EMSAH Seminar | Kenneth Slessor, Film Critic and Smith's Weekly
Event Details
- Date:
- Friday, 12 September 2014 - Friday, 12 September 2014
- Time:
- 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
- Room:
- 601
- UQ Location:
- Michie Building (St Lucia)
- URL:
- http://www.emsah.uq.edu.au/emsah-seminars
- Event category(s):
Event Contact
- Name:
- Ms Stormy Wehi
- Phone:
- 51412
- Email:
- s.wehi@uq.edu.au
- Org. Unit:
- Communication and Arts
Event Description
- Full Description:
- Kenneth Slessor was Australia’s foremost film critic between the wars. His film criticism set the terms for a public engagement with what he saw as a new emerging artform, the sound cinema. Film criticism was Slessor’s main job during his tenure as a journalist at Smith’s Weekly from 1927–1940. He wrote on film at a length and depth that was not only unparalleled in the Australian print culture of his own time, but that would not be rivaled by any individual in any medium until the explosion of the film society movement in the post-war era. The cinema pages of Smith’s Weekly were, under his editorship, the most significant forum for discourse on the cinema in print at that time in Australia. Yet the Smith’s film pages were not only remarkable in their own time. To this day they represent the most devoted coverage of the cinema in the history of Australian newspaper publishing.
Through Smith’s Weekly Slessor was able to improvise a new relation to the cinema in the Australian context, doing so through a combination of forms of engagement. This included Slessor’s and other’s film criticism, film ratings system, industry journalism, cinema-related light verse, satire and parody, and black-and-white art. This combination enabled Smith’s to hold the cinema up for unparalleled scrutiny. In each of these areas the cinema was held the cinema to account against the developing aesthetic of sound cinema unfolding dynamically over the 1930s. Slessor’s film criticism affords us the opportunity not only to examine the work of one of Australia’s most notable film critics but also to think more generally about the place of the cinema in a media environment where print was dominant, radio was growing, and cinema was changing dramatically towards the newer more intimate picture theatre in which the live show accompanying the cinema would disappear altogether. It also provides us with the opportunity to think more extensively about film criticism and its role: its relation to a dynamic medium; its participation and accommodation of a continuous stream that Stanley Cavell would later identify with television; its development of a critical ethics of responding to and being part of this stream; and its rigorous and vigorous development of an explicit ethics of criticism for an Australian cinema (much of which is still with us today).
* This paper grows out of research being undertaken with Philip Mead on the film criticism of Kenneth Slessor. In Networked Language Mead examined the contribution this extended engagement with the cinema had on his poetry arguing that this poetry is best understood as a form of cinematism. This project is designed to bring the ‘good news’ of Slessor’s film critical work to film and television studies as well as literary studies.
All are welcome, this event is open to the public, staff and students. Feel free to bring your lunch with you to the seminar, if you're on your lunch break.
Directions to UQ
- Google Map:
-
- Directions:
- St Lucia Campus | Gatton campus.
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