Monash University (Australia)

Faculty Member, Film and Television Studies

Associate Professor

ECPS

About

Since 1979, I have combined work as a professional writer and film critic with a university career. I was film reviewer for The Age between 1995 and 2006. For my numerous books, essays and public lectures, I have won the Byron Kennedy Award (Australian Film Institute) and the Pascall Prize for Critical Writing, and my PhD on film style won the Mollie Holman Award. I am the author of five books and hundreds of essays on film, art, television, literature, music, popular and avant-garde culture, as well as literally thousands of reviews (soon to be collected on archive website). I am interested in cultural fads and trends, in social histories and political contexts, but I believe we can only speak well and meaningfully about any of these if we pay close attention to how cultural works actually, materially look and sound – not to mention how they make us feel. My tastes in cinema are diverse, since I believe in the importance of global cinema, and in cinema’s past. I have looked into Australian, American, European and Asian cinemas. I have studied genres including musical, melodrama, thriller and art film. I have analysed great auteurs from Sergio Leone and Fritz Lang to Hou Hsiao-hsien and Terrence Malick, and I have an abiding interest in all marginal, underground and avant-garde cinemas. As a writer, I am also deeply invested in the ways, means, conditions and histories of critical discourse itself, and so I have spent most of my life piecing together international histories of theory and criticism.