scope
screen industry views THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT: AUSTRALIAN CINEMA UNDER LOCKDOWN
Relic
Rochelle Siemienowicz
Back in March, when pandemic lockdowns first hit Australia, we all hoped cinemas would be open again by mid year. Surely the COVID-19 crisis could not drag on too long. Yet here we are – at the time of writing – in the middle of Melbourne’s second lockdown, with no end in sight. Just a few weeks after gingerly opening sanitised doors, cinemas were shut again. Other states have been luckier, but ongoing social-distancing restrictions and a lack of tentpole crowd-pleasers from Hollywood mean that nobody’s going back to the movies in quite the way they used to – not for a very long time. This prolonged crisis is devastating for theatrical exhibitors, and we can expect some businesses to fold as a result. Hibernating and bearing costs for six weeks of shutdown is one thing, but a year of uncertainty and poor takings is another. As Palace Cinemas CEO Benjamin Zeccola told The Australian Financial Review in July, ‘It doesn’t work and there’s no simple solution while there is coronavirus and there’s a fear of people getting sick. We are down for the count for the time being.’ Zeccola also predicted that it would take years for cinemas to recover. The whole landscape of international distribution and exhibition has also shifted, morphed and collapsed, like a field full of sinkholes. Schedules continue to change daily, with the big studios pushing back the releases of stupendously expensive blockbusters like James Bond film No Time to Die (Cary Joji Fukunaga) and superhero outings Black Widow (Cate Shortland) and Wonder Woman 1984 (Patty Jenkins) time and time again. (At the time of writing, all three are scheduled to show in cinemas before the end of this year, but nobody smart would bet on it.) Those Australian cinemas that have been able to operate during this time have adapted to the crisis in creative ways. Drive-ins are having a big moment, both here and around the world, with their capacity to offer a communal viewing experience from the safe bubble of a family car. Kriv Stenders’ documentary Brock: Over the Top, about the titular legendary Australian racing-car driver, found a fitting premiere this way. Programmers at cinema chains have also focused on proven nostalgic favourites and been richly rewarded, with films like Shrek (Andrew Adamson & Vicky Jenson, 2001), Dirty Dancing (Emile Ardolino, 1987) and The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987) making shock returns to the Australian box office’s top-twenty list decades after their first release. Repertory cinemas have always understood this appeal, but pandemic programming has broadened it: mainstream audiences are adjusting to the idea that new films are not the only films worth leaving the house for. Releasing Australian movies in cinemas is notoriously challenging at the best of times, with the ever-rolling deluge of competing English-language product – especially from the US and UK – having been a constant problem over the years. The coronavirus crisis has thrown up not only new problems but also new opportunities, as the lack of other films coming down the pipeline theoretically gives ours
124 • Metro Magazine 206 | © ATOM
a bit of air to breathe. Leigh Whannell’s thriller The Invisible Man has been one such beneficiary, doing well in cinemas for more than twenty weeks, with a cumulative Australian box-office return of more than A$8 million. Shifting a film’s release to a purely online venue has been the strategy pursued by psychological horror film Relic. Natalie Erika James’ debut feature premiered to acclaim at Sundance in January when we could still leave the house, and local distributor Umbrella had planned to release it in cinemas. Instead, it was acquired as a Stan Original, going straight to streaming in July, buoyed by good box-office news from its limited release in the preceding weeks in the US – which was kicked off, interestingly, by an exclusive first week in drive-in cinemas. Other films navigating their way to online releases have included Dean Murphy’s The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee (17 July, through Amazon) and Unjoo Moon’s I Am Woman (28 August, through Stan), while a number of other high-profile Australian films, including Jeremy Sims’ Rams, Stephen Maxwell Johnson’s High Ground and Robert Connolly’s The Dry, are still prepping for local release. Previously, a straight-to-streaming release would have been seen as a failure, and excluded a film from prestigious awards entry (including the Oscars and the AACTA Awards). The pandemic has changed these rules, quite literally, with new eligibility criteria announced to accommodate the times and the need for streaming. It would be foolish to declare physical cinemas dead or dying just yet, and we wish them a long and vibrant life. But in the US, the UK and Australia, cinema attendance has been flat for the last fifteen years, with the only real growth coming from ticket inflation. Moving Australian films online is a survival strategy – and one, it seems, we were heading towards anyway.
••• INFECTIOUS SCROLLING: SOCIAL MEDIA, MENTAL HEALTH AND COVID-19 Adolfo Aranjuez
As I write this, my home city of Melbourne has been in and out of lockdown for five months; if things don’t improve substantially, it’ll be seven by the time this is published. I began my self-imposed confinement with a wanton acceptance of the mandate to enact physical distancing, comforted by the knowledge that I could compensate for my lack of interpersonal contact with our contact method du jour: social media. Until now, I have found myself relying on Twitter for ‘the discourse’; on Instagram for a sense of being ‘part’ of more social things; on Facebook, which I’ve all but emigrated from except for its offshoot app Messenger, for real-time typed and video chats. (I’ve also finally waded into TikTok and … oh boy.)
scope
screen industry views THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT: AUSTRALIAN CINEMA UNDER LOCKDOWN
Relic
Rochelle Siemienowicz
Back in March, when pandemic lockdowns first hit Australia, we all hoped cinemas would be open again by mid year. Surely the COVID-19 crisis could not drag on too long. Yet here we are – at the time of writing – in the middle of Melbourne’s second lockdown, with no end in sight. Just a few weeks after gingerly opening sanitised doors, cinemas were shut again. Other states have been luckier, but ongoing social-distancing restrictions and a lack of tentpole crowd-pleasers from Hollywood mean that nobody’s going back to the movies in quite the way they used to – not for a very long time. This prolonged crisis is devastating for theatrical exhibitors, and we can expect some businesses to fold as a result. Hibernating and bearing costs for six weeks of shutdown is one thing, but a year of uncertainty and poor takings is another. As Palace Cinemas CEO Benjamin Zeccola told The Australian Financial Review in July, ‘It doesn’t work and there’s no simple solution while there is coronavirus and there’s a fear of people getting sick. We are down for the count for the time being.’ Zeccola also predicted that it would take years for cinemas to recover. The whole landscape of international distribution and exhibition has also shifted, morphed and collapsed, like a field full of sinkholes. Schedules continue to change daily, with the big studios pushing back the releases of stupendously expensive blockbusters like James Bond film No Time to Die (Cary Joji Fukunaga) and superhero outings Black Widow (Cate Shortland) and Wonder Woman 1984 (Patty Jenkins) time and time again. (At the time of writing, all three are scheduled to show in cinemas before the end of this year, but nobody smart would bet on it.) Those Australian cinemas that have been able to operate during this time have adapted to the crisis in creative ways. Drive-ins are having a big moment, both here and around the world, with their capacity to offer a communal viewing experience from the safe bubble of a family car. Kriv Stenders’ documentary Brock: Over the Top, about the titular legendary Australian racing-car driver, found a fitting premiere this way. Programmers at cinema chains have also focused on proven nostalgic favourites and been richly rewarded, with films like Shrek (Andrew Adamson & Vicky Jenson, 2001), Dirty Dancing (Emile Ardolino, 1987) and The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987) making shock returns to the Australian box office’s top-twenty list decades after their first release. Repertory cinemas have always understood this appeal, but pandemic programming has broadened it: mainstream audiences are adjusting to the idea that new films are not the only films worth leaving the house for. Releasing Australian movies in cinemas is notoriously challenging at the best of times, with the ever-rolling deluge of competing English-language product – especially from the US and UK – having been a constant problem over the years. The coronavirus crisis has thrown up not only new problems but also new opportunities, as the lack of other films coming down the pipeline theoretically gives ours
124 • Metro Magazine 206 | © ATOM
a bit of air to breathe. Leigh Whannell’s thriller The Invisible Man has been one such beneficiary, doing well in cinemas for more than twenty weeks, with a cumulative Australian box-office return of more than A$8 million. Shifting a film’s release to a purely online venue has been the strategy pursued by psychological horror film Relic. Natalie Erika James’ debut feature premiered to acclaim at Sundance in January when we could still leave the house, and local distributor Umbrella had planned to release it in cinemas. Instead, it was acquired as a Stan Original, going straight to streaming in July, buoyed by good box-office news from its limited release in the preceding weeks in the US – which was kicked off, interestingly, by an exclusive first week in drive-in cinemas. Other films navigating their way to online releases have included Dean Murphy’s The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee (17 July, through Amazon) and Unjoo Moon’s I Am Woman (28 August, through Stan), while a number of other high-profile Australian films, including Jeremy Sims’ Rams, Stephen Maxwell Johnson’s High Ground and Robert Connolly’s The Dry, are still prepping for local release. Previously, a straight-to-streaming release would have been seen as a failure, and excluded a film from prestigious awards entry (including the Oscars and the AACTA Awards). The pandemic has changed these rules, quite literally, with new eligibility criteria announced to accommodate the times and the need for streaming. It would be foolish to declare physical cinemas dead or dying just yet, and we wish them a long and vibrant life. But in the US, the UK and Australia, cinema attendance has been flat for the last fifteen years, with the only real growth coming from ticket inflation. Moving Australian films online is a survival strategy – and one, it seems, we were heading towards anyway.
••• INFECTIOUS SCROLLING: SOCIAL MEDIA, MENTAL HEALTH AND COVID-19 Adolfo Aranjuez
As I write this, my home city of Melbourne has been in and out of lockdown for five months; if things don’t improve substantially, it’ll be seven by the time this is published. I began my self-imposed confinement with a wanton acceptance of the mandate to enact physical distancing, comforted by the knowledge that I could compensate for my lack of interpersonal contact with our contact method du jour: social media. Until now, I have found myself relying on Twitter for ‘the discourse’; on Instagram for a sense of being ‘part’ of more social things; on Facebook, which I’ve all but emigrated from except for its offshoot app Messenger, for real-time typed and video chats. (I’ve also finally waded into TikTok and … oh boy.)
I haven’t been alone in this – GlobalWebIndex has found that, during the pandemic, 23 per cent of internet users aged 16–64 have spent considerably more time on social media. In Australia specifically, that figure is comparable: AdNews reports that 33 per cent of respondents have upped their feed-scrolling. There’s no doubt that being stuck at home has lent itself to endless refreshed feeds, ‘look at me’s and retweets. And, pandemic aside, social media’s expanded role in everyday life becomes even clearer with the fact that, as of July 2020, its total global user count has reached 3.96 billion – that’s over half of the world’s population, or almost two-thirds of what We Are Social calls the ‘eligible’ population (i.e. those aged thirteen and over, who are legally allowed to be on such platforms). Things have certainly changed since the days of pioneer sites Friendster and MySpace in the early 2000s. By now, the mechanisms behind social media’s allure are well established. Notwithstanding the actual content of posts (whether they be memes or meaningful milestones), research has established that usage is heavily premised on a ‘reward’ system linked to the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is responsible for, among other things, motivation; when a post is liked, shared or responded to, we get a rush of the chemical. After several experiences of such gratification, we start seeking out the chemical ‘hit’, in a type of reinforcement-driven behaviour reminiscent of that discovered by psychologist BF Skinner in his 1930s experiments on ‘operant conditioning’. It’s this latter revelation that’s arguably given rise to the notion of social-media addiction (a diagnosis that remains scientifically contested): even in the absence of a guaranteed ‘reward’, we hold out for it online – and respond detrimentally when it’s withheld from us. Such adverse reactions can manifest acutely in users’ mental health. In 2017, Instagram was named the number-one offender in this arena, with strong links to increased depression and anxiety; this was acknowledged by the company two years later when it rolled out the removal of publicly visible like and view counts, which users had been misidentifying as metrics for self-worth. ‘The idea is to depressurize Instagram,’ CEO Adam Mosseri explained at the time, ‘[and] make it less of a competition.’ In a disempowering, isolating time like what we’re currently living through, the desire for the ‘rewards’ promised by social media is understandable. Feeling ‘seen’ or as though people value what we have to say is a potent source of validation. In turn, the exchanging of humorous videos and memes is, as psychologist Bart Andrews told CNET in March, ‘a coping strategy’ responding to a ‘sense of helplessness in inaction’. But social media has its risks as well: an April 2020 study from China uncovered strong correlations between frequent social-media use during COVID-19 outbreaks and subsequent mental-health issues. On top of this, today, social media doesn’t just offer a means by which to gain a sense of having ‘socialised’; it’s also grown into a significant conduit for information gathering. According to Forbes, as of 2018, 64.5 per cent of all internet users receive breaking news through social media (the figure has likely increased since). A 2020 report by the Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford determined that around a third of people worldwide now rely on social media as their main source of local news. A 2018 University of Technology Sydney study found that more than half of Australians obtained news via social media on a weekly basis.
Yet, all the while, as outlined by Statista earlier this year, social media remains the least trusted source of news globally – an apprehension compounded by the existence of fake news, conspiracy theories, unqualified opinion and deliberate misinformation. What we’re seeing, then, is a double-edged affinity for social media: on the one hand, it’s a handy instrument for affirmation, connection and information; on the other, it’s dangerously habit-forming, inconsistent and unreliable. (This hasn’t even accounted for the profit motive, with social media embodying a low-expense, high-return vehicle through which companies can obtain and monetise users’ private information as well as gain vital insights into consumption, locational and ethical behaviour, all under the guise of a ‘free’ service – but that’s outside my scope here.) In the COVID-19 era, this simultaneous drawcard and deterrent is only magnified as we clamour to know what’s happening around us, both in our immediate circles and around the planet. Engulfed in immense precariousness, paralysing worry and/or dizzying solitude, it’s easy to extract some modicum of solace or certainty from the feed. When it comes down to it, social media is a digital technology that seeks to approximate presence. Its various platforms are – if you’ll oblige my momentary reversion to Baudrillardian academese – simulacra that substitute reality with simulations, or else provide ‘more’ reality than non-mediated reality itself: they’re examples of hyperreality. It bears emphasising that the posts we end up seeing are curated; some are heavily edited (through countless rewordings, or through image effects and photoshopping), and the most spontaneous-looking selfie was likely picked from a pool of at least fifteen others. At users’ disposal, too, are functionalities to delete, hide, archive, mute, block, repost or private-message. All of this is easy to forget, of course, when the urge to offset public-health-driven absence is great. And, lest I be criticised for veering closely to what new-media scholar Richard Grusin has termed the ‘technological fallacy’, let me add the caveat that I’m not indicting the technology itself for causing the adverse impacts we’re witnessing. Social media is a tool, and it’s up to its human users to decide whether to employ it for wellbeing or wild spiralling. So, in our current context, it might be worth heeding the advice of mental-health organisations BeyondBlue and the Black Dog Institute that we limit our scrolling and liking. Right now, the line between #FOMO and freak-out is pretty thin, so we’d best log on with care.
Scientists observe a lab rat at the US National Institutes of Health in 1954
metromagazine.com.au | © ATOM | Metro Magazine 206 • 125
The Freeplay Z•O•N•E
BELONGING AND REPRESENTATION: THE 2020 FREEPLAY INDEPENDENT GAMES FESTIVAL April Tyack
The Freeplay Independent Games Festival, proudly advertised as the longest-running independent games festival in the world, went ahead as a fully virtual event in 2020. Freeplay is unique in its celebration of personal and experimental game development practice in Australia, presented through a varied schedule of performance art, critical reflections on game design, and discussions of community and belonging. The broader move towards large-scale online events would seem to invite unfavourable comparisons with their in-person counterparts. If Freeplay 2020 is any indication, however, the distinct qualities of virtual events have started to become clear. Despite the present reliance on streaming platforms that are designed to encourage very different modes of communication and engagement, the remediation of real-time video in virtual worlds can extend the performative potentials of both. In keeping with the festival’s proclivity for artistic practice and playfulness, Cecile Richard and Jae Stuart adapted LIKELIKE Online, a newly developed multiplayer exhibition space, to create the Freeplay Z•O•N•E – a beautifully low-res environment in which dozens of audience avatars wiggled in appreciation of festival speakers on the embedded livestream, played games in the installation space and, most importantly, clamoured to be given the ability to climb a virtual tree. The online format had other advantages, not least of which was a wider cohort of international speakers, many of whom were presenting at Freeplay for the first time. Speaking to the festival’s theme of belonging – which could so easily have produced an event characterised by self-satisfied celebrations of game making communities as they are – presenters described their own experiences of isolation and exclusion as a means of demonstrating ways that these communities could become more inclusive of underrepresented people. Another session that could only have occurred online was a reflection on the festival itself, delivered by a panel of past and present Freeplay directors who have collectively presided over its sixteenyear history. Their recollections of the problems facing the Australian indie game development scene during their respective directorships were, to some extent, an indictment: issues of discrimination, working conditions and sustainability were crucial in 2004, and remain unresolved today. Despite their continuation, however, these issues’ present articulations reflect a more conscious awareness of games in broader cultural discussions. A 2018 survey from the Game Developers’ Association of Australia shows that the vast majority of Australian game developers are still white men (and while age is
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not reported, few have over ten years experience), but organisations such as Making Space have emerged in response to the need to realise change for all underrepresented people in or adjacent to game making communities. The Triple-A companies that profited from an industry culture of overwork are mostly gone, replaced by indie studios in which pressure and unpaid overtime are more often self-imposed, but no less detrimental to mental and physical health. Finally, issues of environmental sustainability – in particular, manufacturers’ dependence on conflict minerals to produce PC and console hardware, and the vast quantities of electricity consumed by their operation – have begun to influence discussion, alongside long-running concerns around the sustainability of Australian game development communities and careers. On this final point, Freeplay festival co-founder Katharine Neil was unequivocal in her advice to underrepresented people, observing a tendency to view event organisation as a means to improve their standing – and hence their job prospects – in the local scene. Neil emphasised, drawing from her own experiences, that the immense amounts of time and energy required to run a festival like Freeplay would be better invested in developing their own craft. All of that is true: volunteers, particularly those from marginalised groups, are ultimately less likely to be hired if they have less experience with their practice. A career in game development requires a dedication that is not served by event organising. Yet it is no coincidence that Freeplay has become more inclusive of underrepresented people under the directorship of Chad Toprak, a first-generation Turkish-Australian Muslim immigrant. The question of who is allowed to speak at a festival of early-career game makers – and who feels welcome to submit a proposal at all – is directly connected with efforts made by its leadership team. To observe that issues of representation for early-career practitioners are bound up with those of leadership, however, is not to suggest that marginalised people must limit their own career prospects for the sake of others. Rather, it shows that inclusivity can be effortless when it is second nature: even in a year in which the challenge of adapting to the online format accompanied more familiar issues of event financing and coordination, Freeplay 2020 showed a broader vision of what (and who) the Australian indie games scene is, and could continue to be. So whatever happens in the years to come, Freeplay 2020 marks an ongoing transformation in defining who belongs at Freeplay and, hopefully, within Australian game making communities more broadly. The independent games scene is changing, and anyone organising the festival in future will be held to account by very different communities from those that existed in 2004.
••• WHEN LIVE VENUES BECOME SCREEN HUBS: THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE GOES ONLINE Liz Giuffre
Live-performance spaces were designed for people to congregate in person. When that can’t happen, as has been the case throughout Australia since the COVID-19 pandemic prompted state governments to begin placing restrictions on large gatherings in March, venues have to adapt or else simply close their doors. The Sydney Opera House has provided one such example of adaptation in action; with its ‘From Our House to Yours’ program – described as a mixture of ‘live broadcasts, archival footage, and
premieres’, and promoted on social media with the caption ‘the show must go on(line)’ – the performingarts centre has accelerated existing programs and morphed old models in order to stay operational and keep serving audiences. The big challenge for live venues crossing to screen is the undercutting of their core business – scarcity. The reason live venues exist, arguably, is to provide that limited, exclusive experience that only a few people can have at a certain time: you have to be there or else miss out forever. Is the current absence of that exclusivity a challenge that digital producers for live venues are struggling with? ‘I think you kind of get the best of both worlds,’ Stuart Buchanan, head of digital programming at the Sydney Opera House, tells me. ‘You have that shared experience of coming together to watch [a show] live [online].’ The Sydney outlet is not alone, with live ‘what’s on’ columns now including digital concerts from across the world as part of their recommendations. ‘We’ve been livestreaming shows for years, but never on this scale,’ says Buchanan. What makes it more interesting [at the moment] is that digital programming does make the Opera House more approachable [in] many different respects, [if] people are [for] whatever reason [unable] to visit the House due to tyranny of distance, or because of mobility issues, or that it’s not affordable. Of course, there have been famous recordings of shows staged at the Opera House before – Hannah Gadsby’s game-changing Netflix special Nanette being an excellent recent example – and ‘live in concert’ performances have been produced for television, DVD and just about every other media form for decades. But these new COVID-era shows are different because they are filmed and broadcast live, with the aim of keeping the screen as interactive as possible. ‘Certainly, [we’re] looking at digital as a two-way platform, as opposed to a purely passive platform,’ says Buchanan. This is where good old social media and the ‘second screen’ come in: by allowing audiences to watch, tweet and comment in real time, these events create a space for them to engage with both the artists and one another, enabling a connection that is missed by all. There are clear inroads to be made with particular audiences, too, Buchanan says. Kids programming has been one of the key drivers in terms of quantity of content we’re making, but also in some of the innovations we’ve been keen to see in digital. For example, one of the things that we’ve [been doing] now for quite some time [is] digital interactive tours, and what I mean by that [is] tours that are conducted online and in real time with schools that might be watching from regional or remote areas […] They’re able to interact with the tour guide as they walk around the House telling stories about what’s happening, and you might watch that as a video. One of the leaders in this new type of screened live performance at big outlets like the Opera House has been The Wiggles (aka the Beatles of kids music). As well as performing their own DIY shows from Hot Potato Studios and broadcasting across various socialmedia outlets, The Wiggles gained international attention as a result of their show at the Sydney Opera House – not only for the band, but also for the Opera House’s digital output. ‘The Wiggles, for example … it was great that everybody came together to watch them
The Wiggles
live,’ Buchanan says. ‘I think, off the top of my head, the real-time audience for that was somewhere in the region of 15,000 people.’ Just a few more than the 2000 or so who would have fitted into the Concert Hall normally, then! Outlets like the Opera House have made deliberate choices to keep up high production standards and polished performances, setting professional live venues apart from DIY shows or ‘Instaconcerts’ (in which, as the name suggests, performers take to Instagram to play for fans). Bigger venues pose much bigger logistical challenges and risks (how many people can be in the space at once? How close can they be to one another?), but these can push innovation too. ‘It’s given us so much to think about, creatively, going forward,’ says Buchanan. It’s allowed us to try a whole bunch of new things in a really quick period of time that might have otherwise taken a lot longer to do […] One of the things that’s interesting about [the 20 June event] with the Alaska Orchestra is we’re actually working with a video artist who’s mixing the live performance with their own artworks to create a kind of digital show that’s quite unlike something you would see if you were sitting in the Opera House. We’re making a virtue out of the fact that this is a digital experience, rather than just purely replicating the live experience. So that’s something for us that’s pretty interesting to delve further into in the future, transforming it a little bit just from being ‘point and shoot’ – if you like – with the cameras to [seeing] how we [can] take best advantage of the screen experience to enhance the whole event.
••• Rochelle Siemienowicz is a writer and critic with a PhD in Australian cinema. She is a journalist for screenhub and was co-host of the longrunning film podcast Hell Is for Hyphenates. Adolfo Aranjuez is an editor, writer, speaker and dancer. He is currently the Melbourne International Film Festival’s publications and content coordinator, and Liminal’s publication editor; previously, he edited Metro and Archer. His essays and poetry have appeared in Meanjin, Right Now, Screen Education, The Manila Review, Cordite and elsewhere. <http://adolfoaranjuez.com> April Tyack is a postdoctoral researcher in computer science at Aalto University, and served as vice-president of the Australian chapter of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRAA) from 2018 to 2020. Dr Liz Giuffre is a senior lecturer in communication at the University of Technology Sydney as well as a freelance arts commentator and journalist. m
metromagazine.com.au | © ATOM | Metro Magazine 206 • 127
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