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At Melbourne State College (MSC – an institution for training teachers which has since been absorbed into University of Melbourne, Australia), I taught the following course (outlined immediately below) four times between 1982 and 1985, changing some elements (primarily, the selection of films screened and analysed) each year. Reconstructing as many of these lectures as possible from my surviving handwritten texts, adaptations into essays for publication (sometimes many years later), notes and audiocassette recordings – an ongoing process – I have aggregated and organised the results into an order that can be followed, virtually, in this sequence (I have indicated those titles which later became the subject of my DVD/Blu-ray feature-length audio commentaries). I have also taken the liberty of including in this link-chain a few lectures from similar 1981 gigs which I reworked during the MSC years, and even a few earlier essays I wrote as a MSC student in 1978. As further lectures in the list are put online on my website, I will link to them in this Guide. Opening
Lecture: Introduction to a (False) History of Cinema Space,
Landscape, Environment Time,
Memory, Identity Sex
Positions 1: Power Sex
Positions 2: Play The
Energy Principle: Melodrama Realism
and Unrealism Romance,
Desire, Ecstasy Poetics
of Pop Culture The
Musical: An Idealisation The
B Movie Techniques
and Methodologies of Film Analysis Guess-Work:
The Logic of Fiction Modernist Fiction: Ten Ways to Tell a Story The
Film-Text: Open and Closed The
Cinema of Poetry Profound
Cinema Closing
Lecture: Four Definitions of Modernism On the Course The above course was designed for 1st year students; in the 3-term curriculum, it came after a more technologically-based ‘history of cinema from its origins to the coming of sound’ (taught by the renowned experimental filmmaker Arthur Cantrill, who was Head of the Media Department in these years); and before a more general introduction to Media Studies (taking in radio, television, graphic design, and so on). In 1985, my final year at MSC, I taught all three of these units. I was 22 when I began teaching this course, and 25 when I finished it. In terms of its orientation, it was slanted to ‘film appreciation’ (as that school of knowledge-transmission, developed in teachers’ colleges rather than universities, was once popularly known). Each lecture was closely tied to the particulars of that week’s chosen movie – screened for the students, in every case, on 16mm in an especially equipped theatre-classroom (I even worked the projector on occasion) which was later demolished and recustomised. Clips during the lectures were also projected in this way, before the general rise of VHS video and, in later years beyond ‘85, laserdisc and DVD/Blu-ray. For anyone familiar with the history of university-level film studies and its changing (sometimes warring) ‘schools’, it will be easy to locate the elements that identify this course with its time: the early 1980s. It built upon established pedagogical methods – approaching cinema via its canonised auteurs and broad genres – while also aiming to introduce then-still-new tools of ‘textual’ film analysis derived from structuralism and poststructuralism, semiotics, feminism, and continental philosophy (with some elementary nods to Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism). Set readings (one essay per week) ranged from Jean-André Fieschi, Julia Lesage and Roland Barthes to Roger Tailleur, Edward Colless and Kristin Thompson. The ’canon’ of cinema I drew upon (and, at the time, felt most comfortable with) is particular and selective: a cinephilic haven derived mainly from classical Hollywood and European art cinema, with a couple of detours to elsewhere in the globe. (Altering the subtitle of the course each year, I ended up calling it a Fantasia or a Utopia of the Movies!) To this I added, wherever possible, my interest/investment in experimental and short cinema from Australia and elsewhere. (All the filmmakers attached to this department, from Arthur and John Hughes to Monique Schwarz and various video artists, hailed from the experimental/independent sphere.) I make no apology for my youthful choices, even as I would program it differently today, in terms of both films and topics. All the same, I consider the basic emphases of this course – on film form and style, aesthetic appreciation, cultural/ideological/historical analysis, the distinction between classical and modernist filmmaking – to be still worth placing at the base of any cinema studies curriculum. They are also, to speak personally, some of the main lines that I have elaborated in my own research inside and outside the university context, and in my ongoing practice as a film critic.
© Adrian Martin October 2025 |
