Rebecca Harkins-Cross moves deftly between the images on the screen (and the voices on the soundtrack) and the life of the filmmaker in her essay about Corinne Cantrill’s experimental, autobiographical film In This Life’s Body. Tristen Harwood takes the scenic route in his essay on Mad Max, taking in settler violence and capitalism – and calls a section of his essay “Personal Narrative”.

Isabella Trimboli writes about the Carlton Underground of the sixties, unhobbled by deference or nostalgia for the glorious bohemian past: all those movies with angsty male heroes. In the same vein, Mish Grigor points out that Death in Brunswick has not aged well: it actually seemed not unproblematic back then, even by the unenlightened standards of 1990. Not problematic is Barbara Creed’s groundbreaking Homosexuality: A Film for Discussion, written about here by Kate Jinx, a film that can still move with its sense of openness and decency – the poignant reasonableness of the liberation movement.

John Safran provides background more than criticism in his piece about Oz, Chris Löfvén’s daggy, loveable 1976 version of The Wizard of Oz, with Dorothy off to see the last concert by the Wizard, a gender-bending rock and roller, accompanied by a brainless surfie, a cowardly member of the Lions bikie gang, and a heartless motor mechanic. (Like Mad Max, it is a movie that spends as much time in the hinterland as it does in the city.) The background is fun, film gossip: “‘Bruce [Spence] was so peed off he refused to be involved in the marketing and promotion,’ Chris says ‘… An a-hole from start to finish.’”

Martin Flanagan also gives background to The Story of the Kelly Gang, filling us in on that obscure, 1906 historical episode to which not enough attention has been paid, and talks about Kelly’s cultural afterlife, without even mentioning the Mick Jagger / Tony Richardson or Heath Ledger / Gregor Jordan movies.

Loading

Does a picture of Melbourne emerge from these essays and these movies? Up to a point: Melbourne in these films is a multicultural city, a bohemian city, a city – and a culture – not yet gentrified (here’s my cine-memoir: rewatching the movies back to back, I found myself boggling at all that cheap inner-suburban housing).

The leafy green eastern suburbs and their inhabitants seem somehow to have escaped the filmmakers’ gaze, though it is their children at play in those shared households, perhaps. Nowadays, it seems that when Melbourne appears on film, it is mostly pretending to be somewhere else.

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.