STAFF PROFILE
Associate Professor Adrian Danks
Dr Adrian Danks is Senior Lecturer and Head of Cinema Studies at the School of Media and Communication.
Research
Adrian has published widely on the cinematic representation of place, the relationship of domestic photography to cinema, film culture, film restoration, found footage cinema, home movies, Australian and Iranian cinema, and cinematic authorship. His writing has appeared in a range of books and journals including: Senses of Cinema, Metro, Screening the Past, Real-Time, Screen Education, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, Traditions in World Cinema, 24 Frames: Australia and New Zealand, Go! Melbourne in the Sixties, Twin Peeks: Australian and New Zealand Feature Films, and Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave.
He has also acted as a referee for various publications including: Senses of Cinema, Screening the Past, Continuum, Landscape Research, Australian Studies, Scope, Studies in Australasian Cinema and Southern Review.
Adrian is currently writing books on the history of home movies in Australia (Songs of Air) and global found footage cinema. Other recent projects explore the history of rear/back projection, what happens when characters go to movies in the cinema, and Agnès Varda’s films about Jacques Demy.
Research supervision
Adrian has supervised students to completion at both MA and PhD levels, and is currently supervising approximately six students (project and thesis based) on a range of topics including the Ned Kelly films, Joris Ivens in Australia, diasporic Rastafarian experience in Ethiopia, and post-9/11 depictions of masculinity.
He is a registered supervisor for students at MA and PhD levels.
Adrian is also a member of the Media Program team, has taught an array of Cinema and cultural studies courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels (including Authorship and Narrative in the Cinema, Histories of Film Theory, Australian Cinema, Asian Cinemas, Reading Local, National and Global Cinemas, Postmodernism and Popular Culture, Television Cultures), and is supervising numerous students at both MA and PhD levels. He is co-editor of the internationally recognised journal, Senses of Cinema, and co-curator of The Melbourne Cinémathèque.
His research interests include Australian, American and Iranian cinema, home movies, film criticism, auteurism, experimental cinema, found footage and recycled cinema. He has published widely in a range of books and journals including, and is currently writing several books including one on the history and practice of home moviemaking in Australia.
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Doctorate of Philosophy (Cinema Studies), LaTrobe University, Bundoora Campus, 2001
Dissertation: “To Become Immortal and then Die: The Representation of Home Photographic Materials in the Cinema”
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Bachelor of Arts (Honours - Cinema Studies), LaTrobe University, Bundoora Campus, 1992
Thesis: “Deciphering the Indecipherable: Deconstruction and Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil”
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Bachelor of Arts (Media Studies), Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, 1991
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Bachelor of Commerce, University of Melbourne, Parkville, 1988
Adrian is co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque (was President between 1988 and 2006), and Cteq: Annotations on Film and Australian Content editor for Senses of Cinema.
He was co-convenor of the 13th Biennial Conference of the Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand (2006), and presented and co-curated the Jean-Pierre Melville Retrospective at the 2006 Sydney Film Festival.
He has also served on the film selection committees, curatorial boards and judging panels of numerous organisations including the Melbourne International Film Festival, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Experimenta, ReelDance and the Big West Festival.
Adrian is a member of the Australian Film Critics Association (affiliated with FIPRESCI).
- Danks, A. (2021). The “absent circus master”: the “arrival” of Ingmar Bergman in Australia In: Popular Communication, , 1 - 13
- Danks, A. (2021). Bliss In: Metro Magazine, , 108 - 119
- Danks, A. (2021). ‘Beethoven Had His Critics, Too...’: The Australian Biopic in the Twenty-First Century In: Australian Genre Film, Routledge, United States
- Danks, A. (2021). March 1949, Melbourne: Eisenstein in Australia In: The Eisenstein Universe, Bloomsbury Academic, London, United Kingdom
- Danks, A. (2018). The Picture Show Man In: Metro, , 106 - 114
- Danks, A. (2018). Rudimentary modernism: Ken G. Hall, Rear-Projection and 1930s Hollywood In: American-Australian Cinema: Transnational Connections, Palgrave Macmillan, Switzerland
- Danks, A.,Gaunson, S.,Kunze, P. (2018). Where I'm calling from: An American-Australian cinema? In: American-Australian Cinema: Transnational Connections, Palgrave Macmillan, Switzerland
- Danks, A. (2018). Jeane Moreau in The Bride Wore Black In: Close-Up - Great Cinematic Performances Volume 2: International, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
- Danks, A. (2018). "Something short of fascinating": Re-examining Fred Zinnemann's The Sundowners (1960) In: Screening the Past, , 1 - 12
- Danks, A. (2017). Picking up the pieces: contemporary Australian cinema and the representation of Australian film history In: Australian Screen in the 2000s, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Switzerland
15 PhD Completions and 1 Masters by Research Completions7 PhD Current Supervisions
- Support for the XIIIth Biennial Conference of the Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand and Going to the Cinema public forum.. Funded by: Ian Potter Foundation Grant pre-2014 from (2006 to 2006)