Though we have seen periods during which Australian cinema has been synonymous with period-set narratives and idealised evocations of the outback, there has always been a darker side to our cinematic imagination, a gritty, hard-edged element that is just as crucial to this country’s feature film output as are the sepia-tinged dreamscapes. Many of the pivotal films of the Australian New Wave brou ... (read more)
Nick Prescott
Nick Prescott studied Literature, Film and Drama as an undergraduate, and has been working in those areas ever since. Nick wrote his PhD on American authors Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, and has an ongoing fascination with contemporary and postmodern literature. Teaching full-time in the Humanities since 2005, Nick is Coordinator of the Bachelor of Creative Arts at Flinders University, teaches the core topics in these degrees, and frequently delivers lectures on French Cinema for his colleagues in Languages. Nick is a weekly film reviewer for the ABC, was on the Adelaide Writers' Week Committee for a decade, and has written on both literature and the cinema for numerous publications both in Australia and overseas.
The appearance of an idiosyncratic scholarly text addressing the work of a major European film-maker such as Dušan Makavejev is timely, given our increasingly fraught condition as subjects of a world that becomes more convolutedly politicised with every nanosecond. This is a highly political and indeed humanist analysis of a significant body of cinematic work.
Lorraine Mortimer’s introductory ... (read more)
When Raimond Gaita’s memoir Romulus, My Father was published in 1998, the acclaim with which it was greeted was ubiquitous. The book was significant not simply because it was a strikingly revealing personal narrative written by a renowned philosopher, but because it managed to present a story that contained large doses of personal tragedy without rendering the experience of reading it either fal ... (read more)