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Jake Wilson

‘There is such and such a relationship between a man and a woman. They are living in such and such a place. And here come the intruders.’ So Roman Polanski, interviewed in 1969, described the conception of Cul de Sac (1966), his favourite among his films.

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It is easy, too easy, to feel familiar with Clint Eastwood. However fully we realise that he is just another actor playing a role, part of us wants to believe that he speaks to colleagues in terse catchphrases and squints at friends and family with profound contempt. Almost invariably, his tough-guy image sets the terms for assessments of his work as a director – whether he’s seen as the Last Classicist or merely as a hardened old pro who gets the job done. To be sure, in conversation with journalists Eastwood has often been willing to play up to his laconic reputation. My favourite example came when he was asked how he approached the adaptation of The Bridges of Madison County: ‘I took all the drivel out.’

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One morning in 2004, an Aboriginal man named Cameron Doomadgee was arrested for swearing at a police officer; forty-five minutes later he lay dead on the floor of his cell. Something had gone badly wrong, though the white senior sergeant on duty, the towering Chris Hurley, denied he was in any way at fault.

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It takes fifteen minutes of screen time before Karen (Shai Pittman), the young Aboriginal heroine of Beck Cole’s Here I Am, finds a room of her own. Before this, we have seen her riding away from prison in a taxi, blissfully feeling the wind on her face; walking through dark Adelaide streets, clutching a box of treasured possessions; and prostituting herself to a stranger in a pub in exchange for a night’s accommodation.

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Directed by John Boulting in 1947, the original film version of Graham Greene’s thriller Brighton Rock is as honourable an adaptation as anyone could want. The plot may be simplified, but the essentials are all there (Greene himself co-wrote the script), and so is the cheery, grimy atmosphere of a mid-century British seaside resort, captured on location. There are two unforgettable performances, by Richard Attenborough as ‘Pinkie’, the psychopathic teenage gangster with a strangely pure belief in the reality of hell; and by Hermione Baddeley as Ida Arnold, the tart-with-a-heart who vows to bring Pinkie to justice.

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As his title suggests, Jonathan Rosenbaum tackles two subjects in his latest collection of essays, neither of them easy to define. In an era when films are mostly viewed at home, not on the big screen, cinema can no longer mean what it once did. Cinephilia, too, is an alluring but indefinite concept – love of movies, yes, but not any old love, and probably not the devotion felt by your average fan of Transformers or Twilight.

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Michael Winterbottom by Brian McFarlane and Deane Williams

by
February 2010, no. 318

I approached this readable and well-informed study expecting a middling book on a middling filmmaker. Michael Winterbottom is obviously a talented man by the standards of modern British commercial cinema, but I have always associated his work with a routine blend of fashionable technique and pious liberal sentiment. Nor did Brian McFarlane and Deane Williams raise my hopes with their introduction, in which they praise Winterbottom’s business sense and his avoidance of ‘high-flown accounts of what he is up to’. Above all, they seem impressed by the sheer industry of a director who has averaged one feature a year for the past decade and a half; however you judge him, ‘he does keep getting his films made’.

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‘I never thought Australia needed culture of any kind,’ drawls Barry Humphries in Not Quite Hollywood, Mark Hartley’s recent documentary on Australian ‘trash’ cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. Perverse aesthete that he is, Humphries cannot resist the idea that lack of refinement might be a sign of vitality: ‘Culture is yoghurt, isn’t it, or mould? It grows on decaying things.’

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It is no easy task for an outsider to anatomise a national cinema, and the Austrian academic Adi Wimmer suggests in this series of essays that Australian cinema has always been more national than most. In other words, our filmmakers have been unusually dedicated to the project of defining a collective identity through a set of instantly recognisable myths: the ultimate Australian film would be one that showed a group of sun-bronzed, laconic, Anglo-Saxon blokes battling droughts and big business in a wide brown land seen equally as a symbol of brooding masculinity and as a hostile mother.

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The third full-length English-language study of the films of Jane Campion is a book that will probably be of more interest to the dedicated student than to the general reader. The American scholar Kathleen McHugh is a stiff though clear and conscientious writer who takes care to make her research visible and to spell out any possibly unfamiliar ideas. She has the academic knack for seizing upon parallels, oppositions and ironies, and working through their permutations. Writing, for example, of Campion’s early preoccupations with ethnography and surrealism, she notes that ‘the two form a matched set, ethnography setting out to make the strange ... familiar, surrealism endeavouring to make the familiar strange’. Having set forth a handful of ‘reversible’ concepts of this kind, McHugh goes on to apply them to each of Campion’s films in turn: the bulk of the book proceeds chronologically from the early shorts to the recent In the Cut (2003), incorporating extensive plot summary and ‘thick description’.

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