Environmental Exchanges Seminar Series - Belinda Smaill

Launching in February 2022, the Environmental Exchanges Seminar Series is an opportunity to showcase and discuss innovative new research that engages with key themes in environmental history. On 9 August 2023, the Centre for Environmental History at ANU held their first Environmental Exchanges Seminar for second semester on the theme 'extraction'.
From Extraction to Wilderness: The Last Wild River and Rethinking the Transformations of 1970s Australian Film Culture
The 1970s was a pivotal time for Australian cinema and for the nation’s environmental movement. Much is now known about how, in the 1970s, a new culture of narrative feature film, exemplified by Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1976), looked to the Australian bush and the outback as it formulated a distinctive national cinema. While this cinema tied national identity to the landscape, filmmakers and activists interested in documentary turned to the natural world in a different way, politicising images and contesting uses of the environment that had come before. The successful battle to save the Franklin River from hydro development has been well chronicled, as has the revival of the feature film industry. Offering new insights into an unwritten dimension of the nation’s audio-visual heritage, this talk examines the films that supported the Franklin campaign. It charts the depictions of resource extraction that were widespread in mid-century filmmaking and argues that a changing idea about the environment emerged in sound and image with the cycle of films produced prior and during the campaign. It addresses the little discussed dialogue between histories of film and environmental history.
Belinda Smaill is Professor of Film and Screen Studies at Monash University. She has been researching nonfiction and documentary screen culture for more than two decades. Recently her work has focused on the ethical, cultural and institutional issues that pertain to the presentation of the environment and biodiversity on screen. She is the author of The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture (2010) and Regarding Life: Animals and the Documentary Moving Image (2016). She has published widely in international journals including Screen, Camera Obscura and the Journal of Environmental Media. She is currently lead investigator on the ARC funded project, 'Remaking the Australian Environment Through Documentary Film and Television'.
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