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This chapter examines the connection between disturbing aspects of the settler-colonial experience and the perpetuation of the Gothic mode in Australia. It argues that colonial and postcolonial Gothic texts are defined not only by characteristic settings and themes, but also by the figure of the outsider traversing a land unlike their home. As John Scott and Dean Biron claim in their insightful article on the Australian Gothic, ‘Being removed from a familiar environment and transported into another setting is a constant theme’. Here geographer Edward Casey’s concept of atopos, a Greek word meaning ʼno place, ' or ‘strange’ relates to the sense of estrangement that accompanies the experience of place in Australia’s Gothic landscapes. Accordingly, this examination of the recurring figure of the outsider, immigrant, convict, or traveller who is alienated, exiled, or stranded in an alien landscape investigates how atopia relates to a uniquely Australian sense of place in Gothic narratives.

The screen is the material and imaginative interface where biology meets technology. It is the nexus between science and fiction, where technological and ethical concerns surrounding synthespians, representations of replicants, and manifestations of synthetic biology come into play. This analysis of digital imaging and cinematic imagining of virtual actors and synthetic humans in films such as Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017) examines the ethical implications of digital embodiment technologies and cybernetics. I argue that it is necessary to bring together science and the arts to advance understandings of embodiment and technology. In doing so, I explore commonalities between ethical concerns about technobiological bodies in cultural and scientific discourse and developments such as the creation of virtual humans and “deepfake” digital doubles in screen media.

With Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker as its case study, this article explores misconceptions about the relationship between imagery and imagination.

Murray Smith’s Film, Art, and the Third Culture makes a significant contribution to cognitive film theory and philosophical aesthetics, expanding the conceptual tools of film analysis to include perspectives from neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Smith probes assumptions about how cinema affects spectators by examining aspects of experience and neurophysiological responses that are unavailable to conscious, systematic reflection. This article interrogates Smith’s account of emotion, empathy, and imagination in cinematic representation and film spectatorship, placing his work in dialogue with other recent interventions in the fields of cinema studies and embodied cognition. Smith’s contribution to understanding the role of emotion in screen studies is vital, and when read in conjunction with recent publications by Carl Plantinga and Mark Johnson on ethical engagement and the moral imagination, this new work constitutes a notable advance in film theory.

The concept of empathy has special significance for the study of cinema as a narrative art form because, from its inception, empathy has been seen as an integral aspect of how people engage with art and come to understand the inner life and emotions of others. Deriving from the German word “Einfühlung,” the term “empathy” dates back to the aesthetic criticism of art historian Robert Vischer in 1873. It was later taken up by psychologist Theodor Lipps (1903) and others in the hermeneutic and phenomenological traditions to refer to “feeling into” an aesthetic object, a natural vista, or another person’s subjective experience in order to develop an experiential understanding of other minds and works of art (see Chapter 7, “Empathy in the aesthetic tradition”). The epistemological function of empathy is an enduring focal point for research about empathy’s role in understanding both art and human experience.

The Arrival (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2016) invites epistemological reflection on what Christian Metz terms “film language” by invoking the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which suggests that language structures the way we think and behave. Amy Adams plays Dr Louise Banks, a linguist who attempts to communicate with an advanced alien species that uses a semasiographic language resembling intricate mandalas with no beginning or end, no linear sequence, and no relationship to spoken sounds. “They use non-linear orthography,” Banks states, “Do they think like that too?” As she learns their language, Banks begins to dream in alien graphemes and to experience the world and its temporal structures in ways facilitated by this novel linguistic form. This paper investigates how the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis may apply to the audiovisual language of film, considering how the rhythms of editing and the embodied address of sound and image might elicit experiential modes of knowledge that augment cognition and narrative comprehension. From very early in the history of cinema, narrative structure has dominated. As Philosopher Paul Ricoeur argues, the cause and effect logic of narrative is fundamental to organising human understandings of selfhood, behaviour, and events. Furthermore, in narrative film the codes and conventions of editing, cinematography, and sound also structure the way we think and these aesthetic techniques are at the same time informed by the way humans perceive, experience, and understand the world. Drawing on the phenomenological work of Vivian Sobchack and the contributions Walter Murch and Mark Kerins have made to editing and sound theory respectively, this paper takes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as a starting point for an epistemological approach to cinema as a conduit for understanding others and their stories.

The long-form television drama series Hannibal (Fuller 2013–2015) thematises the embodied imagination and the elicitation of empathy and ethical understanding at the level of narrative and characterisation as well as through character engagement and screen aesthetics. Using Hannibal as a case study, this research investigates how stylistic choices frame the experiences of screen characters and engender forms of intersubjectivity based on corporeal and cognitive routes to empathy; in particular, it examines the capacity for screen media to facilitate what neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese terms intercorporeality. As a constitutive aspect of intersubjectivity and social understanding that works through embodied simulation, intercorporeality invites a reconceptualisation of empathy and its association with ethical motivation and insight. Hannibal also introduces cannibalism as a dark metaphor for the incorporation of another into oneself, reflecting on empathy's ill-understood potential for negative affect and unethical consequences.

The crucial role of the cerebellum in motor learning and coordination is very well known. Considerable interest has recently shifted toward its contribution to nonmotor tasks, such as working memory, emotion, and language. However, the cognitive role and functional subdivisions of the cerebellum, particularly in dynamic, ecologically realistic contexts, are not yet established. By analyzing functional neuroimaging data acquired while participants viewed a short dramatic movie, we found that posterior and inferior cerebellar regions are reliably engaged in dynamic perceptual and affective processes with no explicit motor component. These cerebellar regions show significant relevance to visual salience and unexpected turning points of the movie. Our results demonstrate that distinct functional subdivisions of the cerebellum are robustly engaged in real-life cognitive processes, playing specific roles through a dynamic interaction with higher order regions in the cerebral cortex.

This article sets up a neurophenomenological approach to understanding cinema spectatorship in order to investigate how embodied engagement with technologies of sound and motion can foster a sense of experiential realism. It takes as a starting point the idea that the empirical study of emotive, perceptual, motor, and cognitive processes involved in film spectatorship is impoverished without a phenomenological account of the lived experience under investigation. Correspondingly, engaging with neuroscientific studies enriches the scope of phenomenological inquiry and offers new insights into the film experience. Analysis of diverse films including Interstellar, Leviathan, San Andreas and The Thin Red Line reveals how technological innovations dating from Hale’s Tours (pre-1910) to contemporary D-BOX and Dolby Atmos systems have enhanced the audience’s sense of immersion and corporeal investment in the film experience. Building on the research of Vivian Sobchack and Vittorio Gallese, I argue that aesthetic techniques including the use of low frequency sound effects and wearable cameras facilitate shared affective engagement and a form of embodied simulation associated with kinaesthetic empathy and augmented narrative involvement.

Use of eye tracking data to explore the relationship between sound and vision in two selected sequences from Monsters, Inc. and Saving Private Ryan.

Media and Society explores the relationship between the media, their institutions and the world we live in, examining how they are connected and how society and the media affect each other. The book analyses representations of the world found in films, television, advertisements, news and online to understand the impact of the media in the contemporary world. The sixth edition explores several themes throughout the text, including the contradictory nature of the media and the psychological concerns of the media, to provide clear explanations of complex theories and ideas.

Imagined Landscapes teams geocritical analysis with digital visualization techniques to map and interrogate films, novels, and plays in which space and place figure prominently. Drawing upon A Cultural Atlas of Australia, a database-driven interactive digital map that can be used to identify patterns of representation in Australia’s cultural landscape, the book presents an integrated perspective on the translation of space across narrative forms and pioneers new ways of seeing and understanding landscape. It offers fresh insights on cultural topography and spatial history by examining the technical and conceptual challenges of georeferencing fictional and fictionalized places in narratives. Among the items discussed are Wake in Fright, a novel by Kenneth Cook, adapted iconically to the screen and recently onto the stage; the Australian North as a mythic space; spatial and temporal narrative shifts in retellings of the story of Alexander Pearce, a convict who gained notoriety for resorting to cannibalism after escaping from a remote Tasmanian penal colony; travel narratives and road movies set in Western Australia; and the challenges and spatial politics of mapping spaces for which there are no coordinates.

Using eye tracking as a method to analyse how four subjects respond to the opening Omaha Beach landing scene in Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), this article draws on insights from cinema studies about the types of aesthetic techniques that may direct the audience’s attention along with findings about cognitive resource allocation in the field of media psychology to examine how viewers’ eyes track across film footage. In particular, this study examines differences when viewing the same film sequences with and without sound. The authors suggest that eye tracking on its own is a technological tool that can be used to both reveal individual differences in experiencing cinema as well as to find psychophysiologically governed patterns of audience engagement.

This essay seeks to critically conceptualize the term geocultural space and the emerging field of study with which it is associated by exploring the various ways in which such space is currently being mapped by researchers using digital humanities tools and methods. In drawing together intersecting interests in Geographic Information Systems and spatio-cultural narratives and experiences, this work defines an interdisciplinary field of research that is gathering momentum as geolocative technologies that shape and reshape the ways in which we perceive and experience the world become increasingly prevalent in academic life and in the cultural mainstream.

The Cultural Atlas of Australia is an interactive digital map designed to meet the needs of anyone interested in tracing the ways in which Australian places and spaces have been represented in fictional texts. The foundation of the project is a representative sample of 150 prominent, contemporary feature films, novels and plays set in the Australian landscape.

The term ‘affect’ was not widely used in cinema studies until the 1990s, when it emerged in research at the intersection of film and philosophy. This overview will begin by establishing how Linda Williams’ important essay ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess’ (1991) conceptualizes the affective impact of film on the bodies of audience members. It will then examine changing approaches to affect, with particular attention to cognitivist accounts and to phenomenological film theorist Vivian Sobchack’s noteworthy intervention in the field.

This study of Julian Schnabel’s 2007 film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (hereafter referred to as Diving Bell) seeks to understand the cinematic articulation of compassion by examining how screen aesthetics and narrative content affect audiences and inform the construction of meaning. Drawing in part on philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s account of the ethical and social dimensions of compassion and on the semiotic approach to phenomenology pioneered by Vivian Sobchack, this analysis aims to further understandings of the ethics of affect, and to explore how film can express and invoke empathy and compassion.

Emotion is a crucial component of the film experience: it explicitly underpins genres such as comedy, tragedy, and horror, and it anchors the spectator to the screen through engagement with characters and the issues they confront. Emotion is also an indicator of value: emotional responses tell us something about the ethical, ideological, or aesthetic worth we perceive in a film, its narrative, and the people and events it represents. Indeed, Murray Smith argues that emotional engagement with characters is the main way film influences viewers’ beliefs, values, and ideologies. Smith’s essay ‘Altered States: Character and Emotional Response in the Cinema’ (1994) details emotion’s centrality to film reception. The following summary examines how Smith systematically develops an account of cinematic emotion. It then situates his influential work in relation to other perspectives, including those of Noël Carroll and Carl Plantinga...

CultureMap is the mobile app for the Cultural Atlas of Australia, a digital atlas that maps the locations of more than 200 films, novels, and plays that feature Australian spaces and places. You can use the CultureMap app to find narrative and filming locations near you, you can search for your favourite Australian stories to find out where they are set, or you can search by location to discover what stories have been set there. The app also features our Mapping Ecological Themes showcase, which focuses on films and novels that foreground ecological themes or are set in environmentally sensitive areas. CultureMap is co-funded through an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant and an Inspiring Australia: Unlocking Australia’s Potential grant.

Audience members reportedly convulsed with sobs during the gruelling survival thriller The Grey (Canahan, 2012) and fled screenings of the lucrative surveillance horror film, Paranormal Activity (Peli, 2007) and the nauseatingly visceral rape-revenge feature, Irreversible (Noë, 2002). Filmmakers have begun experimenting with sonic techniques that catalyse these deep-seated physiological reactions, and for researchers working at the interface of moral philosophy, neuroscience, and cinema studies, such responses provide raw data for understanding the ethical, neurological, and bodily reactions underpinning affective responses to film sound. With a focus on the use of sub-audible registers of sound (subsonics or infrasound), this paper considers how recent empirical findings and ethical considerations intervene in the established literature on affect in film-philosophy research. The use of sonic registers at or below the human threshold of conscious perception is believed to carry a powerful affective charge and opens up new avenues for the analysis of embodiment, spectatorship, and technology. This research examines how sound is felt as a physical vibration that can evoke a pervasive mood and trouble emotional reactions to film. Emotion itself has ethical salience as philosophers including Ronald de Sousa and Martha Nussbaum have argued; yet the ethical implications of attempts by filmmakers to use science and new media technologies for the purposes of manipulating the responses of audience members have yet to be explored. Working at the intersection of philosophical analysis and empirical findings, this study reflects on the ethical and aesthetic issues raised by the deployment of infrasound and neuroscientific research for audience manipulation.

An online interactive map and associated database including textual extracts and audiovisual material of film/novel/play locations in Australia.

Stadler reviews "New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images" by Robert Sinnerbrink, Continuum, 2011. pp. x + 247. ₤17.99 (pbk).

Analyses audience interface with the psychopathic protagonist of Michael Winterbottom’s “The killer inside me". Presents theories from neuroscience and finds that the concept of affectless empathy best describes this character. Contends that the physical and psychological distress recounted by spectators is caused in part by their epistemological alignment with an emotionless killer whose point of view is dominant. Explores the significance of motor mimicry in cinematic empathy.

The Cultural Atlas of Australia (CAA) is an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded digital geohumanities project that digitally maps representations of iconic landscapes and sites across Australian literary, theatrical, and cinematic narratives. The CAA has just entered its second year, with 2011 seeing the project team working to build a pilot digital map (accessible at CAA), preliminary data set, and database.

Cult film director Takashi Miike's hybrid homage Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) can be critiqued in terms of its derivative nature, its overstated affect, and its lack of psychological and thematic nuance – characteristics that are associated with ‘bad film’ genres such as the spaghetti western that Miike emulates and valorizes. The classification of texts as ‘bad film’ is often related to their exaggerated affective qualities and the cultural devaluation of emotion and bodily sensation by comparison with aesthetic and intellectual engagement. This article analyses Sukiyaki Western Django in terms of a phenomenology of affect, contending that the film deploys a kinetic, visceral cinematic aesthetic that is central to its meaning and to the relationship between the audience and the screen. The phenomenological method is used to level hierarchies of value, reappraise conceptions of bad film, and strip back the ingrained presuppositions of film theory. I argue that by bracketing traditional ways of understanding, phenomenology prompts a reassessment of how we make sense of cinema and a revaluation of the embodied role of the spectator.

In South Africa and in international markets, the media entertainment industry is heavily reliant on the popularity of screen violence: television series featuring crime and violence are regularly among the best-rated programmes; blockbuster movies showcasing violent action produce the highest box office revenue; and by 2008 the digital game industry revenue outstripped both the film and music industries, with global sales dominated by titles such as World of Warcraft (Gentile, et al. 2009; Piot, 2006; The Age, 2007). This is disturbing in light of findings by leading quantitative media effects researchers claiming that ‘the correlation between media violence and aggression is only slightly smaller than that between smoking and lung cancer’ (Bushman & Huesmann, 2001, p. 234–235). This alarming assertion about the dangers of screen violence is one perspective on how screen media affects young viewers. Other researchers argue that audiences understand the distinction between media texts and reality and that life is not like a game of ‘Simon Says’, in which we mimic what we see and do as we are told (Tulloch, 2000). It is widely acknowledged by experts in both qualitative and quantitative media research that ‘violent media are not necessary precursors to violence’ and ‘violent media are not sufficient to cause violent behaviour’; serious aggressive behaviour requires ‘the confluence of many causal factors’ such as community or domestic violence, parental neglect, poverty, mental health issues and low education (Anderson & Bushman, 2002, p. 448–449). As qualitative ethnographic studies and the uses and gratifications model of audience response show, the media are not all-powerful: viewers can choose what to watch and how to respond and many viewers value the creative freedom of media producers. Qualitative and quantitative research methodologies are often in tension, but they are understood in this chapter to be complementary means of acquiring knowledge.

As Tom O’ Regan states in his discussion of “Unities of Setting and Landscape” in Australian National Cinema, “It is a commonplace that landscape is central to Australian culture” (1). In order to explore the factors underpinning the seemingly commonplace intersection of land, culture and cinema, this article presents a regional study investigating ways of perceiving, mediating and interpreting the wilderness environment. It begins by identifying patterns of screen production and spatial representation in Tasmanian feature films (2), then examines two recurring modes of expression that dominate this landscape cinema and associated critical and industrial discourse: Gothic symbolism and environmentalism. Where the Gothic typically represents the landscape as a malevolent, awesome threat to humans, the environmentalist perspective perceives it to be threatened by us, yet these apparently disjunctive modes are frequently entangled.

The story of Alexander Pearce’s arduous journey through southwest Tasmania and the gruesome fate that befell his comrades on their famishing trek across the island state has been narrated many times in song, on the stage, in print, and on screen. Most famously, the story of Pearce’s escape with seven other convicts from the Sarah Island penitentiary in Macquarie Harbour in 1822 was told with dramatic license in novelist Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life. The historic convict narrative, itself grounded in actual events, was later renamed For the Term of His Natural Life and made into a film shot at Port Arthur in 1908 by Charles McMahon; remade in 1911 by Alfred Rolfe as The Life of Rufus Dawes; remade again in 1927 by Norman Dawn; then adapted once more as a TV miniseries in 1983 by Rob Stewart. Craig Godfrey later directed a straight-to-video, schlock horror-comedy called Back from the Dead (1996) at Port Arthur and Hobart, featuring the modern-day resurrection of a cannibalistic killer convict called Kavendish who was imprisoned in Port Arthur and who “is loosely based on Alexander Pearce.” Tracing Pearce’s Gaelic heritage, Barrie Dowdall filmed a documentary for Ireland’s Channel 4 titled Exile in Hell (2007). More recently the horror film Dying Breed (Jody Dwyer, 2008) imagines Pearce’s inbred descendents feasting on unwary travellers who venture into the wilderness in search of the Tasmanian Tiger. That same year Michael James Rowland directed a carefully researched, hour-long ABC docudrama called The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce. Finally, Tasmania writer-director Jonathan Auf der Heide teamed up with Melbourne cinematographer Ellery Ryan to film the beautifully crafted feature Van Diemen’s Land in 2009. This longitudinal case study brings together historical, aesthetic, and spatial perspectives on film to develop a geocritical analysis of Tasmanian cinema.

Media and society examines the role of the media in contemporary society and analyses representations of the world found in advertisements, film, television, photographs and language. It clearly presents theoretical approaches and includes many examples, definitions, issues questions and explanations to aid students’ understanding.

In this chapter we seek to interrogate the methods and assumptions underpinning geocriticism by engaging with and reframing dominant ways of analysing mediated representations of Australian space in cultural narratives, specifically film, literature, and theatre. What, we ask, might geocriticism contribute to the analysis of Australian texts in which location figures prominently? We argue a geocritical approach may provide an interdisciplinary framework that offers a way of identifying tropes across geographic regions and across media representations. Drawing on scholarship spanning Australian cinematic, literary and theatrical narratives, this chapter surveys published work in the field and posits that a refined geocritical mapping and analysis of the cultural terrain foregrounds the significance of geography to culture and draws different traditions of spatial enquiry into dialogue without privileging any particular textual form. We conclude by scoping possibilities for future research emerging from recent technological developments in interactive online cartography.

From sun-blasted desert heat so searing that the reek of carrion, stale beer, and sweat is almost palpable in Wake in Fright (Kotcheff, 1971) to the deep and silent green of the gloomy canopy of dank, interlocking branches in Van Diemen’s Land (Auf der Heide 2009), landscape often catalyses action in Australian film. Place frames identity and shapes our encounters with the world, as research on topology and dwelling by scholars as diverse as Jeff Malpas and Edward Casey acknowledges, yet cinematic landscapes form a special category of space that has received little attention by philosophers. Building on a phenomenological method of film analysis that has, to date, taken embodiment and affect as its chief concerns, this paper develops a phenomenology of screen space derived from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and his claim that space is existential, and existence is spatial. I question how the experiences of displacement, emplacement, and mobility in the cinema draw attention to what it means to have a sense of place, arguing that film landscapes contribute to the production of environmental and geographic knowledge and extend spatial understanding beyond the horizons of personal experience The screen represents the world and locates us within it yet it also, quite literally, screens what we see and hear and frames what we know. Interrogating the ethical and epistemological implications of the technologically mediated, synaesthetic experience of cinematic space is particularly important when geo-political concerns such as climate change and border control dominate the news. This paper, therefore, identifies received knowledge and attempts to set aside literary modes of analysis such as gothic symbolism, postcolonial critiques, and structuralist dichotomies on which film criticism has tended to rely in order to seek a new way of perceiving and understanding cinematic landscapes.

A study of three film-related books that approach their subject from a phenomenological perspective: - Documentary time: film and phenomenology (Malin Wahlberg); - The tactile eye: touch and the cinematic experience (Jennifer Barker), and; - Cinematic emotion in horror films and thrillers (Julian Hanich).

The slang terms Oreo (someone who looks black but acts white) and Topdeck (someone who looks white but acts black) draw on the language of popular culture to signify racial hybridity, superseding slurs such as ‘black honkie’ and ‘wigger’. Using the terms Oreo and Topdeck to frame the analysis, this article investigates how identity politics finds expression in language, youth media and popular culture. It questions how global media flows affect conceptions of black masculinity by contrasting cinematic representations of African-Americans and black Africans in Shaft and the South African film Hijack Stories, and by examining class, ethnicity and rap culture in 8 Mile. I argue that, as South African media culture reflexively reworks messages about black identities, it produces terminology and texts that neither simply reinforce nor resist racial stereotypes, but legitimate the diversification of blackness by making cultural transition and difference visible.

Pockets of Change collects fourteen essays that address issues of cultural adaptation and transition in the Arts. Based on insights into a range of primary texts and cultural practices—from visual art to film, from literature to theatre—these essays investigate the ways in which traditions, art-forms, cultures and ethics adapt to challenge established boundaries.

Cult film director Takashi Miike's hybrid homage Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) can be critiqued in terms of its derivative nature, its overstated affect, and its lack of psychological and thematic nuance – characteristics that are associated with ‘bad film’ genres such as the spaghetti western that Miike emulates and valorizes. The classification of texts as ‘bad film’ is often related to their exaggerated affective qualities and the cultural devaluation of emotion and bodily sensation by comparison with aesthetic and intellectual engagement. This article analyses Sukiyaki Western Django in terms of a phenomenology of affect, contending that the film deploys a kinetic, visceral cinematic aesthetic that is central to its meaning and to the relationship between the audience and the screen. The phenomenological method is used to level hierarchies of value, reappraise conceptions of bad film, and strip back the ingrained presuppositions of film theory. I argue that by bracketing traditional ways of understanding, phenomenology prompts a reassessment of how we make sense of cinema and a revaluation of the embodied role of the spectator.

This article explores how the imaginative use of the landscape in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008) intersects with the fantasy of Australianness that the film constructs. We argue the fictional Never-Never Land through which the film’s characters travel is an, albeit problematic, ‘indigenizing’ space that can be entered imaginatively through cultural texts including poetry, literature and film, or through cultural practices including touristic pilgrimages to landmarks such as Uluru and Kakadu National Park. These actual and virtual journeys to the Never-Never have broader implications in terms of fostering a sense of belonging and legitimating white presence in the land through affect, nostalgia and the invocation of an imagined sense of solidarity and community. The heterotopic concept of the Never-Never functions to create an ahistorical, inclusive space that grounds diverse conceptions of Australianness in a shared sense of belonging and home that is as mythical, contradictory and wondrous as the idea of the Never-Never itself. The representations of this landscape and the story of the characters that traverse it self-consciously construct a relationship to past events and to film history, as well as constructing a comfortable subject position for contemporary Australians to occupy in relation to the land, the colonial past, and the present.

Cinema is central to the mediation of history and the construction of imaginative geographies that offer a politicized view of the land and its people. This article investigates cinematic representations of landscape and analyses the ways in which maps and journeys in Charles Chauvel’s film Jedda (1955) and Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008)—both set in the far North of Australia—articulate conceptions of “Australianness” in relationship to Indigeneity and the land. We argue the exotic tropics and arid outback regions of northern Australia function metonymically as representative of the nation in these films, working to naturalize ideological values and affirm dominant narratives of history, identity, and entitlement.

This chapter defines and overviews the concept of 'genre' in the context of contemporary screen studies. Using recent examples from film and television, including a case study of popular US television series Grey’s Anatomy, the chapter is divided into two main parts. The first part discusses what genre is, how it operates (in theory and in practice), and the roles of the different stake-holders throughout the life cycle of a genre text; the second part overviews six key approaches to studying genre, namely structuralist, aesthetic, political economy, socio-cultural, family resemblances, and discursive approaches. Ultimately, the chapter discusses 'genre' as an intuitive category negotiated between audiences and the screen media industries and demonstrates this negotiation with a new diagram of genre.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of stardom and celebrity in contemporary popular culture, focusing on the screen media industries. The chapter begins by looking at the emergence of celebrity culture in the early twentieth century, before examining what constitutes 'stardom' or 'celebrity', what role stars and celebrities play for the screen media and entertainment industries, and how audiences engage with them. The chapter then overviews three key approaches to studying celebrity—specifically, the semiotic, ideological, and political economy approaches—before concluding with a case study of Leonardo DiCaprio.

The review and analysis of the Australian film 'The Proposition' directed by John Hillcoat is discussed. The film depicts the Australian outback landscape and the violence and dispossession that mark the land's colonial history.

Review of the book "Tourism and the branded city: Film and identity on the Pacific Rim" by Stephanie Hemelryk Donald and John G. Gammack, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007

"Traditionally books on film or media studies address either film or television, rarely treating them together. Screen Media follows the increasing tendency in tertiary teaching to see film and television as part of a broader field of screen studies. Using wide ranging international examples, and by making clear the links between screen theory and creative practice, it offers undergraduate students the analytical and theoretical vocabulary they need to articulate their ideas about film and television. Topics covered include the historical emergence of screen media and the particularly modern idea of seeing as believing', the commodification of screen media and its role in mediating between individual and society; comparisons and contrasts between the technical and analytical conventions of both media forms; screenwriting, narrative structure, and genre; and the context of reception and the nature of audience responses to various screen texts. Including chapter summaries, discussion questions, and suggestions for further reading, Screen Media is an ideal introduction for undergraduate students to critical engagement with film and television"

In order to address issues of policy coherence research must first question how the mass media might contribute to education and poverty reduction. The media can be educational in its own right, but in a broader sense it can also inform perceptions of and attitudes towards education, educators and socio-economic inequity. Rather than suggesting that policy should be used directly to govern media content, this research indicates that policy might more productively establish guidelines for best practice, informing the development of and access to media technologies, media literacy and media content in the education sector and in the wider community. This chapter argues that the specific area that requires coherence in terms of the media’s role in and impact on education and development involves fostering a culture in which the different stakeholders – educators and academic researchers, media practitioners, policy-makers, corporate citizens and members of the public – work together towards mutual goals. It is the role of policy to guide and co-ordinate this process, and to clarify the goals we strive to attain...

"Traditionally books on film or media studies address either film or television, rarely treating them together. Screen Media follows the increasing tendency in tertiary teaching to see film and television as part of a broader field of screen studies. Using wide ranging international examples, and by making clear the links between screen theory and creative practice, it offers undergraduate students the analytical and theoretical vocabulary they need to articulate their ideas about film and television. Topics covered include the historical emergence of screen media and the particularly modern idea of seeing as believing', the commodification of screen media and its role in mediating between individual and society; comparisons and contrasts between the technical and analytical conventions of both media forms; screenwriting, narrative structure, and genre; and the context of reception and the nature of audience responses to various screen texts. Including chapter summaries, discussion questions, and suggestions for further reading, Screen Media is an ideal introduction for undergraduate students to critical engagement with film and television"