Melbourne Writers Festival Blog

This year the Melbourne Writers Festival has a blog, which is already up and running. One of the contributers is Angela Meyer, who wrote to all the participating authors in the festival a while back and asked them to send her short pieces that might fit under one or more themes chosen by Angela, who would then post anthologies of these pieces under each heading on the blog. I wrote something on 'Passion', 'Time', 'Mornings', and 'Listening' (though there's no guarantee that all of these will appear: Angela has editorial control, and may choose to omit particular entries depending on how everything fits together).

The first two sets of themed posts have already appeared: The first is on 'Passion', and it includes some observations of mine on Paul Schrader and Robert Bresson. The second group is on 'The last film you saw ...' (Kathy Charles on Alan Parker is particularly good). I'll post links to future entries in this series too (whether or not I appear in them), because I think it's a great idea. Kudos to Angela for putting it all together.

Melbourne Writers Festival: Modern Dystopia

I shall be appearing at this year's Melbourne Writers Festival, on a panel with Booker-Prize winning author DBC Pierre, whose new novel Lights Out in Wonderland is about to be published. The panel is on Modern Dystopia, and it takes place at 4 p.m. on Sunday 29 August at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Tickets are on sale now.

UPDATE: You can now download a podcast of this session. I have also uploaded the relevant section of the audio and added some further written discussion of the ideas raised in our discussion here.

Interview on 'The Comic Spot'

I will be a guest on 'The Comic Spot' radio show on 3CR in Melbourne this Thursday afternoon (15 July) at about 5.30 p.m. You can listen in Sydney via streaming (as I do!).

Five Wounds: Various Reviews

A round-up of several different reviews of Five Wounds: 

A very positive assessment at M/C Reviews by Samantha Hagaman (an extract below):  

It really is a case of mirrors within mirrors and themes upon themes in Five Wounds; even the very riddle-like nature of the novel’s illustrations relates to Gabriella’s stunted ability to read prophecies of the future. It requires a great scope of imagination to create an artwork such as Five Wounds, and it’s well worth taking a look and being inspired by Walker’s and Hallett’s collaboration. 

A mixed review in The Big Issue by Jen Breach (online version at her site; extract below):  

Jonathan Walker has successfully created a grubby and brutal otherwordly tone reminiscent of Patrick Suskind's Perfume. Dan Hallett's illustrations are either beautifully detailed and constrained or loose and distrubing, but always in synch with the text. 

And finally, at Radio National's The Book Show, a (more or less) negative review from Simon Keck, but one that includes the irresistible description of Five Wounds as 'nerdy historian fan fiction'.

Inspirations: The Charge of the Light Brigade by Tony Richardson (animations by Richard Williams)

Above is a compilation of several animated sequences (created by Richard Williams), which appear in Tony Richardson's The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). The film in general, and the animations in particular, were a big influence on my first book, Pistols! Treason! Murder! In the film, these sequences punctuate the live action sections, and provide a satirical commentary on events. Below I discuss these animations in an extract from the chapter I contributed to Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn (Re-enactment History), edited by Paul Pickering and Iain McCalman (see here for further discussion of this chapter).

Consider Tony Richardson’s underrated film, The Charge of the Light Brigade, made in 1968 and set during the Crimean War in the mid-nineteenth-century. Richardson is immediately faced with the challenge of authenticity. Is telling a story set in the nineteenth century by means of modern media (that is, moving pictures intended for projection upon a cinema screen) an anachronism? Most complaints on the issue of anachronism concern questions of content or mentality—the latter usually involving the attribution of modern attitudes and beliefs to historical characters. The idea of formal anachronism is rarely raised.

The Charge of the Light Brigade is punctuated with animated sequences—made by Richard Williams—that are its most brilliant coup. These are very obviously not realistic at all, at one level. On the contrary, they consist of moving allegorical tableaux that dramatise relations between the European nation-states (the English lion and bulldog, the French cockerel, the Russian bear). However, their style is realistic in the sense that it invokes the satirical cartoons from the magazine Punch or the etchings that Phiz created for Dickens’ novels—and also perhaps their eighteenth-century forebears, William Hogarth and James Gillray. Considered as pastiche, the animations are lovingly detailed, and their tone faithfully reproduces the imperialist rhetoric of the mid-Victorian era. But they are not just pastiche. Something has been added to the original sources: most obviously, the simple fact of animation, but with it has come a different attitude, a kind of detachment and self-conscious manipulation of hindsight that is (by definition) absent from the primary sources. Very quickly, the integrity of the representation is (deliberately) undermined, as unified tableaux disintegrate into collaged fragments in a way that anticipates techniques later used by Terry Gilliam in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Anachronism is deployed as a critical technique.

For Fredric Jameson, the unwillingness or incapacity to acknowledge anachronism is one of the fundamental characteristics of pastiche. To put this in positive rather than negative terms, one of the achievements of pastiche is to actively suppress the concept of anachronism. By contrast, deliberate use of anachronism, and especially of formal anachronism, is a central feature of The Charge of the Light Brigade, in which the tension—even the contradiction—between modern methods of storytelling and the very different narrative techniques used by people in the past is a creative tension. The only unforgivable error would be to pretend that this tension did not exist–as pastiche does. History exists to map the fault lines between the past and the present, rather than to paper over the cracks.

Pistols! Treason! Murder!: Interview on Radio National's Late Night Live

Another one from the archives: This interview was originally broadcast on Radio National's Late Night Live, in February 2007, for the Australian release of Pistols! Treason! Murder!



The interview refers to my facetious manifesto on 'punk history', as discussed here.