210 Autumn 2013: Features

The aesthetics of conservatism

Australia's hidden defect

Dean Biron

Released in 1998, Rowan Woods’ The Boys (featuring David Wenham and Toni Collette) is one of the most important films ever made in Australia. An intense and claustrophobic study of working-class suburbia in inexorable limbo, The Boys depicts three brothers, one menacingly dominant, the others wretchedly submissive, spiralling toward the commission of a horrific crime that is only ever alluded to in the narrative.

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205 Summer 2011: Features

‘You are sick! This is not art!’

Torture porn films and politics

Rjurik Davidson

During a notorious incident at the Sundance Film Festival, a viewer leaped to his feet after the premiere of Lucky McKee’s movie The Woman and began to protest: ‘This movie degrades women! This movie degrades men! You are sick! This is not art! You are sick! This is a disgusting movie! Sundance should be ashamed! How dare you show this!’

As security approached, he continued: ‘Anyone else who’d like to talk in a similar mind about the degradation of women like this come outside and we’ll talk …’

A woman yelled in response: ‘Are you a woman?’

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201 Summer 2010: Reviews

Gil Scott Heron Is on Parole

Stephen Lawrence

It seems as if Maxine Clarke wins every poetry slam she enters. Clarke writes poetry and produces freelance articles, often dealing with African descendants in a white culture. More importantly, she performs her poetry.

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Print Issue 200 Spring 2010: Reviews

Dreaming the Concrete Jungle

The City’s Outback

Simone Hughes

The City’s Outback is based upon an ethnographic study conducted in Mount Druitt, a suburb in western Sydney. Cowlishaw introduces Frank Doolan, a blackfella who helps her find Aboriginal people to interview – ‘the people of the place’ living within the city’s ‘subordinated self’. Doolan is an agitator, poet, protector, confidant and mediator. He recognises something woeful in a world that ‘systemically damages Aboriginal lives’.

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Print Issue 199 Winter 2010: Reviews

Views of the Hudson

Pam Brown

This collection’s sixty poems are subtitled ‘psalms’ and each is numbered. There’s something immediately Scorsese-esque about the subtitle ‘A New York Book of Psalms’ but Angela Gardner’s New York experience is too coolly considered for that association. As her subtitle implies, New York evokes a religiosity: ‘I see moonlight as the promised land.’

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