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Author: Smaill, Belinda
PhysDes: Article
Subject: DOCUMENTARY FILMS. AUSTRALIA; ASIANS IN FILMS. AUSTRALIA; ETHNIC GROUPS AND THE CINEMA; PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF FILMS; FINISHED PEOPLE, THE (AT, Khoa Do, 2003); LETTERS TO ALI (AT, Clara Law, 2004); SADNESS: A MONOLOGUE BY WILLIAM YANG (AT, Tony Ayres, 1999); CHINESE TAKEAWAY (AT, Mitzi Goldman, 2002)
Summary: Documentary is a genre not widely understood through its capacity to engage the emotions. This article works to acknowledge the affective labour performed by documentary and, more specifically, the way emotions give meaning to documentary subjects. The analysis explores the production of Asian Australian subjects as documentary authors in four prominent films produced over the previous decade: Chinese Takeaway (Mitzi Goldman, 2002), Sadness: A Monologue by William Yang (Tony Ayres, 1999), The Finished People (Khoa Do, 2003) and Letters to Ali (Clara Law. 2004). These texts allow for a fruitful examination of the way the emotions that shape the expression of these author-subjects, such as mourning and care, might impact on the documentary representation of cultural otherness. Asian Australian subjectivity coalesces in and around these texts in a manner that is founded on the activity of mourning. Included here are not only the bereavements of loved ones, but also the losses that are bound to the movements of modernity, such as the lost fullness which is the promise of diaspora, the failure or absence of universal citizenship and the lack of safety in life lived in advanced capitalism. This article explores not only the absences suggested in these films, but also how these absences present a site of ethical encounter for the viewer that both resists reducing and assimilating the Asian Australian author to a devalued ethnic other while also addressing a community of viewers through a relation of reciprocity based in caring attachments to the social realm. -- Abstract
Notes: Part of Special Issue: Transnational Asian Australian Cinema. Part 1

Author: Brook, Scott
PhysDes: Article
Subject: ASIANS AND THE CINEMA. AUSTRALIA; ASIANS IN FILMS. AUSTRALIA; NATIONAL CULTURE AND THE CINEMA. AUSTRALIA; FINISHED PEOPLE, THE (AT, Khoa Do, 2003)
Summary: This article considers the production of the independent feature The Finished People (Khoa Do, 2003) in terms of a key factor reviewers and critics chose to play down: namely, that the director sought to capture public interest in Cabramatta (a suburb in Sydney's south west promoted as Australia's ‘most multicultural suburb’) in order to lift a Community Cultural Development (CCD) project out of the suburbs and deliver it to audiences of art-house cinema. While the film's representational strategies clearly reflect a tradition of independent Asian Australian cinema that critically negotiates the identity politics of state-sponsored multiculturalism, the film's mode of production had less to do with the avant-garde agendas reviewers compared it with, and more to do with an enduring governmental regime of pastoral pedagogy dedicated to the correction of ‘at risk’ subjects. Furthermore, the project strongly anticipated recent policy reforms to CCD initiated by the Australia Council for the Arts in 2004. Under the flexible rubric ‘Creative Communities’ these reforms seek to steer CCD workers away from cultural development as a narrow target of government intervention, and towards a more open and flexible range of policy goals and objectives. A close reading of the film's context of production reveals how such a policy shift might be expected to increase opportunities for local content to move between fields of cultural production, even as it multiplies dilemmas of formal accountability and aesthetic evaluation. -- Abstract
Notes: Part of Special Issue: Transnational Asian Australian Cinema, part 2

Author: Khoo, Olivia
PhysDes: Article
Subject: MULTICULTURALISM AND THE CINEMA. AUSTRALIA; ASIANS AND THE CINEMA. AUSTRALIA; NATIONAL CULTURE AND THE CINEMA. AUSTRALIA; REALISM IN FILMS. AUSTRALIA; ETHICS AND THE CINEMA; JAMMED, THE (AT, Dee McLachlan, 2007); FINISHED PEOPLE, THE (AT, Khoa Do, 2003); RA CHOI (AT, M. Frank, 2005)
Summary: This article examines the use of realist aesthetics in three Australian films, Dee McLachlan's The jammed (2007), Khoa Do's The Finished People (2003) and M. Frank's Ra Choi (2005) as a way of creating ‘value’ within the terms of an Australian national cinema. ‘These films, among other examples of an emergent Asian Australian cinema’, deploy techniques of realism to build an authenticity of experience for spectators, unfamiliar with seeing portrayals of Asian Australians on screen. This article will consider what is at stake in the accepted, and often replicated, relationship between multiculturalism and realism characterizing filmic representations of Asian Australians, and will shift the focus to explore the place of idealism in the creation of value. By examining the aesthetics of what I will call ‘multicultural realism’ I aim to consider how these stylistic strategies seek to politicize certain representations over others in the films' attempt to build an alternative vision of the Australian nation and its diasporic constituents. -- Abstract
Notes: Part of Special Issue: Transnational Asian Australian Cinema. Part 1

Call No: 761 SMA
Author: Smaill, Belinda
Source: UK
Place: Basingstoke, England
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
PubDate: 2010
PhysDes: vii, 221 p. : ill. ; 23 cm
Subject: ASIAN COUNTRIES; CHILDREN AND THE CINEMA; CHILDREN IN FILMS; CULTURE AND THE CINEMA; DOCUMENTARIES; DOCUMENTARIES. AUSTRALIA; EMOTION IN FILMS; FEMINISM AND THE CINEMA; IDENTITY IN FILMS; IDEOLOGY AND THE CINEMA; IMMIGRATION IN FILMS AND TELEVISION; PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CINEMA; REALITY TV; SEX IN FILMS; SOCIAL PROBLEMS IN FILMS; THEORY; VIEWERS; WOMEN FILMMAKERS; LOVELACE, LINDA; BORN INTO BROTHELS: CALCUTTA'S RED LIGHT KIDS (II/US, Zana Briski, Ross Kauffman, 2004); CORPORATION, THE (CN, Jennifer Abbott & Mark Achbar, 2003); DAY I WILL NEVER FORGET, THE (UK, Kim Longinotto, 2002); DIVORCE IRANIAN STYLE (UK, Kim Longinotto & Ziba Mir-Hosseini, 1998); ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM (US, Alex Gibney, 2005); FINISHED PEOPLE, THE (AT, Khoa Do, 2003); FIX: THE STORY OF AN ADDICTED CITY (CN, Nettie Wild, 2002); INSIDE DEEP THROAT (US, Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato, 2005); LETTERS TO ALI (AT, Clara Law, 2004); SADNESS: A MONOLOGUE BY WILLIAM YANG (AT, Tony Ayres, 1999); SEX: THE ANNABEL CHONG STORY (CN, Gough Lewis, 1999)
Summary: "The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture proposes that emotions such as pleasure, hope, pain, empathy or nostalgia play a powerful role in the circulation and reception of documentaries. Emotion shapes how political issues and individuals are represented and perceived in documentary and it is crucial to how we engage with the vicissitudes of the public sphere. In the past documentary has been popularly perceived in ways that align it with education, science, history and the rational realm. This frame has never been adequate for understanding the broad array of styles and themes that can be seen in the documentary genre. Focusing on the question of subjectivity, Smail analyses various different kinds of individuals that can be found in documentaries, such as the female porn star, the politically disenfranchised, children, and the documentary auteur. She envisages an interdisciplinary approach to documentary drawing on scholarship from not only film studies, but also gender studies, queer theory, cultural theories of affect, critical race studies, political theory and pyschoanalysis. " -- BOOK BLURB
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 200-209) and index
ISBN: 9780230237513 (hbk.)
Contents: -- list of illustrations -- acknowledgments -- part one: documentary and pleasure -- 1: introduction: representation and documentary emotion -- 2: pleasure and disgust: desire and the female porn star -- part two: pain and the other -- 3: Injury, identity and recognition: Rize and Fix: the story of an addicted city -- 4: women, pain and the documentaries of Kim Longinotto -- part three: the labour of authorship: caring and mourning -- 5: loss and care: Asian Australian documentary -- 6: civic love and contemporary dissent documentary -- part four: past, present and future: hope and nostalgia -- 7: children, futurity and hope: Born into Brothels -- 8:nostalgia, historical time and reality television: the idol series -- epilogue -- notes -- bibliography -- index --

Call No: S FIN
Author: Do, Khoa; Anderson, Rodney; Le, John; McGoldrick, Jason; Dinh, Mylinh; Italiano, Daniela; Vongmany, Sarah; McDonald, Shane
PubDate: 2003
PhysDes: 65 p.
Subject: FINISHED PEOPLE, THE (AT, Khoa Do, 2003)
Notes: Unpublished script; Donated by the Australian Film Institute

Call No: TITLE CLIPPINGS FILE
PhysDes: Clippings; Press kit
Subject: FINISHED PEOPLE, THE (AT, Khoa Do, 2003)

Author: Grace, Helen
PhysDes: Article
Subject: ASIANS AND THE CINEMA. AUSTRALIA; NATIONAL CULTURE AND THE CINEMA. AUSTRALIA; ASIANS IN FILMS. AUSTRALIA; LANDSCAPES IN FILMS. AUSTRALIA; LITTLE FISH (AT, Rowan Woods, 2005); FINISHED PEOPLE, THE (AT, Khoa Do, 2003); LUCKY MILES (AT, Michael James Rowland, 2007)
Summary: :In considering three films that I link in this speculation on ‘Asian Australian cinema’, I want to argue that if, before The Finished People (Khoa Do, 2003), Asian Australian stories tended to be marginal and community based, the success of Khoa Do's film (and life) has opened out migrant experience to broader empathy so that now it can be drawn upon to speak for general humanity beyond ‘Australianness’. If The Finished People and Little Fish (Rowan Wood, 2005) belong to a period of film industry decline in Australia, corresponding with a parallel social/cultural depression in Australia — the worst of the Howard years — Lucky Miles (Michael James Rowland, 2007) reworks the trauma of those years, as a new Back of Beyond (John Heyer, 1954) — globalized rather than nationalized, its references less to the subsistence aesthetics and economy of postwar nation-building and more to a globalized commodities export market and the genres of global film-making styles. So we no longer need to have quintessential ‘Australian’ battlers to demonstrate resilience; asylum seekers are now better at doing this and much more appealing than Aussie battlers (like the Heart family in Little Fish, notwithstanding the attempt to rescue them by importing global/local stars to perform their abjection) — all the more so if one of the refugees has come in search of his Australian father And if the landscape of the original Back of Beyond provided a counterpoint to the economic centrality of suburban Australia as site of commodity consumption in the 1950s, the Pilbara landscape setting of Lucky Miles is above all a key site of commodity production and export in the globalized economy which also draws the characters to export themselves into the flow of this market. -- Abstract
Notes: Part of Special Issue: Transnational Asian Australian Cinema, part 2