PROJEKTOR

Category Essays on Film

‘A SCREENING IS NEVER ENOUGH’

February 14, 2022 Essays on Film

In strained, testing, times memory seems to cast our earlier experiences of cinema in an idyllic light, filtering it with an amber glow, a golden tinge, soft Spielbergian orange.   

ANTICIPATION

As a teenager in the 1990s, my family and I resided in a small, semi-rural town on the outskirts of Melbourne: Pakenham. At that time the closest cinema complex was almost an hour’s commute: Dandenong Village Cinemas. A visit to the movies was, therefore, a pilgrimage, a hallowed ritual planned well in advance of actually arriving at the megaplex,

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ROMPER STOMPER (1992): A FILM BY GEOFFREY WRIGHT

January 26, 2013 Essays on Film

Pulling on the boots and tightening up the laces

Shaving our heads and strapping on the braces

Now you are a skinhead looking for a fight

Skinhead, skinhead, running through the night

 

 

I was a teenager when writer/director Geoffrey Wright’s Romper Stomper (1992) was released in Australia. In a year that witnessed the worldwide success of the uplifting, feel-good drama Strictly Ballroom, Romper Stomper surfaced and stamped its way to notoriety like a rampaging, cinematic juggernaut.

Revisiting the film today, some two decades after its

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RARE EXPORTS: A CHRISTMAS TALE (2010): A FILM BY JALMARI HELANDER

December 25, 2012 Essays on Film

Every year there comes a day when legions of people around the world, adults and children alike, celebrate the miraculous arrival of a singular individual. He is recognised and revered for both his appearance and his works: tall, bearded, long flowing hair, a jovial disposition, fondness and rapport with children and a penchant for miraculous acts of generosity. Yes. I am referring, of course, to Santa Claus: the portly cosmopolite who sojourns across the world on Christmas Eve, frequents family homes and bestows gifts upon deserving children (and, reportedly, a lump of coal for their

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‘AMERICAN REUNION’ (2012): A FILM BY JON HURWITZ AND HAYDEN SCHLOSSBERG

December 22, 2012 Essays on Film

There are a handful of certainties in life. Bills. Taxes. Death. And high school. For some, the latter is by far the most petrifying. The American satirist Kurt Vonnegut Jr. once observed, 'True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country'. He has a point. If the seniors from my high school’s Class of 1995 were running the country today, I'd have moved to the South of France yesterday.

Even after it’s long over, high school is an inescapable institution: like the infamous Hotel California, you can check out but never leave. Perhaps that

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‘MELANCHOLIA’ (2011): A FILM BY LARS VON TRIER

November 15, 2012 Essays on Film

When Danish Writer/Director Lars von Trier releases a new film, it is often marred by controversy - both for what transpires on the screen and off it.

When Anti-Christ premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, it divided critics and audiences with its explicit and graphic depictions of violence, misogyny and genital mutilation (including a grisly scene of a clitoris being sliced off with a rusty pair of sewing scissors). When a journalist, at a press conference for the film, demanded that von Trier justify why he made the movie, the director infamously retorted: 'I think it's a very

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