Film Studies

Early in Gail Jones’s novel Black Mirror (2002), an Australian artist dives into the Seine to retrieve a bundle that may contain a drowning baby. Before rising to the surface, she experiences a kind of epiphany in the face of possible death – ‘a willed dissolution, a corrupt fantasy of effacement’. Later she revisits the experience in dreams, swimming through a surrealist underworld of discarded bric-a-brac: plainly, a metaphor for dreaming itself, as an act of plunging into mental depths and searching for hidden treasures.

The dilemma faced by the Australian film industry after a decade – and about fifty feature films – of revival is neatly put by the Foreword and the Introduction to The New Australian Cinema. One kind of pioneer, Phillip Adams, to whom some credit for the early impetus is due, has one kind of warning. ‘Our politicians, film corporations and investors are insisting on the need for commercial success in the U.S.’, he says, and reminds us of the reasons some of us thought an Australian film industry was important: ‘We needed to hear our own accent. We wanted our voice to be heard in the world.’ Another and earlier kind of pioneer, Ken G. Hall, speaking from the bitter experience of the immediate post-war years (when, as he says, ‘I made newsreels’) has the opposite warning; ‘There will be no enduring film industry in this country unless it is based on commercially successful films.’

‘Call me Ismail,’ it could plausibly begin: a screenplay not of Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick but of the real-life relationship between two filmmakers renowned for their adaptations of a string of other classic novels. Ismail Merchant first met James Ivory on the steps of the Indian consulate in Manhattan in 1961. ‘Call me by your name,’ the Ivory character might wittily retort in this imagined biopic. That, of course, was to be the title of the film scripted by Ivory nearly a decade and a half after Merchant’s death in 2005, but it captures something of the symbiotic nature of their partnership.

Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon is perhaps the best-known film never made. But what about others that never happened? What might a closer look at these reveal about the state of filmmaking? Such unmade films constitute the ‘dark matter’ of British director Michael Winterbottom’s book Dark Matter: Independent filmmaking in the 21st century. The invisible dark matter of the cosmos shapes our universe; without it many galaxies would fly apart. For Winterbottom, an examination of cinematic dark matter ‘might help to explain the wider landscape of British independent cinema’ this century.

The history of cinema began twice. All art forms are shaped by technological change, but the advent of the talkie in the late 1920s – only a few decades after the first silent films – did not so much develop the medium as kill it and replace it with something new. So abrupt was the change that the strange visual operas of cinema’s earliest years became imbued with a certain innocence, now almost impossible to replicate. To this day, silent film has an aura of mystery, a quality that cultural critic Peter Conrad addresses in his erudite new book.

In recent years, Hollywood has been forced to take a long hard look at itself. Since Alyssa Milano popularised the hashtag #MeToo in 2017, and the Time’s Up movement was launched in 2018, women in the film industry have been sharing their stories of sexism, discrimination, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. Film critic Helen O’Hara’s Women vs Hollywood is not the first attempt at a revisionist history of the Hollywood film industry. Several books have appeared that reread Hollywood through a feminist lens: Laura L.S. Bauer’s Hollywood Heroines: The most influential women in film history (2018), Jill Tietjen and Barbara Bridges’ Hollywood: Her story, an illustrated history of women and the movies (2019), and Naomi McDougall Jones’s The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside our revolution to dismantle the gods of Hollywood (2020).

Reviewing Oliver Stone’s film Salvador for The New Yorker in 1986, Pauline Kael detected a ‘right-wing macho fantasy joined to a left-wing polemic’. That same compound, a politically unstable one, bubbles under the surface of Stone’s autobiography, Chasing the Light. Generally speaking, it is hard to separate judgement about an autobiography from that about its subject, since reading an autobiography is like a long stay at someone’s home, listening to them detail their life story around the dinner table, night after night. The problem is twofold when its author is so politically conflicted. As distinct from a film review, to review Oliver Stone’s autobiography is undeniably to review ‘Oliver Stone’.