Category: film/video

Networks, Rings and Things

These two paragraphs are completely unrelated. I admit it.

Bit 1
I keep forgetting to help spread the word about Phil Agre’s advice piece Networking on the Network, which is specifically aimed at graduate students (it’s almost long enough to be a PhD itself in fact). It isn’t just for academic types, though. It’s full of straightforward and insightful advice that is applicable to people working in, or aspiring to enter, any creative or intellectual profession. It does get a bit prescriptive (“don’t drink coffee” at conferences? good luck!) but the substance of the piece will at least make you take stock of the way you manage your professional relationships.

Bit 2
I know many of you have already seen the last of the Lord of the Rings movies – personally, I am bursting to announce that I saw The Return of the King yesterday and gladly surrendered to the gorgeousness, wonderment, and awe…[sigh]

Anyhow, all you friends of middle earth are invited to participate in the largest audience study ever by completing this questionnaire about your experiences and opinions of the movies. The questionnaire is hosted at the University of Aberystwyth but the study includes researchers working in universities in 20 countries across the world.

Cinema, Memory, and National Identity

There have been times in years past when my own house made me so bored and restless that I spent whole Saturdays doing the rounds of my friends, dropping in for cups of tea and a chat. My behaviour in the blogosphere lately has been exactly like that – for some reason everybody else’s blog has been more interesting to read and write at than my own. So this is where I’ve been for the last couple of days…

At Junk for Code, I’ve been engaged with Gary’s posts (one, two and especially three) about the idea of Australian identity and cinema. We’ve had some productive and enjoyable discussions about all this and as always I’ve been especially concerned with the (im)possibility of presenting a “cosmopolitan” Australia to the rest of the world. The problem as I see it is that it is not yet possible to imagine a “cultured’ Australia in any terms other than those of European modernism. In a postcolonial (or “settler”) culture this is obviously not good enough on its own. In fact, uncultured multiculturalism might be a better way to think of it – uncultured meaning not owned, managed, and maintained by a white, middleclass, urban elite. I also took issue with Gary’s use of the term “lowest common denominator” in talking about mass culture in this post.

Another of my daily reads is Anne Galloway, who has been thinking about Nietsche, machine memory, and the idea of the Forgetting Machine, which I’ve found absolutely fascinating. In the comments section of her post she has drawn in a bunch of people thinking about various kinds of remembering and forgetting (nostalgia, dementia, and hope for example). And I had my own intense stab of nostalgia on coming across this post at antipopper about 90s indie-swoon-pop band The Clouds.

So if I were to synthesise these two areas of concern, it might be to start thinking about the cinematic imagination as a powerful nostalgia engine, especially when it tries to imagine “Australianness”. The cinema remembers selectively, intensely, and affectively, and forgets far more than it remembers. Case in point: while reading Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang I also watched the recent movie Ned Kelly on video. Despite starring cute boys (Heath Ledger, Orlando Bloom), it was a wimpy, romanticized whitewash of what is already a dangerously white and masculinist tale. The direct comparison with the written, but still fictionalised version, made the limitations (rather than the evocative power) of cinema glaringly obvious.