title: Film, Television and the Urban Experience: A Case Study of Brisbane
Creators: name: Davies, Elizabeth Anne
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2010
Subjects: subject: Brisbane cultural life
subject: Imaging city life
subject: Brisbane urban experience

description: This investigation of Brisbane in film and television is a multidisciplinary research study that links anthropological and film/TV studies to the social consequences of imaging city life. It focuses particularly on how Brisbane is portrayed in post 1950s film and television programs. To date, much of the research into city growth and development has relied on the written sources and those of the built and natural environment. Similarly, research into film and television tends to focus on the narrative or auteur form, overlooking the significance of space and place and the contribution of the built environment. This study, however, demonstrates that a significant link exists between the city on one hand and film and television on the other. Therefore, excluding television and film in the history of the city ignores an integral part of Australian, and especially Brisbane, culture during the latter part of the twentieth century. Thinking about the city in terms of film and television, therefore, increases our understanding of the city, and conversely, thinking about film and television in terms of the city increases our understanding of screen culture and processes. There are two parts to this study. Part I is a review of literature dealing with the development of the moving image and the city in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contextual chapters on cultural aspects of the city and the development of the moving image in the urban frame form the theoretical foundation of this study. In Part II, a series of case studies present, critically, aspects of film and television as they relate to Brisbane. First, use of film to promote Brisbane’s urban experience to prospective migrants by the Queensland Government in the 1960s and 1970s reveals the extent to which the moving image can manipulate the perceived urban experience of a place. Next, is an analysis of the early years of Brisbane’s television history: undertaken for its contribution to a ‘sense of place’ and which gave rise to a new industry during the 1960s and 1970s. Contrasting that, however, is the sense of placelessness apparent in films set in Brisbane since the 1970s. In the final case study, however, television drama series from the 1990s once again highlight the ‘sense of place’ in this media as opposed to film. Films and television programs, conventional historical sources, such as newspaper reports, industry publications, are examined as well as interviews taken of key players during that period. Thus, the research surveyed confirms that there exists a nexus of film and television on the one hand and the city on the other. Just as film and television informed and influenced the urban experience and the city, so too the city has positioned itself as the site of film and television industries and culture. Therefore, the general framework presented in Part I of this thesis informs and delineates each of the case studies in Part II. How moving images impact on the developmental trends of the city is a problem that is particularly relevant to the industry partner, the Brisbane City Council. Council decision makers will be in a better position, because of this study, to understand how the city can benefit from television and film exposure and their concomitant industries. Council will be able to include this research in planning its promotional and cultural activities. To that end, the central theme in this study answers the question to what extent Brisbane has featured in moving images and whether this has, and will in the future, influence the type of development that has taken place in the city, and the degree to which this is still occurring.