Given name

Surname

Organisation

Mailing address

State Postcode

Telephone (day) Fax

Email

NEW subscription RENEWING subscription

I attach purchase order number

I enclose a cheque / money order.(Cheques / money orders are to be made payable to ATOM.)

Charge my Visa MasterCard Amex Diners Club

Cardholder name

Signature

Card number:

Expiry date: /

Metro (4 issues) Screen Education (4 issues)

(please tick)

SInGlE TITlE subscription rates:

Individual* $77 School or Corporation $100 Student†/Unemployed† $70

Metro AND Screen Education (8 issues in total)

(please tick)

COMbInED subscription rates:

Individual* $125 School or Corporation $162 Student†/Unemployed† $113

A tax invoice will be issued upon receipt of your order.Prices include GST and P&H. ATOM’s ABN: 84 393 760 027

Subscriptions automatically commence with the current issue, unless requested above.*Corporate payments will not be accepted for individual subscriptions.

†Please attach a photocopy of proof of entitlement.

metro & screen educationmagazines

Yes, I would like to subscribe to …

Please backdate my subscription to include issues _______________ nb: For overseas orders, please add a$30 per magazine title.

Metro and Screen Education magazines are published by Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM).

Subscribewww.metromagazine.com.auwww.screeneducation.com.au

Also available online at:

Post PO Box 2040, St Kilda West, Vic., 3182

AUSTRALIA

tel (+61 3) 9525 5302 Fax (+61 3) 9537 2325

email editor@atom.org.au

screen educationScreen Education is a quarterly magazine for media teachers, and for teachers interested in harnessing the power of visual media to stimulate learning. It is essential reading for those with an interest in media literacy, offering a unique and engaging perspective on screen education, and is an invaluable resource for upper secondary students and university students studying film.

Each issue provides the reader with practical classroom ideas, lesson plans and activities along with essays, study guides, updates on new technology, and research into media pedagogy. The magazine also analyses and offers ways to navigate the ever-changing new media landscape and the benefits (e.g. interactive learning tools) and potential issues (e.g. cyberbullying and pornography) that come with it. Screen Education publishes articles by educators, scholars and critics, and is partially refereed.

The magazine builds on many decades of experience in delivering screen literacy programs for teachers and students. Grounded in both theory and practice, Screen Education cultivates awareness of the diversity and complex character of the moving image, promoting the joy of learning and an appreciation of screen culture.

metroMetro is Australia’s premier film and media quarterly. It is independent, outspoken and passionate about movies, TV and new media from Australia, New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region. First published in 1968, Metro provides readers with comprehensive coverage of the region’s screen industries, and features writing by some of our foremost academics, critics and industry members. Also featuring reviews of all the latest local films as well as interviews with prominent filmmakers, Metro has something for everyone – from the avid film fan to the seasoned theorist.

Combining a wide range of topics and disciplines, Metro offers a unique blend of in-depth scholarship and popular writing, capturing key trends and developments in screen culture. A partially refereed magazine, Metro keeps alive the tradition of the essay, immersing the reader in thought-provoking articles on film and media that are at once analytical and accessible.

Every issue features essays and articles, reviews, interviews and analysis of Australian, New Zealand and Asian features, shorts and documentaries. It also covers television, radio, multimedia, animation, the internet and new media.

10 • Metro Magazine 173 | © ATOM

The pub’s scruffy Irish house pianist Dave (Chris O’Dowd) is at once in awe of the girls’ raw talent and incensed by the local crowd’s wilful indifference to it. When he raises his objections with the publican (comedian Judith Lucy in an enjoyably salty cameo), he loses his job. At youngest sister Julie’s urging, he agrees to help the girls audition for a gig as entertainers in Vietnam. In some of these early scenes there’s a slightly stagy quality to the performances, as if the project hadn’t yet quite made the transition from stage to screen. In contrast, O’Dowd’s performance as the hapless would-be band man-ager is agreeably loose, relaxed and naturalistic.

The action moves to swinging Melbourne, where Gail and Cynthia (Julie has been left behind at the mis-sion) track down Kay and encourage her to join the group. Paler-skinned than the others and raised in a white household, Kay is initially dismissive of her cousins’ attempts, but after reflect-ing on the sterility of her life, she has a change of heart. It is Kay’s journey from denial of her roots to identifying with (and celebrating) her Aboriginal identity that provides the film with its strongest character arc. Her stormy, complicated relationship with the forthright Gail is well written, and their terse exchanges are a highlight.

Dave agrees to become the group’s manager and musical director on the condition that they abandon the maudlin strains of country and western

for American soul music, his great passion. Country and soul are both about loss, he argues, but soul is also about the fight to regain what’s been lost. It’s a stirring speech, and deliv-ered with conviction by O’Dowd, but it strikes another in a series of false notes (no pun intended) in the film. Yes, the sisters live in a backwater, but is it realistic to suggest these vibrant young women would need a white European man to convince them of the appeal of soul music? Did they not have access to a radio? This idea is thrown into stark relief by later scenes where the girls, under Dave’s supervi-sion, begin rehearsals and almost instantly fall into four-part Supremes-style harmony, trading their ‘white’ country voices for a new ‘black’ soul-fulness. It’s in fairytale moments like these – no doubt designed to move the story along – that a film that is arguably about the search for authen-ticity puts its own integrity at risk.

Defying her mother’s wishes, Julie runs away from the mission and is

reunited with Kay and her sisters. After successfully auditioning for the overseas gig, The Sapphires and their manager travel to Saigon. Shots of the group being driven through the war-torn but still bustling streets are ef-fectively intercut with black-and-white archival footage. Arriving at their hotel, they are greeted by their promoter, the streetwise and vaguely menacing Myron (Don Battée), who briefs them on their obligations as performers. The hotel is filled with American soldiers, mostly black, and the girls (particularly Cynthia and Kay) are both delighted and overwhelmed by their introduc-tion to both the sensory overload of Saigon and the firsthand experience of African-American manhood. Kay meets a young helicopter pilot named Robbie (Tory Kittles) and seems to ex-perience an epiphany as the camera lingers over his shirtless torso.

The group is summarily matched with a backing band, and within hours they find themselves perform-ing for the troops in a local nightclub (one of many evocative, detailed sets designed by Melinda Doring). As their confidence grows, the girls move from uncertainty to a giddy sense of discovery – a delight in the pleasures of sensuality, creativity and independ-ence. Kay and Cynthia embark on affairs with Robbie and the band’s

Dave agrees to become the

group’s manager and musical

director on the condition that they abandon the maudlin

strains of country and western for American soul

music, his great passion. Country and soul are both

about loss, he argues, but soul is also about the fight to regain

what’s been lost.

In Tony Krawitz’s new film, buried traumas emerge from the historical murk to plague the present. Anthony Carew spoke with Krawitz about identity, trauma and the troubled politics of contemporary Europe – and how he went about condensing Christos Tsiolkas’ sprawling novel into a lean feature film.

Dead Europe’s Ghosts of Past and Present

Infernal Return

24 • Metro Magazine 174 | © ATOM © ATOM | Metro Magazine 174 • 25

© ATOM | Metro Magazine 171 • 125

[ TV and MEDIA ]

He enters prisons, spends time with Nazis and goes under the knife – never losing his veil of gracious, questioning puzzlement. Does Louis

Theroux’s assumed innocence exploit the goodwill of his subjects, asks DAVE HOSKIN, or does his immersive reporting counter the predictability

of most current affairs journalism?

UnderSkin?

THe subTLe scaLpeL of Louis THeroux

A lot of people have a bone to pick with Louis Theroux. Of his documentary subjects, Conservative politician Ann Widdecombe charged him with playing dumb for the cameras, while her press secretary claimed that he was ‘in charac-ter 24-7’.1 Celebrity publicist Max Clifford, who Theroux profiled in a 2002 program, even went so far as to call him a ‘biter’. Television critics are equally suspicious of his methods, accusing him of ‘po-faced smart-arsery’,2 of being ‘sly’ and ‘underhand’,3 and especially of being a ‘faux-naif’.4 The latter criticism comes up repeatedly, partly because of Theroux’s mild-mannered interviewing style, but also because his shows tend to concen-trate on subjects at society’s margins. From porn stars to neo-Nazis, from paedophiles to clapped-out celebrities, he’s always fascinated with an alternative world view, and his willingness to ask obvious questions frequently casts him in the role of straight man to his subjects’ eccentricities. What’s interesting is that so many people interpret Theroux’s lack of a ‘hard-hitting’ agenda as the feigning of a lack of intelligence, which leads to the persistent critique that he should drop his wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing act and go for the jugular. Some wish he were more ‘aggressively confrontational’,5 others ask if he ‘never recoils’6 from his more ex-treme subjects, and many reviewers cannot wait to do the job that Theroux supposedly neglects. They sneer at the subjects in his documentaries, airily dismiss their moral choices, and clearly feel they just need a bracing dose of The Truth.

Of course they’re entitled to their opinions, but there’s a mean-spirited tone to their responses, a monotonous insistence that Theroux’s work is in-authentic because it doesn’t match their own cyni-cism. What’s disappointing about this critical line is that it’s basically arguing for Theroux to conform to the usual media narrative when dealing with subcul-tures. It’s long been a cliché when covering people outside the mainstream to highlight the most ex-treme examples in order to make the majority look silly. Thus, when the media turns up to a Star Trek convention, you know that they’ll make a beeline for the Trekkie dressed as a Klingon. Conversely, and

more insidiously, in the recent Occupy Wall Street protests, Fox News deliberately withheld footage of a calm, well-spoken activist because he didn’t supply them with the requisite spittle. Such portray-als feel like they’re meant to reassure the ‘average’ viewer at home – we’re encouraged to think of the journalists as the avatars of ‘us’ exposing the crazy beliefs of ‘them’ – and to keep us breaking from the herd. The unspoken subtext is that radical ideas are not to be tolerated; they’re to be ‘aggressively confronted’, ‘recoiled’ from or simply ignored.

The irony is that at the beginning of his career Theroux’s docos were unsatisfying precisely be-cause they were about us versus them. He got his start presenting short segments on TV Nation, a show hosted by Michael Moore that was essen-tially a left-wing version of A Current Affair. The subject matter was surprisingly prophetic, with topics like the Ku Klux Klan and millennialists an-ticipating Theroux’s later fascination with racists and fringe groups. The trouble was that because of their short running time and TV Nation’s overall comedy remit, the tone of the segments was essentially mocking. The Klan piece is little more than an exposé and the millennialists’ beliefs are merely sniggered at. Even Theroux now feels that this early work was somewhat glib.

When Theroux graduated to his own series it initially showed little improvement. Weird Weekends was produced for BBC2, and saw Theroux roving the hinterlands of American subcultures. Even if we leave aside the series’ loaded title (Theroux claims it wasn’t his idea), one of the first episodes, about the subculture of UFO believers, positively strains to play the ‘weirdos’ for laughs. Rather than simply allowing his interviewees to speak for themselves, Theroux stacks the deck with corny ‘space’ music and asks people if they think they’re ‘cracked’. Of course there’s no reason he should take their beliefs seriously. What’s disappointing though is that, whereas his later specials for BBC2 allowed even paedophiles and meth addicts their dignity, in this case it’s clear that Theroux is simply present-ing extreme behaviour for the viewer's amusement.

48 • Metro Magazine 173 | © ATOM

Focus on AsiA And the Middle eAst

In Hong Kong, Mike Walsh fInds tHe Japanese

fIlm Industry resurgent, wHIle CHInese

produCers struggle for wIde appeal In tHe

waKe of a Hollywood onslaugHt. In a regIon

experIenCIng an extraordInary perIod of

transformatIon, Is It any surprIse tHat so

many fIlms foCus on tHe turmoIl of CHIldHood?

The2012

Hong KongInternational

FilmFestival

Panda in the

Headlights

© ATOM | Metro Magazine 173 • 49 © ATOM | Metro Magazine 174 • 53

DOCUMENTARY

The documentary is loosely structured around the trajectories of two projects: one tangible and personal, the other still in the competition stage and very public. McBride and Ryan’s new fam-ily home is a undergoing a slow, sput-tering genesis, while their submission for a new billion-dollar cancer care centre in Melbourne must be whittled down from the fifty ideas they have on the drawing board. A third project at Melbourne’s Docklands – ‘twin tower’ apartments – is also a significant focus of the film.

Graphics of renders, drawings and notes are used throughout the docu-mentary to give a sense of the com-plexity and, in some sense, the gravity of the architectural process. These are big ideas for big buildings – structures that are going to make a huge impact on our physical surrounds – and hav-ing the opportunity to see this kind of imagery brings that point home.

Ryan and McBride are based in Melbourne, a city notoriously in love with black, and their work stands out for its bold use of colour. Their Fitzroy High School project is based on a multicoloured ‘four leaf clover’ design, while several of their other buildings’ facades incorporate the colour purple. The forms are unusual, too, from a

fragmented dome (Debbie’s mother’s house) to their award-winning Klein Bottle House on the Mornington Peninsula, which takes a paradoxical theoretical structure, one with no true outside or inside, and forms from it an extraordinary, origami-like dwelling.

Refreshingly, the documentary does not shy away from portraying the myriad responses to such work, be they enthusiastic or damning. Professor Leon van Schaik of the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT, having observed McBride and Ryan over many years, explains that it is now ‘really exciting to see how all of that experimentation which has been going on in houses … is now begin-ning to pay off in the public realm’. Dimity Reed, former professor of urban design at RMIT, describes their Yardmasters project as an ‘absolute joy of a public building’ and speaks of their ‘sense of commitment to a public engagement of architecture as a gift and as an expression to and of the public’. But a Fitzroy High School student admits she finds her school building ‘hideous’, and the look of pure fear on the face of a real estate agent for the Docklands apartments as Ryan presents her suggested colour palette tells us all we need to know about her opinion.

The negative responses only serve to increase the sense that this architecture is important: it has made an impact; it has got people

talking.

left: the Monaco house in Melbourne's cbD above from top: the Klein bottle house; the DoMe house; interior Design teaM robert McbriDe anD Debbie ryan left: a 3D renDer of the DocKlanDs apartMent DevelopMent the Quays

life architecturally

YEAR: 2012

DiRECTOR: Britt Arthur

RUNNiNg TiME: 54 MiNS

ISS

UE

67 S

CR

EE

N E

DU

CA

TIO

N ©

ATO

M

8

ISS

UE

67 S

CR

EE

N E

DU

CA

TIO

N ©

ATO

M

9

The protagonist of Brave (Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman & Steve Purcell, 2012) is a debutante in both the narrative of this film and in the pantheon of Pixar characters. Merida (Kelly Macdonald) is forced to tame her tomboy tendencies and stand,

trussed up in a corset and gown, before three suitors as a typical princess. Outside of the film, she also steps out as the first female protagonist of Pixar Animation Studios’ thirteen feature films. While female characters have featured as level-headed supporters in Toy Story 2 (John Lasseter et al., 1999) or as part of an ensemble in The Incredibles (Brad Bird, 2004), for example, they have only been secondary to the male protago-nists – be they human or anthropomorphised toys, robots, bugs, rats or monsters. Feminist magazine Ms. drew attention to this disparity with the pointed remark that Pixar’s ‘one-note dedication to male-helmed and -focused films’ represents an endemic aspect of a film industry that is still very patriarchal in its power structure.1

Interestingly, then, the plot of Brave concerns itself with Merida’s battle to break with established gender roles and control her own destiny. This goal is made difficult in a kingdom so heavily influenced by ritual and legend. Early in the film we see Merida as she wants to be: riding her horse (no side-saddle here) through an idyllic Scottish landscape of mountains, lochs and forests, while the sound of Julie Fowlis’ Celtic singing rings out triumphantly. Things are very different at home, however. Merida’s mother, Elinor (Emma Thompson), constantly reminds her what is permissible behaviour for a princess, and attempts to counter the decidedly unladylike influence of Merida’s belching and battle-worn father, Fergus (Billy Connolly), who is proud of his spirited daughter but largely accepts the dictates of a natural order – that she will have to find a husband. During a conversation at the dinner table, Merida is caught between Fergus’ praise (the cliff face she scaled can only be conquered by future kings, he tells her) and Elinor’s finicky fussing over standards and expectations – and she is as excited by one as she is repelled by the other.

ABOVE: THE ADVENTUROUS PRINCESS MERIDA WITH HER TRUSTY HORSE, ANGUS RIGHT: CASTLE DUNBROCH PROVIDES A TYPICAL FAIRYTALE SETTING FOR BRAVE

Brave, Fate and Fairytale Endings

Much has been made of the fiery redhead who is Pixar’s first ever female lead. But considering Brave’s traditional fairytale narrative, is the studio really breaking new ground, asks CHRIS MUIR, or is Pixar moving closer to the conservative values of parent company Disney?

TEA

CH

ING

MED

IA

18

ISS

UE

64

SC

RE

EN

ED

UC

AT

ION

©A

TO

M

ISS

UE

64

SC

RE

EN

ED

UC

AT

ION

©A

TO

M

19

She’s only on screen for less than a minute, but she’s a perfect walking metaphor. Claiborne Ray is the deputy editor of obituaries at The New York Times, and the one thing we see her do is get fired. As she clears her desk and leaves the

newspaper she’s worked at for more than twenty years, she wears a badge that says ‘Not Dead Yet’. She’s followed by over a hundred of her coworkers and as they leave, you can’t help feeling they represent the first line in the newspaper’s own obituary. Page One: Inside The New York Times (Andrew Rossi, 2011) began filming soon after an article appeared in The Atlantic questioning the paper’s future. Deep in debt, its circulation falling and forced to compete with the egg-thieving, faster-moving creatures of the internet age, the Gray Lady was suddenly faced with her own mortality. The Atlantic story was gleefully bounced around the media echo chamber, each retelling seeming to lend it greater credence. Finally someone had dared to say the unsayable: what would happen if The New York Times died? Andrew Rossi’s documentary takes that question as its central theme.

Some reviewers have attacked Page One because it focuses chiefly upon the Times’ media desk rather than the paper as a whole, but this misses the film’s point. From the very begin-ning, Rossi makes it clear that the problems faced by the Times are typical of the newspaper industry in general. By concentrating on the media desk he places us in the eye of the storm and provides us with the guidance of expert report-ers. Better still, the reporters couldn’t be more perfectly cast. The first is David Carr, a man who describes himself as ‘a 54-year-old ex-crackhead who sounds like Kermit the Frog’.1 Smart, funny and fiercely protective of what the Times stands

Brush with

MortalitY

The rise of online journalism and advertising has cast the future of the newspaper industry into doubt. In light of the UK phone-hacking scandal, Dave Hoskin discusses recent documentary Page One: Inside The New York Times, and considers what it would mean to see one of the pillars of the fourth estate crumble.

ISS

UE

66

SC

RE

EN

ED

UC

AT

ION

©A

TO

M

91

ISS

UE

66

SC

RE

EN

ED

UC

AT

ION

©A

TO

M

90

Basically it’s about these people, who look amazing, sound amazing, and move like none of us do, but who are ultimately very fragile people. They don’t tear down the walls of their society. They ultimately succumb to the pressures of their society, and in that way they’re more familiar than a lot of film subjects are – they’re really more like us.

- Todd Haynes1

Despite its distinct narrative and stylistic con-ventions, melodrama is often overlooked in an educational context in favour of more common, accessible or popular genres. It is fair to say that such an oversight is based, at least in part, on

the plethora of (often-derided) melodramatic soap operas on television, such as The Bold and the Beautiful, Days of Our Lives and Desperate Housewives. While these texts certainly share many narrative and stylistic features with film melodramas, it is important to make two distinctions between the formats: in film melodramas, particularly family melodramas of the 1950s, there is a contained (rather than serialised) narrative, and greater emphasis is placed on visual style in order to heighten the characters’ emotions, their dialogue, and the films’ wider narrative concerns.

Literally translating to ‘music’ and ‘drama’, melodrama is widely understood to focus on surface and presentation at the

Paradise is Burning

They might be dismissed as ‘weepies’ or overly sentimental chick flicks, writes Simon RogeRS, but the family melodramas from the 1950s and beyond offer excellent opportunities for analysing film craft precisely because of their heightened drama and stylistic excess.

Expressing the Unspeakable through Melodrama in All That Heaven Allows and Far from Heaven

CATHY (JULIANNE MOORE) IS THE REPRESSED FEMALE PROTAGONIST IN FAR FROM HEAVEN, TODD HAYNES’ HOMAGE TO SIRKIAN MELODRAMA

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RON (ROCK HUDSON) AND CARY (JANE WYMAN) IS DOOMED IN DOUGLAS SIRK’S ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS

GEN

RE

MA

TTER

S

Drawn into Motion

THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN

Drawn into MotionShortly before his death, Tintin creator Hergé named Steven Spielberg as his preferred director to film the much-loved graphic stories about an intrepid boy journalist. Almost thirty years later, his wish has been granted. Myke Bartlett looks at the challenges of adapting such an iconic series – and balancing the demands of new audiences with those of devoted fans.

Steven Spielberg has earned a surprising degree of vitriol from Tintin devotees. Fans, particularly those with access to the internet, tend to express their disapproval in tones of melodramatic hyperbole. Given the sense of ownership many tend to feel,

reinterpretations can seem like theft – as though their adored property has been given a respray and sold on to an unappre-ciative public.

In the case of The Adventures of Tintin (2011), even respectable publications appeared to take the position that Spielberg had damaged the property by leaving his grubby Hollywood fin-gerprints all over it. The most dramatic of these pieces – one of many negative articles run by The Guardian – came from a

‘stunned and sickened’ Nicholas Lezard, who wrote that he

had been obliged to watch two hours of literally senseless violence being perpetrated on something I loved dearly. In fact, the sense of violation was so strong that it felt as though I had witnessed a rape.1

Leaving aside this desperate, inappropriate imagery, such comments illustrate the perils inherent in adapting a cultural icon for the silver screen. In considering Spielberg’s take on Hergé’s intrepid journalist, we can examine the sort of ‘senseless violence’ a director might see the need to inflict on an icon to make them ready for box office success.

ISS

UE

68

SC

RE

EN

ED

UC

AT

ION

©A

TO

M

ISS

UE

68

SC

RE

EN

ED

UC

AT

ION

©A

TO

M

4140

Who are these creatives? Whom do we choose to acknowledge? Most commercial video games are made by teams of hundreds. When I completed playing Batman: Arkham City, released in 2011 by Rocksteady Studios, the credits lasted for a full four-teen minutes. Directors, producers, animators, writers, artists, programmers, voice actors, quality assurance, translators: it seemed impossible to acknowledge more people than were crammed into those credits.

For film, the auteur debate raged long and hard before reach-ing any sort of détente, and while directors are still often held up as artists, there seems to be a general acknowledgement that they also stand on the shoulders of their cast and crew. For video games, Game Masters is a crinkle in the already compli-cated discussion. Many of the video games that the exhibition features make the choice clear enough: early arcade machines and many contemporary indie video games were made by one or two creative people. Yet many more of the games on display present no easy answer when it comes to authorship. Even if a creator had a title like ‘director’ or ‘lead designer’ after their name, how much does that really mean when their day-to-day job was more the management of two hundred other people than being creative?

ACMI have responded to this question with a pragmatic blend of solutions. For some games, studios are simply presented as author – the LEGO series is exhibited under the TT Games name, while Nintendo (rather than Shigeru Miyamoto or Eiji Aonuma) claims authorship over the Zelda series. In other instances, the artistic stamp of an author appears so strongly as to track across multiple video games from multiple teams and companies. Game Masters shows us the evolution of Warren Spector across System Shock (1994, made at Looking Glass Studios), Deus Ex (2000, made at Ion Storm) and Epic Mickey (2010, made at Junction Point). Hundreds if not thou-sands of different people worked on these video games, yet Game Masters points to Spector’s crucial influence across the titles he worked on. Indeed, the Game Masters catalogue cites Spector’s development of ‘player choice and the in-game consequences that follow from those choices’ as defining traits of his work.

While tracing large-scale, collaborative works back to such select themes might seem a fool’s errand, there nonetheless appears to be a ring of truth in Spector’s case. At the launch of Game Masters, Spector – who was in attendance – expressed some reluctance at taking such sweeping credit for his games, but at the same time agreed that in all instances, he played the shaping role. ‘I tell my teams that I’m going to create this box for you,’ said Spector. ‘And as long as you stay within it, do what you want. But if you ever go outside of that creative framework, I’m going to push you back in.’

Is it less significant to celebrate the game developer who shapes that box than it is to celebrate the lone

artist who applies the paint to the canvas, or the film director who oversees

the story, nudges the actors and

The first thing that you see at Game Masters, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image’s (ACMI) latest and boldest exhibit of video games, is a row of arcade machines. Here is the video game’s public history, laid out as expected, with brightly coloured

cabinets and neon lights drawing innocent and nostalgic visi-tors alike to each machine as bewitchingly as they did three decades ago. Here is the peculiar din of video games as they exist in public space: Donkey Kong’s warning fanfare, the irritat-ing waka-waka of Pac-Man’s ghost chase. The area is furnished with wood panelling and hazy mirrors, leaving visitors wanting only a grotesque 1970s beige, chocolate and orange colour scheme to more perfectly recall the last era that video games were so visible in public life. This is a kind of capsule of time and space in gallery form.

Yet something is quite different about this re-encounter (or, for many younger visitors, a first encounter) with arcade video games. Next to each cabinet is the name of the game’s designer in neon. Beneath each name is a plaque with several para-graphs of information about the person, or persons, who made the game. These names – Masanobu Endo, Ed Logg, Shigeru Miyamoto – were almost always absent in the early years of video games, and they are striking in their reappearance.

Sometimes, this absence was due to innocent thoughtlessness: who would want to know the name of a video game designer, anyway? Other times, the companies responsible for getting games out there worked very hard to make sure players never knew more about a video game’s designer than that he or she had once worked at Atari, or Taito, or Konami. In some cases, this lack of artistic recognition was too much: a number of Atari workers quit the company in 1979 to form a rival devel-oper called Activision. There, it was hoped, artists would get their due (the first batch of Activision games were true to their

promise: to speak of David Crane’s Pitfall! is no less ludicrous than to speak of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather).

This is the central proposition of Game Masters: that video games have authors. This, in a way, seems obvious enough, since video games do not spring fully formed from the balance

sheets of executives. There are always creative middlemen: designers who tweak levels, artists who sketch characters, pro-grammers who cut code, composers who write music, writers who chart dialogue. In the four decades since the first com-mercial video games were developed, we’ve come to accept that these digital artefacts are made by humans. To make this point explicit, ephemera from the world of video-game creatives is displayed alongside the games themselves at Game Masters. Concept artwork, scripts, design documents and video inter-views enact much of the argument that video games have authors, beyond the simple titles that group the games on display under a creative’s name.

Early arcade machines and

many contemporary indie

video games were made by

one or two creative people.

Yet many more of the games

on display present no easy

answer when it comes to

authorship.

Previous sPread: Pac-Man This sPread, clockwise from above: Game masters exhibition (Courtesy aCmi 2012); EPic MickEy ConCept art (© Disney); Game Developer Warren speCtor (© Disney)

Thought-provoking articles on film and media.

Promoting the joy of learning and an

appreciation of screen culture.