Academic literature on the topic 'Cloud Cult (Musical group)'

This essay uses the history of Touch and Go Records – an independent record label founded in 1981 – to show how the late twentieth-century environment of Detroit became fertile ground for the rise of hardcore punk. As the landscape of the post-industrial city was transformed by such developments as deindustrialization and white flight, a cadre of white, suburban youth transformed spaces of abandonment into places of innovation and alternative urban redevelopment, particularly in the city's troubled Cass Corridor neighborhood. Such urban spaces provided the room for musical experimentation in ways that were not possible in the postwar American suburb. Such a process was undoubtedly informed by the economic and political histories of post-industrial Detroit. Yet this essay argues that the rise of hardcore punk was more than an indicator of economic and political transformation; it was also a moment of cultural rupture. Viewed from such a perspective, one sees a group of musicians, writers, and others set on creating a new, viable art form, one that sought to critique and replace an older dominant musical culture that had come to be perceived as lacking vitality and originality. This moment of cultural realignment came to play a great role in the evolution of late twentieth century American culture.

Abstract In the diverse space of contemporary music, the fascinating and controversial personality of the Welsh composer Karl Jenkins, which is surprising from several perspectives, stands out. Open to assimilating and processing music from various sources (academic, liturgical, folk, entertainment, oriental, exotic), the all-round musician Karl Jenkins impresses the public with unexpected artistic choices, giving up the hypostasis of instrumentalist of the jazz-rock band Nucleus and of the group Softmachine in favour of the postmodern creator he has become today, synthetizing trends from musical compositions of the last decades of the 20th century. Once with the return to the functional system, either through minimalism or through neo-romanticism, the artist has successfully covered a potential sonority path of modern opposites, also evoking references to creative models of the past. We are referring to the musical valorizing of the sacred in a synthetic vision between tradition and innovation, in the works included in the Adiemus cycle, in the opus choir Missa for Peace and, more particularly, in the Requiem (2005), a significant score in the contemporaneity. The manner in which the composer, while resorting to a musical genre originating from the Roman Catholic cult and drawing on the liturgical text of the Mass for the dead, inserted Japanese poetry, written following the structure of haiku, belonging to representative authors - Gozan Koshigaya, Issho Kosughi, Hokusai Katsushika, Kaga-no-Chiyo, is highly surprising. This study aims to highlight the interweaving imagined by Karl Jenkins between the two cultures as well as to conduct a semantic analysis of an opus in which the relationships between music and words entail a highly emotional response.

The article reveals the historical conditions, content and consequences of the “Scientific session on the problems of physiological teaching of Academician I.P. Pavlov” June 28 - July 4, 1950, which aimed to establish the leading role of the cerebral cortex with the subordination of all physiological processes reflected in the conditioned reflexes determined by IP Pavlov. But in reality, such a meaning was only the external plot of J.V. Stalin’s script, which consisted in taming scientists by means of harassing one of their groups on another. The roles of whistleblowers and accused of infidelity to the teachings of I.P. Pavlov were determined by J.V. Stalin in advance from among the students of the scientist, and his scientific authority was turned into a means of reproach and accusation. In fact, the main reports, speeches and discussions only seemingly proclaimed their relevance to the purpose of the stated topic – the problems of physiological teaching of Academician I.P. Pavlov. These problems were only a means of accusing a group of scientists, first of all the favorite and closest to I.P. Pavlov of his students in order to discredit them and further repression. The proclamation at the session of June 28 - July 4, 1950 of the actual cult of personality of Pavlov was actually a means of devaluing this doctrine, as it limited the further development of physiological, and with it psychological, genetic, medical knowledge in the former USSR. The psychiatric continuation was realized in a subsequent similar session entitled: “Physiological teachings of Academician I.P. Pavlov in psychiatry and neuropathology”, which lasted from 11 to 15 October of the following year, 1951. Both sessions were preceded by a session of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences named after V.I. Lenin (in the Russian original abbreviation “VASHNIL – All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences named after V.I. Lenin”) July 31 – 1948, which was the destruction of genetics. Thus, the development of genetics, physiology, psychology, and psychiatry was interrupted for several decades. Repressions included the defeat of fiction (Resolution of the Central Committee of the VKP (b) on the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad”, August 1946), the defeat of musical culture (Resolution “On decadent tendencies in Soviet music” on February 10, 1948), the defeat of research history (September 1946, September 1949), the defeat of biology (session “VASHNIL” in 1948), the defeat of physiology (Pavlov’s session, 1950), another defeat of economists’ research (Stalin’s article “Economic problems of socialism in the USSR” ), the defeat of linguistics (Stalin’s article “Marxism and the problems of linguistics” in 1959), the defeat of chemistry (1951), the defeat of medicine (The case of the murderous doctors 1952 – 1953). The contrast of the way of thinking characteristic of the people of Russia is revealed, on the basis of which repressions and an unprecedented conviction in the morality of murder and other forms of violence in the USSR became possible. As a result, the purpose of the scientist and his life purpose is redirected to serve the highest levels of power instead of serving the truth and evaluated from the height of these higher levels, where the criterion of truth is a matter of personal preference of the ruler of the top floor of the pyramid. The ways of using IP Pavlov’s name at the session dedicated to his name, as well as I.P. Pavlov’s position in relation to the authorities and psychologists are given. The opposition of the work of I.P. Pavlov to the works of Z. Freud, T. Morgan and other scientists, which is not justified by the content and scientific spheres in which scientists worked, is revealed. The Ukrainian-Georgian direction of the Pavlov’s session, which was considered peripheral from the point of view of the Moscow speakers appointed by J.V. Stalin, is covered. Based on the principle of action of V.A. Romanets, the main consequences of the aftereffect of seven decades are presented. These include the incompleteness of the aftermath of the Pavlov’s session, which consists not only in the indefinite implementation of its resolution, but also the transmission from generation to generation of scholars of postcolonial countries that emerged after the collapse of the USSR, ways of thinking, organizing relationships and imitative behavior that cannot be explained modern trends in the scientific world of free countries. The mechanisms of the system of organization of scientific activity tested by Pavlovskaya and other sessions, which after the collapse of the USSR replace the dead institutions of control over scientists, are revealed. The conclusions state that Ukraine must free itself from the communist Stalinist legacy, and that Ukrainian psychologists play a leading role in this, as the psychological climate of all Ukrainian science needs to change. It is noted that the creation of conditions for the free scientific search of Ukrainian scientists of all specialties requires the elimination of generalized fear, inherited and actualized by the current apologists of Stalinist academism. This fear must be transformed into the joy of creating previously unknown knowledge for the spiritual and intellectual prosperity of the Ukrainian nation in the community of other nations of the world.

O trabalho objetiva relato de experiência do projeto de extensão universitária "Repórter Junino", financiado pelo PROEXT 2015/MEC/SESu, considerando o período dos últimos cinco anos de atuação - 2012 a 2017. O projeto atua desde 2005, de forma ininterrupta, no curso de Jornalismo da Universidade Estadual da Paraíba (UEPB), congregando a interface entre cultura popular, tecnologia em rede digital e prática jornalística na construção da memória dos festejos juninos (quadrilhas juninas, artesanato, culinária regional, ritmos musicais e manifestações culturais) de Campina Grande (PB) e do Nordeste por meio de fluxo de trabalho em rede com redação em nuvem. A experiência de extensão coaduna pesquisa e ensino por meio de disciplinas como Agência de Notícias e Jornalismo Móvel e o Grupo de Pesquisa em Jornalismo e Mobilidade (Mobjor), fomentando fluxo de trabalho de cobertura jornalística da cultura popular em contexto de sociedade em rede e de múltiplos saberes. Os principais resultados são a formação de mais de mil alunos no seu tempo de existência e participação, por meio de seleção de cerca de 70 alunos e dez professores por ano, que se envolvem na atividade com produção de conteúdo cultural para plataformas digitais (site www.reporterjunino.com.br e redes sociais Instagram, Facebook e Twitter), além da construção da memória em formato digital das manifestações culturais das comunidades e artistas/protagonistas locais, diferindo a cobertura da abordagem dos meios de comunicação de massa tradicionais. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Cultura Popular. Jornalismo Digital. Repórter Junino. Memória. Extensão Universitária. ABSTRACT The paper aims to report the experience of the university extension project called “Repórter Junino,” funded by PROEXT 2015/MEC/SESu, considering its last six years of operation - 2012 to 2017. The project has been continuously active in the journalism course of the State University of Paraíba (UEPB) since 2005. It promotes the interface between popular culture, digital network technology and journalistic practice to build the memory of the June celebrations (June quadrilha dances, handicrafts, regional cuisine, musical rhythms and cultural events) of Campina Grande, State of Paraíba (PB) and the Northeast, through a networked workflow with cloud writing. The extension experience includes research and teaching through courses such as News Agency and Mobile Journalism and the Research Group on Mobility and Journalism (Mobjor), fostering the workflow of journalistic coverage of popular culture in the context of network society and multiple knowledges. The main results are the training of more than 1,000 students in their time of existence and participation, through selection of about 70 students and 10 teachers per year, who are involved in the activity by producing cultural content for digital platforms. In addition, they build digital memory of the cultural expressions of the communities and local artists and protagonists, differing from the coverage approach of the traditional mass media. KEYWORDS: Popular Culture; Digital Journalism; Repórter Junino; Memory; University Extension. RESUMEN El trabajo tiene como objetivo el relato de la experiencia del proyecto de extensión universitaria "Repórter Junino" (Reportero Junino), financiado por PROEXT 2015/MEC/SESu, considerando el período de los últimos cinco años de actuación - 2012 a 2017. El proyecto opera desde 2005, de forma ininterrumpida, en el curso de periodismo de la Universidade Estadual da Paraíba (UEPB - Universidad del Estado de Paraíba), agrupando la interfaz entre cultura popular, tecnología en red digital y práctica periodística en la construcción de la memoria de los festejos de junio (cuadrillas, artesanía, culinaria regional, ritmos musicales y manifestaciones culturales) de Campina Grande (PB) y del Noreste, a través del flujo de trabajo en red con redacción en la nube. La experiencia de extensión integra estudio y enseñanza por medio de materias como Agencia de Noticias y Periodismo Móvil e el Grupo de Estudio en Periodismo y Movilidad (Mobior), fomentando el flujo de trabajo de cobertura periodística de la cultura popular en un contexto de sociedad en red y de múltiples conocimientos. Los principales resultados son la formación de más de mil alumnos en su tiempo de existencia y participación por medio de selección, de alrededor de 70 alumnos y diez profesores por año, que participan en la actividad con producción de contenido cultural para plataformas digitales, y de la construcción de la memoria en formato digital de las manifestaciones culturales de las comunidades y artistas/protagonistas locales, diferenciando la cobertura del planteamiento delos medios de comunicación en masa tradicionales. PALABRAS CLAVE: Cultura Popular; Periodismo Digital; Repórter Junino; Memoria. Extensión Universitaria.

IntroductionThe rekindling popularity of the vinyl record and record collecting provide a counternarrative to the ideals of technological progress and supersession, signalling the paradoxical return of a physical music format in the digital realm where “the fetish of newness is at its most aggressive” (Tischleder and Wasserman 7). In this way, the vinyl record provides a disruptive lens through which to question media history as “a history of obsolescence, where new media displace and redefine older media” and explore how “obsolescence resists becoming obsolete” (Tischleder and Wasserman 2). Magaudda (29) argues that the dematerialisation of music media has reconfigured the role of materiality in media practices and has seen physical formats such as the vinyl record “bite back” as mediators of distinct listening practices and unique material relationships to music. Against the background of on-demand streaming services and retro nostalgia in the digital age (Hogarty), record collecting may be dismissed as a resistant and obsolete collecting practice. However, as this article will explore, record collecting can be characterised as a highly social practice, providing a means to communicate identity and taste, maintain a sense of the past, and orient the social life and personal history of the collector. This article reports on the results of ethnographic research investigating the record collections of some young millennial music fans to locate the position and significance of vinyl records in their social lives as a legacy media format. To do this, I examine three key capacities of vinyl record collections in evoking autobiographical memories, maintaining personal histories and anchoring a sense of the past. The significance of personal record collections and collecting practices was investigated in a series of semi-structured in-depth interviews with a group of self-identified record collectors. The sentiments of the collector in describing their collecting can be found to reveal their acquisitions as transactions within the spheres of commodity culture and the gift economy, articulating the renewed appeal of vinyl records in the digital age. This perspective of the social meanings and media practices surrounding vinyl records in the digital age highlight the formats significance in understanding the complex trajectories of media history. Vinyl RecordsSucceeding the shellac gramophone record in the 1948, the vinyl record was the dominant format for commercial music distribution until it was largely replaced by the Compact Disc and the audio cassette in the 1980s and 1990s (Osbourne 81). Vinyl sales remained low until 2007 (Richter), when the withering sales of cassette singles and the rising popularity of alternative guitar music saw renewed interest in the seven-inch vinyl record (Osbourne 140). The popularity of both seven-inch and twelve-inch vinyl records have continued to rise into the 2010s, spurred on by industry and artist endorsements on Record Store Day (Harvey) and the return of in-house vinyl production by major labels (Ellis-Petersen). In Australia, vinyl sales generated $15.1 million dollars in 2016, showing 75% growth over the previous year (Australian Recording Industry Association). It is in this way that the resurgent trajectory of vinyl records has come to be understood as an allegorical case for broader debates around media materiality in the digital age. Vinyl records can be regarded as unique and highly collectable based on their material affordances. The aesthetic appeal of large album cover art has been described as a crucial component to the enduring popularity and resurgence of the format (Bartmanski and Woodward 123) and this is often reflected in the display of a collection within domestic spaces, enabling the musical taste of the collector to be observed and admired by others (Giles, Pietrykowski, and Clark 436). Further, the materiality of vinyl records necessitates a distinctive set of actions for music playback, engaging the listener physically in a different way to digital interfaces (Bartmanski and Woodward 37). In their analysis of the resurgent cultural and social value of vinyl records, Bartmanski and Woodward expand on the importance of materiality and ownership of vinyl records for collectors in serving socially communicative and identity affirming processes, affording “opportunities to revisit and remember one’s past …, such opportunities are also useful for understanding and defining self as having a biography of cultural consumption or tastes” (107). The unique material affordances differentiate vinyl records from other music media formats and have cemented their position as “the collectable format” (Shuker 57, emphasis in original). Marshall expands on this notion, writing that “the greater materiality – and fragility – of the vinyl album allows its history to be inscribed onto the material object – more so than with a CD, and much more so than with a digital file” (67). It is through such material affordances that vinyl records communicate their own histories and those of the collector.The unique material biographies of vinyl records are crucial in understanding how record collections potentially afford the collector a sense of the past. Material traces such as the wear and tear of the album cover, the marks of a previous owner or artist’s signatures obtained on its surface chronicle the journey of a record as it passes through stages of commodification and circulation before finally entering the collector’s possession. It is the physical biography of a vinyl album that differentiates it from other identical copies in the eyes of the collector, reflecting the distinctive “aura” (Benjamin, The Work of Art 220) of the individual object. Physically imbued with history and “social life” (Appadurai 3), vinyl records can materialise and reflect the personal history of the collector within the collection. These descriptions reveal the renewed position of the vinyl record as a uniquely collectable media format in the digital age, providing a framework to explore the significance of the format in the social lives of young millennial record collectors. Record CollectingIn the seminal essay on book collecting Unpacking My Library, Walter Benjamin describes the relationship that forms between the items of a collection and the owner. He explains the process in which objects enter the collection as the infusion of object with the biography of the collector, allowing the collector to “live in them” (Benjamin 67). There are few domains in which the significance of this relationship is more pronounced than in characterising the music collector and their relationship with their collection. Popular music represents a complex cultural form closely connected to concepts of identity, belonging, affect, personal, and cultural memory (Bennet and Rogers 37). Characterised as a “critical bedrock in everyday life”, music and its many mediatised modalities can be seen to shape everyday “sociocultural sensibilities …, influencing in fundamental ways how individuals understand themselves as cultural beings over time” (Bennet and Rogers 38). The personal record collection remains one of the most popular and well-established forms of musical collection. Moreover, the vinyl record maintains an enduring popularity in the digital age at the centre of specific musical cultures and as a repository of personal and cultural history.Roy Shuker’s discussion of the contemporary record collector provides a valuable insight into the identity founding capabilities of record collecting as a social practice (331). Shuker orients his findings against popularised notions of the record collector represented in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity; male; obsessive and socially incompetent, before challenging this stereotype in exploring the connection between the social practice of record collecting and a retrospective sense of self and the past (311). In this way, a record collection may be appraised as an “attempt to preserve both the past and memories of the past” (Montano 2). Significantly, Shuker found that some collectors emphasised the social nature of their collecting practice, citing collecting as the foundation of close social relationships with friends and family (326). It is through these social dimensions of record collecting practice that the reconfigured position of vinyl records can be understood as an ongoing project of identity, taste and personal history. Gift Economy and Commodity CultureEntry into the collection is a pivotal transition in the biography of an object and a “privileged moment” in the life of a collector (Marshall 67). For the record collector, new and re-pressed records lining the shelves of record stores, curated collections for sale or trade at record fairs, vast online marketplaces, and divested selections of tip-shops and garage sales represent troves of opportunity and potential for collectors to explore musical genres, uncover rare or unique records and to increase their own musical scholarship. Conversely, receiving a record as a gift or inheriting a collection of records from a family member represents a mode of acquisition which is less discussed and concerns a very different set of motivations and associations for the collector. These different circumstances of acquisition can be broadly categorised as transactions within the circuits of commodity culture and social actions within the gift economy and play a pivotal role in the imbuing of collection objects with the personal history of the collector. Lewis Hyde demarcates the boundaries between these the two systems of merit, finding “A commodity has value … A gift has worth” (78). In furthering this distinction, Hyde describes transactions within commodity culture as expressions of individuality and identity, enabling upwards mobility and changes to identity, while the gift economy concerns the strengthening of social ties, reaffirming cultural traditions and may reflect sentiments of nostalgia (68). In an age of digital music, the physicality of records enables them to be move through the gift economy in ways in which digital files cannot. While digital files may be gifted in a token sense via gift cards or transferred electronically, they struggle to communicate “worth” to the receiver in the same way as a tangible gift (Harvey et al.). It is in this sense that the “bonding power” of records which enter the collection as a gift can be understood from the more detached transactions within commodity culture (Hyde 86).As a transaction within the channels of commodity culture, a vinyl record may be utilised as a symbolic object to communicate musical taste, fandom and the cultural expertise of the collector which may not be “adequately signified socially merely by storage of digital files and players” (Bartmanski and Woodward 107). This signifying ability is afforded by the considerable material presence of the vinyl record cover and the collection within domestic spaces. In addition to social display, one interviewee explained how their collection invites a historical perspective of their own evolving musical tastes:I’ll keep buying more records that I like, and even if I don’t like the band later I’ll keep the vinyl anyway because at some point I did like them. It’s like a chronological order of stuff that I listen to. I’ll always go back to it as a personal history. I’ve always loved music so having that there gives me a perspective what I’ve been into. (Eddie, 21)Culture and taste are revealed as dimensions of the self through the collection, revealing a trajectory of continuity and change over time (Bartmanski and Woodward 107). As a materialisation of “personal history”, the record collection may be described as a “technology of the self” in which music may be experienced in association with “the past” and is therefore part of “producing oneself as a coherent being over time” and a “cuing in how to proceed” into the future. (DeNora 66). In addition to this retrospective view of personal musical development, Eddie also revealed how interpersonal connections come to become associated with records in his collections through the gift economy:I have a couple of records that friends have bought for me, and that in itself I find is really nice – its someone that cares that you are into music and knows some bands that I respect and that I am into. Often, we will chuck it on and listen together. (Eddie 21)Bundled up in the relationship between musical taste and the collection, records received as gifts from friends demonstrate the nurturing or affirmation of social bonds which may be then further solidified through shared listening experience (Brown and Sellen 37). Here, the sentimental value of the gift is privileged over its monetary value, revealing its “worth” within the gift economy (Hyde 78). These social connections embedded within record collections and can be understood further through the inheritance of a collection as it is passed down by familial generations.Material Memory: Inheritance and LossIf ownership can be characterised as “the most intimate relationship one can have to objects”, then the process of inheriting a collection marks an important moment of divestment and transfer of ownership and responsibility from the collector to another (Benjamin, Unpacking 67). One interviewee who inherited his late father’s record collection highlighted the powerful bond between object and collector, describing the collection as a “part” of his father that remains:A lot of it my dad really cherished it y’know? I feel like he’s gone, if this goes, it’s like another part of him that’s gone forever. And no one likes to think of death and what happens after you’re gone and forgotten – but the vinyl lives on, what you don’t take with you when you die is everything, and that is what stays. (Simon 22)Records inherited from a deceased family member occupy an eminent position within the collection as items infused with the social life, bearing the material traces of past ownership. Moreover, collectors may forge a sense of permanence as the collection exists beyond their own lifetime (Marshall 65). Importantly, the collection maintains a connection between the interviewee, their late father, and a sense of the past as a form of memorial. In this way, the economic value of the collection gives way to its priceless sentimental and memorial worth for the interviewee, situating the inheritance of the collection clearly within the realm of the gift economy.The worth and value of record collections as projects of identity and signifiers of the past can be further understood when interviewees were asked to consider the loss of their collections. One interviewee remarked on the loss of a collection in terms of invested time, effort and embedded sentimental worth:I’d be devastated, it’s a killer – I don’t know how to say it. The music itself isn’t gone because you can get that elsewhere, but you just lose something that you’ve put so much time into. You’ve lost the physicality. And if there is something with heritage or sentimental value around a particular record then they are gone as well. It’s like any other sentimental item. (Dominic, 23)The investment of time in curating and pursuing additions to the collection is a key part of the satisfaction associated with collecting. It is one of the features which has come to differentiate record collecting as a marker of music fandom and expertise in a digital age of instantaneous gratification and access, facilitated by streaming. Interestingly, the interviewee’s comment about the insignificant loss of “the music itself” resembles one of Benjamin’s original claims around collecting as a relationship between collector and object based not in functional value, but on a love for them as “the scene, the stage, of their fate” (Unpacking 62). Here, the value of the record collection in signifying musical fandom and identity is differentiated from sentimental worth, clearly highlighting the unique and diverse appeal of vinyl records as a collectable object in the digital age.Wax SouvenirsBeyond socially significant and identity affirming capacities of vinyl records, records may also serve as a memorial cue, conjuring specific episodic memories from the life narrative of the collector. One interviewee recited an encounter with a favourite band, prompted by a record cover adorned by signatures:Interviewee: Yeah, the signed one is my favourite to look at. Aesthetically pleasing. It holds more value in my subjective categorisation. More sentimental value. I met the people that produced it and I got them to sign it for me.Interviewer: Does it remind you of that time?Interviewee: Yeah definitely, I’m hell bummed I didn’t get Kevin Parker to sign it! He’s the only one missing from the Frond album which he played drums on and he wasn’t at the rehearsal where the others were. (Elliot, 23)The record sleeve and signatures serve as indexical verification of the experience for the collector and contribute both to the objects unique “aura” (Benjamin, The Work of Art 220), and the collector’s subjective evaluation of its sentimental ‘worth’. This use of records as memorial cues was common for a many of the collectors interviewed, with one interviewee purchasing a specific record as a memento or souvenir with the intention of later recollection: Interviewee: I didn’t buy this to listen to. I know I said that I buy vinyl to listen to, but this one was more to support them and to have a cool memento, because they are cool guys and I got to open their launch show.Interviewer: Does it remind you of anything more specifically about that time?Interviewee: It takes me back to the weeks leading up to the release, listening to the awful Spotify master, playing the release gig itself. I feel like my collection is something that I'm going to keep for a long time - I can see myself looking back in 5-10 years and having a chuckle. (Simon, 22)These accounts resonate with the retrospective and evocative qualities of the collection as described by Benjamin, observing the way in which collectors “look into the object” and see connections to “moments and experiences in their life” (Unpacking 62). In this sense, vinyl records may serve an evidentiary function for the collector in a similar fashion to a souvenir, inviting reflection on past experiences from the owner and providing material proof of the experience when recounting to others.Conclusion This artcile has explored not only the resurgent position of vinyl records as a legacy music format, but the ways in which record collections can serve as sites of identity, memory and personal history. The role of materiality in media practices has been significantly transformed in the wake of cloud-based streaming services and has seen the vinyl record regarded as a highly collectable and unique physical media format in the digital age, capable of orienting the identities and social lives of music collectors. The descriptions gathered from interviews with millennial collectors reveal the intimate relationship between collector and collection, characterised by Benjamin (Unpacking 59), enabling the collection to materialise and reflect the personal history of the collector. As transactions within the gift economy, interviewees articulated the sentimental worth of their collections in affirming social bonds and familial connections. Moreover, interviewees explained how the patina of records within their collections reflect unique ‘social life’ (Appadurai 3) and serve as memorial cues for specific episodic memories. In this way, the enduring vinyl record is illustrative of the ways in which media history cannot be characterised as a simple trajectory of technological supersession and obsolescence, but as a complex system of evolution and redefinition of media practices, materiality and social meanings.ReferencesAppadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Australian Recording Industry Association. 2016 ARIA Yearly Statistics. 29 March 2017. <http://www.aria.com.au/documents/MEDIARELEASEARIARELEASES2016WHOLESALESFIGURES.pdf>.Bartmanski, Dominik, and Ian Woodward. Vinyl. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library”. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 59-67.———. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217-252.Bennett, Andy, and Ian Rogers. Popular Music Scenes and Cultural Memory. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.Brown, Barry, and Abigail Sellen. “Sharing and Listening to Music”. Consuming Music Together. Eds. Kenton O'Hara, and Barry Brown. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006. 37-56.Ellis-Petersen, Hannah. "Records Come Round Again: Sony to Open Vinyl Factory in Japan." The Guardian 30 June 2017. <https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jun/29/sony-to-open-vinyl-pressing-factory-in-japan-records>.Giles, David, Stephen Pietrzykowski, and Kathryn Clark. “The Psychological Meaning of Personal Record Collections and the Impact of Changing Technological Forms.” Journal of Economic Psychology 28.4 (2007): 429–443. Harvey, John, David Golightly, and Andrew Smith. "Researching Gift Economies Online, Offline and In-Between." 4th Digital Economy Conference: Open Digital. Salford: MediaCityUK, 2013.Hogarty, Jean. Popular Music and Retro Culture in the Digital Era. New York: Routledge, 2017.Hyde, Lewis. The Gift. New York: Vintage Books, 2007.Magaudda, Paolo. “When Materiality ‘Bites Back’: Digital Music Consumption Practices in the Age of Dematerialization.” Journal of Consumer Culture 11.1 (2011): 15–36. Marshall, Lee. “W(h)ither Now? Music Collecting in the Age of the Cloud.” Popular Music Matters: Essays in Honour of Simon Frith. Eds. Lee Marshall and Dave Laing. London: Routledge, 2016. 61-71.Montano, Ed. "Collecting the Past for a Material Present: Record Collecting in Contemporary Practice." MA Dissertation. University of Liverpool, 2003. Osborne, Richard. Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Group, 2013.Richter, Felix. "Infographic: The LP Is Back!" Statista Infographics 6 Jan. 2014. <https://www.statista.com/chart/1465/vinyl-lp-sales-in-the-us>.Shuker, Roy. “Beyond the ‘high Fidelity’ Stereotype: Defining the (Contemporary) Record Collector.” Popular Music 23.3 (2004): 311–330.

IntroductionMusicians and critics regard Australian jazz as vibrant and creative (Shand; Chessher; Rechniewski). From its tentative beginnings in the early twentieth century (Whiteoak), jazz has become a major aspect of Australia’s music and performance. Due to the large distances separating cities and towns, its development has been influenced by geographical isolation (Nikolsky; Chessher; Clare; Johnson; Stevens; McGuiness). While major cities have been the central hubs, it is increasingly acknowledged that regional centres also provide avenues for jazz performance (Curtis).This article discusses findings relating to transient musical populations shaped by geographical conditions, venue issues that are peculiar to the Northern region, and finally the challenges of cultural and parochial mindsets that North Queensland jazz musicians encounter in performance.Cairns and MackayCairns and Mackay are regional centres on the coast of Queensland, Australia. Cairns – population 156,901 in 2016 (ABS) – is a world famous tourist destination situated on the doorstep of the Great Barrier Reef (Thorp). Mackay – population 114,969 in 2016 (ABS) – is a lesser-known community with an economy largely underpinned by the sugar cane and coal mining industries (Rolfe et al. 138). Both communities lie North of the capital city Brisbane – Mackay in the heart of Central Queensland, and Cairns as the unofficial capital of Far North Queensland. Mackay and Cairns were selected for this study, not on representational grounds, but because they provide an opportunity to learn through case studies. Stake notes that “potential for learning is a different and sometimes superior criterion to representativeness,” adding, “that may mean taking the one most accessible or the one we can spend the most time with (451).”Musically, both regional centres have a number of venues that promote live music, however, only Cairns has a dedicated jazz club, the Cairns Jazz Club (CJC). Each has a community convention centre that brings high-calibre touring musicians to the region, including jazz musicians.Mackay is home to the Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music (CQCM) a part of the Central Queensland University that has offered conservatoire-style degree programs in jazz, contemporary music and theatre for over twenty-five years. Cairns does not have any providers of tertiary jazz qualifications.MethodologySemi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with twenty-two significant individuals associated with the jazz communities in Mackay and Cairns over a twelve-month period from 2015 to 2016. Twelve of the interviewees were living in Cairns at the time, and ten were living in Mackay. The selection of interviewees was influenced by personal knowledge of key individuals, historical records located at the CQCM, and from a study by (Mitchell), who identified important figures in the Cairns jazz scene. The study participants included members of professional jazz ensembles, dedicated jazz audience members and jazz educators. None of the participants who were interviewed relied solely on the performance of jazz as their main occupation. All of the musicians combined teaching duties with music-making in several genres including rock, jazz, Latin and funk, as well as work in the recording and producing of recorded music. Combining the performance of jazz and commercial musical styles is a common and often crucial part of being a musician in a regional centre due to the low demand for any one specific genre (Luckman et al. 630). The interview data that was gathered during the study’s data collection phase was analysed for themes using the grounded theory research method (Charmaz). The following sections will discuss three areas of findings relating to some of the unique North Queensland influences that have impacted the development and sustainability of the two regional jazz communities.Transient Musical PopulationsThe prospect of living in North Queensland is an alluring proposition for many people. According to the participants in this study, the combination of work and a tropical lifestyle attracts people from all over the country to Cairns and Mackay, but this influx is matched by a high population turnover. Many musicians who move into the region soon move away again. High population turnover is a characteristic of several Northern regional centres such as the city of Darwin (Luckman, Gibson and Lea 12). The high growth and high population turnover in Cairns, in particular, was one of the highest in the country between 2006 and 2011 (ABS). The study participants in both regions believed that the transient nature of the local population is detrimental to the development and sustainability of the jazz communities. One participant described the situation in Cairns this way: “The tropics sort of lure them up there, tease them with all of the beauty and nature, and then spit them out when they realise it’s not what they imagined (interviewee 1, 24 Aug. 2016).” Looking more broadly to other coastal regional areas of Australia, there is evidence of the counter-urban flow of professionals and artists seeking out a region’s “natural and cultural environment” (Gibson 339). On the far North coast of New South Wales, Gibson examined how the climate, natural surroundings and cultural charms attracted city dwellers to that region (337). Similarly, most of the participants in this study mentioned lifestyle choices such as raising a family and living in the tropics as reasons to move to Cairns or Mackay. The prospect of working in the tourism and hospitality industry was found to be another common reason for musicians to move to Cairns in particular. In contrast to some studies (Salazar; Conradson and Latham) where it was found that the middle- to upper-classes formed the majority of lifestyle migrants, the migrating musicians identified by this study were mostly low-income earners seeking a combination of music work and other types of employment outside the music industry. There have been studies that have explored and critically reviewed the theoretical frameworks behind lifestyle migration (Benson and Osbaldiston) including the examination of issues and the motivation to ‘lifestyle migrate’. What is interesting in this current study is the focus of discussion on the post-migration effects. Study participants believe that most of the musicians who move into their region leave soon afterwards because of their disillusionment with the local music industry. Despite the lure of musical jobs through the tourism and hospitality industry, local musicians in Cairns tend to believe there is less work than imagined. Pub rock duos and DJs have taken most of the performance opportunities, which makes it hard for new musicians to compete.The study also reveals that Cairns jazz musicians consider it more difficult to find and collaborate with quality newcomers. This may be attributed to the smaller jazz communities’ demand for players of specific instruments. One participant explained, “There’s another bass player that just moved here, but he only plays by ear, so when people want to play charts and new songs, he can’t do it so it's hard finding the right guys up here at times (interviewee 2, 23 Aug. 2016).” Cairns and Mackay participants agreed that the difficulty of finding and retaining quality musicians in the region impacted on the ability of certain groups to be sustainable. One participant added, “It’s such a small pool of musicians, at the moment, I've got a new project ready to go and I've got two percussionists, but I need a bass player, but there is no bass player that I'm willing to work with (interviewee 3, 24 Aug. 2016).” The same participant has been fortunate over the years, performing with a different local group whose members have permanently stayed in the Cairns region, however, forging new musical pathways and new groups seemed challenging due to the lack of musical skills in some of the potential musicians.In Mackay, the study revealed a smaller influx of new musicians to the region, and study participants experienced the same difficulties forming groups and retaining members as their Cairns counterparts. One participant, who found it difficult to run a Big Band as well as a smaller jazz ensemble because of the transient population, claimed that many local musicians were lured to metropolitan centres for university or work.Study participants in both Northern centres appeared to have developed a tolerance and adaptability for their regional challenges. While this article does not aim to suggest a solution to the issues they described, one interesting finding that emerged in both Cairns and Mackay was the musicians’ ability to minimise some of the effects of the transient population. Some musicians found that it was more manageable to sustain a band by forming smaller groups such as duos, trios and quartets. An example was observed in Mackay, where one participant’s Big Band was a standard seventeen-piece group. The loss of players was a constant source of anxiety for the performers. Changing to a smaller ensemble produced a sense of sustainability that satisfied the group. In Cairns, one participant found that if the core musicians in the group (bass, drums and vocals) were permanent local residents, they could manage to use musicians passing through the region, which had minimal impact on the running of the group. For example, the Latin band will have different horn players sit in from time to time. When those performers leave, the impact on the group is minimal because the rhythm section is comprised of long-term Cairns residents.Venue Conditions Heat UpAt the Cape York Hotel in Cairns, musicians and audience members claimed that it was uncomfortable to perform or attend Sunday afternoon jazz gigs during the Cairns summer due to the high temperatures and non air-conditioned venues. This impact of the physical environment on the service process in a venue was first modelled and coined the ‘Servicescape’ by Bitner (57). The framework, which includes physical dimensions like temperature, noise, space/function and signage, has also been further investigated in other literature (Minor et al.; Kubacki; Turley and Fugate). This model is relevant to this study because it clearly affects the musician’s ability to perform music in the Northern climate and attract audiences. One of the regular musicians at the Cape York Hotel commented: So you’re thinking, ‘Well, I’m starting to create something here, people are starting to show up’, but then you see it just dwindling away and then you get two or three weeks of hideously hot weather, and then like last Sunday, by the time I went on in the first set, my shirt was sticking to me like tissue paper… I set up a gig, a three-hour gig with my trio, and if it’s air conditioned you’re likely to get people but if it’s like the Cape York, which is not air conditioned, and you’re out in the beer garden with a tin roof over the top with big fans, it’s hideous‘. (Interviewee 4, 24 Aug. 2016)The availability of venues that offer live jazz is limited in both regions. The issue was twofold: firstly, the limited availability of a larger venue to cater for the ensembles was deemed problematic; and secondly, the venue manager needed to pay for the services of the club, which contributed to its running costs. In Cairns, the Cape York Hotel has provided the local CJC with an outdoor beer garden as a venue for their regular Sunday performances since 2015. The president of the CJC commented on the struggle for the club to find a suitable venue for their musicians and patrons. The club has had residencies in multiple venues over the last thirty years with varying success. It appears that the club has had to endure these conditions in order to provide their musicians and audiences an outlet for jazz performance. This dedication to their art form and sense of resilience appears to be a regular theme for these Northern jazz musicians.Minor et al. (7) recommended that live music organisers needed to consider offering different physical environments for different events (7). For example, a venue that caters for a swing band might include a dance floor for potential dancers or if a venue catered for a sit down jazz show, the venue might like to choose the best acoustic environment to best support the sound of the ensemble. The research showed that customers have different reasons for attending events, and in relation to the Cape York Hotel, the majority of the customers were the CJC members who simply wanted to enjoy their jazz club performances in an air conditioned environment with optimal acoustics as the priority. Although not ideal, the majority of the CJC members still attended during the summer months and endured the high temperatures due to a lack of venue suitability.Parochial MindsetsOne of the challenging issues faced by many of the participants in both regions was the perceived cultural divide between jazz aficionados and general patrons at many venues. While larger centres in Australia have enjoyed an international reputation as creative hubs for jazz such as Melbourne and Sydney (Shand), the majority of participants in this study believed that a significant portion of the general public is quite parochial in their views on various musical styles including jazz. Coined the ‘bogan factor’, one participant explained, “I call it the bogan factor. Do you think that's an academic term? It is now” (interviewee 5, 17 Feb. 2016). They also commented on dominant cultural choices of residents in these regions: “It's North Queensland, it's a sport orientated, 4WD dominated place. Culturally they are the main things that people are attracted to” (interviewee 5, 17 Feb. 2016). These cultural preferences appear to affect the performance opportunities for the participants in Cairns and Mackay.Waitt and Gibson explored how the Wollongong region was chosen as an area for investigation to see if city size mattered for creativity and creativity-led regeneration (1224). With the ‘Creative Class’ framework in mind (Florida), the researchers found that Wollongong’s primarily blue-collar industrial identity was a complex mixture of cultural pursuits including the arts, sport and working class ideals (Waitt and Gibson 1241). This finding is consistent with the comments of study participants from Cairns and Mackay who believed that the identities of their regions were strongly influenced by sport and industries like mining and farming. One Mackay participant added, “I think our culture, in itself, would need to change to turn more people to jazz. I can’t see that happening. That’s Australia. You’re fighting against 200 years of sport” (interviewee 6, 12 Feb. 2016). Performing in Mackay or Cairns in venues that attract various demographics can make it difficult for musicians playing jazz. A Cairns participant added, “As Ingrid James once told me, ‘It's North Queensland, you’ve got an audience of tradesman, they don't get it’. It's silly to think it's going to ever change” (interviewee 7, 26 Aug. 2016). One Mackay participant believed that the lack of appreciation for jazz in regional areas was largely due to a lack of exposure to the art form. Most people grow up listening to other styles of music in their households.Another participant made the point that regardless of the region’s cultural and leisure-time preferences, if a jazz band is playing in a football club, you must expect it to be unpopular. Many of the research participants emphasised that playing in a suitable venue is paramount for developing a consistent and attentive audience. Choosing a venue that values and promotes the style of jazz music that the musicians are performing could help to attract more jazz fans and therefore build a sustainable jazz community.Refreshingly, this study revealed that musicians in both regions showed considerable resilience in dealing with the issue of parochial mindsets, and they have implemented methods to help educate their audiences. The audience plays a significant part in the development and future of a jazz community (Becker; Martin). For the Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music in Mackay, part of the ethos of the institution is to provide music performance and educational opportunities to the region. One of the lecturers who made a significant contribution to the design of the ensemble program had a clear vision to combine jazz and popular music styles in order to connect with a regional audience. He explained, “The popular music strand of the jazz program and what we called the commercial ensembles was very much birthed out of that concept of creating a connection with the community and making us more accessible in the shortest amount of time, which then enabled us to expose people to jazz” (interviewee 8, 20 Mar. 2016).In a similar vein, several Cairns musicians commented on how they engaged with their audiences through education. Some musicians attempted to converse with the patrons on the comparative elements of jazz and non-jazz styles, which helped to instil some appreciation in patrons with little jazz knowledge. One participant cited that although not all patrons were interested in an education at a pub, some became regular attendees and showed greater appreciation for the different jazz styles. These findings align with other studies (Radbourne and Arthurs; Kubacki; Kubacki et al.), who found that audiences tend to return to arts organizations or events more regularly if they feel connected to the experience (Kubacki et al. 409).ConclusionThe Cairns and Mackay jazz musicians who were interviewed in this study revealed some innovative approaches for sustaining their art form in North Queensland. The participants discussed creative solutions for minimising the influence of a transient musician population as well as overcoming some of the parochial mindsets in the community through education. The North Queensland summer months proved to be a struggle for musicians and audience members alike in Cairns in particular, but resilience and commitment to the music and the social network of jazz performers seemed to override this obstacle. 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In his directorial debut, The Man with the Iron Fists (2012), RZA not only evokes the textual borrowing techniques he has utilised as a hip-hop producer, but also reflects the influence of filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, who has built a career upon acknowledging mainstream and cult film histories through mise-en-scene, editing, and deft characterisation. The Man with the Iron Fists was originally to coincide with Tarantino’s rebel slave narrative Django Unchained (2012), which Tarantino has discussed openly as commentary regarding race in contemporary America. In 2011, Variety reported that RZA had joined the cast of Tarantino’s anticipated Django Unchained, playing “Thaddeus, a violent slave working on a Mississippi plantation” (Sneider, “Rza Joins ‘Django Unchained’ Cast”). Django Unchained follows Tarantino’s pattern of generic and trope mixology, combining elements of the Western, blaxploitation, and buddy/road film. He famously stated: “[If] my work has anything it's that I'm taking this from this and that from that and mixing them together… I steal from everything. Great artists steal; they don't do homages” (“The Directors of Our Lifetime: In Their Own Words”). He sutures iconography from multiple films in numerous genres to form new texts that stand alone, albeit as amalgamations of references. In considering meanings attached particularly to exploitation films, this article addresses the significance of combining influences within The Man with the Iron Fists and Tarantino’s Django Unchained, and the ideological threads that emerge in fusing exploitation film aesthetics. Ultimately, these films provide a convergence not only of texts, but also of the collective identities associated with and built upon those texts, feats made possible through the filmmakers’ use of pastiche. Pastiche in Identity Formation as Subversive A reflection of the postmodern tendency towards appropriation and borrowing, pastiche is often considered less meaningful than its counterpart, parody. Fredric Jameson suggests that though pastiche and parody share commonalities (most notably the mimicry of style and mannerisms), they do so to different effects. Jameson asserts that parody mimics in an effort to mock the idiosyncrasies within a text, whereas pastiche is “neutral parody” of “dead styles” (114). In short, as Susan Hayward writes, “In its uninventiveness, pastiche is but a shadow of its former thing” (302). For Jameson, the most ubiquitous form of pastiche is the nostalgia film, which attempts to recapture the essence of the past. As examples, he points to the George Lucas films American Graffiti (1973), which is staged in the United States of the 1950s, and Star Wars (1977), which reflects the serials of the 1930s-1950s (114-115). Though scholars such as Jameson and Hayward are contemptuous of pastiche, a growing number see its potential for the subversion and critique that the aforementioned suggest it lacks. For instance, Sarah Smith reminds us that pastiche films engage in “complicitous critique”: the films maintain the trappings of original texts, yet do so in order to advance critique (209). For Smith and other scholars, such as Judith Butler and Richard Dyer, Jameson’s criticism of pastiche is dismissive, for while these scholars largely agree that pastiche is a form of mimicry in which the distance between original and copy is minimal, they recognise that a space still exists for it to be critical. Smith writes: “[W]hile there may be greater distance between the parody and its target text than there is between the pastiche and the text it imitates, a prescribed degree of distance is not a prerequisite for critical engagement with the ur-text” (210). In this regard, fidelity to the original texts is not only required but to be revered, for these likenesses to the original “act as a guarantee of the critique of those origins and provide an opportunity for the filmmaker to position [himself or herself] in relation to them” (Smith 211). Essentially, pastiche is a useful technique in which to construct hybrid identities. Keri E. Iyall Smith suggests that hybrid identities emerge from “a reflexive relationship between local and global” (3). According to popular music scholar Brett Lashua, hybrid identities “make and re-make culture through appropriating the cultural ‘raw materials’ of life in order to construct meaning in their own specific cultural localities. In a sense, they are ‘sampling’ from broader popular culture and reworking what they can take into their own specific local cultures” (“The Arts of the Remix: Ethnography and Rap”). As will be evidenced here, Tarantino utilises pastiche as an unabashed genre poacher; similarly, as a self-avowed Tarantino student and hip-hop producer known for his sampling acumen, RZA invokes pastiche to reflect mastery of his craft and a hybridised identity his multifaceted persona. Plagiarism, Poaching, and Pastiche: Tarantino Blurs Boundaries As a filmmaker, Tarantino is known for indulging in excess: violence, language, and aesthetics. Edward Gallafent characterised the director’s work as having a preoccupation with settings and journeys, violence (both emotional and physical), complicated chronological structures, and dissatisfying conclusions (3-4). Additionally, pieces of Tarantino’s cinematic fandom are inserted into his own films. Academic and popular critics continually note Tarantino’s rise as an obsessive video store clerk turned respected and eccentric auteur. Tarantino’s authorship lies mostly in his ability to borrow (or in his words, steal) narrative arcs, characterisations, and camera work from other filmmakers, and use them in ways that feel innovative and different from those past works. It is not that he borrows generally from movements, films, and filmmakers, but that he conscientiously lifts segments from works to incorporate into his text. In Postmodern Hollywood: What’s New in Film and Why It Makes Us Feel So Strange, Keith M. Booker contends that Tarantino’s work often straddles lines between simplistic reference for reference’s sake and meditations upon the roles of cinema (90). Booker dismisses claims for the latter, citing Tarantino’s unwillingness to contextualise the references in Pulp Fiction, such that the film is best described not an act of citation so much as a break with the historical. Tarantino’s lack of reverence provides him freedom to intermingle texts and tropes to fit his goals as a filmmaker, rather than working within the confines of generic narratives. Each film feels both apart and distinct from genre categories. Jackie Brown, for example, has many of the traits attached to blaxploitation, from its focus on drug culture, the casting of Pam Grier who gained status playing female leads in blaxploitation films, and extreme violence. Tarantino’s use of humour throughout, particular in his treatment of character types, plot twists, and self-aware musical cues distances the film from easy characterisation. It is, but isn’t. What is gained is a remediated conception of cinematic reality. The fictions created in films of the past are noted in Tarantino’s play with tropes. His mixes produce an extreme form of mediated reality – one that is full of excess, highly exaggerated, and completely composed of stolen frameworks. Tarantino continues his generic play in Django Unchained. While much of it does borrow heavily from 1960s and 1970s Western filmmakers like Leone, Corbucci, and Peckinpah (the significance of desolate landscapes, long takes, extreme violence), it also incorporates strands of buddy cop (partners with different backgrounds working together to correct wrongs), early blaxploitation (Broomhilda’s last name is von Shaft suggesting that she is an ancestor of blaxploitation icon John Shaft, the characterisation of Django as black antihero enacting revenge on white racists in power), and kung fu (revenge narrative, in addition to the extensive training moments between Dr. Schultz and Django). The familiar elements highlight the transgressions of genre adherence. The comfort of the western genre and its tropes eases the audience, only for Tarantino to incorporate those elements from outside the genre to spark interest, to shock, to remind audiences of the mediated reality onscreen. Tarantino has been criticised for his lack of depth and understanding regarding women and people of colour, despite his attempts to provide various leading and supporting roles for both. Django Unchained was particularly criticised for Tarantino’s use of the term nigger - over 100 instances in the film. Tarantino defended his decision by claiming historical accuracy, poetic license, and his desire to confront audiences with various levels of racism. Many, including Spike Lee, disagreed, arguing Tarantino had no claim to making a film about slavery. Lee stated through Twitter: “American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them” (“Spike Lee on Django Unchained: Filmmaker Calls Movie ‘Disrespectful’”). Not only does Lee evoke the tragedy of the American slave trade and the significance of race within contemporary filmmaking, but he uses genre to underscore what he perceives is Tarantino’s lack of reverence to the issue of slavery and its aftermath in American culture. Django Unchained is both physically and emotionally brutal. The world created by Tarantino is culturally messy, as Italian composers rub elbows with black hip-hop artists, actors from films’ referenced in Django Unchained interact with new types of heroes. The amounts of references, people, and spectacles in his films have created a brand that is both hyperaware, but often critiqued as ambivalent. This is due in part to the perception of Tarantino as a filmmaker with no filter. His brand as a filmmaker is action ordered, excessive, and injected with his own fandom. He is an ultimate poacher of texts and it is this aesthetic, which has also made him a fan favourite amongst young cinephiles. Not only does he embrace the amount of play film offers, but he takes the familiar and makes it strange. The worlds he creates are hazier, darker, and unstable. Creating such a world in Django Unchained provides a lot of potential for reading race in film and American culture. He and his defenders have discussed this film as an “honest” portrayal of the effects of slavery and racial tension in the United States. This is also the world which acts as context for RZA’s The Man with the Iron Fists. Though a reference abandoned in Django Unchained, the connection between both films and both filmmakers pleasure in pastiche provide further insight to connections between film and race. Doing the Knowledge: RZA Pays Homage As a filmmaker, RZA utilises Tarantino’s filmmaking brand techniques to build his own homage and add to the body of kung-fu films. Doing so furnishes him the opportunity to rehash and reform narratives and tropes in ways that change familiar narrative structures and plot devices. In creating a film which relies on cinematic allusions to kung fu, RZA—as a fan, practitioner, and author—reconfigures kung fu from being an exploitative genre and reshapes its potential for representational empowerment. While Tarantino considers himself an unabashed thief of genre tropes, RZA envisions himself more as a student who pays homage to masters—among whom he includes Tarantino. Indeed, in an interview with MTV, RZA refers to Tarantino as his Sifu (a Chinese term for master or teacher) and credits him not only for teaching RZA about filmmaking, but also for providing him with his blessing to make his first feature length film (Downey, “RZA Recalls Learning from ‘The Master’ Quentin Tarantino”). RZA implies that mastery of one’s craft comes from incorporating influences while creating original work, not theft. For instance, he states that the Pink Blossom brothel—the locus for most of the action in the film—was inspired by the House of Blue Leaves restaurant, which functions in a similar capacity in Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (“RZA Talks Sampling of Kung Fu Films for Movie & The Difference Between Biting vs. Influence”). Hip-hop is an art form in which its practitioners “partake of a discursive universe where skill at appropriating the fragments of a rapidly-changing world with verbal grace and dexterity is constituted as knowledge” (Potter 21). This knowledge draws upon not only the contemporary moment but also the larger body of recorded music and sound, both of which it “re-reads and Signifies upon through a complex set of strategies, including samplin’, cuttin’ (pastiche), and freestylin’ (improvisation)” (Potter 22). As an artist who came of age in hip-hop’s formative years and whose formal recording career began at the latter half of hip-hop’s Golden Age (often considered 1986-1993), RZA is a particularly adept cutter and sampler – indeed, as a sampler, RZA is often considered a master. While RZA’s samples run the gamut of the musical spectrum, he is especially known for sampling obscure, often indeterminable jazz and soul tracks. Imani Perry suggests that this measure of fidelity to the past is borne out of hip-hop’s ideological respect for ancestors and its inherent sense of nostalgia (54). Hallmarks of RZA’s sampling repertoire include dialog and sound effects from equally obscure kung fu films. RZA attributes his sampling of kung fu to an affinity for these films established in his youth after viewing noteworthy examples such as The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978) and Five Deadly Venoms (1978). These films have become a key aspect of his identity and everyday life (Gross, “RZA’s Edge: The RZA’s Guide to Kung Fu Films”). He speaks of his decision to make kung fu dialog an integral part of Wu-Tang Clan’s first album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers): “My fantasy was to make a one-hour movie that people were just going to listen to. They would hear my movie and see it in their minds. I’d read comic books like that, with sonic effects and kung fu voices in my head. That makes it more exciting so I try to create music in the same way” (Gross, ““RZA’s Edge: The RZA’s Guide to Kung Fu Films”). Much like Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and his other musical endeavours, The Man with the Iron Fists serves as further evidence of RZA’s hybrid identity., which sociologist Keri E. Iyall Smith suggests emerges from “a reflexive relationship between local and global” (3). According to popular music scholar Brett Lashua, hybrid identities “make and re-make culture through appropriating the cultural ‘raw materials’ of life in order to construct meaning in their own specific cultural localities. In a sense, they are ‘sampling’ from broader popular culture and reworking what they can take into their own specific local cultures” (“The Arts of the Remix: Ethnography and Rap”). The most overt instance of RZA’s hybridity is in regards to names, many of which are derived from the Gordon Liu film Shaolin and Wu-Tang (1983), in which the competing martial arts schools come together to fight a common foe. The film is the basis not only for the name of RZA’s group (Wu-Tang Clan) but also for the names of individual members (for instance, Master Killer—after the series to which the film belongs) and the group’s home base of Staten Island, New York, which they frequently refer to as “Shaolin.” The Man with the Iron Fists is another extension of this hybrid identity. Kung fu has long had meaning for African Americans particularly because these films frequently “focus narratively on either the triumph of the ‘little guy’ or ‘underdog’ or the nobility of the struggle to recognise humanity and virtue in all people, or some combination of both” (Ongiri 35). As evidence, Amy Obugo Ongiri points to films such as The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, a film about a peasant who learns martial arts at the Shaolin temple in order to avenge his family’s murder by the Manchu rulers (Ongiri 35). RZA reifies this notion in a GQ interview, where he speaks about The 36th Chamber of Shaolin specifically, noting its theme of rebellion against government oppression having relevance to his life as an African American (Pappademus, “This Movie Is Rated Wu”). RZA appropriates the humble origins of the peasant San Te (Gordon Liu), the protagonist of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, in Thaddeus (whom RZA plays in the film), whose journey to saviour of Jungle Village begins with his being a slave in America. Indeed, one might argue that RZA’s construction of and role as Thaddeus is the ultimate realisation of the hybrid identity he has developed since becoming a popular recording artist. Just as Tarantino’s acting in his own films often reflects his identity as genre splicer and convention breaker (particularly since they are often self-referential), RZA’s portrayal of Thaddeus—as an African American, as a martial artist, and as a “conscious” human being—reflects the narrative RZA has constructed about his own life. Conclusion The same amount of play Tarantino has with conventions, particularly in characterisations and notions of heroism, is present in RZA’s Man with the Iron Fists. Both filmmakers poach from their favourite films and genres in order to create interpretations that feel both familiar and new. RZA follows Tarantino’s aesthetic of borrowing scenes directly from other films. Both filmmakers poach from films for their own devices, but in those mash-ups open up avenues for genre critique and identity formation. Tarantino is right to say that they are not solely homages, as homages honour the films in which they borrow. Tarantino and RZA do more through their poaching to stretch the boundaries of genres and films’ abilities to communicate with audiences. References “The Directors of Our Lifetime: In Their Own Words.” Empire Online. N.d. 8 May 2013 ‹http://www.empireonline.com/magazine/250/directors-of-our-lifetime/5.asp›. Booker, Keith M. Postmodern Hollywood: What’s New in Film and Why It Makes Us Feel So Strange. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007. Downey, Ryan J. “RZA Recalls Learning from ‘The Master’ Quentin Tarantino.” MTV. 30 August 2012. 14 July 2013 ‹http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1692872/rza-man-with-the-iron-fists-quentin-tarantino.jhtml›. Gallefent, Edward. Quentin Tarantino. London: Longman. 2005. Gross, Jason. “RZA’s Edge: The RZA’s Guide to Kung Fu Films.” Film Comment. N.d. 5 June 2013 ‹http://www.filmcomment.com/article/rzas-edge-the-rzas-guide-to-kung-fu-films›. Iyall Smith, Keri E. “Hybrid Identities: Theoretical Examinations.” Hybrid Identities: Theoretical and Empirical Examinations. Ed. Keri E. Iyall Smith and Patricia Leavy. Leiden: Brill, 2008. 3-12. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. London: Pluto, 1985. 111-125. Lashua, Brett. “The Arts of the Remix: Ethnography and Rap.” Anthropology Matters 8.2 (2006). 6 June 2013 ‹http://www.anthropologymatters.com›. “The Man with the Iron Fists – Who in the Cast Can F-U Up?” IronFistsMovie 21 Sep. 2012. YouTube. 8 May 2013 ‹http://youtu.be/bhJOQZFJfqA›. Pappademus, Alex. “This Movie Is Rated Wu.” GQ Nov. 2012. 6 June 2013 ‹http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201211/the-rza-man-with-the-iron-fists-wu-tang-clan›. Perry, Imani. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004. Potter, Russell. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 1995. “RZA Talks Sampling of Kung Fu Films for Movie & The Difference between Biting vs. Influence.” The Well Versed. 2 Nov. 2012. 5 June 2013 ‹http://thewellversed.com/2012/11/02/video-rza-talks-sampling-of-kung-fu-films-for-movie-the-difference-between-biting-vs-influence/›. Smith, Sarah. “Lip and Love: Subversive Repetition in the Pastiche Films of Tracey Moffat.” Screen 49.2 (Summer 2008): 209-215. Snedier, Jeff. “Rza Joins 'Django Unchained' Cast.” Variety 2 Nov. 2011. 14 June 2013 ‹http://variety.com/2011/film/news/rza-joins-django-unchained-cast-1118045503/›. “Spike Lee on Django Unchained: Filmmaker Calls Movie ‘Disrespectful.’” Huffington Post 24 Dec. 2012. 14 June 2013 ‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/23/spike-lee-django-unchained-movie-disrespectful_n_2356729.html›. Wu-Tang Clan. Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Loud, 1993. Filmography The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. Dir. Chia-Liang Lui. Perf. Chia Hui Lui, Lieh Lo, Chia Yung Lui. Shaw Brothers, 1978. Django Unchained. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, Christoph Waltz. Miramax, 2012. Five Deadly Venoms. Dir. Cheh Chang. Perf. Sheng Chiang, Philip Kwok, Feng Lu. Shaw Brothers, 1978. Jackie Brown. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster. Miramax, 1997. Kill Bill: Vol. 1. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Darryl Hannah. Miramax, 2003. The Man with the Iron Fists. Dir. RZA. Perf. RZA, Russell Crowe, Lucy Liu. Arcade Pictures, 2012. Pulp Fiction. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson. Miramax, 1994. Shaolin and Wu-Tang. Dir. Chiu Hui Liu. Perf. Chiu Hui Liu, Adam Cheng, Li Ching.

Introduction Films with deaf characters often do not focus on the condition of deafness at all. Rather, the characters seem to satisfy a role in the story that either furthers the plot or the audience’s understanding of other hearing characters. The deaf characters can be symbolic, for example as a metaphor for isolation representative of ‘those without a voice’ in a society. The deaf characters’ misunderstanding of auditory cues can lead to comic circumstances, and their knowledge can save them in the case of perilous ones. Sign language, because of its unique linguistic properties and its lack of comprehension by hearing people, can save the day in a story line. Deaf characters are shown in different eras and in different countries, providing a fictional window into their possible experiences. Films shape and reflect cultural attitudes and can serve as a potent force in influencing the attitudes and assumptions of those members of the hearing world who have had few, if any, encounters with deaf people. This article explores categories of literary function as identified by the author, providing examples and suggestions of other films for readers to explore. Searching for Deaf Characters in Film I am a sign language interpreter. Several years ago, I started noticing how deaf characters are used in films. I made a concerted effort to find as many as I could. I referred to John Shuchman’s exhaustive book about deaf actors and subject matter, Hollywood Speaks; I scouted video rental guides (key words were ‘deaf’ or ‘disabled’); and I also plugged in the key words ‘deaf in film’ on Google’s search engine. I decided to ignore the issue of whether or not the actors were actually deaf—a political hot potato in the Deaf community which has been discussed extensively. Similarly, the linguistic or cultural accuracy of the type of sign language used or super-human lip-reading talent did not concern me. What was I looking for? I noticed that few story lines involving deaf characters provide any discussion or plot information related to that character’s deafness. I was puzzled. Why is there signing in the elevator in Jerry Maguire? Why does the guy in Grand Canyon have a deaf daughter? Why would the psychosomatic response to a trauma—as in Psych Out—be deafness rather than blindness? I concluded that not being able to hear carried some special meaning or fulfilled a particular need intrinsic to the plot of the story. I also observed that the functions of deaf characters seem to fall into several categories. Some deaf characters fit into more than one category, serving two or more symbolic purposes at the same time. By viewing and analysing the representations of deafness and deaf characters in forty-six films, I have come up with the following classifications: Deafness as a plot device Deaf characters as protagonist informants Deaf characters as a parallel to the protagonist Sign language as ‘hero’ Stories about deaf/hearing relationships A-normal-guy-or-gal-who-just-happens-to-be-deaf Deafness as a psychosomatic response to trauma Deafness as metaphor Deafness as a symbolic commentary on society Let your fingers do the ‘talking’ Deafness as Plot Device Every element of a film is a device, but when the plot hinges on one character being deaf, the story succeeds because of that particular character having that particular condition. The limitations or advantages of a deaf person functioning within the hearing world establish the tension, the comedy, or the events which create the story. In Hear No Evil (1993), Jillian learns from her hearing boyfriend which mechanical devices cause ear-splitting noises (he has insomnia and every morning she accidentally wakes him in very loud ways, eg., she burns the toast, thus setting off the smoke detector; she drops a metal spoon down the garbage disposal unit). When she is pursued by a murderer she uses a fire alarm, an alarm/sprinkler system, and a stereo turned on full blast to mask the sounds of her movements as she attempts to hide. Jillian and her boyfriend survive, she learns about sound, her boyfriend learns about deafness, and she teaches him the sign for orgasm. Life is good! The potential comic aspects of deafness may seem in this day and age to be shockingly politically incorrect. While the slapstick aspect is often innocent and means no overt harm or insult to the Deaf as a population, deafness functions as the visual banana peel over which the characters figuratively stumble in the plot. The film, See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989), pairing Gene Wilder with Richard Pryor as deaf and blind respectively, is a constant sight gag of lip-reading miscues and lack-of-sight gags. Wilder can speak, and is able to speech read almost perfectly, almost all of the time (a stereotype often perpetuated in films). It is mind-boggling to imagine the detail of the choreography required for the two actors to convince the audience of their authenticity. Other films in this category include: Suspect It’s a Wonderful Life Murder by Death Huck Finn One Flew over the Cuckoo’s NestThe Shop on Main StreetRead My Lips The Quiet Deaf Characters as Protagonist Informants Often a deaf character’s primary function to the story is to give the audience more information about, or form more of an affinity with, the hearing protagonist. The deaf character may be fascinating in his or her own right, but generally the deafness is a marginal point of interest. Audience attitudes about the hearing characters are affected because of their previous or present involvement with deaf individuals. This representation of deafness seems to provide a window into audience understanding and appreciation of the protagonist. More inferences can be made about the hearing person and provides one possible explanation for what ensues. It is a subtle, almost subliminal trick. There are several effective examples of this approach. In Gas, Food, Lodging (1992), Shade discovers that tough-guy Javier’s mother is deaf. He introduces Shade to his mother by simple signs and finger-spelling. They all proceed to visit and dance together (mom feels the vibrations on the floor). The audience is drawn to feel ‘Wow! Javier is a sensitive kid who has grown up with a beautiful, exotic, deaf mother!’ The 1977 film, Looking for Mr. Goodbar presents film-goers with Theresa, a confused young woman living a double life. By day, she is a teacher of deaf children. Her professor in the Teacher of the Deaf program even likens their vocation to ‘touching God’. But by night she cruises bars and engages in promiscuous sexual activity. The film shows how her fledgling use of signs begins to express her innermost desires, as well as her ability to communicate and reach out to her students. Other films in this category include: Miracle on 34th Street (1994 version)Nashville (1975, dir. Robert Altman)The Family StoneGrand CanyonThere Will Be Blood Deaf Characters as a Parallel to the Protagonist I Don’t Want to Talk about It (1993) from Argentina, uses a deaf character to establish an implied parallel story line to the main hearing character. Charlotte, a dwarf, is friends with Reanalde, who is deaf. The audience sees them in the first moments of the film when they are little girls together. Reanalde’s mother attempts to commiserate with Charlotte’s mother, establishing a simultaneous but unseen story line somewhere else in town over the course of the story. The setting is Argentina during the 1930s, and the viewer can assume that disability awareness is fairly minimal at the time. Without having seen Charlotte’s deaf counterpart, the audience still knows that her story has contained similar struggles for ‘normalcy’ and acceptance. Near the conclusion of the film, there is one more glimpse of Reanalde, when she catches the bridal bouquet at Charlotte’s wedding. While having been privy to Charlotte’s experiences all along, we can only conjecture as to what Reanalde’s life has been. Sign Language as ‘Hero’ The power of language, and one’s calculated use of language as a means of escape from a potentially deadly situation, is shown in The River Wild (1996). The reason that any of the hearing characters knows sign language is that Gail, the protagonist, has a deaf father. Victor appears primarily to allow the audience to see his daughter and grandson sign with him. The mother, father, and son are able to communicate surreptitiously and get themselves out of a dangerous predicament. Signing takes an iconic form when the signs BOAT, LEFT, I-LOVE-YOU are drawn on a log suspended over the river as a message to Gail so that she knows where to steer the boat, and that her husband is still alive. The unique nature of sign language saves the day– silently and subtly produced, right under the bad guys’ noses! Stories about Deaf/Hearing Relationships Because of increased awareness and acceptance of deafness, it may be tempting to assume that growing up deaf or having any kind of relationship with a deaf individual may not pose too much of a challenge. Captioning and subtitling are ubiquitous in the USA now, as is the inclusion of interpreters on stages at public events. Since the inception of USA Public Law 94-142 and section 504 in 1974, more deaf children are ‘mainstreamed’ into public schools than ever before. The Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1993, opening the doors in the US for more access, more job opportunities, more inclusion. These are the external manifestations of acceptance that most viewers with no personal exposure to deafness may see in the public domain. The nuts and bolts of growing up deaf, navigating through opposing philosophical theories regarding deaf education, and dealing with parents, siblings, and peers who can’t communicate, all serve to form foundational experiences which an audience rarely witnesses. Children of a Lesser God (1986), uses the character of James Leeds to provide simultaneous voiced translations of the deaf student Sarah’s comments. The audience is ushered into the world of disparate philosophies of deaf education, a controversy of which general audiences may not have been previously unaware. At the core of James and Sarah’s struggle is his inability to accept that she is complete as she is, as a signing not speaking deaf person. Whether a full reconciliation is possible remains to be seen. The esteemed teacher of the deaf must allow himself to be taught by the deaf. Other films in this category include: Johnny Belinda (1949, 1982)Mr. Holland’s OpusBeyond SilenceThe Good ShepherdCompensation A Normal Guy-or-Gal-Who-Just-Happens-to-Be-Deaf The greatest measure of equality is to be accepted on one's own merits, with no special attention to differences or deviations from whatever is deemed ‘the norm.’ In this category, the audience sees the seemingly incidental inclusion of a deaf or hearing-impaired person in the casting. A sleeper movie titled Crazy Moon (1986) is an effective example. Brooks is a shy, eccentric young hearing man who needs who needs to change his life. Vanessa is deaf and works as a clerk in a shop while takes speech lessons. She possesses a joie de vivre that Brooks admires and wishes to emulate. When comparing the way they interact with the world, it is apparent that Brooks is the one who is handicapped. Other films in this category include: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (South Korea, 1992)Liar, LiarRequiem for a DreamKung Fu HustleBangkok DangerousThe Family StoneDeafness as a Psychosomatic Response to Trauma Literature about psychosomatic illnesses enumerates many disconcerting and disruptive physiological responses. However, rarely is there a PTSD response as profound as complete blockage of one of the five senses, ie; becoming deaf as a result of a traumatic incident. But it makes great copy, and provides a convenient explanation as to why an actor needn't learn sign language! The rock group The Who recorded Tommy in 1968, inaugurating an exciting and groundbreaking new musical genre – the rock opera. The film adaptation, directed by Ken Russell, was released in 1975. In an ironic twist for a rock extravaganza, the hero of the story is a ‘deaf, dumb, and blind kid.’ Tommy Johnson becomes deaf when he witnesses the murder of his father at the hands of his step-father and complicit mother. From that moment on, he is deaf and blind. When he grows up, he establishes a cult religion of inner vision and self-discovery. Another film in this category is Psych Out. Deafness as a Metaphor Hearing loss does not necessarily mean complete deafness and/or lack of vocalization. Yet, the general public tends to assume that there is utter silence, complete muteness, and the inability to verbalize anything at all. These assumptions provide a rich breeding ground for a deaf character to personify isolation, disenfranchisement, and/or avoidance of the harsher side of life. The deafness of a character can also serve as a hearing character’s nemesis. Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995) chronicles much of the adult life of a beleaguered man named Glenn Holland whose fondest dream is to compose a grand piece of orchestral music. To make ends meet he must teach band and orchestra to apparently disinterested and often untalented students in a public school. His golden son (named Cole, in honor of the jazz great John Coltrane) is discovered to be deaf. Glenn’s music can’t be born, and now his son is born without music. He will never be able to share his passion with his child. He learns just a little bit of sign, is dismissive of the boy’s dreams, and drifts further away from his family to settle into a puddle of bitterness, regrets, and unfulfilled desires. John Lennon’s death provides the catalyst for Cole’s confrontation with Glenn, forcing the father to understand that the gulf between them is an artificial one, perpetuated by the unwillingness to try. Any other disability could not have had the same effect in this story. Other films in this category include: Ramblin’ RoseBabelThe Heart Is a Lonely HunterA Code Unkown Deafness as a Symbolic Commentary on Society Sometimes films show deafness in a different country, during another era, and audiences receive a fictionalized representation of what life might have been like before these more enlightened times. The inability to hear and/or speak can also represent the more generalized powerlessness that a culture or a society’s disenfranchised experience. The Chinese masterpiece To Live (1994) provides historical and political reasons for Fenxi’s deafness—her father was a political prisoner whose prolonged absence brought hardship and untended illness. Later, the chaotic political situation which resulted in a lack of qualified doctors led to her death. In between these scenes the audience sees how her parents arrange a marriage with another ‘handicapped’ comrade of the town. Those citizens deemed to be crippled or outcast have different overt rights and treatment. The 1996 film Illtown presents the character of a very young teenage boy to represent the powerlessness of youth in America. David has absolutely no say in where he can live, with whom he can live, and the decisions made all around him. When he is apprehended after a stolen car chase, his frustration at his and all of his generation’s predicament in the face of a crumbling world is pounded out on the steering wheel as the police cars circle him. He is caged, and without the ability to communicate. Were he to have a voice, the overall sense of the film and his situation is that he would be misunderstood anyway. Other films in this category include: Stille Liebe (Germany)RidiculeIn the Company of Men Let Your Fingers Do the ‘Talking’ I use this heading to describe films where sign language is used by a deaf character to express something that a main hearing character can’t (or won’t) self-generate. It is a clever device which employs a silent language to create a communication symbiosis: Someone asks a hearing person who knows sign what that deaf person just said, and the hearing person must voice what he or she truly feels, and yet is unable to express voluntarily. The deaf person is capable of expressing the feeling, but must rely upon the hearing person to disseminate the message. And so, the words do emanate from the mouth of the person who means them, albeit self-consciously, unwillingly. Jerry Maguire (1996) provides a signed foreshadowing of character metamorphosis and development, which is then voiced for the hearing audience. Jerry and Dorothy have just met, resigned from their jobs in solidarity and rebellion, and then step into an elevator to begin a new phase of their lives. Their body language identifies them as separate, disconnected, and heavily emotionally fortified. An amorous deaf couple enters the elevator and Dorothy translates the deaf man’s signs as, ‘You complete me.’ The sentiment is strong and a glaring contrast to Jerry and Dorothy’s present dynamic. In the end, Jerry repeats this exact phrase to her, and means it with all his heart. We are all made aware of just how far they have traveled emotionally. They have become the couple in the elevator. Other films in this category include: Four Weddings and a FuneralKnowing Conclusion This has been a cursory glance at examining the narrative raison d’etre for the presence of a deaf character in story lines where no discussion of deafness is articulated. A film’s plot may necessitate hearing-impairment or deafness to successfully execute certain gimmickry, provide a sense of danger, or relational tension. The underlying themes and motifs may revolve around loneliness, alienation, or outwardly imposed solitude. The character may have a subconscious desire to literally shut out the world of sound. The properties of sign language itself can be exploited for subtle, undetectable conversations to assure the safety of hearing characters. Deaf people have lived during all times, in all places, and historical films can portray a slice of what their lives may have been like. I hope readers will become more aware of deaf characters on the screen, and formulate more theories as to where they fit in the literary/narrative schema. ReferencesMaltin, Leonard. Leonard Maltin’s 2009 Movie Guide. Penguin Group, 2008.Shuchman, John S. Hollywood Speaks. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Filmography Babel. Dir. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Central Films, 2006. DVD. Bangkok Dangerous. Dir. Pang Brothers. Film Bangkok, 1999. VHS. Beyond Silence. Dir. Caroline Link. Miramax Films, 1998. DVD. Children of a Lesser God. Dir. Randa Haines. Paramount Pictures, 1985. DVD. A Code Unknown. Dir. Michael Heneke. MK2 Editions, 2000. DVD. Compensation. Dir. Zeinabu Irene Davis. Wimmin with a Mission Productions, 1999. VHS. Crazy Moon. Dir. Allan Eastman. Allegro Films, 1987. VHS. The Family Stone. Dir. Mike Bezucha. 20th Century Fox, 2005. DVD. Four Weddings and a Funeral. Dir. Mike Newell. Polygram Film Entertainment, 1994. DVD. Gas, Food, Lodging. Dir. Allison Anders. IRS Media, 1992. DVD. The Good Shepherd. Dir. Robert De Niro. Morgan Creek, TriBeCa Productions, American Zoetrope, 2006. DVD. Grand Canyon. Dir. Lawrence Kasdan, Meg Kasdan. 20th Century Fox, 1991. DVD. Hear No Evil. Dir. Robert Greenwald. 20th Century Fox, 1993. DVD. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Dir. Robert Ellis Miller. Warner Brothers, 1968. DVD. Huck Finn. Stephen Sommers. Walt Disney Pictures, 1993. VHS. I Don’t Want to Talk about It. Dir. Maria Luisa Bemberg. Mojame Productions, 1994. DVD. Knowing. Dir. Alex Proyas. Escape Artists, 2009. DVD. Illtown. Dir. Nick Gomez. 1998. VHS. In the Company of Men. Dir. Neil LaBute. Alliance Atlantis Communications,1997. DVD. It’s a Wonderful Life. Dir. Frank Capra. RKO Pictures, 1947. DVD. Jerry Maguire. Dir. Cameron Crowe. TriSTar Pictures, 1996. DVD. Johnny Belinda. Dir. Jean Nagalesco. Warner Brothers Pictures, 1948. DVD. Kung Fu Hustle. Dir. Stephen Chow. Film Production Asia, 2004. DVD. Liar, Liar. Dir. Tom Shadyac. Universal Pictures, 1997. DVD. Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Dir. Richard Brooks. Paramount Miracle on 34th Street. Dir. Les Mayfield. 20th Century Fox, 1994. DVD. Mr. Holland’s Opus. Dir. Stephen Hereck. Hollywood Pictures, 1996. DVD Murder by Death. Dir. Robert Moore. Columbia Pictures, 1976. VHS. Nashville. Dir. Robert Altman. Paramount Pictures, 1975. DVD. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Dir. Milos Forman. United Artists, 1975. DVD. The Perfect Circle. Dir. Ademir Kenovic. 1997. DVD. Psych Out. Dir. Richard Rush. American International Pictures, 1968. DVD. The Quiet. Dir. Jamie Babbit. Sony Pictures Classics, 2005. DVD. Ramblin’ Rose. Dir. Martha Coolidge. Carolco Pictures, 1991. DVD. Read My Lips. Dir. Jacques Audiard. Panthe Films, 2001. DVD. Requiem for a Dream. Dir. Darren Aronofsky. Artisan Entertainment, 2000. DVD. Ridicule. Dir. Patrice Laconte. Miramax Films, 1996. DVD. The River Wild. Dir. Curtis Hanson. Universal Pictures, 1995. DVD. See No Evil, Hear No Evil. Dir. Arthur Hiller. TriSTar Pictures,1989. DVD. The Shop on Main Street. Dir. Jan Kadar, Elmar Klos. Barrandov Film Studio, 1965. VHS. Stille Liebe. Dir. Christoph Schaub. T and C Film AG, 2001. DVD. Suspect. Dir. Peter Yates. Tri-Star Pictures, 1987. DVD. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. Dir. Park Chan-wook. CJ Entertainments, Tartan Films, 2002. DVD. There Will Be Blood. Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson. Paramount Vantage, Miramax Films, 2007. DVD. To Live. Dir. Zhang Yimou. Shanghai Film Studio and ERA International, 1994. DVD. What the Bleep Do We Know?. Dir. Willam Arntz, Betsy Chasse, Mark Vicente. Roadside Attractions, 2004. DVD.

Despite numerous critics describing him as an auteur (i.e. a film-maker who ‘does’ everything and fulfils every production role [Bordwell and Thompson 37] and/or with a signature “world-view” detectable in his/her work [Caughie 10]), Rolf de Heer appears to have declined primary authorship of Dance Me to My Song (1997), his seventh in an oeuvre of twelve feature films. Indeed, the opening credits do not mention his name at all: it is only with the closing credits that the audience learns de Heer has directed the film. Rather, as the film commences, the viewer is informed by the titles that it is “A film by Heather Rose”, thus suggesting that the work is her singular creation. Direct and uncompromising, with its unflattering shots of the lead actor and writer (Heather Rose Slattery, a young woman born with cerebral palsy), the film may be read as a courageous self-portrait which finds the grace, humanity and humour trapped inside Rose’s twisted body. Alternatively, it may be read as yet another example of de Heer’s signature interest in foregrounding a world view which gives voice to marginalised characters such as the disabled or the disadvantaged. For example, the developmentally retarded eponyme of Bad Boy Bubby (1993) is eventually able to make art as a singer in a band and succeeds in creating a happy family with a wife and two kids. The ‘mute’ girl in The Quiet Room (1996) makes herself heard by her squabbling parents through her persistent activism. In Ten Canoes (2006) the Indigenous Australians cast themselves according to kinship ties, not according to the director’s choosing, and tell their story in their own uncolonised language. A cursory glance at the films of Rolf de Heer suggests he is overtly interested in conveying to the audience the often overlooked agency of his unlikely protagonists. In the ultra-competitive world of professional film-making it is rare to see primary authorship ceded by a director so generously. However, the allocation of authorship to a member of a marginalized population re-invigorates questions prompted by Andy Medhurst regarding a film’s “authorship test” (198) and its relationship to a subaltern community wherein he writes that “a biographical approach has more political justification if the project being undertaken is one concerned with the cultural history of a marginalized group” (202-3). Just as films by gay authors about gay characters may have greater credibility, as Medhurst posits, one might wonder would a film by a person with a disability about a character with the same disability be better received? Enabling authorship by an unknown, crippled woman such as Rose rather than a famous, able-bodied male such as de Heer may be cynically regarded as good (show) business in that it is politically correct. This essay therefore asks if the appellation “A film by Heather Rose” is appropriate for Dance Me to My Song. Whose agency in telling the story (or ‘doing’ the film-making), the able bodied Rolf de Heer or the disabled Heather Rose, is reflected in this cinematic production? In other words, whose voice is enabled when an audience receives this film? In attempting to answer these questions it is inevitable that Paul Darke’s concept of the “normality drama” (181) is referred to and questioned, as I argue that Dance Me to My Song makes groundbreaking departures from the conventions of the typical disability narrative. Heather Rose as Auteur Rose plays the film’s heroine, Julia, who like herself has cerebral palsy, a group of non-progressive, chronic disorders resulting from changes produced in the brain during the prenatal stages of life. Although severely affected physically, Rose suffered no intellectual impairment and had acted in Rolf de Heer’s cult hit Bad Boy Bubby five years before, a confidence-building experience that grew into an ongoing fascination with the filmmaking process. Subsequently, working with co-writer Frederick Stahl, she devised the scenario for this film, writing the lead role for herself and then proactively bringing it to de Heer’s attention. Rose wrote of de Heer’s deliberate lack of involvement in the script-writing process: “Rolf didn’t even want to read what we’d done so far, saying he didn’t want to interfere with our process” (de Heer, “Production Notes”). In 2002, aged 36, Rose died and Stahl reports in her obituary an excerpt from her diary: People see me as a person who has to be controlled. But let me tell you something, people. I am not! And I am going to make something real special of my life! I am going to go out there and grab life with both hands!!! I am going to make the most sexy and honest film about disability that has ever been made!! (Stahl, “Standing Room Only”) This proclamation of her ability and ambition in screen-writing is indicative of Rose’s desire to do. In a guest lecture Rose gave further insights into the active intent in writing Dance Me to My Song: I wanted to create a screenplay, but not just another soppy disability film, I wanted to make a hot sexy film, which showed the real world … The message I wanted to convey to an audience was “As people with disabilities, we have the same feelings and desires as others”. (Rose, “ISAAC 2000 Conference Presentation”) Rose went on to explain her strategy for winning over director de Heer: “Rolf was not sure about committing to the movie; I had to pester him really. I decided to invite him to my birthday party. It took a few drinks, but I got him to agree to be the director” (ibid) and with this revelation of her tactical approach her film-making agency is further evidenced. Rose’s proactive innovation is not just evident in her successfully approaching de Heer. Her screenplay serves as a radical exception to films featuring disabled persons, which, according to Paul Darke in 1998, typically involve the disabled protagonist struggling to triumph over the limitations imposed by their disability in their ‘admirable’ attempts to normalize. Such normality dramas are usually characterized by two generic themes: first, that the state of abnormality is nothing other than tragic because of its medical implications; and, second, that the struggle for normality, or some semblance of it in normalization – as represented in the film by the other characters – is unquestionably right owing to its axiomatic supremacy. (187) Darke argues that the so-called normality drama is “unambiguously a negation of ascribing any real social or individual value to the impaired or abnormal” (196), and that such dramas function to reinforce the able-bodied audience’s self image of normality and the notion of the disabled as the inferior Other. Able-bodied characters are typically portrayed positively in the normality drama: “A normality as represented in the decency and support of those characters who exist around, and for, the impaired central character. Thus many of the disabled characters in such narratives are bitter, frustrated and unfulfilled and either antisocial or asocial” (193). Darke then identifies The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980) and Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone, 1989) as archetypal films of this genre. Even in films in which seemingly positive images of the disabled are featured, the protagonist is still to be regarded as the abnormal Other, because in comparison to the other characters within that narrative the impaired character is still a comparatively second-class citizen in the world of the film. My Left Foot is, as always, a prime example: Christy Brown may well be a writer, relatively wealthy and happy, but he is not seen as sexual in any way (194). However, Dance Me to My Song defies such generic restrictions: Julia’s temperament is upbeat and cheerful and her disability, rather than appearing tragic, is made to look healthy, not “second class”, in comparison with her physically attractive, able-bodied but deeply unhappy carer, Madelaine (Joey Kennedy). Within the first few minutes of the film we see Madelaine dissatisfied as she stands, inspecting her healthy, toned and naked body in the bathroom mirror, contrasted with vision of Julia’s twisted form, prostrate, pale and naked on the bed. Yet, in due course, it is the able-bodied girl who is shown to be insecure and lacking in character. Madelaine steals Julia’s money and calls her “spastic”. Foul-mouthed and short-tempered, Madelaine perversely positions Julia in her wheelchair to force her to watch as she has perfunctory sex with her latest boyfriend. Madelaine even masquerades as Julia, commandeering her voice synthesizer to give a fraudulently positive account of her on-the-job performance to the employment agency she works for. Madelaine’s “axiomatic supremacy” is thoroughly undermined and in the most striking contrast to the typical normality drama, Julia is unashamedly sexual: she is no Christy Brown. The affective juxtaposition of these two different personalities stems from the internal nature of Madelaine’s problems compared to the external nature of Julia’s problems. Madelaine has an emotional disability rather than a physical disability and several scenes in the film show her reduced to helpless tears. Then one day when Madelaine has left her to her own devices, Julia defiantly wheels herself outside and bumps into - almost literally - handsome, able-bodied Eddie (John Brumpton). Cheerfully determined, Julia wins him over and a lasting friendship is formed. Having seen the joy that sex brings to Madelaine, Julia also wants carnal fulfilment so she telephones Eddie and arranges a date. When Eddie arrives, he reads the text on her voice machine’s screen containing the title line to the film ‘Dance me to my song’ and they share a tender moment. Eddie’s gentleness as he dances Julia to her song (“Kizugu” written by Bernard Huber and John Laidler, as performed by Okapi Guitars) is simultaneously contrasted with the near-date-rapes Madelaine endures in her casual relationships. The conflict between Madeline and Julia is such that it prompts Albert Moran and Errol Vieth to categorize the film as “women’s melodrama”: Dance Me to My Song clearly belongs to the genre of the romance. However, it is also important to recognize it under the mantle of the women’s melodrama … because it has to do with a woman’s feelings and suffering, not so much because of the flow of circumstance but rather because of the wickedness and malevolence of another woman who is her enemy and rival. (198-9) Melodrama is a genre that frequently resorts to depicting disability in which a person condemned by society as disabled struggles to succeed in love: some prime examples include An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey, 1957) involving a paraplegic woman, and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) in which a strong-spirited but mute woman achieves love. The more conventional Hollywood romances typically involve attractive, able-bodied characters. In Dance Me to My Song the melodramatic conflict between the two remarkably different women at first seems dominated by Madelaine, who states: “I know I’m good looking, good in bed ... better off than you, you poor thing” in a stream-of-consciousness delivery in which Julia is constructed as listener rather than converser. Julia is further reduced to the status of sub-human as Madelaine says: “I wish you could eat like a normal person instead of a bloody animal” and her erstwhile boyfriend Trevor says: “She looks like a fuckin’ insect.” Even the benevolent Eddie says: “I don’t like leaving you alone but I guess you’re used to it.” To this the defiant Julia replies; “Please don’t talk about me in front of me like I’m an animal or not there at all.” Eddie is suitably chastised and when he treats her to an over-priced ice-cream the shop assistant says “Poor little thing … She’ll enjoy this, won’t she?” Julia smiles, types the words “Fuck me!”, and promptly drops the ice-cream on the floor. Eddie laughs supportively. “I’ll just get her another one,” says the flustered shop assistant, “and then get her out of here, please!” With striking eloquence, Julia wheels herself out of the shop, her voice machine announcing “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me”, as she departs exultantly. With this bold statement of independence and defiance in the face of patronising condescension, the audience sees Rose’s burgeoning strength of character and agency reflected in the onscreen character she has created. Dance Me to My Song and the films mentioned above are, however, rare exceptions in the many that dare represent disability on the screen at all, compliant as the majority are with Darke’s expectations of the normality drama. Significantly, the usual medical-model nexus in many normality films is ignored in Rose’s screenplay: no medication, hospitals or white laboratory coats are to be seen in Julia’s world. Finally, as I have described elsewhere, Julia is shown joyfully dancing in her wheelchair with Eddie while Madelaine proves her physical inferiority with a ‘dance’ of frustration around her broken-down car (see Starrs, "Dance"). In Rose’s authorial vision, audience’s expectations of yet another film of the normality drama genre are subverted as the disabled protagonist proves superior to her ‘normal’ adversary in their melodramatic rivalry for the sexual favours of an able-bodied love-interest. Rolf de Heer as Auteur De Heer does not like to dwell on the topic of auteurism: in an interview in 2007 he somewhat impatiently states: I don’t go in much for that sort of analysis that in the end is terminology. … Look, I write the damn things, and direct them, and I don’t completely produce them anymore – there are other people. If that makes me an auteur in other people’s terminologies, then fine. (Starrs, "Sounds" 20) De Heer has been described as a “remarkably non-egotistical filmmaker” (Davis “Working together”) which is possibly why he handed ownership of this film to Rose. Of the writer/actor who plied him with drink so he would agree to back her script, de Heer states: It is impossible to overstate the courage of the performance that you see on the screen. … Heather somehow found the means to respond on cue, to maintain the concentration, to move in the desired direction, all the myriad of acting fundamentals that we take for granted as normal things to do in our normal lives. (“Production NHotes”) De Heer’s willingness to shift authorship from director to writer/actor is representative of this film’s groundbreaking promotion of the potential for agency within disability. Rather than being passive and suffering, Rose is able to ‘do.’ As the lead actor she is central to the narrative. As the principle writer she is central to the film’s production. And she does both. But in conflict with this auteurial intent is the temptation to describe Dance Me to My Song as an autobiographical documentary, since it is Rose herself, with her unique and obvious physical handicap, playing the film’s heroine, Julia. In interview, however, De Heer apparently disagrees with this interpretation: Rolf de Heer is quick to point out, though, that the film is not a biography.“Not at all; only in the sense that writers use material from their own lives.Madelaine is merely the collection of the worst qualities of the worst carers Heather’s ever had.” Dance Me to My Song could be seen as a dramatised documentary, since it is Rose herself playing Julia, and her physical or surface life is so intense and she is so obviously handicapped. While he understands that response, de Heer draws a comparison with the first films that used black actors instead of white actors in blackface. “I don’t know how it felt emotionally to an audience, I wasn’t there, but I think that is the equivalent”. (Urban) An example of an actor wearing “black-face” to portray a cerebral palsy victim might well be Gus Trikonis’s 1980 film Touched By Love. In this, the disabled girl is unconvincingly played by the pretty, able-bodied actress Diane Lane. The true nature of the character’s disability is hidden and cosmeticized to Hollywood expectations. Compared to that inauthentic film, Rose’s screenwriting and performance in Dance Me to My Song is a self-penned fiction couched in unmediated reality and certainly warrants authorial recognition. Despite his unselfish credit-giving, de Heer’s direction of this remarkable film is nevertheless detectable. His auteur signature is especially evident in his technological employment of sound as I have argued elsewhere (see Starrs, "Awoval"). The first distinctly de Heer influence is the use of a binaural recording device - similar to that used in Bad Boy Bubby (1993) - to convey to the audience the laboured nature of Julia’s breathing and to subjectively align the audience with her point of view. This apparatus provides a disturbing sound bed that is part wheezing, part grunting. There is no escaping Julia’s physically unusual life, from her reliance on others for food, toilet and showering, to the half-strangled sounds emanating from her ineffectual larynx. But de Heer insists that Julia does speak, like Stephen Hawkings, via her Epson RealVoice computerized voice synthesizer, and thus Julia manages to retain her dignity. De Heer has her play this machine like a musical instrument, its neatly modulated feminine tones immediately prompting empathy. Rose Capp notes de Heer’s preoccupation with finding a voice for those minority groups within the population who struggle to be heard, stating: de Heer has been equally consistent in exploring the communicative difficulties underpinning troubled relationships. From the mute young protagonist of The Quiet Room to the aphasic heroine of Dance Me to My Song, De Heer’s films are frequently preoccupied with the profound inadequacy or outright failure of language as a means of communication (21). Certainly, the importance to Julia of her only means of communication, her voice synthesizer, is stressed by de Heer throughout the film. Everybody around her has, to varying degrees, problems in hearing correctly or understanding both what and how Julia communicates with her alien mode of conversing, and she is frequently asked to repeat herself. Even the well-meaning Eddie says: “I don’t know what the machine is trying to say”. But it is ultimately via her voice synthesizer that Julia expresses her indomitable character. When first she meets Eddie, she types: “Please put my voice machine on my chair, STUPID.” She proudly declares ownership of a condom found in the bathroom with “It’s mine!” The callous Madelaine soon realizes Julia’s strength is in her voice machine and withholds access to the device as punishment for if she takes it away then Julia is less demanding for the self-centred carer. Indeed, the film which starts off portraying the physical superiority of Madelaine soon shows us that the carer’s life, for all her able-bodied, free-love ways, is far more miserable than Julia’s. As de Heer has done in many of his other films, a voice has been given to those who might otherwise not be heard through significant decision making in direction. In Rose’s case, this is achieved most obviously via her electric voice synthesizer. I have also suggested elsewhere (see Starrs, "Dance") that de Heer has helped find a second voice for Rose via the language of dance, and in doing so has expanded the audience’s understandings of quality of life for the disabled, as per Mike Oliver’s social model of disability, rather than the more usual medical model of disability. Empowered by her act of courage with Eddie, Julia sacks her uncaring ‘carer’ and the film ends optimistically with Julia and her new man dancing on the front porch. By picturing the couple in long shot and from above, Julia’s joyous dance of triumph is depicted as ordinary, normal and not deserving of close examination. This happy ending is intercut with a shot of Madeline and her broken down car, performing her own frustrated dance and this further emphasizes that she was unable to ‘dance’ (i.e. communicate and compete) with Julia. The disabled performer such as Rose, whether deliberately appropriating a role or passively accepting it, usually struggles to placate two contrasting realities: (s)he is at once invisible in the public world of interhuman relations and simultaneously hyper-visible due to physical Otherness and subsequent instantaneous typecasting. But by the end of Dance Me to My Song, Rose and de Heer have subverted this notion of the disabled performer grappling with the dual roles of invisible victim and hyper-visible victim by depicting Julia as socially and physically adept. She ‘wins the guy’ and dances her victory as de Heer’s inspirational camera looks down at her success like an omniscient and pleased god. Film academic Vivian Sobchack writes of the phenomenology of dance choreography for the disabled and her own experience of waltzing with the maker of her prosthetic leg, Steve, with the comment: “for the moment I did displace focus on my bodily immanence to the transcendent ensemble of our movement and I really began to waltz” (65). It is easy to imagine Rose’s own, similar feeling of bodily transcendence in the closing shot of Dance Me to My Song as she shows she can ‘dance’ better than her able-bodied rival, content as she is with her self-identity. Conclusion: Validation of the Auteurial OtherRolf de Heer was a well-known film-maker by the time he directed Dance Me to My Song. His films Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and The Quiet Room (1996) had both screened at the Cannes International Film Festival. He was rapidly developing a reputation for non-mainstream representations of marginalised, subaltern populations, a cinematic trajectory that was to be further consolidated by later films privileging the voice of Indigenous Peoples in The Tracker (2002) and Ten Canoes (2006), the latter winning the Special Jury prize at Cannes. His films often feature unlikely protagonists or as Liz Ferrier writes, are “characterised by vulnerable bodies … feminised … none of whom embody hegemonic masculinity” (65): they are the opposite of Hollywood’s hyper-masculine, hard-bodied, controlling heroes. With a nascent politically correct worldview proving popular, de Heer may have considered the assigning of authorship to Rose a marketable idea, her being representative of a marginalized group, which as Andy Medhurst might argue, may be more politically justifiable, as it apparently is with films of gay authorship. However, it must be emphasized that there is no evidence that de Heer’s reticence about claiming authorship of Dance Me to My Song is motivated by pecuniary interests, nor does he seem to have been trying to distance himself from the project through embarrassment or dissatisfaction with the film or its relatively unknown writer/actor. Rather, he seems to be giving credit for authorship where credit is due, for as a result of Rose’s tenacity and agency this film is, in two ways, her creative success. Firstly, it is a rare exception to the disability film genre defined by Paul Darke as the “normality drama” because in the film’s diegesis, Julia is shown triumphing not simply over the limitations of her disability, but over her able-bodied rival in love as well: she ‘dances’ better than the ‘normal’ Madelaine. Secondly, in her gaining possession of the primary credits, and the mantle of the film’s primary author, Rose is shown triumphing over other aspiring able-bodied film-makers in the notoriously competitive film-making industry. Despite being an unpublished and unknown author, the label “A film by Heather Rose” is, I believe, a deserved coup for the woman who set out to make “the most sexy and honest film about disability ever made”. As with de Heer’s other films in which marginalised peoples are given voice, he demonstrates a desire not to subjugate the Other, but to validate and empower him/her. He both acknowledges their authorial voices and credits them as essential beings, and in enabling such subaltern populations to be heard, willingly cedes his privileged position as a successful, white, male, able-bodied film-maker. In the credits of this film he seems to be saying ‘I may be an auteur, but Heather Rose is a no less able auteur’. References Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction, 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993. Capp, Rose. “Alexandra and the de Heer Project.” RealTime + Onscreen 56 (Aug.-Sep. 2003): 21. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue56/7153›. Caughie, John. “Introduction”. Theories of Authorship. Ed. John Caughie. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 9-16. Darke, Paul. “Cinematic Representations of Disability.” The Disability Reader. Ed. Tom Shakespeare. London and New York: Cassell, 1988. 181-198. Davis, Therese. “Working Together: Two Cultures, One Film, Many Canoes.” Senses of Cinema 2006. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/06/41/ten-canoes.html›. De Heer, Rolf. “Production Notes.” Vertigo Productions. Undated. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.vertigoproductions.com.au/information.php?film_id=10&display=notes›. Ferrier, Liz. “Vulnerable Bodies: Creative Disabilities in Contemporary Australian Film.” Australian Cinema in the 1990s. Ed. Ian Craven. London and Portland: Frank Cass and Co., 2001. 57-78. Medhurst, Andy. “That Special Thrill: Brief Encounter, Homosexuality and Authorship.” Screen 32.2 (1991): 197-208. Moran, Albert, and Errol Veith. Film in Australia: An Introduction. Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 2006. Oliver, Mike. Social Work with Disabled People. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1983. Rose Slattery, Heather. “ISAAC 2000 Conference Presentation.” Words+ n.d. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.words-plus.com/website/stories/isaac2000.htm›. Sobchack, Vivian. “‘Choreography for One, Two, and Three Legs’ (A Phenomenological Meditation in Movements).” Topoi 24.1 (2005): 55-66. Stahl, Frederick. “Standing Room Only for a Thunderbolt in a Wheelchair,” Sydney Morning Herald 31 Oct. 2002. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/10/30/1035683471529.html›. Starrs, D. Bruno. “Sounds of Silence: An Interview with Rolf de Heer.” Metro 152 (2007): 18-21. ———. “An avowal of male lack: Sound in Rolf de Heer’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2003).” Metro 156 (2008): 148-153. ———. “Dance Me to My Song (Rolf de Heer 1997): The Story of a Disabled Dancer.” Proceedings Scopic Bodies Dance Studies Research Seminar Series 2007. Ed. Mark Harvey. University of Auckland, 2008 (in press). Urban, Andrew L. “Dance Me to My Song, Rolf de Heer, Australia.” Film Festivals 1988. 6 June 2008. ‹http://www.filmfestivals.com/cannes98/selofus9.htm›.

At the start of the twentieth century, many young Australian artists travelled abroad to expand their art education and to gain exposure to the modern art movements of Europe. Most of these artists were active members of artist associations such as the Victorian Artists Society or the New South Wales Society of Artists. Male artists from Victoria were generally also members of the Melbourne Savage Club, a club with a strong association with the arts.This paper investigates the dual function of the club, as a space where the artists felt “at home” in the familiar environment that the club offered whilst they were abroad and, at the same time, a meeting space where they could engage in a stimulating artistic environment and gain introductions to leading figures in the art world. For those artists who chose England, London’s arts clubs played a large role, for it was in these establishments that they discussed, exhibited, shared, and met with their English counterparts. The club environment in London would have a significant impact on male Australian artists, as it offered a space where they were integrated into the English art world, which enhanced their experience whilst abroad.Artists were seldom members of Australia’s early gentlemen’s clubs, however, in the late nineteenth century Melbourne, artists formed less formal social groupings with exotic names such as the Prehistoric Order of Cannibals, the Buonarotti Club, and the Ishmael Club (Mead). Melbourne artists congregated in these clubs until the Melbourne Savage Club, modelled on the London Savage Club (1857)—a club whose membership was restricted to practitioners in the performing and visual arts—opened its doors in 1894.The Melbourne Savage Club had its origins in the Metropolitan Music Club, established in the late 1880s by a group of professional and amateur musicians and music lovers. The club initially admitted musicians and people from the dramatic professions free-of-charge, however, author Randolph Bedford (1868–1941) and artist Alf Vincent (1874–1915) were not content to be treated on a different basis to the musicians and actors, and two months after Vincent joined the club, at a Special General Meeting, the club resolved to vary Rule 6, “to admit landscape or portrait painters and sculptors without entrance fee” (Melbourne Savage Club). At another Special General Meeting, a year later, the rule was altered to admit “recognised members of the musical, dramatic and artistic professions and sculptors without payment of entrance fee” (Melbourne Savage Club).This resulted in an immediate influx of prominent Victorian male artists (Williams) and the Melbourne Savage Club became their place of choice to gather and enjoy the fellowship the club offered and to share ideas in a convivial atmosphere. When the opportunity arose for them to travel to London in the early twentieth century, they met in London’s famous art clubs. Membership of the Melbourne Savage Club not only conferred rights to visit reciprocal clubs whilst in London, but also facilitated introductions to potential patrons. The London clubs were the venue of choice for visiting artists to meet their fellow artist expatriates and to share experiences and, importantly, to meet with their British counterparts, exhibit their works, and establish valuable contacts.The London Savage Club attracted many Australian expatriates. Not only is it the grandfather of London’s bohemian clubs but also it was the model for arts clubs the world over. Founded in 1857, the qualification for admission was (and still is) to be, “a working man in literature or art, and a good fellow” (Halliday vii). If a candidate met these requirements, he would be cordially received “come whence he may.” This was embodied in the club’s first rules which required applicants for membership to be from a restricted range of pursuits relating to the arts thought to be commensurate with its bohemian ideals, namely art, literature, drama, or music.The second London arts club that attracted expatriate Australian artists was the New English Arts Club, founded in 1886 by young English artists returning from studying art in Paris. Members of The New English Arts Club were influenced by the Impressionist style as opposed to the academic art shown at the Royal Academy. As a meeting place for Australia’s expatriate artists, the New English Arts Club had a particular influence, as it exposed them to significant early Modern artist members such as John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Walter Sickert (1860–1942), William Orpen (1878–1931) and Augustus John (1878–1961) (Corbett and Perry; Thornton; Melbourne Savage Club).The third, and arguably the most popular with the expatriate Australian artists’ club, was the Chelsea Arts Club, a bohemian club formed in 1891 by local working artists looking for a place to go to “meet, talk, eat and drink” (Cross).Apart from the American-born founding member, James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), amongst the biggest Chelsea names at the time of the influx of travelling young Australian artists were modernists Sir William Orpen, Augustus John, and John Sargent. The opportunity to mix with these leading British contemporary artists was irresistible to these antipodean artists (55).When Melbourne artist, Miles Evergood (1871–1939) arrived in London from America in 1910, he had been an active exhibiting member of the Salmagundi Club, a New York artists’ club. Almost immediately he joined the New English Arts Club and the Chelsea Arts Club. Hammer tells of him associating with “writer Israel Zangwill, sculptor Jacob Epstein, and anti-academic artists including Walter Sickert, Augustus John, John Lavery, John Singer Sargent and C.R.W. Nevison, who challenged art values in Britain at the beginning of the century” (Hammer 41).Arthur Streeton (1867–1943) used the Chelsea Arts Club as his postal address, as did many expatriate artists. The Melbourne Savage Club archives contain letters and greetings, with news from abroad, written from artist members back to their “Brother Savages” (Various).In late 1902, Streeton wrote to fellow artist and Savage Club member Tom Roberts (1856–1931) from London:I belong to the Chelsea Arts Club now, & meet the artists – MacKennel says it’s about the most artistic club (speaking in the real sense) in England. … They all seem to be here – McKennal, Longstaff, Mahony, Fullwood, Norman, Minns, Fox, Plataganet Tudor St. George Tucker, Quinn, Coates, Bunny, Alston, K, Sonny Pole, other minor lights and your old friend and admirer Smike – within 100 yards of here – there must be 30 different studios. (Streeton 94)Whilst some of the artists whom Streeton mentioned were studying at either the Royal Academy or the Slade School, it was the clubs like the Chelsea Arts Club where they were most likely to encounter fellow Australian artists. Tom Roberts was obviously attentive to Streeton’s enthusiastic account and, when he returned to London the following year to work on his commission for The Big Picture of the 1901 opening of the first Commonwealth Parliament, he soon joined. Roberts, through his expansive personality, became particularly active in London’s Australian expatriate artistic community and later became Vice-President of the Chelsea Arts Club. Along with Streeton and Roberts, other visiting Melbourne Savage Club artists joined the Chelsea Arts Club. They included, John Longstaff (1861–1941), James Quinn (1869–1951), George Coates (1869–1930), and Will Dyson (1880–1938), along with Sydney artists Henry Fullwood (1863–1930), George Lambert (1873–1930), and Will Ashton (1881–1963) (Croll 95). Smith describes the exodus to London and Paris: “It was the Chelsea Arts Club that the Heidelberg School established its last and least distinguished camp” (Smith, Smith and Heathcote 152).Streeton, who retained his Chelsea Arts Club membership when he returned for a while to Australia, wrote to Roberts in 1907, “I miss Chelsea & the Club-boys” (Streeton 107). In relation to Frederick McCubbin’s pending visit he wrote: “Prof McCubbin left here a week ago by German ‘Prinz Heinrich.’ … You’ll introduce him at the Chelsea Club and I hope they make him an Hon. Member, etc” (Streeton et al. 85). McCubbin wrote, after an evening at the Chelsea Arts Club, following a visit to the Royal Academy: “Tonight, I am dining with Australian artists in Soho, and shall be there to greet my old friends. How glad I am! Longstaff will be there, and Frank Stuart, Roberts, Fullwood, Pontin, Coates, Quinn, and Tucker’s brother, and many others from all around” (MacDonald, McCubbin and McCubbin 75). Impressed by the work of Turner he wrote to his wife Annie, following avisit to the Tate Gallery:I went yesterday with Fullwood and G. Coates and Tom Roberts for a ramble … to the Tate Gallery – a beautiful freestone building facing the river through a portico into the gallery where the lately found turners are exhibited – these are not like the greater number of pictures in the National Gallery – they represent his different periods, but are mostly in his latest style, when he had realised the quality of light (McCubbin).Clearly Turner’s paintings had a profound impression on him. In the same letter he wrote:they are mostly unfinished but they are divine – such dreams of colour – a dozen of them are like pearls … mist and cloud and sea and land, drenched in light … They glow with tender brilliancy that radiates from these canvases – how he loved the dazzling brilliancy of morning or evening – these gems with their opal colour – you feel how he gloried in these tender visions of light and air. He worked from darkness into light.The Chelsea Arts Club also served as a venue for artists to entertain and host distinguished visitors from home. These guests included; Melbourne Savage Club artist member Alf Vincent (Joske 112), National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) Trustee and popular patron of the arts, Professor Baldwin Spencer (1860–1929), Professor Frederick S. Delmer (1864–1931) and conductor George Marshall-Hall (1862–1915) (Mulvaney and Calaby 329; Streeton 111).Artist Miles Evergood arrived in London in 1910, and visited the Chelsea Arts Club. He mentions expatriate Australian artists gathering at the Club, including Will Dyson, Fred Leist (1873–1945), David Davies (1864–1939), Will Ashton (1881–1963), and Henry Fullwood (Hammer 41).Most of the Melbourne Savage Club artist members were active in the London Savage Club. On one occasion, in November 1908, Roberts, with fellow artist MacKennal in the Chair, attended the Australian Artists’ Dinner held there. This event attracted twenty-five expatriate Australian artists, all residing in London at the time (McQueen 532).These London arts clubs had a significant influence on the expatriate Australian artists for they became the “glue” that held them together whilst abroad. Although some artists travelled abroad specifically to take up places at the Royal Academy School or the Slade School, only a minority of artists arriving in London from Australia and other British colonies were offered positions at these prestigious schools. Many artists travelled to “try their luck.” The arts clubs of London, whilst similarly discerning in their membership criteria, generally offered a visiting “brother-of-the-brush” a warm welcome as a professional courtesy. They featured the familiar rollicking all-male “Smoke Nights” a feature of the Melbourne Savage Club. With a greater “artist” membership than the clubs in Australia, expatriate artists were not only able to catch up with their friends from Australia, but also they could associate with England’s finest and most progressive artists in a familiar congenial environment. The clubs were a “home away from home” and described by Underhill as, “an artistic Earl’s Court” (Underhill 99). Most importantly, the clubs were a centre for discourse, arguably even more so than were the teaching academies. Britain’s leading modernist artists were members of the Chelsea Arts Club and the New English Arts Club and mixed freely with the visiting Australian artists.Many Australian artists, such as Miles Evergood and George Bell (1878–1966), held anti-academic views similar to English club members and embraced the new artistic trends, which they would bring back to Australia. Streeton had no illusions about the relative worth of the famed institutions and the exhibitions held by clubs such as the New English. Writing to Roberts before he joins him in London, he describes the Royal Academy as having, “an inartistic atmosphere” and claims he “hasn’t the least desire to go again” (Streeton 77). His preference lay with a concurrent “International Exhibition”, which featured works by Rodin, Whistler, Condor, Degas, and others who were setting the pace rather than merely continuing the academic traditions.Architect Hardy Wilson (1881–1955) served as secretary of The Chelsea Arts Club. When he returned to Australia he brought back with him a number of British works by Streeton and Lambert for an exhibition at the Guild Hall Melbourne (Underhill 92). Artists and Bohemians, a history of the Chelsea Arts Club, makes special reference of its world-wide contacts and singles out many of its prominent Australian members for specific mention including; Sir John William (Will) Ashton OBE, later Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Will Dyson, whose illustrious career as an Australian war artist was described in some detail. Dyson’s popularity led to his later appointment as Chairman of the Chelsea Arts Club where he initiated an ambitious rebuilding program, improving staff accommodation, refurbishing the members’ areas, and adding five bedrooms for visiting members (Bross 87-90).Whilst the influence of travel abroad on Australian artists has been noted, the importance of the London Clubs has not been fully explored. These clubs offered artists a space where they felt “at home” and a familiar environment whilst they were abroad. The clubs functioned as a meeting space where they could engage in a stimulating artistic environment and gain introductions to leading figures in the art world. For those artists who chose England, London’s arts clubs played a large role, for it was in these establishments that they discussed, exhibited, shared, and met with their English counterparts. The club environment in London had a significant impact on male Australian artists as it offered a space where they were integrated into the English art world which enhanced their experience whilst abroad and influenced the direction of their art.ReferencesCorbett, David Peters, and Lara Perry, eds. English Art, 1860–1914: Modern Artists and Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.Croll, Robert Henderson. Tom Roberts: Father of Australian Landscape Painting. Melbourne: Robertson & Mullens, 1935.Cross, Tom. Artists and Bohemians: 100 Years with the Chelsea Arts Club. 1992. 1st ed. London: Quiller Press, 1992.Gray, Anne, and National Gallery of Australia. McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907–17. 1st ed. Parkes, A.C.T.: National Gallery of Australia, 2009.Halliday, Andrew, ed. The Savage Papers. 1867. 1st ed. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1867.Hammer, Gael. Miles Evergood: No End of Passion. Willoughby, NSW: Phillip Mathews, 2013.Joske, Prue. Debonair Jack: A Biography of Sir John Longstaff. 1st ed. Melbourne: Claremont Publishing, 1994.MacDonald, James S., Frederick McCubbin, and Alexander McCubbin. The Art of F. McCubbin. Melbourne: Lothian Book Publishing, 1916.McCaughy, Patrick. Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters. Ed. Paige Amor. The Miegunyah Press, 2014.McCubbin, Frederick. Papers, Ca. 1900–Ca. 1915. Melbourne.McQueen, Humphrey. Tom Roberts. Sydney: Macmillan, 1996.Mead, Stephen. "Bohemia in Melbourne: An Investigation of the Writer Marcus Clarke and Four Artistic Clubs during the Late 1860s – 1901.” PhD thesis. Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2009.Melbourne Savage Club. Secretary. Minute Book: Melbourne Savage Club. Club Minutes (General Committee). Melbourne: Savage Archives.Mulvaney, Derek John, and J.H. Calaby. So Much That Is New: Baldwin Spencer, 1860–1929, a Biography. Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1985.Smith, Bernard, Terry Smith, and Christopher Heathcote. Australian Painting, 1788–2000. 4th ed. South Melbourne, Vic.: Oxford University Press, 2001.Streeton, Arthur, et al. Smike to Bulldog: Letters from Sir Arthur Streeton to Tom Roberts. Sydney: Ure Smith, 1946.Streeton, Arthur, ed. Letters from Smike: The Letters of Arthur Streeton, 1890–1943. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989.Thornton, Alfred, and New English Art Club. Fifty Years of the New English Art Club, 1886–1935. London: New English Art Club, Curwen Press 1935.Underhill, Nancy D.H. Making Australian Art 1916–49: Sydney Ure Smith Patron and Publisher. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991.Various. Melbourne Savage Club Correspondence Book: 1902–1916. Melbourne: Melbourne Savage Club.Williams, Graeme Henry. "A Socio-Cultural Reading: The Melbourne Savage Club through Its Collections." Masters of Arts thesis. Melbourne: Deakin University, 2013.