When the sun sets over suburbia : Class and subculture in Bruce Beresford's Puberty Blues
- Authors: Speed, Lesley
- Date: 2006
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies Vol. 20, no. 3 (2006), p. 407-420
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- Description: Bruce Beresford’s film Puberty Blues (1981) focuses on Australian surf culture of the 1970s and the Sydney beach-side suburb of Cronulla Beach, presenting the Cronulla surf subculture as a prism through which Australian society is viewed. The film, which centres on the quest of the characters of Debbie and Sue to join the elite Greenhills surfing gang, signifies a turning point in Australian screen depictions of class, prefiguring an increased emphasis on the middle class and deviating from a traditional equation of class with the working class. The film’s bleak and satirical portrayal of the Australian middle class also reveals dimensions of suburban Australia that are usually absent from local films and television series. Based on Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey’s 1979 novel of the same name, the film draws on a cultural tradition that associates surfing with freedom from social constraints. Yet the film depicts the protagonists’ idealization of surfers as being undermined when drugs intrude upon their world. The flight from middle-class suburban existence also suggests that the comforts of suburbia are deceptive. This article’s analysis of class and subculture in Puberty Blues aims to draw greater attention to Australian film depictions of subculture and middle-class life, for despite the large body of work around subcultures and although the majority of Australian films made in the last 25 years centre on the middle class, these aspects of Australian cinema have generally received little analysis from film and cultural studies scholars.
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003001872
Renditions from the inside : Prison Songs, documusical and performative documentary
- Authors: Speed, Lesley
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Continuum-Journal of Media & Cultural Studies Vol. 33, no. 3 (2019), p. 324-336
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- Description: Produced for SBS Television, Kelrick Martin's Prison Songs is unusual as a documentary in which the participants convey their stories through songs that were written for the film. Centring on inmates of Darwin Correctional Centre, known as Berrimah Prison, and described in its press kit as 'Australia's first ever documentary musical', Prison Songs involved a collaborative production process in which inmates contributed to writing the musical numbers. As a documusical, the film belongs to a documentary subgenre that originated in the United Kingdom and forms part of a wider landscape of convergence between non-fiction and fictional television. Prison Songs expands Australian documentary, contemporary Indigenous film-making and stories about incarceration. The film's presentation of participants' experiences through music, story, dance and humour can be situated within the performative documentary mode, in which orthodox screen discourses of sobriety are supplanted by poetic expression. Its use of songs and musical performance as partial alternatives to interviews and narration traverses boundaries between avant-garde and television forms, expression and information, and prison and the wider society.
A world ruled by hilarity : Gender and low comedy in the films of Amy Heckerling
- Authors: Speed, Lesley
- Date: 2002
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Senses of Cinema Vol. 22, no. 4 (2002), p.
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- Description: Beneath their surface frivolity and boisterous humour, the films of Amy Heckerling use comedy to address themes such as gender difference, adolescent sexuality and parenthood. Although the association between female directors and genres such as teen film, comedy and romance has been seen to reinforce a gendered hierarchy, close analysis of Heckerling's work offers a more complex view of the relationship between women directors, teenage audiences and Hollywood entertainment. This article situates Heckerling's most well-known films, Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Look Who's Talking (1989) and Clueless (1995), in the context of the significance of some female film directors in contemporary Hollywood. While her films exemplify Hollywood's tendency to absorb and de-politicise feminist values, Heckerling's career also reflects the role of contemporary female film directors in expanding teen film and low comedy beyond their traditional masculine preoccupations.
Comic investigation and genre-mixing : the television docucomedies of Lawrence Leung, Judith Lucy and Luke McGregor
- Authors: Speed, Lesley
- Date: 2020
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Continuum Vol. 34, no. 5 (2020), p. 690-702
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- Description: In an era in which comedians have been positioned as public commentators, a cycle of Australian television documentaries centres on the premise of a comedian’s investigation of a theme of existential significance. Produced for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, these series are Lawrence Leung’s Choose Your Own Adventure (2009), Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey (2011), Judith Lucy is All Woman (2015) and Luke Warm Sex (2016). This article examines the relationship between genre-mixing and cultural commentary in this cycle, which explores themes of life goals and identity, spirituality, gender and sex. Employing conventions of personalized documentary, these docucomedies use performance reflexively to highlight spectacle and explore the humour of awkward situations and contemporary and changing cultural values. Central to each series is the positioning of the comedian as commentator, central participant, therapeutic subject and performer. Using humour to address uncertainties about what is acceptable in today’s society, these docucomedies draw on traditions of Australian screen comedy and non-fiction representation to serve as public pedagogy about twenty-first-century concerns, from spirituality and mediated intimacy to pornography. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Fishing the waters of life: Zane Grey’s White Death, exploitation film and the Great Barrier Reef
- Authors: Speed, Lesley
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Studies in Australasian Cinema Vol. 11, no. 1 (2017), p. 5-17
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- Description: Edwin G. Bowen’s White Death (1936) is an Australian–American film about shark fishing that stars the American novelist and fisherman Zane Grey as himself. Set mainly at the Great Barrier Reef, it has a semi-fictional plot about Grey’s quest to kill a shark in the face of opposition from an anti-fishing activist, Newton Smith (Alfred Frith). Although White Death was financially unsuccessful and has received little attention in histories of Australian film or Grey’s life, it is significant in several ways. The film is unusual among early Australian productions for combining elements of the genres of travelogue documentary, fictional adventure film and exotic exploitation film. It reflects an American perspective of Australia as an exotic location. White Death is also linked to the interwar development of tourism at the Great Barrier Reef and foreshadows the growth of the environmental conservation movement. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.