Dr Belinda Smaill

Background and Research Interests

Belinda Smaill received her PhD from Monash University. She also received a degree in Fine Arts, majoring in practical filmmaking, from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Her work has appeared in a number of international journals including Camera Obscura (Forthcoming), Studies in Australasian Cinema, Jump Cut and Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. She has a particular interest in Australian film and television, especially representations that pertain to multiculturalism and cultural difference. She has conducted research into Australia’s multicultural public service television provider, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). Documentary film has also been a central concern in her research, particularly the aesthetics of non-fiction film and the cultural reception of the form.

Current projects include an Australian Research Council funded study of Asian Australian cinema that she is conducting in collaboration with Dr. Olivia Khoo (Curtin University) and Dr. Audrey Yue (University of Melbourne). This project, providing the first sustained study of Asian Australian cinema, documents the representation of Asians in Australian cinema and the development of an Asian Australian cinema. This includes an examination of this cinema in relation to Australian national cinema and other transnational and diasporic Asian cinemas and the impact of various shifts in immigration, film and cultural policies.

Her book, Documentary Film: Politics, Emotion, Culture is due to be published at the end of 2009. The book presents a new critical framework for exploring the way emotions and subjectivity are central to documentary film’s role in the public sphere.

Selected Publications

Books

Documentary Film: Politics, Emotion, Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Forthcoming December 2009.

Edited Books

Usha M. Rodrigues and Belinda Smaill (Eds). Youth, Media and Culture in the Asia Pacific Region. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008.

Edited Journal Issues

Olivia Khoo, Belinda Smaill and Audrey Yue. “Asian Australian Cinema.” Special Issues of Studies in Australasian Cinema, 2:2 and 2:3 (2008).

Refereed Journal Articles

“The Documentaries of Kim Longinotto: Women, Change and Painful Modernity.” Camera Obscura 71 (2009) Forthcoming.

“Injured Identities: Pain, Politics and Documentary.” Studies in Documentary Film. 2007

“Loss and Transformation: Mourning and The Finished People.” Journal of Film and Video, 59:3 (2007): 32-45, 2007

“Diasporic Subjectivity in Contemporary Australian Documentary: Travel, History and the Televisual Representation of Trauma.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 20:2 (2006): 269-283.

“Three Australian Documentaries: Diaspora and Subjectivity.” Post Script: Essays in Film and Humanities,_ _24: 2/3 (2005): 23-35.

“Narrating Community: Multiculturalism and Australia’s SBS Television.” The Journal of Communication Inquiry, 26: 4 (2002): 391-407.