Dr Adrian Martin
- PhD (Monash)
- Senior Research Fellow
- Contact details
Background
Since 1979, Dr. Adrian Martin has combined work as a professional writer and film critic with a university career. He was film reviewer for The Age between 1995 and 2006. For his numerous books, essays and public lectures he has won the Byron Kennedy Award (Australian Film Institute) and the Pascall Prize for Critical Writing, and his PhD on film style won the Mollie Holman Award. He is the author of four books and hundreds of essays on film, art, television, literature, music, popular and avant-garde culture.
Research Interests
I would describe my approach to cinema, television and indeed all art forms as a ‘cultural aesthetics’ – I am interested in cultural fads and trends, in social histories and political contexts, but I believe we can only speak well and meaningfully about any of these if we pay close attention to how cultural works actually, materially look and sound – not to mention how they make us feel. My tastes in cinema are very wide and diverse, since I believe in the importance of global cinema, and in cinema’s past. I have looked into Australian, American, European and Asian cinemas; I have studied genres including musical, melodrama, thriller and art film; I have analysed great auteurs from Sergio Leone and Fritz Lang to Hou Hsiao-hsien and Terrence Malick; I have an abiding interest in all marginal, underground and avant-garde cinemas. As a writer, I am also deeply invested in the ways, means, conditions and histories of critical discourse itself, and so I have spent most of my life piecing together international histories of theory and criticism.
Selected Publications
This book (1998) appeared in the British Film Institute’s monumental Modern Classics series. It is about a film I have loved since I first saw it in 1984: Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, a sad, epic testament, long developed, that turned out to be his final work. In the book, I try to cover many aspects of this magisterial movie in a vivid, condensed form of writing: its production, its style, Leone’s career, De Niro’s acting, the many films this one has influenced. Australia’s greatest non-fiction writer, Meaghan Morris, wrote a tribute to this book in Meanjin magazine.
This anthology (2003) about the current state of global cinema and our intelligent love for it, co-edited with the great US critic Jonathan Rosenbaum and published by the British Film Institute, is widely cited internationally: Politics and Culture (US) called it “the most influential recent work on contemporary cinephilia”, and Kamera (UK) remarked “everyone who cares about the movies should read this important book”. It has inspired film programs and conferences in Spain, Argentina, Croatia and the US. Sections of the book have appeared in eight languages, and a full Spanish edition is forthcoming from Chile in 2008.
This book (2003) was commissioned by for the prestigious ‘Australian Screen Classics’ series co-published by Currency Press and ScreenSound. It was reviewed positively in various Australian publications, from The Bulletin to Screening the Past (“it will undoubtedly take its place on the shelves of Australian film scholarship” … “a fascinating study that says so many things and moves in so many directions”). The book combines aesthetic, cultural and industrial approaches to a major achievement of Australian cinema. It is used as set reading for a ‘Contemporary Australian Cinema’ course at Melbourne University Arts.
Phantasms, my first book (1994), was commissioned by Sophie Cunningham during her years at Penguin. It is a book about trends in popular culture, based on the notion of the phantasm: some intense, underlying dream, desire or anxiety that takes a usually disguised or displaced form on the surface of a film or TV show. Although now out-of-print, it continues to be cited in many works, from Australia and elsewhere, on popular culture.