AustLit

'This article introduces the nine articles that comprise the 'Cities' issue of Studies in Australasian Cities. Established and emerging scholars explore cities in Australian and New Zealand film and television. Articles cover aspects of media production, reception and exhibition in particular cities, studies of various city characters and spaces, and analyses of the relationship between representations of a city on-screen and the 'real' city.' (Editor's abstract)

'Australian film and television production is concentrated in two principal cities, Sydney and Melbourne, and dispersed among the metropolitan centres of Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth and the next rung of cities and regions including the Gold Coast, Canberra, Hobart and Darwin among others. National and international integration is reshaping the relations among, the television programming taking place within, and the production capabilities and infrastructures of these cities. This article considers the national distribution of screen production capabilities and how media design interests in their coordination, development and control of production activity interact with location interests seeking to sustain production work across these cities.' (Editor's abstract)

'Television is a complex entity, more than even a technology and a cultural form. The recent 'spatial' turn in media research opens the way to a new understanding of the early years of regular television broadcasting in Brisbane. Television has its own set of physical and social geographies which this article traces. These have many overlapping and distinct sites, which are addressed. Analysis is organized around two main nodes, those of the city and those of the home. We also emphasize their many points of interaction and linkage.' (Editor's abstract)

'Underbelly (2008), Screentime's $10.4 million, thirteen-part dramatization of the so-called 'Gangland Wars' from 1995 to 2004, tracing the rise and fall of career criminal Carl Williams, showcases a Melbourne largely unseen on the screen. That so much of Underbelly is shot on location means that its sets are the real spaces and places of Melbourne, overlaid with the scripted drama of what may have occurred there. This provides a new way of mapping the city, crime by crime, over time, a new way of understanding the Melbourne that the Kennett Government remade throughout the 1990s as an 'entrepreneurial city'. It is our argument that it is this 'entrepreneurial' Melbourne that is being re-presented in Underbelly. Kennett's entrepreneurial city is the context in which Williams operates and the philosophy to which he ascribes during his takeover of Melbourne's drug trade. Drawing on examples from the 2008 Underbelly series, newspaper reports, Silvester and Rule's 2008 repackaging of their underworld reports and a mixture of neo-liberal and entrepreneurial theory, this article explores Melbourne's construction as an entrepreneurial city and how this has been represented, repackaged and experienced in a way Kennett himself could never have foreseen, through the Underbelly television series and the new markets this has opened.' (Editor's abstract)

'The Gold Coast has a crime problem, which will not come as a surprise to the viewers of the films and television programmes that feature Australia's sixth largest city. The vast majority of material set on the Gold Coast has criminal themes. The Gold Coast is an imagined city created, to a large degree, by a multiplicity of moving image artefacts produced by visitors. From the miles of amateur footage shot by tourists to pseudo-Hollywood blockbusters, the Gold Coast exists as a surf and sun paradise, at least in the minds of audiences around the world. However, analysis of a variety of moving image products suggests that not far behind the glitz and glamour of the beach-based boosterism is the grimy flip side of crime, corruption and desperation. This imagined paradise is encircled by sharks, both from the sea and the land. But the crime themes explored so far by the Gold Coast film industry do not address the real transgressions on which the city is founded, neither the deals that saw a city built on sand and swamp nor the dispossession of the original inhabitants.' (Editor's abstract)

'Australian feature films featuring gay male characters have consistently defined the inner-city - and particularly the inner-city of Sydney - as a gay space. This article examines a range of such films within the historical context of the emergence of gay male community and culture in Sydney. While this history reveals the complex and contested nature of gay men's connections to the city, on-screen depictions have tended to mask such complexity in favour of a simplistic urban/gay versus rural/straight divide. By repeatedly exploring gay life in inner-city spaces through the eyes of heterosexual, rural visitors, Australian films have developed and replicated discourses that have seen Sydney defined as the 'true' home of gay male community and culture.' (Editor's abstract)

'Monkey Grip is viewed as a film that evokes the sexual politics of feminism and of city life, and can thus be seen as both a feminist film and a 'Melbourne film', a convergence that emerges in other films made and set in Melbourne, including Love and Other Catastrophes. The city appears as a centre of dwelling and habitation, with attention drawn to the spectacle of the interiors of the residences, in which much of the action occurs, and with reflection on the conditions and values of production. Bachelard's notion of the house image is applied to distinguish the performances of gender from those in films in non-urban settings.' (Editor's abstract)