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The Air of the Time: Breathing On the Beach.
Helen Grace, School of Cultural Histories and Futures, University of Western Sydney, Nepean
| [ Go to this paper in the timetable ] |
In the first issue of Continuum, Tom O'Regan suggests that 'the 1950s period in Australian filmmaking is simultaneously all too familiar and all too unfamiliar.' It is, he says, a 'period which is more often than not important for what did not happen than for what did' and he observes that local cinema exhibition and distribution withdrew from film production, which left local producers disenfranchised, forcing them to do culturally inauthentic "location films" or low-budget work, which suffered due to its undercapitalisation. Taking off from this sense of the period as being more important for what did not happen than for what did, this presentation will concern itself with the mood of the 1950s and in particular, the air of Melbourne, in the context of Stanley Kramer's 1959 film, *On the Beach*. This is a film in which the air is a central character: the air of Melbourne - languid, lethargic, stifling, the air of a backwater, occasionally refreshed by a storm, or a sea breeze across the Bay; the air of the rest of the world - poisonous, deadly and slowly moving towards us; the air of the stars & their observation (which is reminiscent of current Sydney press fascination with sitings of Tom & Nicole.) In millennial Australia, the setting of 'Howard's End', has this air returned to us?
