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Gillian Armstrong: Television School
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Born in Melbourne, Victoria, Gillian Armstrong graduated from Swinburne technical college in 1968 where she studied theatrical costume design and film-making. In 1972 she entered, and later graduated from, the Australian Film and Television School. Three years later she directed two shorts films: The Singer And The Dancer and Smokes and Lollies (1975).
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When Gillian Armstrong started her studies in the Australian Film and Television School in Sydney, she had not given any thought to becoming a director. Women just did not direct films in Australia.
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After briefly working as an editor, Armstrong earned a scholarship to the newly created Australian Film and Television School. At the school's interim training scheme for directors, she graduated along side Philip Noyce and Chris Noonan in the school's first group of directors in 1973. Working in various parts of the industry, from designing costumes to assisting director Fred Schepisi on Libido (1973), Armstrong ... made the short film Gretel, which was Australia's official entry at the Grenoble International Festival of Short Films.
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Around the world, Armstrong's films have drawn critical acclaim because of her ability to bring such ethereal elements as romantic attraction and deep emotion to the screen. The DGA Magazine caught up with the director recently in Los Angeles as she was about to receive Women in Film's prestigious Dorothy Arzner Directing Award, which recognizes the importance of women directors in the film and television industry.
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Towards the end of her book, Collins remarks on her own approach to feminist film theory, for which she sees an analog in Armstrong's films. She explains, for instance, that the "shift in focus of feminist critique from psychoanalytic theories of narrative, subjectivity, and spectatorship to historical questions of cinema as a public sphere which articulates the experience of modernity, has opened up a promising vein of enquiry into the sexual politics of cinema." (78) Although she doesn't say much more than this, Collins is clearly concerned to move away from notions of voyeurism and masochism and sadistic looking in the cinema to consider discriminating, intelligent acts of looking and analysis. Referencing the work of Frankfurt School theorists and the feminist scholars who have reinterpreted it, Collins argues the necessity of rethinking the female experience of modernity through recurring figures of modern femininity, "in particular those of the public woman, the streetwalker, the window shopper, the flaneur/flaneuse, and the prostitute." (78) Much like Armstrong's films, she suggests, such attention to figures is not a matter of identifying and promoting a singular national or gendered type (the "strong" or "independent" Australian woman, the one-dimensional and unchanging "female spectator"). Rather, it involves a commitment to exploring a range of peculiarly modern experiences (captured perhaps most brilliantly in Armstrong's documentary series beginning with Smoke and lollies in 1976 and ending with Not fourteen again in 1996).
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Armstrong's films demonstrate a diversity and breadth of story-telling. She has alternated between shooting in Australia and the US, between period and contemporary drama, films for theatrical release and television and ... between documentary and drama.
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