About

A season of early Australian cinema showcasing the roles that women played in front of the camera and in film production. The program strands 'Thoroughly Modern' and 'Adorable Outcasts' respectively explore the creation of a modern national identity and cinematic fantasies of the exotic through images of women. Silent films will be accompanied on the Gallery's Wurlitzer Style 260 theatre organ.

LECTURE
Sun 6 May 2.30pm / Cinema A

Professor Jill Julius Matthews, Head of the School of Cultural Inquiry at the Australian National University, Canberra, will discuss the multiple relationships between Australian women and moving pictures in the first decades of the twentieth century. Author of Dance Hall & Picture Palace: Sydney's Romance with Modernity (2005), Mathews is also currently working with other scholars on the project 'Mapping the Movies: The changing nature of Australia's cinema circuits and their audiences 1956-1984'. Drawing on popular culture and early film, she will trace women's pleasure in the role of viewer, as well as their work in front of and behind the camera, and in the front and back rooms of the theatre and will explore how movies made us modern.

QAGOMA acknowledges the generous assistance of the National Film and Sound Archive Australia, Canberra for providing film prints and film notes for the program. Program curated by Kathryn Weir, Australian Cinémathèque.

List of Works

• Thoroughly Modern: Women in Early Australian Cinema
• The Woman Suffers (incomplete) 1918 | Director: Raymond Longford
• The Sentimental Bloke 1919 | Director: Raymond Longford
• A Girl of the Bush 1921 | Director: Franklyn Barrett
• Silks and Saddles 1921 | Director: John Wells
• Sunshine Sally (incomplete) 1922 | Director: Lawson Harris
• The Cheaters 1929–30 | Director: Paulette McDonagh
• Showgirl's Luck 1930 | Director: Norman Dawn
• Adorable Outcasts: Women in Early Australian Cinema
• The Jungle Woman 1926 | Director: Frank Hurley
• The Adorable Outcast (aka Black Cargo of the South Seas) 1928 | Director: Norman Dawn
• The Romance of Runnibede 1928 | Director: Scott R Dunlap
• Lovers and Luggers 1936 | Director: Ken G Hall
• Uncivilised 1936 | Director: Charles Chauvel