Focusing on the incidence of the ‘Westerns’ film genre in the 120-odd years of Australian cinema history, exploring how the American genre has been adapted to the changing Australian social, political and cultural contexts of their production, including the shifting emphases in the representation of the Indigenous population.



The idea for the book came to the author while he was writing two recent articles. One was an essay for Screen Education on the western in Australian cinema of the 21st century; the other piece was the review of a book entitled Film and the Historian, for the online journal Inside Story . Between the two, he saw the interesting prospect of a book-length study of the role of the western genre in Australia’s changing political and cultural history over the last century – and the ways in which film can, without didacticism, provide evidence of such change. Key matters include the changing attitudes to and representation of Indigenous peoples and of women's roles in Australian Westerns.



When one considers that the longest narrative film then seen in Australia, and quite possibly the world was Charles Tait’s The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), it is clear that Australia has some serious history in the genre, and Kelly has ridden again in Justin Kurzel’s 2020 adaptation of Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang.

The Handbook of Nordic Cinema is a comprehensive reference work providing an overview of cinema in the Nordic countries - Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland. Comparing the cinematic cultures of the five Nordic nations as well as Sápmi, it gives the readers a more comparative and general perspective of Nordic Cinema. Even though the Nordic countries are very different, and have very different cinematic traditions and media histories, they have many institutional and thematic elements in common. One example is how film production in all five countries, and in Sápmi too, is dependent on different forms of government support systems.

The main focus is on feature films but the book also presents chapters and central discussions on documentaries and animation as well as connecting film production in the Nordic countries to the emerging media situation with television and streaming services as central partners and competitors.

The inclusion of a number of smaller case studies and thematic explorations enables the Handbook of Nordic Cinema to broaden the understanding of individual genres including occupation dramas, comedies, animation and documentary. There is also thorough exploration of attitudes towards cultural motifs and elements - the roles of nature, crime, disaster and piracy.

The book presents an interpretation of neo-noir filmmaking through the lens of economics, based on readings of central neo-noir works from the noir revival of the early 1970s to recent films. Analyzing key themes and figures of neo-noir – desire and betrayal, corruption and alienation, the private detective and the femme fatale – the project reads neo-noir filmmaking as a privileged site for the expression of anxieties around work, money, trust, and exchange. Neo-noir filmmaking embodies a profound reflection on the hollowing-out of economic and social life, the collapse of trust, the erosion of institutions, and fears regarding legacy and identity, developments that have undermined the promise of American life in the long twilight of the American dream since the end of postwar prosperity.



Aimed at the many scholars and faculty who study and teach film noir and neo-noir at levels from high school to post-graduate. It will appeal as well to the extensive community of cinephiles enthusiastic about noir, those who attend “Noirvember” screenings at repertory movie houses, who read the websites of the Film Noir Foundation or Eddie Muller (the self-styled “Czar of Noir”), and participate in discussions of noir and neo-noir filmmaking on online forums.

This article analyses the particularities of Sarah Maldoror’s gaze, founded upon a singular notion of political cinema that used the poetic image of a surrealist matrix. In the Portuguese-speaking world, Maldoror stood out from other engagé¹ filmmakers for being the first to use fiction to portray the fight for African independence. Later films shot in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau portray the involvement of people in the decolonization, without failing to unabashedly point out the cultural hybridity. Her work (dis)orders itself as a ‘filmography of survival’ – which includes both personal projects and commissions accepted to make a living in cinema, in her insubordinate and politicized way. Making use of poetry, jazz and painting, she relied upon a surrealist aesthetic and never conceded to the pressures exerted on her filmmaking, all the while putting together a body of work portraying decolonization and survival. I propose that the invisibility of Maldoror’s filmography resulted from the difficult balance between her creative choices and the coercion she was subjected to.