Sustaining a lifelong career in any part of the film
industry anywhere in the world is hard, but sustaining one in the ever-shifting realm of creative, independent, socially engaged, intellectually inspired, formally innovative practice in Australia is especially tough.
John Cumming’s superb book is not only about the prodigious, exploratory, challenging films, videos and TV programs made by John Hughes – an underrated, canny maverick of our national scene; it is also about what it takes to keep moving and changing with the times, how to negotiate with institutions and collaborate with sympathetic minds from other art forms, how to research and teach and theorise on the spot. Only after that concerted effort can a big picture – involving, in Hughes’ case, a multi-media aesthetic of collage-design, and a long view of generations, conflicts and transmissions in social history – be discerned. John Cumming elegantly gives us both this collective history and a fine appreciation by one artist of another – both of them forever struggling in and with the conditions, limits and possibilities of their culture.
Adrian Martin, Adjunct Associate Professor of Film Studies, Monash University
