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"Smaill, Belinda"
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The documentary : politics, emotion, culture
\"An exploration of the role of emotion and affect in contemporary documentary film, arguing that analysis of the sociality of the emotions is integral to advancing our understanding of the formulation of selfhood in documentary. Belinda Smaill also examines documentary's political function, looking at issues such as gender, ethnicity and class\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Tasmanian tigers and polar bears: The documentary moving image and (species) loss
In this essay I explore how two divergent examples of the nonfiction moving image can be understood in relation to the problem of representing species loss. The species that provide the platform for this consideration are the thylacine, better known as the Tasmanian tiger, and the polar bear. They represent the two contingencies of species loss: endangerment and extinction. My analysis is structured around moving images from the 1930s of the last known thylacine and the very different example of Arctic Tale (Adam Ravetch, Sarah Robertson, 2007), a ‘Disneyfied’ film that dramatises climate change and its impact on the polar bear. Species loss is frequently perceived in a humanist sense, reflecting how we ‘imagine ourselves’ or anthropocentric charactersations of non-human others. I offer a close analysis of the two films, examining the problem of representing extinction through a consideration of the play of absence and presence, vitality and extinguishment, that characterises both the ontology of cinema and narratives about species loss.
Journal Article
From Extraction to Wilderness: Australian Film History, Environmental History, and The Last Wild River
This article examines the earliest coordinated use of film in an environmental campaign in Australia. The battle to save the Franklin River from hydro development occurred at a pivotal moment for both the environmental movement and the nation’s feature film renaissance. With a focus on the first film of the Franklin campaign, The Last Wild River (1977), I reveal how a novel idea of wilderness emerged in sound and image, one that questioned the established ideals of resource extraction that preceded it. I trace the sophisticated use of activist film at this moment of consequential cinematic and environmental change.
Journal Article
Transnational Australian cinema
To date, there has been little sustained attention given to the historical cinema relations between Australia and Asia. This is a significant omission given Australia’s geo-political position and the place Asia has held in the national imaginary, oscillating between threat and opportunity. Many accounts of Australian cinema begin with the 1970s film revival, placing “Asian-Australian cinema” within a post-revival schema of multicultural or diasporic cinema and ignoring Asian-Australian connections prior to the revival. Transnational Australian Cinema charts a history of Asian-Australian cinema, encompassing the work of diasporic Asian filmmakers, films featuring images of Asia and Asians, films produced by Australians working in Asia’s film industries or addressed at Asian audiences, and Asian films that use Australian resources, including locations and personnel. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, the book considers diasporic Asian histories, the impact of government immigration and film policies on representation, and the new aesthetic styles and production regimes created by filmmakers who have forged links, both through roots and routes, with Asia. This expanded history of Asian-Australian cinema allows for a renewed discussion of so-called dormant periods in the nation’s film history. In this respect, the mapping of an expanded history of cinema practices contributes to our broader aim to rethink the transnationalism of Australian cinema.
eBook
Documentary Film and Animal Modernity in Raw Herring and Sweetgrass
In each of these examples the capacity for cinema to observe its animal subject in space and time is crucial. Since this time the representation of the animal in contemporary documentary has proliferated, particularly through the expanding sub-genre of the wildlife film.1 This has become tied into what Gregg Mitman refers to as a contemporary 'green wave' of film and television, enabled by the popular penchant for 'eco-chic' (214) that is underpinned not only by commercial imperatives but also by ethical and environmental concerns. The long duration of these images provides time to study the detail of bodies and movement, aspects that attest to 'livingness,' and constitute these as representations that show the long-standing role of animals in the human world of agriculture.15 If the film dwells on the beauty of images, it does so through the long take in which the camera allows for each gesture and change in the frame to be appreciated. [...]approaches owe much to Haraway's work: her notion of 'companion species' has established a paradigm in which animals are 'world sharing' partners and her notion of a web of relations is one that explores the possibility of an 'ongoing \"becoming with\"' (16) companion species, entailing the destabilization of species categories.17 Rather than seeking to destabilize human exceptionalism, these films reward a reading focused on how animals, their performative and material qualities, are located aesthetically according to Bazanian interests, and how this location informs the social and historical. The film aligns with the ethnographic preference of the time to depict racialized traditionalism, isolated from modernity. [...]there is much to suggest that with Sweetgrass the filmmakers seek to draw attention to the connections between these documentaries. 11 While these films bear the stamp of the Sensory Ethnography Lab, they have, for the most part, not featured in ethnographic film festivals.
Journal Article
From Extraction to Wilderness: Australian Film History, Environmental History, and The Last Wild River
This article examines the earliest coordinated use of film in an environmental campaign in Australia. The battle to save the Franklin River from hydro development occurred at a pivotal moment for both the environmental movement and the nation's feature film renaissance. With a focus on the first film of the Franklin campaign, The Last Wild River (1977), I reveal how a novel idea of wilderness emerged in sound and image, one that questioned the established ideals of resource extraction that preceded it. I trace the sophisticated use of activist film at this moment of consequential cinematic and environmental change.
Journal Article
Loss and Transformation: Mourning and The Finished People
In understanding the value of these emotions in regards to the social function of representation, my aim is not simply to identify a sense of loss for the characters and in the social imaginary, but to theorize how, through a process of mourning, this loss and sorrow might be transformed, politically, for a reconfigured and enabling approach to these lost or absent objects. [...] the filmmakers' use of digital video technology, cinéma vérité-style camera work, and voice-over commentaries that sound as if they were recorded during an interview, result in a formal sensibility associated with documentary representation.
Journal Article
New Food Documentary: Animals, Identification, and the Citizen Consumer
The cluster of films I am concerned with depicts animals in agriculture, fishing, and/or industry and includes productions such as Maharajah Burger ( 1997), A Cow at My Table ( 1998), Beef Inc. ( 1999), Bacon, The Film (2002), Animals (2003), Darwin s Nightmare (2004), We Feed the World (2005), Our Daily Bread (2005), End of the Line (2007), King Corn (2007), Milk In The Land: Ballad of An American Drink (2007), Meat the Truth (2008), Food, Inc. (2008), Pig Business (2009), Fresh (2009), Farmageddon: The Truth About the Food and Dairy Industry (2012), The Moo Man (2012), The Last Ocean (2012), Leviathan (2013), Raw Herring (2013), American Meat (2013) and The Animal Condition (2014).2 Many of these films identify problems with large-scale fishing or agricultural practices and \"agribusiness,\" critiquing the interests of commerce, the activities of the state, and/or the effects on the consumer (and often, albeit to a lesser extent, on the environment).3 Some are explicit in their persuasive mission while others are more expressive, opening multiple pathways for viewer interpretation. [...]to understand citizen consumers through intercorporeal or embodied modes of identification also suggests the social import of understanding spectatorial processes.
Journal Article
Ecological Relations
This chapter augments conceptions of the national cinema as a space of cultural relations by proposing that cinema can also be understood through the lens of ecological relations. It explores how the wildlife webcam, or naturecam, functions in a cinema studies frame. By bracketing two very different examples the chapter asserts the diverse ways in which the category of documentary manifests recorded reality and brings the discipline's (documentary studies specifically and film studies more broadly) analytical and historical frames to nascent digital moving image forms. It offers a double‐ edged intervention with an approach to Australian cinema that privileges the optic of the nonhuman, exploring how it might in turn revise the status of the human, while also advancing an expanded notion of documentary. The chapter shows how both FalconCam and The Back of Beyond bring to the fore a lack of certainty and human powerlessness in the encounter with the natural world.
Book Chapter