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 While The Wog Boy and Fat Pizza have been accused of a return to outdated ethnic stereotypes, these films differ from previous comic depictions of Australian ethnic minorities.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
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
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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.
Australian comedy films of the 1930s : Modernity, the urban and the international
- Authors: Speed, Lesley
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Book
- Relation: The Moving Image
- Full Text: false
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- Description: Comedy has been a perpetual part of Australian film, in which humour reflects Australia's adaptation in times of crisis, social change and technological advances. This was never more so than in the 1930s, when Australia produced more comedy feature films than in any other decade before 1970. These films of the 1930s embraced the new technology of sound, made local vaudeville performers into movie stars, offered escape from the Depression and revealed a diverse and international Australia. In these films, Australia moved further from Empire and the bush, forged the Digger legend, responded to cultural diversity and viewed itself as a modern, urban nation. Influenced by Hollywood, Australian comedies of the 1930s adapted international styles to local points of view. Based on research at the National Film and Sound Archive, Lesley Speed's book provides new insight into Australian comedy films of the 1930s and the extraordinary period of social change in which they were produced.