Editor’s Introduction

Welcome to the first issue of Studies in Australasian Cinema for 2019. This issue comprises two articles which deal with the paradoxical themes at work in politicised representations of gender and sexuality. In ‘Riding in cars as girls: discourses of victimhood, power and agency in Beneath Clouds and American Honey’, Samantha Cater places Australian film Beneath Clouds in a relationship with the US road movie American Honey. In doing so, the article foregrounds the overlapping themes of passivity, victimisation and objectification of young women on the one hand, and notions of resilience agency and selfdetermination on the other. Likewise, in charting the visibility of gay and lesbian representation/production in Australian film in the 1970s, Jessie Matheson’s ‘“about gays by gays”: The politics of representation in early Australian gay film culture, 1971–1982’, reveals the twin imperatives of developing queer film culture: challenging and subversive, on the one hand, but bound in many ways by aesthetic and industrial demands of acceptability and intelligibility. As always, please enjoy this issue of Studies in Australasian Cinema.