sam crispFeb 7

going to post tidbits from this as I read.

have never been interested in the abundance of sex comedies from 70s Australian film, but am more sympathetic after discovering that it was motivated by the introduction of the R certificate in 1971 which ended oppressive censorship laws. kind of unthinkable that such a change could shape a national cinema today.

Show threadsam crispFeb 7
Rainer Werner Fassbinder watched Don's Party at the Berlin film festival and Stratton witnessed his "noisy enjoyment" of it 🥹
Show threadsam crispFeb 7
I don't think I ever noticed that Picnic at Hanging Rock uses the same haunting pan pipe music as Norman McLaren's Pas de deux - whoa!
Show threadsam crispFeb 23

incredible how Stratton writes about these movies contemporaneously, floating on top of the critical consensus like oil on water

like one critic he quotes complains of a movie "The narrative is simply a series of incidents" like yeah man that's exactly why 70s movies are so good

Show threadsam crisp

it's a shame we have no lens to talk about all the non-genre Australian movies today!!! Stratton tries his best to advocate for "Australian New Wave" as a way to engage with this stuff but it seems to have languished in the realm of what I call "Wikipedia knowledge." embalmed in an infobox.

Unfortunately we make do with "Ozploitation" which is such a stupid and embarrassing term to retrospectively frame much of this work, drawing out only its worst aspects.

Feb 23 at 1:41amWeb