From my total body of rather prolific writing (4 decades worth, at this point), this website draws essentially upon my accumulated (and ongoing) film reviews and short essays.

 

The film reviews have their origin in many forms: as pieces for newspapers, radio or TV; as articles or parts of articles; as previously unpublished drafts or notes. Likewise for the short essays.

 

Each review or essay reflects the specific time and place in which it was written. The site is designed in such a way that you can track (though the suggested internal links) my sometimes highly changing views on a particular film director or genre across the span of years covered; sometimes I have added a postscript to a piece to note my reassessment, or created a new collage/montage from different pieces written across the years.

 

As of 2022 – as my ties to any university institution anywhere in the world become more tenuous – I have started incorporating into the website a selection of my longer essays, academic pieces, and chapters contributed to book anthologies. When these concern a single film, they appear under ‘Reviews’; otherwise they can be found in ‘Essays’.

 

What is not on this website: my books, published since 1994. Also: the original, longer versions of my various regular columns (for Good Weekend, de Filmkrant and Caiman) since 2000. I am republishing much of this material in various book projects (such as my 2018 essay collection Mysteries of Cinema), and as ‘rewards’ in PDF collections (5 or 6 long essays per PDF, arranged thematically) connected to my Patreon funding appeal.

 

Also not on this website: at present, I am holding back from publishing many texts that form the basis of ongoing or possible book projects. These projects cover:

– Raúl Ruiz

– Philippe Garrel (co-author Cristina Álvarez López)

– Brian de Palma (co-author Cristina Álvarez López)

– Essays on World Cinema Directors

– Australian Cinema

– Art Criticism

– Film Critics & History/Methods of Film Criticism

– Audiovisual Essays (co-author Cristina Álvarez López)

– Screenwriting: A Cinephile’s Advice

If any intrepid publisher is interested in any of these projects, please contact me via this website with a good offer!

 

Beyond what I am making available on Patreon, I possess some extra copies of the following, physical books by me: Phantasms (essays on popular culture, 1994), The Mad Max Movies (2003), the Spanish-language Sublimes obsesiones with texts by me & Raúl Ruiz (2004), and the expanded Portuguese edition of Last Day Every Day (2015). Plus – the following are essay collections edited or co-edited by me – the complete & expanded Spanish translation of Movie Mutations (2003) as Mutaciones del cine contemporáneo (2010); Movie Mutations in its Farsi edition; and Film – Matters of Style (1992). These are the rarest, final copies of all these books, which will likely never be republished (and which, in the past, have raised exorbitant prices on ebay). So if you are interested to buy a signed copy of any of these, contact this website.

 

Note: I often receive inquiries about my approximately 80 feature-length DVD/Blu-ray audio commentaries, commissioned and released by various companies around the world. (For a reasonably up-to-date list, see my Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Martin.) These ‘lectures’ of mine are neither pre-scripted, nor transcribed after the fact, so they do not exist in any written form. I do, however, possess extra copies of some discs on which, variously, my commentaries, booklet essays and audiovisual essays appear, and I will be offering them, from time to time, as bonuses for purchase by my supporters on Patreon.

 

Only a portion of my collaborative work with Cristina Álvarez López since 2012 – some of our writings, but not our audiovisual essays – is reproduced on this site. A listing (with links where available) of Cristina’s work year by year, including our text & audiovisual collaborations, can be found on her new site: https://laughmotel.wordpress.com/cv/

 

Since 2021, Cristina & I have been producing and compiling works that can be purchased via Vimeo on Demand. They come in two distinct series: Multimedia Lectures on Film (info at https://laughmotel.wordpress.com/multimedia-lectures-on-film-2/), which each run for approx. 1 hour; and The Audiovisual Essay Collection (https://laughmotel.wordpress.com/the-audiovisual-essay-collection/), gathering, upgrading & reworking our best audiovisual essays into thematic groups. In future, we will also offer online courses in film criticism & analysis. Stay tuned!

 

COPYRIGHT

For every text on this site, I have returned to my original manuscripts, not the versions as edited and published. I retain copyright on all material. Nothing can be reproduced, reused or translated into another language without my written permission and negotiated payment.

 

EFFUSIVE THANKS

This website has been almost 20 years, on and off, in the making. Thousands of separate texts have been variously researched, collected, collated, photocopied, typed, sub-edited, checked, transported over oceans, and tabulated by the following very kind and professional people, all of whom I thank profusely:

 

Cristina Álvarez López
Ariel Avissar

Angela Bandis

Lauren Bliss

Felicity Chaplin

Anna Dzenis
Paul Grant

Gerard Hayes
Konrad Lenz
Lung Chieh Lim

Sarinah Masukor

Grant McDonald
Tim McQueen
Vicky Mousoulis
Marina D. Richter

Sofia Ríos

Eloise Ross

Stephanie Van Schilt

Andrey Walkling

Kathlyn Wiltshire

Monica Zetlin

Alina Zidaric

 

Above all, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude – also ongoing! – to my Webmaster, Bill Mousoulis. He has patiently stuck by this project, without complaint, for its entire, lengthy period of gestation. When he hooked up with Vicky Mousoulis, she kindly pitched in, too. In the same period, Bill has also performed sterling webmastering duties for two film journals with which I’ve been closely involved, Rouge and LOLA. And he also has his own, splendid filmmaking career, which can be assiduously followed here: http://www.innersense.com.au/

 

But I could never have achieved the ultimate ‘push’ to complete this project and get it out to the world – an effort literally involving thousands of pages of writing in folders and boxes, and just as many computer files on diverse supports – without the aid and encouragement of my beloved, Cristina Álvarez López. That I’ve managed to keep all this material together during a complete relocation of my life from Australia to Europe speaks to her resourcefulness and loving nature. I dedicate the site to her.

 

Adrian Martin, September 2022.

 

History of this site – track the changes made to this site since its July 2017 launch.