions of Aboriginality, non-Aboriginality has historically remained uncritiqued—non-Aboriginal endorsement and reaction is discussed, but what this reaction and engagement, or lack of engagement (whether because of ignorance, unawareness, or racism) reveals is not. That is, non-Aboriginality has not had to critique the power it has to continue to remain ignorant of stories about wasted Indigenous lives. Thornton’s film appears to have disrupted this form of non-engagement.With the emergence of Indigenous media and Indigenous media makers, ethnographic films have been reconceptualised in terms of aesthetics, cultural observations and epistemological processes. By re-exploring the history of ethnographic film making and shifting attention from constructions of the ‘other’ to reception by the mainstream, past films, past representations of colonisation, and past dialogues will not be wasted. With the focus on constructing Aboriginality, the cultural value of non-Aboriginality has remained unquestioned and invisible. By re-examining the reactions of mainstream Australians over the last one hundred years in light of the success of Samson and Delilah, cultural and historical questions about ‘the Aborigine’ can be reframed so that the influence Indigenous discourses have in Australian nation-building will be more apparent. The reception of Samson and Delilah signifies the transformational power in wasted voices, wasted dialogues and the wasted opportunities to listen. Wasted DialoguesFelicity Collins argues that certain “cinematic events that address Indigenous-settler relations do have the capacity to galvanise public attention, under certain conditions” (65). Collins states that after recent historical events, mainstream response to Aboriginal deprivation and otherness has evoked greater awareness of “anti-colonial politics of subjectivity” (65). The concern here is with mainstream Australia dismantling generations of colonialist representations and objectifications of the ‘other.’ What also needs to be re-examined is the paradox and polemic of how reaction to Aboriginal dispossession and deprivation is perceived. Non-Indigenous reaction remains a powerful framework for understanding, viewing and positioning Indigenous presence and representation — the power to see or not to see, to hear or to ignore. Collins argues that Samson and Delilah, along with Australia (Luhrmann, 2009) and First Australians (Perkins, 2008), are national events in Australian screen culture and that post-apology films “reframe a familiar iconography so that what is lost or ignored in the incessant flow of media temporality is precisely what invites an affective and ethical response in cinematic spaces” (75).It is the notion of reframing what is lost or ignored to evoke “ethical responses” that captures my attention; to shift the gaze from Aboriginal subjectivity, momentarily, to non-Aboriginal subjectivity and examine how choosing to discard or ignore narratives of violence and suffering needs to be critiqued as much as the film, documentary or representation of Indigenality. Perhaps then we can start to engage in dialogues of intersubjectivity rather than monologues about Aboriginality.I made [Samson and Delilah] for my mob but I made sure that it can work with a wider audience as well, and it’s just been incredible that it’s been completely embraced by a much wider audience. It’s interesting because as soon as you knock down that black wall between Aboriginals and white Australia, a film like this does become an Australian film and an Australian story. Not an Aboriginal story but a story about Australians, in a sense. It’s just as much a white story as it is a black one when you get to that position. (Thornton in interview)When we “get to that position” described by Thornton, intercultural and intersubjective dialogue allows both Aboriginality and non-Aboriginality to co-exist. When a powerful story of Indigenous experiences and representations becomes perceived as an Australian story, it provides a space for what has historically been ignored and rendered invisible to become visible. It offers a different cultural lens for all Australians to question and critique notions of value and waste, to re-assess what had been relegated to the wasteland by ethnographic editing and Westernised labels. Ever since Spencer, Melies, Abbie and Elkin decided to retain an image of Aboriginality on film, which they did with specific purposes and embedded values, it has been ‘the Aborigine’ that has been dissected and discussed. It would be a waste not to open this historiography up to include mainstream reaction, or lack of reaction, in the development of cultural and cinematic critique. A wasteland is often perceived as a dumping ground, but by re-visiting that space and unearthing, new possibilities are discovered in that wasteland, and more complex strategies for intersubjectivity are produced. At the centre of Samson and Delilah is the poverty and loss that Indigenous communities experience on a daily basis. The experiences endured by the main characters are not new or recent ones and whether cinematic reception of them produces guilt, pity, sympathy, empathy, fear or defensiveness, it is the very potential to be able to react that needs to be critiqued. As Williamson Chang points out, the “wasteland paradigm is invisible to those embedded in its structure” (852). By looking more closely at white society’s responses in order to discern more clearly if they are motivated by feelings that their wealth—whether material, cultural or social—or their sense of belonging is being challenged or reinforced then ruling values and epistemologies are challenged and dialogic negotiations engaged. If dominant non-Indigenous society has the power to classify Indigenous narratives and representation as either garbage or something of value, then colonialist structures remain intact. If they have the self-reflexive power to question their own response to Indigenous narratives and representations, then perhaps more anti-colonial discourses emerge. Notions of value and waste are tied to cultural hierarchies, and it is through questioning how a dominant culture determines value that processes of transformation and mediation take place and the intersubjective dialogue sparked by Samson and Delilah can continueIn her review of Samson and Delilah, Therese Davis suggests that the film brings people closer to truthfulness, forcing the audience to engage with that realism: “those of us ‘outside’ of the community looking in can come to know ourselves differently through the new languages of this film, both cultural and cinematic. Reformulating the space of the national from an ‘insider,’ Aboriginal community-based perspective, the film positions its spectators, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, in a shared space, a space that allows for new forms of attachment, involvement and self-knowledge, new lines of communication.” Davis goes on to caution that while the film is groundbreaking, the reviews situating the film as what Australian cinema should be need to be mindful of feeding “notions of anti-diversity, which “is an old debate in Australian Cinema Studies, but in this instance anti-diversity is doubly problematic because it also runs the risk of narrowly defining Indigenous cinema.” The danger, historically, is that anything Indigenous, has always been narrowly defined by the mainstream and yes, to continue to limit Indigenous work in any medium is colonising and problematic. However, rather than just caution against this reaction, I am suggesting that reaction itself be critiqued. While currently contemporary mainstream response to Samson and Delilah is one of adoration, is the centre from which it comes the same centre which less than fifty years ago critiqued Indigenous Australians as a savage, noble, and/or dying race wasting away? Davis writes that the film constructs a new “relation” in Australian cinema but that it should not be used as a marker against which “all new (and old) Indigenous cinema is measured.” This concern resembles, in part, my concern that until recently mainstream society has constructed their own markers of Aboriginal cultural authenticity, deciding what is to be valued and what can be discarded. I agree with Davis’s caution, yet I cannot easily untangle the notion of ‘measuring.’ As a profound Australian film, certainly cinematic criticism will use it as a signifier of ‘quality.’ But by locating it singularly in the category of Indigenous cinema, the anti-colonial and discursive Indigenous discourses the film deploys and evokes are limited to the margins of Australian film and film critique once more. After considering the idea of measuring, and asking who would be conducting this process of measuring, my fear is that the gaze returns to ‘the Aborigine’ and the power to react remains solely, and invisibly, with the mainstream. Certainly it would be a waste to position the film in such a way that limits other Indigenous filmmakers’ processes, experiences and representations. I see no problem with forcing non-Indigenous filmmakers, audiences and perceptions to have to ‘measure’ up as a result of the film. It would be yet another waste if they didn’t, and Samson and Delilah was relegated to being simply a great ‘Indigenous Australian film,’ instead of a great Australian film that challenges, inverts and re-negotiates the construction of both Aboriginality and non-Aboriginality. By examining reaction to the film, and not just reading the film itself, discussions of dialogical cultural representation can include non-Aboriginality as well as Aboriginality. Films like this are designed to create a dialogue and I’m happy if someone doesn’t like the film and they tell me why, because we’re creating dialogue. We’re talking about this stuff and taking a step forward. That’s important. (Thornton)The dialogue opened up by the success of Thornton’s beautiful film is one that also explores non-Aboriginality. If we waste the opportunity that Samson and Delilah provides, then Australia’s ongoing cinematic history will remain a wasteland, and many more Indigenous voices, stories, and experiences will continue to be wasted.ReferencesBuckmaster, Luke. “Interview with Warwick Thornton”. Cinetology 12 May 2009. 18 Aug. 2010 ‹http://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2009/05/12/interview-with-warwick-thornton-writerdirector-of-samson-delilah›.———. “Samson and Delilah Review: A Seminal Indigenous Drama of Gradual and Menacing Beauty”. Cinetology 6 May 2009. 14 June 2010 ‹http://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2009/05/06/samson-delilah-film-review-a-seminal-indigenous-drama-of-gradual-and-menacing-beauty›.Chang, Williamson, B. C. “The ‘Wasteland’ in the Western Exploitation of ‘Race’ and the Environment”. University of Colorado Law Review 849 (1992): 849-870.Chandra-Shekeran, Sangeetha. “Challenging the Fiction of the Nation in the ‘Reconciliation’ Texts of Mabo and Bringing Them Home”. The Australian Feminist Law Journal 11 (1998): 107-133.Collins, Felicity. “After the Apology: Reframing Violence and Suffering in First Australians, Australia and Samson and Delilah”. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 24.3 (2010): 65-77.Cowlishaw, Gillian, K. “Censoring Race in ‘Post-Colonial’ Anthropology”. Critique of Anthropology 20.2 (2000): 101-123. Davis, Therese. “Love and Marginality in Samson and Delilah”. Senses of Cinema 57 (2009). 7 Jan. 2010 ‹http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/09/51/samson-and-delilah.html›. Ginsburg, Faye. “Culture/Media: A (Mild) Polemic”. Anthropology Today 10.2 (1994): 5-15.Gorman, Sean. “Review of Samson and Delilah”. History Australia 6.3 (2009): 81.1-81.2.Hall, Sandra. “Review of Samson and Delilah”. Sydney Morning Herald. 7 May 2009. Hawes, Stanley. “Official Government Production”. Round Table on Ethnographic Film in the Pacific Area. Canberra: Australian National Advisory Committee, 1966. 62-71.Isaac, Bruce. “Screening ‘Australia’: Samson and Delilah”. Screen Education 54 (2009): 12-17. Langton, Marcia. Well, I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television...: An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by and about Aboriginal People and Things. Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1993.McCarthy, F. D “Ethnographic Research Films” Round Table on Ethnographic Film in the Pacific Area Australian National Advisory Committee (1966): 80-85.Neville, Brian, and Johanne Villeneuve. Waste-Site Stories: The Recycling of Memory. Albany: State U of New York P., 2002.Ravier, Matt. “Review: Samson and Delilah”. In Film Australia. 2009. 7 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.infilm.com.au/?p=802›.Redwood, Tom. “Warwick Thornton and Kath Shelper on Making Samson and Delilah”. Metro 160 (2009): 31.Rennie, Ellie. “Samson and Delilah under the Stars in Alice Springs”. Crikey 27 Apr. 2009. 18 Aug. 2010 ‹ http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/04/27/samson-and-delilah-under-the-stars-in-alice-springs/›.Samson and Delilah. Dir. Warwick Thornton. Footprint Films, 2009. Treole, Victoria. Australian Independent Film. Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1982.