School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemMontage Vietnam: documentary aesthetics and the dialectic of popular radicalism( 2014)This thesis is the first in-depth study of the politics of exposition in explicitly political, populist documentary, taking as case studies three pivotal documentaries of the Vietnam era - Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig (1968), Peter Davis’ Hearts and Minds (1973) and The Newsreel Film Collective’s Summer 68 (1969). Three different aesthetic approaches are linked by the filmmakers’ desire to undermine dominant representations of ‘the television war’ whilst consciously avoiding relegation to the art-house for fear of ‘preaching to the choir’. As such, the desire to reach as wide an audience as possible is continually offset by the politics of visual pleasure and documentary realism. This thesis offers an examination of how these tensions play out, termed here the dialectic of popular radicalism. These films’ political aesthetic can be mapped by examining their dialectical relationship to both mainstream entertainment and news services, as well as European modernism. This map will use the mechanics of each film’s metalanguage as its defining structure. Through a recalibration of Comolli and Narboni’s influential ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ (1969) - via the varied lenses of documentary, genre and Soviet film theory - a politicised understanding of Keith Beattie’s ‘documentary display’ will be produced. It is my contention that the dialectic between popular and radical sensibilities manifests in varying degrees of visibility of each film’s metalanguage, or textual ‘voice’, to use Bill Nichols’ 1981 formulation. This visibility is at the heart of these films’ political aesthetic. Solidifying Nichols’ conception of voice as the metalanguage of the popular political documentary provides a concrete means of understanding documentary realism in relation to rhetoric: rather than looking through documentary’s window onto the world, it draws focus onto the window itself. Taking lessons from Marxist aesthetic and film theory as well as the works themselves, this thesis encourages an antagonistic approach to traditional structures of representation in documentary, while taking into account the dynamic nature of aesthetic radicalism and the need for rhetorical intelligibility. If accepting cinema as a continuously evolving textual system necessitates the abandonment of static notions of classicism, it follows that we must also jettison those regarding documentary progressivity.
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ItemCinema's scatological imagination( 2014)For Georges Bataille, scatology is the "science of shit," and is vitally connected to what he calls "heterology." Located in the intersection between the sacred and profane, and associated with extreme experiential and bodily states, heterology is "the science of what is completely other" (Bataille 1985, 102). For Bataille, there is a critical interchange between and overlap across these liminal "sciences." Central to his understanding of scatology/heterology is the attribution of transformative, powerful properties to that which is traditionally perceived as low, base and filthy: shit – the body's wastes and excesses. While ample space has long since been provided for the discussion of sexuality and perversion in both popular and critical discourses, scatology largely remains a subject of taboo, relegated to the domain of that which is unofficial, illegitimate or other. Associated with the obscene, the infantile, disorder, and aberrance, scatology is at once a subject which elicits disgust and shock, and one which is frequently dismissed as trivial, illegitimate, or even fatuous. As such, with its evocation of both otherness and ubiquity, and its invocation of a multiplicitous scope of extreme responses which range from laughter to horror, the scatological is above all defined by its ambivalence, heterogeneity, and resistance to containment. This ambivalence arises from our responses to excrement in general, to its representation and reception in film, and, correspondingly, its place in the realm of cinema studies, where it has been largely neglected. This thesis takes up for the first time a full-length exploration of the way in which what I have termed a scatological imagination operates in the cinema. Informed by Bataille's twinned ideas of scatology and heterology, and by Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel's conceptualisation of what she terms the "anal-sadistic universe" (1985), this thesis explores, in broad terms, the relationship between scatology, divinity, the body, and defiance in film. It examines scatology as both a representational device and as an aesthetic, sensibility or practice which not only underpins much of its onscreen expression and display, but also offers up a powerful lens itself with which to conceptualise relationships between the cinema, experience, bodies, and pleasure. The scope of this analysis centres on three particular cinematic categories or practices: surrealism (focusing especially on the overturning, dehierarchising role of excrement in the films of Luis Buñuel); avant-garde and arthouse cinema (particularly Pier Paolo Pasolini's infamous film Salò); and trash and bad taste cinemas (focusing on the "shit cinema" of trash filmmaker John Waters). I posit this latter category as one whose dissident, marginal status⎯and overriding emphasis on bodily defilement, excess, and heterogeneity⎯lends itself particularly resonantly to scatological concerns and aesthetics. I argue that Waters' project, which presents an aesthetics or even poetics of scatology⎯one which is heavily underpinned by a systematic elevation of the scatological as sublime or divine: a "holy shit"⎯offers up the most radical, mobilising and performative possibilities for the expression of scatological and anal sites. At its most extreme, the scatological imagination centralises and celebrates bodily waste, shit, and "what is completely other." Texts which celebrate the scatological and stress its relationship with the sublime, I contend, ultimately offer up more transgressive, defiant and performative possibilities for the excremental, and therefore ultimately for that which is otherwise degraded, rejected, repressed or marginalised. Across these different cinematic categories, I also examine how the scatological imagination addresses its audience, and how this might differ from earlier displays of the grotesque. Situating the scatological imagination as a vital element of what Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986) have identified as emerging, displaced forms of carnivalesque practice and exhibition, I argue that the visual language of the cinema provides a particularly powerful and evocative expression of the scatological and the anal. Correspondingly, across my analysis, I also investigate the highly ambivalent and embodied spectatorial experiences which are elicited by scatological modes of address and performance, exploring the ways in which what I term a "scatological gaze" is constructed in these films, and what kinds of pleasures (or displeasures) these might offer the viewer. I also explore the ways in which the highly ambivalent pleasures invoked by such viewing experiences can be conceptualised through a scatological lens. The scatological gaze, I argue, is structured by and in ambivalence.
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ItemPicture perfect: Hollywood’s ideal communities and the perils of dream-building( 2013)This study explores the interaction between the depiction of idealised communities in post-World War II filmmaking, and the efforts of urban planners and property developers to actually construct such idealised communities. It examines the ideals of community as depicted in small-town films of the 1940s and suburban sitcoms of the 1950s and explores how these imagined places were an inspiration for post-war suburban development. However, these ideals were also a source of discontent as people grappled with the realities of dispersed, centreless, car-oriented suburbs and found them wanting compared to imagined communities, and the study examines the way in which such anti-suburban sentiment was expressed in popular culture. It examines attempts to respond to this discontent through the creation of new built environments that better reflect media ideals. The attempts by Walt Disney to create such places, first at Disneyland and then in planned communities, are explored. The study then examines the way in which urban planners responded to these influences at the planned communities of Seaside and Celebration. Finally, the study examines the way in which anxiety about the impossibility of imposing a film-like perception of the urban environment has been reflected in films such as The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) and Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998). I argue that the way urban planners have approached the development of cities and towns has been shaped by cultural depictions of the such places, and is frequently “sold” by resorting to cultural ideals, but that the blurring of boundaries between real and imagined places has also spurred a great deal of criticism of urban planners’ approaches.
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ItemWho is behind the camera? The cinema of Giorgio Mangiamele( 2009)The cinema of independent film director Giorgio Mangiamele has remained in the shadows of Australian film history since the 1960s when he produced a remarkable body of films, including the feature film Clay, which was invited to the Cannes Film Festival in 1965. This thesis explores the silence that surrounds Mangiamele’s films. His oeuvre is characterised by a specific poetic vision that worked to make tangible a social reality arising out of the impact with foreignness — a foreign society, a foreign country. This thesis analyses the concept of the foreigner as a dominant feature in the development of a cinematic language, and the extent to which the foreigner as outsider intersects with the cinematic process. Each of Giorgio Mangiamele’s films depicts a sharp and sensitive picture of the dislocated figure, the foreigner apprehending the oppressive and silencing forces that surround his being whilst dealing with a new environment; at the same time the urban landscape of inner suburban Melbourne and the natural Australian landscape are recreated in the films. As well as the international recognition given to Clay, Mangiamele’s short films The Spag and Ninety-Nine Percent won Australian Film Institute awards. Giorgio Mangiamele’s films are particularly noted for their style. This thesis explores the cinematic aesthetic, visual style and language of the films. It also explores the influence of the cultural context in which the films were made and from which the film director originated. It looks at wartime Sicily, and specifically the film director’s natal city Catania; the neorealist period in post-war Rome; and the city of Melbourne to which the film director relocated in 1952. Finally, the research looks at the filmmaking experience whilst working for the Film Unit of the Papua New Guinea Government in Port Moresby.
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ItemTheoretrical avant-gardes and avant-garde theories: toward the sociology of an academic art culture( 2010)Beginning not with the question "What is avant-garde film?" but instead "How is it that this question has come to be asked in the university and who can legitimately ask it?" the theme of this study is the symbolic production over the last four decades of avant-garde cinema, to be understood here both as a specialised field of position-takings and a socio-occupational identity. Such a task is necessarily too large in scope to complete in a single study so I have here limited myself to definitions and symbolic productions of avant-garde film circulated by social agents (artists, critics and theorists) within higher education for the most part in Britain over the preceding four decades, where in any case, this form has found its strongest affiliations and where the relay of position-takings has been most restive. Drawing on the research of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault on correspondences between artistic or cultural taxonomies and social class stratifications, on the importance of education in the whole process of cultural reproduction, and on the genealogy of ideas, discourses, and professions, this thesis situates the study and teaching of the avant-garde both at the core of the origins of film studies in higher education and as a central and inextricable component of the discourse of film theory. Following this hypothesis, a gradual institutional fusion is traced from the mid 1960s to the 1970s of two currents - the artistic, theoretical avant-garde and the avant-garde, quasi-artistic theorists - which are customarily historicised as separate instances and which, although fading from the higher education agenda from the early 1980s onwards, are argued to provide long-enduring institutional identities and broadly inclusive discursive constituents. I have also broadened this study of symbolic production to include a review of a whole array of pedagogic consequences and results of the original grouping of art education and media studies under the same institutional, discursive, and occupational sign.