Professor Roger Hillman
Australian National University
Roger Hillman is an Associate Professor of Film Studies and German Studies at the Australian National University, Canberra. Major research areas span film and music, European narratives (film and literature), and issues of cultural memory. Publications include Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography, coed. with Leslie Devereaux (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music, Ideology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Reading Images, Viewing Texts: Crossdisciplinary Perspectives, coed. with Louise Maurer (Berne: Peter Lang, 2006). A co-authored book on transcultural issues in Turkish-German literature and film is pending.
Beyond welcoming more general interaction with scholars at the Centre, Professor Hillman envisages working on a project involving representations of Gallipoli, as (from an Australian perspective) these shift from a national myth to a more transnational one. Specifically he has in mind close work on Louis de Bernières' novel Birds without Wings and the film Gallipoli, directed by Tolger ÖS;rnek, to counterpoint them against the appearance a quarter of a century earlier of the Peter Weir film Gallipoli and Roger McDonald's novel 1915. These analyses would embody key issues of fictional representation and history, film/novel and documentary, and the processes of transformation operating on a national myth which was created when 'Empire' had quite different resonances. The works by Weir and McDonald blended two historical moments: 1) an after-image of Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War, and 2) identity issues at the core of the resurgence of Australian film in the 1970s, postcolonial strivings away from the Motherland. What might Gallipoli look like now, as direct links to the historical event disappear, but ever more young Australians (and sport teams) make a pilgrimage there? Above all, what are we to make of the decidedly non-nationalistic film by the Turkish director Örnek? Beyond the specific case study, this project should yield more general approaches to the issue of national myths vis-à -vis transnational force fields in culture, and in readings of history.
