Academic literature on the topic 'Fremantle Studies'

Reflecting on the current TV landscape dominated by global streaming, Fremantle’s Jo Porter suggests that Australian TV is currently riding a high, with ‘quality’ dramas ‘cutting through’ and ‘getting noticed’ internationally. For Porter, this level of global visibility is occurring despite the barrier of its regional or ‘accented’ voice. However, in this article, I suggest that the global cache of certain Australian dramas may in fact be the product of accented storytelling rather than something to be conquered or overcome. In shaping this argument, I consider language politics and accent shifts in Australian TV history particularly in relation to exporting, format trade and remaking, exploring links between Grundy Television and Fremantle. By comparing language and accent in the cult classic Prisoner with Fremantle’s Wentworth and Picnic at Hanging Rock, I consider how the inclusion and exclusion of vernacular voice sheds light on industrial change and TV history.

PurposePublic private partnerships (PPPs) centralize decision making into a hybrid type of firm, consisting of a government entity with a private firm, that is either a profit‐seeking or non‐profit entity, that initiates, constructs, maintains, or provides a service. The PPP model recognizes that both the public and the private sectors have certain comparative advantages in the performance of specific tasks. PPPs, grounded in cost/benefit analysis, have been used in Australia for decades and are presently being introduced in the USA as a form of innovate contracting. This paper aims to evaluate PPPs as a potentially transferable model for the delivery of public services. PPP firms are evaluated in terms of capital asset management, productive and allocative efficiency, transfer of risk between the public and private sectors, rights to the residual, and the public interest. A case study comparison of Fremantle Ports (Australia) and the Indiana Toll Road (USA) is employed to demonstrate PPP design and function.Design/methodology/approachA description and evaluation of public private partnerships (PPP) is presented and two original and primary case studies are reviewed.FindingsA PPP functioning as a monopoly provider of a common pool public asset approximates economic efficiency when user fees cover virtually full cost. Identifying optimal output and quality assessment is more challenging in the case of social goods in which the public goal is subsidy minimization and clients cannot assess quality. Best practices are helpful; they guarantee the PPP process, but not the outcome. All PPPs, in whatever country or industry, are vulnerable to bureaucratic expansion whenever they are given access to subsidized loans underwritten by taxpayers.Originality/valueThe two case studies in this paper are 100 percent original; they were examined in person by the authors, and the managers of the two entities were interviewed in Indiana (USA) and Fremantle, Western Australia.

This creative work and its associated exegesis examines the concept of what I have termed a ‘transcendental structure’ in relation to a documentary film form, and what outcomes, specific to a non-fiction mode of representation, result from the application of this structure. A transcendental structure in film has a long history of investigation and interpretation in narrative fiction film theory and practice, but is substantially absent from documentary scholarship. The topic appears, in different forms, in the critical writings of Zavattini (1940), Bazin (1946), Pasolini (1965), Schrader (1972), Deleuze (1985), and more recently, Perez (1998) and Minghelli (2016). All of these theorists have identified a cinema of a double nature: on one level, explicit in its narrative programme and engagement, while on another level, simultaneously registering a spatial and temporal ‘beyond’ that invites an alternative experience based on a formal engagement. This aesthetic or non-narrative dimension is made perceivable through cinematic strategies that aim to interrupt or suspend the narrative flow and foreground elements external to the narrative programme. It is for this reason that landscape holds particular importance to a transcendental structure; in its physical interaction with and set-apartness from the human narrative, and through this, in its contrasting temporality to the narrative and less tangible level of registration. This research will proceed by testing this structure through my own creative practice: a documentary feature on Fremantle’s Rajneesh sannyasin community, titled The Beloved. This is an ongoing community in Fremantle, which in the eighties, experienced a dramatic and public rise and fall as a movement. It is also a community with which I have an enduring personal relationship. This has allowed me to address not only their public history, but also the troubled memory that survives within the community. This documentary will be accompanied by the exegesis which will identify the concept of a transcendental structure within fiction film scholarship and, in the absence of critical writings that relate to this concept in documentary, will examine documentaries that are able to be discussed in these terms. The key films that I examine in the exegesis include Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985), which brings the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust into the realm of present experience by rejecting archival imagery in favour of landscapes from the concentration camps in their contemporary state; and sleep furiously (Koppel, 2008), in which the unprocessed trauma of community disintegration is registered through affect-based experience rather than the narrative or representational programme. From the sum of this research, I argue that the interview based historical documentary is particularly suitable as a platform for a transcendental structure, and useful to historical subjects of a sensitive, troubled, and unresolved nature. The double nature of the structure, exhibited in the dissociation of the voice recounting the historical narrative from imagery of present-day settings, opens up new communicative possibilities and spaces for the contemplation and processing of incomprehensible, repressed, or traumatic experience.