Accessibility Tools
- Content scaling 100%
- Font size 100%
- Line height 100%
- Letter spacing 100%
Anne Rutherford
Anne Rutherford is a freelance writer and film critic and an Adjunct Associate Professor in Cinema Studies at Western Sydney University. She is the author of What Makes a Film Tick and her film and art criticism has been published widely in books, journals and magazines. Her recent work has appeared in Australian Book Review, The Monthly, Meanjin and Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism. In 2022 she was awarded the Australian Film Critics’ Association award for best international review.
At one moment in Ivan Sen’s new film Limbo (Bunya Productions), I suddenly felt as though I was watching a German Expressionist film from the 1920s, that era in silent cinema when the expressive power of the image reached its zenith, when mood emanated from every surface and character was crafted by an indivisible composite of elaborately constructed sets, sculptural lighting, texture, compositi ... (read more)
In February 2019, artist Nan Goldin and the activist group she founded staged a ‘die-in’ at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The group demanded that the Museum refuse further funding from the super-wealthy art-patron Sackler family, whose pharmaceutical arm, Purdue, produced and aggressively marketed the highly addictive prescription painkiller OxyContin. Launching the drug in 1996, Purdue C ... (read more)
‘The devil’s throat’, ‘the devil’s lair’, ‘the devil’s cauldron’: if volcanoes are the hearth of the devil, there is no question that Satan has an irresistible allure. To watch the earth split asunder and spew up its entrails in a roiling inferno is to encounter the elemental turbulence that festers underneath the stable ground we tread. It shakes all certainty to its core. It br ... (read more)
Outlaw, the opening exhibition of the purpose-built new media gallery at Sydney Modern, (the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s new extension) features Howie Tsui’s mesmerising multimedia installation, Retainers of Anarchy. On a 27.4-metre long, 3.85-metre high projection, which simulates the form of a scroll painting, hundreds of images hand-drawn in ink are animated into a kaleidoscope of ... (read more)
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)