1. The Films Of John Hughes
can be purchased for $34.95
+ P&H at
John
Hughes.
An
underrated,
canny
maverick
of our
national
film scene.

2. John Cumming is a Senior
Lecturer in Film and Television
at Deakin University and
vice president of the
Australian Screen Production
Education and Research
Association (ASPERA).
John started making Super-8
films at Swinburne Community
School in the 1970s. He has
made several short 16 mm films,
documentaries and numerous
videos. Works from the trilogy
Obsession, Recognition and
Sabotage (1981–1987) have
been included in retrospectives
of Australian experimental
filmmaking in Madrid (1994),
Melbourne (1996, 2004, 2009)
and Thessaloniki (2010).
In the 1980s he served as
secretary and then chairperson
of the Independent Film Action
Committee (IFAC). John was
a member of the Australian
crew on Peter Watkins’ epic
transnational anti-nuclear film
The Journey (1987).
In the 1990s John was a member
of the editorial committee
of Filmnews and worked
with a number of community
media organisations.
He has taught at the VCA,
UTS, La Trobe and Melbourne
universities and has written for a
range of journals and magazines
on independent filmmaking and
cultural policy in Australia.
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; 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
the book
the
author
$34.95
theeduc
atio nsh o p.
com.au
+ P&H