School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemFor a history of black( 2008)In 'For a History of Black' Sean Cubitt investigates the physiological, technological and cultural problems associated with the (non-) colour black. As the complete absence of colour, black is an ideal that is never actualised, says Cubitt. The representation of black operates differently in different media. In many contexts, such as low-light cinema, early television and new media art, artists have made creative use of the limitations and artefacts of how production technologies handle black. Cubitt's detailed media history connects questions of aesthetics with the physiology of perception and industrial changes.
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ItemCrimes against urbanity: the concrete soul of Michael Mann(Taylor and Francis, 2008)This article examines the contemporary crime film's reimagination of urban space. Through a case study of selected films by Michael Mann, it argues that the extreme stylisation of certain postmodern crime texts functions to aestheticise the industrial infrastructure of late capitalism, and that the genre offers a visual training through which generic sites of commerce, transit and industry (non-place) may be personalised, rendered habitable, and potentially reclaimed.
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ItemDigital dialectics: the paradox of cinema in a studio without walls( 1999)This essay presents a brief history of the impact of digital technology on cinema. Drawing on original interviews with leading Australian film makers, it firstly examines how changes in technology are affecting contemporary film production. It then extends this analysis to consider the implications of such changes for contemporary film theory.
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ItemBaby bitches from hell: monstrous little women in film(Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2005)The Surrealists were fascinated by what they perceived as the dual nature of the little girl, her propensity for innocence and evil. This theme has also proven an enduring one in the history of the cinema and provided the basis for many acclaimed films from The Innocents to Lolita. The view of the female child as particularly close to the non-material world of fantasy and the imagination was central to the beliefs of the Surrealists. They regarded childhood as "the privileged age in which imaginative faculties were still à l’état sauvage – sensitive to all kinds of impressions and associations which education would systematically 'correct'". "Dissecting mystery is like violating a child", Bunuel was fond of saying.' In the 1924 Manifesto, Breton claimed, "The spirit which takes the plunge into Surrealism exultantly relives the best of its childhood."
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ItemBroken Screen: Doug Aitken’s Electric Earth and the inner workings of a single moment( 2007)An earlier and different version of this essay appeared as: Green, C. (2007). “Broken Screen,” Broadsheet (Adelaide), vol. 36, no. 1 (January 2007), 52-55.Over time from the 1960s, audience tolerance for disrupted narration has increased in proportion to the penetration of new media’s database and digital effect paradigms into cinematic representation: the concept of neo-baroque cinema and the idea of the Cinema Effect have been formulated in response to this. Trying to “understand” broken narratives—the world of Lev Manovich’s database aesthetic—through character motivation, residually insisting on naive cinematic realism, has always seemed excessively willful. This essay is going to explore the workings of broken narratives through the concept of a cinematic experience of suspension, which is specific to a panoramic, environmental installation and a quasi-documentary film genre, and which is very different to the identifications of classical narrative cinema.