Ana Kokkinos

Front matter

Visionaries: Thinking Through Female Filmmakers Series Editors Lucy Bolton and Richard Rushton

Titles in the series include:

The Cinema of Marguerite Duras: Feminine Subjectivity and Sensoriality Michelle Royer

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements

Introduction: Ana Kokkinos 1. Antamosi and Only the Brave: the early films 2. Head On: centring the other

3. The Book of Revelation: othering the centre With Sharon Bickle

Chapter 1. Antamosi and Only the Brave: the early films

Chapter 1 examines Kokkinos’s early work by looking at her student short Antamosi and her short feature Only the Brave. In this chapter, I am broadly interested in establishing the features and preoccupations of Kokkinos’s developing style, including the stylised social realism and focus on Greek-Australian migrant families in working-class Melbourne for which she is best known. In Chapter 1 I also track the emergence and characteristics of the proto-outsider, emerging first in the final scene of Antamosi before its explicit realisation from the first scene of Only the Brave. I look particularly at the construction of protagonist Alex as an outsider in terms of class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in Only the Brave, as well as noting her role as a witness to social injustice and trauma.

Chapter 2. Head On: centring the other

Chapters 2—4 each focus on one of Kokkinos’s feature films, with Chapter 2 focused on her first feature film, Head On. Head On was a critical and commercial success; it was widely celebrated as a ‘landmark’ film in relation to its explicit and unapologetic depiction of queerness in particular, and continues to be exhibited in film festivals around the world almost two decades after its release. This chapter builds on discussions that posit Head On (and, for some scholars, Only the Brave before it) as the first example(s) of ‘New Queer Cinema’ in Australia. In doing this, I focus on Kokkinos’s increasingly bold focus or ‘centring’ of an outsider or ‘Othered’ protagonist, and note the recurrence of the outsider as a witness to social injustice and trauma. I argue that the latter reveals the outsider in Kokkinos’s oeuvre as a pretext for a denaturalising appraisal of Australian social and cinematic norms (which, as I argue in Chapter 3, is reinforced in The Book of Revelation when its hegemonic protagonist is ‘othered’). However, I argue that unlike other social-realist films which tend to favour a didactic tone, Kokkinos’s films’ emphasis on the traumatised body instead invites an affective, and specifically queer, mode of engagement from audiences, which is emphasised by her refusal to recuperate protagonist Ari into any fixed identity or narrative conclusion.

Chapter 3 (with Sharon Bickle). The Book of Revelation: othering the centre

Chapter 3 is focused on Kokkinos’s most controversial film, The Book of Revelation. In this chapter I, with Sharon Bickle, am interested in the depiction of the film's protagonist Daniel, who, as a successful, white, hetero-masculine man is the only hegemonic protagonist of Kokkinos’s oeuvre. It is therefore interesting that he is also the only protagonist that does not witness traumatic social injustice but is instead the victim of it. We argue that Daniel’s abduction and torture disorientates him so profoundly that he is forcibly recast as an outsider to his own life — he changes his name and leaves his previous job, house, partner, and profession on his release from capture. Moreover, where Head On focused on or ‘centred’ a marginalised character or ‘Other, we argue that The Book of Revelation can be read as the reverse: as ‘othering’ the standard hero of much Australian cinema, namely the white, heterosexual, Anglo-Irish man (Seco 2008). We examine how this occurs through a rewriting of the rape-revenge genre and conclude by exploring a reading of the film as a violent rejection of masculinist Australian film mythologies.