Table of contents for No. 84 in Screen Education

An introduction to Scorsese opens up an understanding of historical context, textual and cultural traditions, narrative complexity, the power of ideas, and the interplay between convention and invention. Most importantly, an introduction to Scorsese is an introduction to the art of filmmaking. Martin Scorsese, a filmmaker with a passion for cinema, has used his extensive and expert knowledge of the artform to create a distinctive and renowned body of work. He is best known for his fascination with gangsters and misfits, his exploration of masculinity and his preoccupation with the streets of New York – subjects that have provided fertile ground for his career-long meditation on morality, society and the human condition. These concerns also arise in the many Scorsese films set in quite different worlds and featuring characters as…

Sen has become a master of employing the recognisable to examine the ignored, here not only nodding to genre trademarks and then segueing into action-oriented inclusions such as car chases, long-range shootouts and labyrinthine stalking as a way of highlighting an environment in which greed validates discrimination and exploitation, but also relying on and subverting expectations set by its predecessor to help strengthen its case. Just like the secrets those who walk on it choose to keep, landscape lingers. In crafting his follow-up to 2013’s Mystery Road, Ivan Sen lets his latest film rove and ruminate, probing and pondering the texture and complexity present in the outback scenery and reflected in its inhabitants. Goldstone (2016) is a second effort in several senses of the word: though it marks Sen’s fifth…

TEACHING THE MAN Australian screen culture has a rich tradition of coming-of-age stories that use the experience of young people as a lens through which to examine questions of identity, history, culture and social change. The budding consciousness and formative life experiences of young people give writers and directors the opportunity to examine places and periods in Australian history through a kind of curious and often critical gaze. The youthful protagonists of these screen texts are frequently both insiders and outsiders to the affairs of everyday Australian life – they have intimate but idiosyncratic, or even troubled, perspectives on its domestic and kinship arrangements, its class and ethnic relations, and its stratifications of romance, gender and sexuality. The Year My Voice Broke (John Duigan, 1987), Flirting (John Duigan, 1991) and…

Google Arts & Culture is making it easier to explore the world with students in an innovative way, and it even has free downloadable resources for teachers and students to use to extend their learning. Tabletop Audio  http://www.tabletopaudio.com Cost: free Tabletop Audio was originally created as a resource for use in combination with role-playing games. It allowed players to add situational audio files to their gaming experience. What it has developed into is a great free resource for a variety of creative individuals such as writers, artists, graphic designers, animators, filmmakers, teachers and students. Created by an independent professional composer and sound designer, Tabletop Audio is a collection of ten-minute audio files (called ‘ambiences’) that can be downloaded and used in your own projects. Many of the ambiences would be…

Dory’s condition means every day is a constant act of (re)finding her place and role in the world, but embracing that will actually be the way in which she learns to ‘find herself’. In Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton & Lee Unkrich, 2003), Marlin (Albert Brooks), the over-anxious clownfish, is looking for his titular lost son (Alexander Gould), who wants to prove his under-formed ‘lucky’ fin does not hold him back. In the sequel, Finding Dory (Andrew Stanton & Angus MacLane, 2016), Marlin’s comic sidekick is repositioned as heroine, the family goal is inverted, the quest becomes a mystery with clues to be interpreted and solved, and difference is not simply to be overcome but also to be embraced. Dory the blue tang (Ellen DeGeneres) is now the lost child looking…

Not to have confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself. – Simone de Beauvoir Sex sells, or rather, sex appeal does – as long as customers don’t think they have it. It’s hardly new information that the global marketing and entertainment machine is devilishly attuned to telling consumers – particularly women – that they are physically lacking. Hollywood feeds us a daily diet of unnatural and unrealistic body ideals, often born of near-starvation regimens and the ruthless digital enhancement of its idols. The price that these tactics demand goes far beyond the wallet, however, and young people are disproportionately affected. Research suggests approximately 75 per cent of girls in high school would like to be thinner,1 and 31 per cent of women between the ages of eighteen…

The blurring of the personal and the professional, whereby each becomes the underside or duplicate of the other, taps into anxieties about the conduct of the US in the wake of the attacks on the Twin Towers. Despite being a remake of the acclaimed Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs (Andrew Lau & Alan Mak, 2002), The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006) exuberantly marshals Scorsese’s signature film style and aesthetics, as well as many of his recurring cinematic tropes. His auteurist fingerprint is evident in the bursts of operatic violence and the psychologically tormented characters competing for ascendancy in an ambivalent moral landscape. The Departed was to be the film that finally netted Marty a Best Director Oscar. It was also to become his most commercially successful movie, a title now…

The narrative of the man doing something to impress a girl is stripped of its romanticism, and instead has a dark, disturbing quality to it. Why do men sing songs, write poems, build cathedrals, climb mountains, sail seas, conquer lands, take to the skies, fly to the moon? To, the old maxim goes, impress a girl. It’s also the reason men create websites that so embed themselves into modern existence that they’re used by 1.7 billion people1 – roughly a quarter of the global population – and are valued at US$350 billion (and climbing).2 Well, at least that’s how The Social Network, David Fincher’s widely praised, Oscar-winning 2010 film about the birth of Facebook, tells it. In a great opening scene that instantly separates The Social Network from the bland…

Anyone who, over the last few decades, spent their childhood parked in front of a TV would be very familiar with cartoon animals playing out fables of prejudice. As a child of the 1980s, I can remember almost every piece of children’s entertainment at some point offering up a Very Special Episode about discrimination and difference.1 While the analogies tended to be indirect – words like ‘racism’ or ‘sexism’ were off limits – they all resolved essentially the same way, with our heroes learning that differences are not to be feared and that, at the end of the day, we’re all basically the same no matter what we look like. For a while, Disney’s Zootopia (Byron Howard & Rich Moore, 2016) was going to be a feature-length take on the…

WARRING VS WHINING First, a few words of clarification: despite the title of this issue’s column, our main concern is not with how or whether we should be critiquing critics per se, although, as touched on in Part One, that’s something almost all of us are always doing. Even when we do not reference a particular critic or work of criticism when formulating our own opinions, a sense of the critical consensus is arguably already there, in the back of our minds, quietly framing and informing our own impressions and conclusions: Is this film really worthy of the acclaim it’s been getting? or I kind of like this – why does it have such a low score on Rotten Tomatoes? Does it get worse in the third act? Of course…

When a director gets as big as Martin Scorsese – one of the true titans of American cinema, and arguably the nation’s greatest living director – their name tends to become shorthand for a particular style of filmmaking. Witness the way wistful indie cinema is inevitably compared to Wes Anderson’s works, or the way words like ‘Lynchian’, ‘Hitchcockian’ or ‘Kubrickian’ have become commonplace in the critical lexicon. Yet despite the long shadow cast by Scorsese’s fifty-plus-year career – including more than twenty fictional features and several documentaries, shorts and television shows – the description of a film as ‘Scorsesian’ remains relatively rare. Granted, the superficial signifiers of his work – cocaine-fuelled Italian-American goodfellas and nogoodniks filmed with hyperkinetic crash zooms over a Rolling Stones soundtrack – are easily (and often)…

The internet is enormous, which is both good and bad. It’s great that we have this massive repository of information, but without a proper index it’s difficult to traverse and, from everything we’ve learnt from the new wave of cybercrime police procedurals, it’s very easy to slip into ‘the deep web’ (and Lil’ Bow Wow may or may not be able to save you). While there isn’t an index (per se), there are search engines; ‘engine’ is plural because there is more to searching the internet than ‘googling’. Google’s status as a verb solidifies its place as the king of search engines and it isn’t going anywhere – it doesn’t matter how many script editors Microsoft pays to insert the line ‘Bing it’ into television vernacular, it’s not going to…

Alice’s subject matter diverges from the kind of gritty New York criminal milieu that is typical Scorsese territory. Taken in tandem with the film’s collaborative origins, this gives us pause to consider where we might place Alice within Scorsese’s corpus, one that is typically conceptualised in terms of a singular directorial vision. The recent Martin Scorsese retrospective at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne has prompted renewed interest in the director’s oeuvre, providing an excellent opportunity to revisit some of his lesser-known works. Scorsese’s first studio film, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), is one such title.1 Despite its commercial success, Alice is a relative obscurity compared to Scorsese’s two narrative features that bookend it: Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976). Alice is a challenging…