University of Tasmania, Australia

Ms Pauline Marsh

Riawunna RHD Candidate

Contact Details

Thesis Title

A Cinematic Campfire: Imagining and Enacting Reconciliation through Australian Feature Film, 2000-2010.

Using actor Tom E. Lewis’s metaphor of cinema as a campfire as a starting point, I examine the intersubjective cross-cultural encounters in films that explicitly deal with the relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. With a sensitivity to Australia’s broad, conflicted and persistent reconciliation process, my research explores a number of Australian feature films released between 2000-2010. Collaborative production and reception practices that resonate strongly with the ideals and practices of a reconciling nation are also analysed.

I approach filmmaking and film viewing as a method and means of sharing stories, ideas and imaginings, and as a mode of cultural expression through which meanings are generated dialogically—through the verbal, visual, and/or emotional dimensions that cinema encompasses. I propose that a new paradigm in Australian cinema now exists: Reconciliation Cinema. This body of work is a conglomeration of drama, intrigue, surprise, trauma, sorrow and celebration; and the metaphorical campfire where new meanings and understandings about long-standing issues of cross-cultural realities in Australia are negotiated and re-negotiated.