Strike me lucky : Social difference and consumer culture in Roy Rene’s only film
- Authors: Speed, Lesley
- Date: 2009
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Screening the Past Vol. 26, no. (2009), p.
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- Description: Strike Me Lucky (Australia 1934) presents an imaginative view of Australian society and consumer culture in the 1930s. The only film starring vaudeville star Roy Rene, it has been largely dismissed because of its poor box office performance and perceived artistic failure. Yet Strike Me Lucky is significant for centring on a prominent Jewish Australian comedian and for being an early screen example of Australian ethnic humour. The film’s diverse view of Australian society undermines perceptions of the 1930s as culturally homogeneous and Anglocentric. Its depiction of a modern consumer culture reflects upon Australia’s relationship to Hollywood and modern capitalism.
- Description: 2003008037
Win and lose : Subculture and social difference in 'Dogs in Space'
- Authors: Speed, Lesley
- Date: 2009
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine Vol. 162, no. (2009), p. 160-165
- Full Text: false
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- Description: Lesley Speed takes a closer look at a cult classic's snapshot of Melbourne post-punk subculture.
- Description: 2003007958
Life as a pizza : The comic traditions of wogsploitation films
- Authors: Speed, Lesley
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine Vol. 146/147, no. (2005), p. 136-144
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- Description: At the box office and in television ratings, Australian comedy reached a high point with this film and the television series Pizza, which spawned the film Fat Pizza (Paul Fenech, 2003). These 'wogsploitation' films were created by Australians of non-English speaking backgrounds and eschew the sensitive and dramatic portrayals of ethnic minorities seen in earlier films. While The Wog Boy and Fat Pizza have been accused of a return to outdated ethnic stereotypes, these films differ from previous comic depictions of Australian ethnic minorities. Far from being positioned as victims, the protagonists of these films simultaneously assert their ethnic identities and reconfigure the Australian stereotype of the 'ocker'.
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003001257
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
You and me against the world : Revisiting puberty blues
- Authors: Speed, Lesley
- Date: 2004
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine Vol. 140, no. (2004), p.
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- Description: Depicting thirteen-year-old girls having sex, consuming alcohol, smoking marijuana and defying adult authorities, Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey’s 1979 novel Puberty Blues caused a scandal upon its original publication.
The comedian comedies : George Wallace's 1930s comedies, Australian cinema and Hollywood
- Authors: Speed, Lesley
- Date: 2008
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine Vol. , no. 158 (2008), p. 76-82
- Full Text: false
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- Description: The article analyzes five significant films from Australian director George Wallace's comedic personalities. These films were considered more than simply entertaining as these films reveal much about the Australian film industry in the 1930s, including to its relationship to Hollywood's output and the representation of national identity.
The possibilities of roads not taken - Intellect and utopia in the films of Richard Linklater
- Authors: Speed, Lesley
- Date: 2007
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Popular Film and Television Vol. 35, no. 3 (Fall 2007), p. 98-106
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- Description: This article examines the relationship between the films of Richard Linklater and Hollywood. These films expand Hollywood's capacity for producing mentally stimulating alternatives to formulaic entertainment. Linklater's independent and studio films reflect the changed relationship between these spheres, while pursuing a utopian quest for alternatives to purely physical consumer gratification.
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003005783
The virtual city in 'The doctor Blake mysteries'
- Authors: Speed, Lesley
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Metro Vol. 187, no. (2016), p. 50-56
- Full Text: false
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- Description: Ballarat provides the stage upon which the ABC's riveting period crime drama 'The doctor Blake mysteries' unfolds. As such, writes lesley speed, the city - whose size is between that of a metropolitan centre and a rural town - exemplifies the regional gothic as well as the interaction between real and imagined places.
Prurient exuberance : Early Australian sex hygiene films and the origins of ozploitation
- Authors: Speed, Lesley
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Screening the Past Vol. , no. 42 (2017), p. 1-11
- Full Text: false
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- Description: Australian exploitation films that were made since the 1960s have received considerable attention in Mark Hartley’s 2008 documentary, Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! However, Hartley’s film and much of the subsequent interest in Ozploitation overlooks the fact that exploitation films existed in Australia since at least the 1910s. In its most basic definition, an exploitation film centres on a topic that is forbidden, such as sex or vice, while purporting to educate the public about it. This article examines the significance of two early Australian sex hygiene films, Remorse, a Story of the Red Plague (John E. Mathews, 1917) [1] and Should a Doctor Tell? (P. J. Ramster, 1923). Although these films do not survive, the information available about them reveals affinities with contemporaneous American and British exploitation films. They also form a precedent for the role of exploitation in the revival of the Australian film industry in the early 1970s. Purporting to explore the issue of sexually-transmitted disease while appealing to audience prurience, early sex hygiene films courted controversy in a manner that prefigures The Naked Bunyip: A Survey of Sex in Australia (John B. Murray, 1970), a significant early film in the revival and one of a cycle of local sexploitation films. Early Australian sex hygiene films expand understanding of Ozploitation by providing a glimpse of the diversity of early Australian film-making and forming a precedent for the role of exploitation in the development of Australian film.
In the best film star tradition : Claire Adams and Mooramong
- Authors: Speed, Lesley
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Screening the Past Vol. , no. (2015), p.
- Full Text: false
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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.