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Philip Brophy
‘A road movie in a frock’ is one way this much acclaimed, award-winning movie has been described.
But Philip Brophy has a different take in his provocative reading of Stephan Elliott's classic 1994 film. He invites you to consider what the film says about Australia, its history, its culture and its cinema and the results might surprise you. Join him on a wild ride that takes you beyond the film's frames to a darker Australia.
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is the seventh title in Currency's Australian Screen Classics series.
Review
'... a wickedly engaging non-linear analysis of the film that pulses with odd juxtapositions and unexpected associations connecting up disparate elements into a 'map' of the film and the culture it conjures and from which it has grown'
. Keith Gallasch,
Real Time No.85, June-July 2008.
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Currency Press | 978-0-86819-821-7 | Sales rights: worldwide | PB
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Catharine Lumby
One of the seminal films of the 1970s,
Alvin Purple depicts Alvin’s struggles with his irresistibility to women—from his school days and time as a waterbed salesman to his short-lived career as a sex therapist. The ‘definitive ocker comedy’,
Alvin Purple survived a critical mauling and went on to become the most commercially successful Australian film of the 1970s.
Catharine Lumby takes a fresh look at the film, the social and political era in which it was made and the forces that fuelled its success. She revisits claims that the movie is little more than an exercise in sexploitation and argues that the film is far more complex than its detractors have allowed.
See other titles in Currency's Australian Screen Classics Series.
Review
A wonderful read: I feel like I've been excavated and carbon dated
. - Graeme Blundell
Resources
-
 Article - an extract of Catharine Lumby's critique was also published in the
Australian
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Currency Press | 978-0-86819-844-6 | Sales rights: worldwide | PB
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Sylvia Lawson
The Back of Beyond celebrates the life and times of Australia’s best known outback mail man Tom Kruse MBE. Every fortnight he battled isolation, heat, sand dunes and floods to deliver mail and supplies to the families along the 517 kilometre Birdsville Track in central Australia.
Representing the complex interrelations of the multicultural commmunity and their environs, the film is considered by many to be one of Australia’s premier films, and is an exemplary represenation of 1950s Australian transformational culture.
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Currency Press | 978-0-86819-975-7 | Sales rights: worldwide | PB
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Tony Moore
When
The Adventures of Barry McKenzie burst onto the Australian screen in 1972 it created a furore. With ‘Bazza’ (Barry Crocker), the chundering, Fosters-sucking innocent abroad, Barry Humphries and Bruce Beresford created a foil for the audiences. The movie triggered a riotous sequel,
Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, and a wave of ocker comedies that celebrate and critique the Australian national character. With irrepressible humour and sharp-witted insight, Tony Moore explores the subversive satire of the films, their influence on his generation, and what they have to say today.
Review
As Prime Minister I demonstrated my gift for ridicule by granting my only imperial honour to the intrinsically conservative Barry Humprhries. It’s time for a book that has fun with the political satire of Barry McKenzie - The Hon. E.G. Whitlam AC, QC
See other titles in Currency's Australian Screen Classics series.
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Currency Press | 978-0-86819-748-7 | Sales rights: worldwide | PB
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Andrew Frost
Lauded by many as one of the most powerful Australian films made in the past 20 years, Rowan Woods’ stunning debut feature
The Boys touched off a storm of media controversy upon its release in 1998.
The film evoked vivid memories of the 1986 rape and murder of a young Sydney woman named Anita Cobby. Although Woods’ film was fictional,
The Boys remains inextricably connected to its real-life counterpart in the minds of many viewers.
But that connection is only part of the story behind the making of
The Boys. In this thoughtful and thought-provoking essay, Andrew Frost contextualises the major thematic concerns of the film into the broader context of social anxieties about violence, crime and morality.
Frost chronicles his own personal journey with the film and its makers from art school to the underground Super 8 filmmaking scene of Sydney in the mid-1980s, from the early short films of director Woods to the multiple award-winning
The Boys. Frost discovers new aspects of
The Boys even today and wonders if its stinging moral message has been heard among the clamour of
everyday suburban life.
See all the titles in the Australian Screen Classics series.
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Currency Press | 978-0-86819-862-0 | Sales rights: worldwide | PB
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Australian Screen Classics; Indigenous themes; film/tv; criticism
Henry Reynolds
Set in central-western New South Wales in the 1890s, Fred Schepisi’s film of Thomas Keneally’s award-winning novel is a powerful and confronting story of a black man’s revenge against an unjust and intolerant society.
Raised by missionaries, Jimmie Blacksmith, a young half-caste Aboriginal man, is poignantly caught between the ways of his black forefathers and those of the white society to which he aspires. Exploited by his boss and betrayed by his [white] wife, he declares war on his white employers and goes on a violent killing spree.
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith was one of the most significant films of the 1970s ‘renaissance’. It was the first Australian feature in which the whole story is told from an Aboriginal perspective and it broke new ground in dealing with one of the most tragic aspects of Australian history: the racist treatment of the Aboriginal population. The spectre of the violent and vengeful black had barely been touched upon and the depth of rage that the film put on screen was unprecedented in Australian film at the time.
Review
A timely and very important work - Sean Gorman,
Senses of Cinema
See all the titles in our Australian Screen Classics series.
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Currency Press | 978-0-86819-824-8 | Sales rights: Australia/NZ | PB
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Christos Tsiolkas
Fred Schepisi’s film,
The Devil’s Playground, is an intimate portrait of a 13-year-old boy struggling in spirit and body with the constraints of living in a Catholic seminary. It is also the story of how the Brothers cope with the demands of their faith. Made in 1976, this semi-autobiographical film established Schepisi as one of Australia’s most talented directors and was one of the first Australian films to be selected for Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.
Christos Tsiolkas invites you to share his twenty-five year journey of viewing, reviewing and re-imagining the film. He remembers his first illicit experience of the film at age thirteen and describes how his views of it changed in later years. As he chronicles the impact of
The Devil’s Playground on the development of his sense of self and of his love of cinema, he also explores the sexuality, politics, history and aesthetics of the film.
A passionate tribute to the power and possibilities of cinema.
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Currency Press | 978-0-86819-671-8 | Sales rights: Australia/NZ | PB
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cultural studies/history; indigenous themes; political/social; film & television
Jane Mills
Filmed in 1955
Jedda was the first Australian feature film to use Aboriginal actors in lead roles, the first to be filmed in colour and the first to be shown at the Cannes film festival.
It tells the tragic story of a young Aboriginal girl of the Arunte tribe, adopted by a white woman, Sarah McCann, as a surrogate for her own baby who has died. She raises her as a white child, isolating her from Aboriginal contact. But when Marbuck, an Aboriginal man seeking work arrives on the station, Jedda is fascinated by him.
Jedda was one of several popular melodramas of the post-World War II era that dealt with miscegenation. Mills explores these themes and the representation of the Australian Aborigine, while making comparisons to the Native American sub-genre of the Hollywood Western.
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Currency Press | 978-0-86819-920-7 | Sales rights: worldwide | PB
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Adrian Martin
‘No other Australian films have influenced world cinema and popular culture as widely and lastingly as George Miller’s
Mad Max trilogy’
So writes leading film writer Adrian Martin in this sparkling new appreciation of the movies that rudely shook up Australian cinema and made Mel Gibson and George Miller internationally famous.
Martin compares the three movies sharing his views on which works best and why. In a chapter dedicated to each film, he looks at their critical reception and their themes, examines shooting techniques and provides a shot-by-shot of integral scenes.
Since
Mad Max roared onto cinema screens in 1979, the films have developed a worldwide cult following and provoked numerous debates as to their meaning: are the films a study of masculinity in crisis, an investigation of good versus evil, a celebration of the Western (with wheels) or a frightening vision of the post apocalypse?
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Currency Press | 978-0-86819-670-1 | Sales rights: Australia/NZ | PB
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Gail Jones
The Piano, written and directed by Jane Campion, is one of the most honoured films of the new Australian cinema, and is considered by many critics to be a modern masterpiece. Campion won the Palme D'Or at Cannes in 1993 for the film, making her the first woman ever to win this prestigious award; it also won Best Original Screenplay (Campion), Best Actress (Holly Hunter) and Best Supporting Actress (Anna Paquin) at the 1994 Oscars.
In 1880 the widowed, and mute, Ada (Holly Hunter) and her young daughter, Flora (Anna Paquin) leave their native Scotland and travel to New Zealand’s remote South Island, as the arranged family of Stewart (Sam Neil), an Englishman who lives and works the land there. With them come Ada’s piano which serves as her outlet of expression, her ‘voice’. Despite fierce insistence from Ada, Stewart leaves the piano on the beach after he decides it is too heavy to carry back to his homestead. Stewart’s neighbour Baines (Harvey Kietel) makes a deal with Stewart for the piano and lessons with Ada, which has dire repercussions for them all.
More Australian Screen Classics
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Currency Press | 978-0-86819-799-9 | Sales rights: Australia/NZ | PB
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