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Portrait of a Modern Lady: a Beginning Interactive Spotlight on Celebrity Femininity & Retrospective Archive of Cinematic Sensuality within Mainstream World Cinema
*June 23rd, 2010

At 15 her mother shot her assaultive, drunken father in self-defense. At 16 she won a modelling contest and graced the Italian catwalks, going to New York to pursue a ballet scholarship. A severe knee injury ended her ambitions and, with no funds bar a $500 cheque and a one-way plane ticket to Los Angeles as a gift from her mother, she went to Hollywood.

Her kind were the proverbial dime a dozen: young, talented women dreaming of superstardom and their name up in lights, immortalized by the cult of celebrity. This woman, however, had just what it took. Her debut as a sexy femme fatale led to a flurry of similar offers, all of which she resisted until cast in the film debut of the man whom, as an adolescent girl, she had had a crush on - Tom Hanks. Following this up with a powerhouse performance opposit Keanu Reeves, she went from strength to strength, her model figure and combination of demure innocence and sultry heat leading to a provocative Vanity Fair cover and a nude spread in Playboy. Unlike many aspiring actresses whose career fell apart after posing nude, her blossomed and after working with the likes of Robert Redford she accepted a controversial role which required her to gain 30 pounds and conceal her astonishing beauty. Her performance was exceptional and she won the Academy Award for Best Actress - only the second actress who had posed nude for Playboy to win an Oscar (after Kim Basinger).By 2005 she commanded a salary of US$10 million a film. Increasingly political, she formed a charity to help her homeland and by 2010 had upto 5 potential Hollywood blockbusters on her slate. Hers is the ultimate rags to riches Hollywood success story: but - who is she?

Pioneering Disability & Film Studies Unification in Retrospective of a Century of Australian Cinema 1911-2010 emerges from National Film & Sound Archive SAR Research Fellowship
*June 2nd, 2010

Recently emerging through the National Film & Sound Archive's SAR Fellowship is a retrospective of a century of representations of disability in Australian film, from 1911 to 2010: from the most reprehensible of silent era prejudicial stereotypes in such forgotten films as Called Back and Should a Doctor Tell? to contemporary evocations of the wheelchair as an icon of both medical disability and cultural disablement in the contemporary post-Mabo definition of indigenous Australian experience in Samson & Delilah.

Initiated by a 2009 government arts grant through Arts-SA's Richard Llewellyn Arts & Disability Trust awarded to freelance author and filmmaker Robert Cettl, the research was to cover only Australian feature films from 1970 to 2004 but upon award of the SAR Fellowship and access to the NFSA's vast resources and extensive collection was expanded to include all feature film (government funded and independent), short films, government films and documentaries. The final manuscript emerged as a Harvard reference monograph of Australian film history as informed by the political, analytical and cultural framework of the Disability Movement following on from the pioneering film and disability study US-based work of Prof. Paul Longmore and author Michael Norden whose book The Cinema of Isolation established the analytical methodology involved in the consideration and deconstruction of images of disabled people in film.

The research results from the SAR Fellowship represent the first full application of the social model of disability to Australian film analysis and history, ending the cultural domination of the long-standing medical model as the de facto ideological standard.

Covering physical, psychological and intellectual disability, the study results - Always an Other? Representations of Disability in Australian Cinema - are currently being developed by the author an (c) holder the NFSA for release as an e-book, with interactive video extracts to possibly be released during a Canberra screening of the seminal film on disability in Australian film, Rolf de Heer's Dance Me To My Song in National Disability Week, December 2010 (ed - further details pending, please check back for progress reports).

FURTHER DETAILS / EXPANDED ARTICLE WITH ADDITIONAL EMBEDDED VIDEO FOUND IN THE AUSTRALIAN FILM SECTION: READ MORE

CHRISTIAN POLITICAL PRESSURE OPPOSES FREE SPEECH LEGISLATION IN AUSTRALIA IN DEFIANCE OF UN HUMAN RIGHTS' ARTICLE 19:

MANDATORY INTERNET FILTERS TO BE INTRODUCED IN AUSTRALIA, BLOCKING UP TO 95-99% OF ADULT CONTENT AVAILABLE FREELY THROUGHOUT THE REST OF THE DEMOCRATIC WESTERN WORLD

Opposed only by the newly formed Australian Sex Party, Australia's powerful Christian Lobby representatives are privvy to exclusive secret meetings with Australia's Communications Minister Stephen Conroy (a devout Catholic) over the indtroduction of mandatory ISP level internet filtering in Australia. Formerly calling itself "the clever country", the self-important but internationally insignificant nation refuses to adopt a Constitutional guarantee of free speech in deference to pressure from the Nation's fundamentalist Christian parties - the Christian Democrats (led by veteran Festival of Light campaigner Fred Nile) and Family First (led by arch-censorship advocate Steve Fielding). Recent leadership overhauls now mean that both major political parties in Australia, Liberal & Labour respectively, are headed by devout Christians, unanimously in support of an increasing censorship regime throughout Australia that will heavily restrict adult freedoms.

With current Prime Minister Kevin Rudd proudly quoting scripture in Parliament and holding press conferences outside his Church and opposition leader Tony Abbott a fundamentalist Catholic who opposes women's rights over their own bodies, opposes stem cell research and is vehemently anti-abortion, democracy in Australia has been rendered null and void - there is no choice but Christian ideology. This reactionary state of affairs began with the leadership of Methodist Prime Minister John Howard, who legislated to introduce chaplains into every school and unquestioningly supported the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld led invasion of Iraq that many in America now consider the basis for potential war crimes investigation against the so-called War on Terror Bush government.

Considered a dark horse in the upcoming 2010 election, the Australian Sex Party was formed in late 2009 to combat the rising tide of Australian religious conservatism which has led to one of the strictest film and literature censorship regimes in the world, alongside China and Iran, making Australian democracy a hypocrisy that has led the European community to condemn Australia as "the global village idiot", a racist nation of Christian "wowsers".

TO READ MORE ABOUT AUSTRALIAN FILM SEE HERE
TO READ MORE ABOUT CENSORSHIP & RELIGION SEE HERE

James Cameron & Avatar:
Placating the American Populace with Derivative, Comforting Theist Spiritual Gibberish
*January 11th, 2010

It's been 12 years between films for James Cameron, whose lavish Titanic somehow became a "contemporary classic" of Romantic Hollywood cinema.

His latest, Avatar - released in 3D and in Omnimax versions - has now passed the US$1 billion box-office mark. Yet, in its simplistic clash between atheistic military occupationists and indigenous spiritualists it is a derivative reworking of American ideals of Manifest Destiny transplanted into outer space and although admittedly entertaining finally emerges in support of a vaguely New Age informed Theist credo which is comfortingly re-assuring in a way that such recent American films as Knowing, The Invention of Lying and The Box have fought against.

Indeed, in post 9/11 Hollywood a virtual crisis of faith has erupted in populist cinema, making for an ideological battle between the forces of political atheism on the one hand and Christian orthodox Theism on the other. And, sadly, in terms of box-office receipts, re-assuring a troubled post War on Terror America of the validity of Theist mythology is more popular than the rigorous, intellectual questioning of morality, ethics and science that informs the Atheistic cinema revival (though such comedies as Year One suggest a revival in religious satire may be one means to combat the lavish Theist fantasies of such works as The Day the Earth Stood Still, Angels & Demons and Avatar).

Ironically, the Vatican have spoken out against the film for its elevation of nature to a position reserved for a higher power, replacing conventional religion with the worship of nature.

In that, Cameron is rather cleverly, albiet slyly, responding to the ecological crises of the modern era and its newfound spiritualism as advanced by many in the New Age field of self-help and personal development. However, he merely replaces "God" with "Nature" and delivers a mythic story which in its overtones of white Messianicism is inherently racist. This Messianic superiority of the great white hero is trait Hollywood adores, it having infiltrated such as the Western A Man Called Horse (whose plot Cameron shameless lifts for Avatar) on down to the amusic fantasy of 10,000 BC. However, it is hardly a progressive theme, and the enormous success of this essential pandering to racist spiritualism does not bode well for American popular mythology.

FOR A FULL ACCOUNT OF AVATAR AS THEIST MYTH, SEE

FOR A DETAILED ACCOUNT OF THE SELF-HELP / NEW AGE DISCIPLINE'S INFLUENCE ON AMERICAN FILM READ MORE HERE

In late 2009, Academy Award winning director Roman Polanski was detained in Switzerland by police authorities at the request of American law enforcement. The arrest, on charges dating back 25 years, outraged the European Film community leading to film festival pressure on authorities to petition for the director's immediate release.

For almost three decades, Polanski had been a fugitive from American justice, fleeing the country to avoid prosecution on statutory rape charges - drugging a minor for the purposes of sexual intercourse. Given sanctuary in Paris, which has a non- extradition treaty with the United States, Polanski carefully co-ordinated his activities and filmmaking career in Europe. When he was awarded the Academy Award for The Pianist, he refused to fly to the US to accept it for fear of arrest and prosecution. Polanski is currently under arrest in Switzerland awaiting extradition proceedings, even though his alleged "victim" has urged the matter be dropped and the European filmmaking community is pressuring the US to abandon the issue.

Yet, Polanski's "crime" occured at perhaps the darkest period in the man's life, shortly following the slaughter of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate by the notorious Manson Family.

It was after this horrific crime - one of the most infamous to emerge in the wake of the so-called "sexual revolution" and the crime which alone is said to have ended the peace and love hippie generation - that Polanski made the bloodiest version of Shakespeare then committed to film, MacBeth, and segued to Europe for the bizaree thriller of psycho-sexual identity dissolution in The Tenant, the last film he made with US backing before fleeing the country to remain in Europe.

The moral / ethical dilemma posed by Polanski's actions and arrest is an unusual one: should he be held accountable for actions which even the "victim" considers unwarranting of the current action and debate, or whether his transgressions may be excused because of the unusual circumstances of the events leading up to them and Polanski's subsequent behaviour (his "crime" was never repeated)? Does a great director's artistic achievements within international film culture excuse him from moral / ethical accountability (to Christian moral codes of sexual propriety over and above the legal definition of statutory rape)? Now in his 70s, Polanski faces possible imprisonment in the USA if convicted. FOR A FULL REVIEW OF THE TENANT, SEE HERE