At a pivotal moment in the new SBS miniseries The Australian Wars, director and presenter Rachel Perkins takes us to a place she says is ‘etched in the memory of my family. A place called Blackfellas Bones.’ Perkins turns to talk directly to camera: ‘You know, we turn away from things that we don’t want to see. We all do it. And I admit that I actually didn’t really want to make this d ... (read more)
‘In traditional journalism, you’re meeting with a source and that source is telling you a story. In today’s world we don’t trust sources because we don’t trust humans. We trust data.’
Christo Grosev, in Navalny.
In the documentary film Navalny, Christo Grosev, chief investigator with the Bellingcat group of independent journalists, details how he followed the data trail to identi ... (read more)
Eleven vials of smallpox virus were transported to Sydney on the First Fleet by Surgeon John White1. In the crucible of a filmmaker’s mind, this historical fact is forged into fantasy, the vials transmuted into eleven vampires, let loose to suck the lifeblood out of the local people. When that filmmaker is Warwick Thornton (Sweet Country, Samson and Delilah), this monstrous cargo becomes a metap ... (read more)
Any film about shark conservation faces a dilemma: how to de-sensationalise an animal whose cinematic charisma relies on the combination of thrill and fear. What reels us in as viewers is the excitement of an up-close, full-frontal encounter with a dangerous predator. Film scholar Tom Gunning talks about this as ‘lust for the eyes’, when an image ‘rushes forward to meet the viewer’, provok ... (read more)
Non-linear, interactive, random: hypertext fiction has scrambled our expectations of what narrative can be and how it can work. Today, control is wrested from authors, with readers using hyperlinks to navigate their own trajectory through multiple possible stories experienced in the virtual spaces of the internet. But what happens when those unpredictable pathways unfold across a physical space, n ... (read more)
In the hands of an occupational hygienist, the combination of light and a fluid medium is a scientific tool to demonstrate the flow of vapours, the way aerosols hang suspended in the air, tiny particles that linger and drift, hovering like miasmas. When the gaseous medium of air is freighted with moisture, light makes air visible, revealing it as dense and saturated. This sudden revelation brings ... (read more)
