Table of contents for Spring 2015 (79) in Screen Education

In August 2014, ESPN’s 30 for 30 Shorts won an Emmy for Outstanding Short-format Nonfiction Program.1 Much like ESPN’s original Peabody Award–winning 30 for 30 series, which documented thirty years of stories drawn from major sporting events and related happenings in sports culture from 1979 to 2009,2 the latter series offers compelling nonfiction stories at the intersection of sports and society – only these films are short, with runtimes ranging from as little as six minutes to as long as nearly twenty-three minutes. Short films in the series, like their feature-length counterparts, offer focused examinations of specific developments, figures and events from the vast world of sports. Topics range from accounts of unlikely American football heroes and fashion-forward college basketball programs to stories of youth sports scandals, inviting the exploration…

A NEW TREND IN EXPERIENCING – AND PROMOTING – ACTION BLOCKBUSTERS So let us pause a moment to behold the venerable ritual of the casting announcement ascending to undreamt-of heights. In short, one simply can’t escape its giddy, clickbait tone and lead-story status in entertainment news these days. And that’s true regardless of whether we’re in the thick of awards season, or busy during the summer holidays or monitoring the ‘box-office race’ – there is more consistent promotion from the fan outlets and trades about the overflowing casts of upcoming blockbusters than ever before. Indeed, there are now enough anticipated films in pre-production, all with sufficiently opulent casts, that they can take turns dominating websites’ front pages on a daily basis; today I was greeted by a revelation regarding Furious…

Wes Anderson is one of the most singular filmmakers of the past twenty years, an auteur whose inimitable style is instantly recognisable, and sustained across his entire filmography. Anderson – born in Houston, Texas, in 1969 – is a profoundly visual filmmaker, staging stylised films filled with elaborate set pieces. From his breakout second film, Rushmore (1998), to his Oscar-crashing latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Anderson has established a vivid visual language, full of elaborate tracking shots and geometric camera movements, and montages filled with now-iconic slow-motion shots set to old pop hits. Working with a palette of bright colours – particularly reds and yellows, in wardrobe, wallpaper, carpet and decor as much as in cinematography – Anderson uses recurring visual devices that are sometimes seen as archaic and…

One Night the Moon (2001) carries us deep into the vast, wild spaces of the Australian outback, where director Rachel Perkins contrasts three imaginings of the landscape. While the European coloniser emphasises boundaries and private ownership, the Indigenous perspective sees the land and self as one. However, the child, unrestrained by conditioning, looks with open eyes and an insatiable curiosity, both wonderful and dangerous. Employing minimal dialogue, the film tells its story through Kim Batterham’s stunning cinematography, and music composed and performed by Paul Kelly, Kev Carmody and Mairead Hannan. True events form the basis of One Night the Moon’s plot-line. It is set in 1932, in a homestead in the Flinders Ranges. Singer/songwriter Paul Kelly plays Jim, a white farmer who protects his property by rule of rifle. ‘No…

In the opening moments of Disney’s Big Hero 6 (Don Hall & Chris Williams, 2014), we see San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge remodelled with Shinto torii arches. Soon we are presented with a metropolis glimmering with lights from cars and buildings, the city’s ferry building announcing that we are in the Port of San Fransokyo. This urban landscape is filled with skyscrapers with neon signs displaying katakana symbols, and, upon moving from sky to ground level, we are brought into a seedy alley between buildings marked with hiragana and kanji. Immediately, the film announces that we have entered an excitingly different but recognisable world – a sensorially immersive blend of Tokyo and San Francisco. As Hall describes it, this geographic ‘mashup’ ‘felt more interesting as a setting – more…

For a growing number of children in Australia, dementia will become a feature of their understanding and experiences as they observe family members, neighbours or friends embarking on a pathway of significant change following a diagnosis. Dementia is a condition that is confronting and distressing and, because of this, one that tends to be avoided as a topic of conversation with children unless it needs to be dealt with directly. Consequently, many children know little or nothing about it until they encounter it through the lived experiences of someone they know. As teachers, can we utilise film, screen-based learning, and literature as tools to support children in developing greater awareness of dementia and hopefully becoming better equipped to deal with it? And if we embark on this journey with our…

Social networking services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat have become the dominant communication medium for Australian teenagers. A 2013 Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) report found that 92 per cent of teens aged sixteen to seventeen had accessed social networking services in the past four weeks.1 Social media is everywhere, and it isn’t disappearing any time soon; even as specific services go out of favour with teens (another ACMA report observed that ‘the proportion of teenagers using Facebook decreased from 70 per cent in 2012 to 58 per cent in 2013’2 ), others invariably rise to take their place (for example, Instagram – used by 53 per cent of Australian young adults3 – continues to flourish). Yet the pervasive ubiquity of social media is not reflected in modern…

QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY The information listed here relates to the courses on offer in 2015, and is intended as a guide only. Courses and/or fees may be subject to change. With a lineage dating as far back as 1849, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) was formally established in 1989 following the amalgamation of numerous other educational institutions. Split across three locations in and around Brisbane, the university’s film and TV courses are located at the Kelvin Grove campus, which boasts a Creative Industries Precinct offering state-of-the-art facilities for screenings, exhibitions, performances and seminars, as well as industry-standard editing, recording, post-production and studio equipment. The campus also houses a fitness complex, and is located within the popular Kelvin Grove Urban Village, which provides a range of recreational options including parklands,…

Here we are, living in the future. For children of the 1980s (or for children with a weakness for that decade’s cinema), 2015 is a very special year. This is the year in which the cool kids scoot about on hoverboards, clad in their self-adjusting Nike shoes, while their parents zoom overhead in flying cars. From the seats of a 1980s cinema, the future looked pretty marvellous. Sadly, the future ain’t what it used to be. The predictions of the Back to the Future trilogy (Robert Zemeckis, 1985–1990), in which Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) and Doc Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) take their time-travelling DeLorean to 21 October 2015, have mostly been exposed as hopelessly optimistic. But thirty years on, the films provide a unique opportunity to see how we…

In a gloomy bar in 1970s New York City, a bet is made. The Unmarried Mother (Sarah Snook), a writer of ‘confessional stories’ for women’s magazines, bets he can tell the Barkeep (Ethan Hawke) the best story he’s ever heard. The stakes aren’t high: a bottle of whiskey if he wins, or else ‘a twenty’ added to the tab at the end of the night. Increasingly deadly attacks by a terrorist referred to as the Fizzle Bomber weigh heavily on the city’s population. Many have already fled the city, and the men left in the bar watch their boxing game amid an air of hostility that does not suffer outsiders easily. ‘Look at this freak,’ one of them spits out as soon as the Unmarried Mother walks through the door.…

Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011) is a film that revels in surfaces and reflections, and seduces the spectator with its irresistibly polished veneer. Yet this emphasis on surface offers paradoxical viewing pleasures. The film’s ultra-cool neon artificiality codes the film as self-reflexive, while also drawing attention to the conflicting narrative blueprints that underpin it. For like the sleek 1973 Chevrolet so thrillingly piloted by Driver (Ryan Gosling), Drive’s narrative framework is always on the move. The film self-consciously draws on both fairytale and film noir tropes and archetypes, and these often-contradictory reference points produce a highly kinetic aesthetic that is not easy to pin down. Drive happily slows down for extended sequences that exude a distilled fairytale quality. These scenes privilege silence and slow-motion tableaux as Driver is rapturously inscribed…

Last year marked the seventieth anniversary of the release of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), a Hollywood classic that is often cited as the definitive example of film noir. Adapted from James M Cain’s 1943 novel of the same name, and with a screenplay by Wilder and hardboiled-crime novelist Raymond Chandler, the film explores notions of fatalism, greed, betrayal, guilt and masculine anxiety, revealed in the film through flashbacks that act as a cynical commentary on the inevitability of fate. The narrative follows insurance agent Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) as he recounts meeting married seductress Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck); their mutual lustful greed leads them to murder for insurance money and, through a convoluted spiral, culminates in emptiness and death. Unlike fellow auteur Edmund Goulding’s tasteful observations of greed in…