Author Adrian Danks

This special tribute dossier is devoted to one of the true legends of Australian screen culture, the inimitable and mercurial John Flaus. It marks a little over 60 years since the start of John’s involvement...

In 1965, Agnès Varda made a short, intense documentary on the then almost 40-year relationship between the French writers Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet. Her film predominantly and characteristically focuses...

The history of Australian cinema is littered with small-scale, unobtrusive and even intimate portraits of working and middle class life that are largely forgotten in many accounts of what is troubling called...

This dossier (the first of a projected series) on contemporary Australian filmmakers focuses on currently active directors who started making audiovisual work in the 1990s or 2000s. Although a number of these...

At the end of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), Marlene Dietrich’s Tana wearily intones an epitaph for Orson Welles’ Hank Quinlan, a bloated, corrupt cop now floating on the surface of the river: “He...

Words for Battle (1941) is the first of Humphrey Jennings’ extraordinary string of wartime documentaries to fully extend the parameters, conventions and patriotic necessities of the form. A fugue of images,...

“Swimming”, he told her. “He wants to have a swim.” “Sailing? There’s a race on Saturday.” “I didn’t ask him. I should think he sails. He’s the sort of man who would.” She took a drink...

This is a revised version of an essay that first appeared in a 1997 edition of CTEQ: Annotations on Film. Border Incident (1949) sits within the cycle of “procedural” film noir that came into prominence...

Albie Thoms (1941-2012) was one of the most significant figures of Australian postwar film culture. In a peripatetic career that stretched from his adventurous work with the Sydney University Drama Society...

Introduction: Tasmania and the Cinema Tasmania’s intermittent relationship with the cinema dates back before the first feature film made on its rugged West Coast in 1925, Louise Lovely and Wilton...

“Flynn does not deal in depth, but he has a freshness, a galvanizing energy, a cheerful gaiety (in the old sense) made to inspire boys.” (2) “ never fights his material, playing directly into the...

For Guillaume-en-Egypte, Polly and Chris This is a slightly revised version of a paper presented at a symposium devoted to Chris Marker in the late 1990s. Each of the speakers was asked to identify and talk...