Ned Kelly and the movies 1906-2003: representation, social banditry and history

This PhD thesis investigates the fascinating subject of the Ned Kelly movies. Since the early days of Australian film production, movies on Kelly were appearing at regular intervals, and certainly, they are a significant addition to cinema studies and cultural history. Yet, beyond the movies, this thesis discusses Kelly’s nineteenth century cultural industry, which played a significant role in commodifying Ned as an important figure of popular entertainment. Indeed, the performance customs and social practices established during Kelly’s historic Outbreak of 1878-1880 were taken into the moving pictures in the twentieth century. Kelly’s representation though has not been a fixed artefact, and by examining his twentieth and twenty-first century cinema representation, this thesis explores how the origins of his popular image have continued in popular culture. With this thesis adding to the growing field of research on celluloid bandits, it demonstrates the importance of understanding how the Kelly films shift beyond the normal parameters of cinema studies and delve into broader areas of cultural history. As it argues, the Kelly movies are significantly influenced by popular history as well as Kelly’s tradition of visual imagery, folk songs and literature

B for Bad, B for Bogus and B for Bold: Rupert Kathner, The Glenrowan Affair and Ned Kelly

The recent attention given to American B movies tends to overlook Australia's own industry of Badness. For devotees of Bad cinema, The Glenrowan Affair (Rupert Kathner, 1951) is a true gem. Based on the ex-ploits of bushranger Ned Kelly, and promoted as a 'serious drama', Eric Reade laughed, 'if the picture had been billed as a comedy it would have done better business'.<sup>1</sup> To investigate why The Glenrowan Affair is so utterly, terribly and awfully Bad, this paper will discuss its relationship with the industry of Kelly cinema, as well as Kathner's oeuvre, which has recently inspired the docudrama Hunt Angels (Alec Morgan, 2006)

Marvellous Melbourne: Lady filmgoers, Spencer's pictures and Cozens Spencer

This article addresses the dual topic of exhibition and production by exploring showman Cozens Spencer's popular Australian documentary, Marvellous Melbourne: Queen City of the South (Spencer's Pictures 1910). The story of this film is the role that women played - not just in the city, but in relation to the cinema: as filmgoers, workers and on-screen characters. And indeed, by focusing on Marvellous Melbourne, much can be drawn from the ways that Spencer's on-screen moving pictures were speaking to his 'movie mad' filmgoers. Evidenced in a film such as this, I am suggesting that its modern narrative - which concentrates on the modern city, and modern women in motion within the city - is very much engaged with Spencer's endeavour to provide his audience with a modern cinema experience, illuminating the fantasy and romance of a technocentric and cultured city. But before discussing how Marvellous Melbourne represented its target demographic on screen, it is equally important first to ask how it became central to the sort of city cinema programme that Spencer was attempting to create

American Cartel: Block Bookings and the Paramount Plan

This chapter investigates how the Australian film industry was historically shaped during its formative period by the block booking contract system, which flooded Australia cinema screens with popular American films. While the block booking strategy did not last, Australias obsession with American cinema did, to the point where exhibitors today are still dependent on filling their venues with the latest craze from America. By concentrating on the silent period of 19091927, this chapter discusses a number of significant shifts in film exhibition that transformed Australian cinema from an independent and self-sufficient industry into a local Hollywood

Protesting colonial Australia: Convict theatre and Kelly ballads

No abstract availabl

International Outlaws: Tony Richardson, Mick jagger and Ned Kelly

This article examines British director Tony Richardson's international version of Ned Kelly (1970) in the context of international Australian films and the national Australian cinema. Ever since Richardson was given government assistance to produce a film about the Australian bushranger Ned Kelly, pressure to help the local industry had been mounting, especially considering that Richardson's film undercut some local productions under consideration. Outraged that a British director would be allowed to make a film about an Australian national hero when its own directors were begging for such opportunities, locals responded to Richardson and star Mick Jagger's arrival in Australia with great resentment. By looking equally at Richardson's calamitous making of the first international Kelly production, and the state of the Australian film industry, this article discusses Ned Kelly as a cautionary tale about foreigners making films about historical Australian subjects. From start to finish, Ned Kelly was a disaster, and never again would an international production be given the same concessions as were granted to Tony Richardson

Murder ballad: The assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford

Abstract not availabl

Australian (Inter)national Cinema: The Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry in Australia, 1926-1928, Australasian Films Ltd. and the American monopoly

Despite Australia being one of the most robust and progressive film industries during the early years of moving pictures, it experienced a significant decline in film production from 1915. Whether this decline was a direct result of poor government policy is something that the Royal Commission on the motion picture industry in Australia 1926-1928 investigated. Marking a significant, yet terribly neglected moment of Australian film history, the Commission surveyed a variety of issues which had stunted the development of the national Australian cinema. By surveying the early period of the Australian cinema, in this article I will discuss how the Royal Commission's recommendations pushed for the national industry to become more active within the Hollywood world cinema mode

'"What sort of spot is Port Arthur?": For the term of his natural life and the Tasmanian gothic'

...Tasmanian Gothic cinema... tends to be a response to its dark and wet landscapes, which register a paradoxical sense of beauty and menace. The dramatic inclines of Tasmania's topography, its volatile climate, together with the wild and dense temperate forest, which covers a third of the state, form a forbidding mise-en-scene suggestive of a Gothic sublime... The island continues to be cast, derisively as well as romantically, as a strange outpost that harbours secrets. Tasmania is the end of the line. There is nothing new about the Tasmanian Gothic. In The Life and Adventure of Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) Charles Dickens has his hero, Augustus, fearfully write about his imminent voyage to Van Diemen's Land and imminent death: 'Ere this reaches you, the undersigned will be - if not a corpse - on the way to Van Diemen's Land'. In 1874 Marcus Clarke's seminal novel 'His Natural Life' engagingly narrativised the nightmarish miasma that would inform all future texts exploring the theme of the Tasmanian Gothic and the subject of convictism. In his description of this frightful milieu, Clarke histrionically introduces Van Diemen's Land in the following fashion: the sea-line is marked with wrecks. The sunken rocks are dismally named after the vessels they have destroyed. The air is chill and moist, the soil prolific only in prickly undergrowth and noxious weeds, while foetid exhalations from swamp and fen cling close to the humid, spongy ground. All around breathes desolation; on the face of nature is stamped a perpetual frown..

American combine: Australasian Films Ltd., and block bookings

The 1927-1928 Commonwealth Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry in Australia followed a series of public inquiries into the Australian cinema. One agenda of the Commission was to examine the dominance of American movies in Australian film exhibition. By concentrating on how the Commission explored this issue, as it related to the exhibition and distribution of Hollywood movies in Australia, here I will consider the extent to which Australian exhibition has been guided by and dependent on American movies. With the Commission established, in part, to explore the accusation of an American combine ruling the exhibition industry, and stunting the local production sector, the real question was whether the Commissioners would be persuaded to make recommendations to wrest the powers from America, and consequently redirect the local exhibition industry's dependence on Hollywood movies