Adrian Martin goes online - A new website goes up with his collected works on offer

Adrian Martin

There are just a handful of critics and commentators produced in Australia with international reputations. Tim Flannery’s writing appears regularly in the greatest publication in the world The New York Review of Books; Jack Sargeant gets a guernsey fairly frequently; Barrie Pattison was once a fixture in Motion and Films and Filming; Philip Brophy contributes most notably to Film Comment with erudite pieces on sound and music for film. I cant think of others but am happy to be corrected.

Then there is the case of Adrian Martin an astonishingly prolific writer for close to forty years and one whose enthusiasm for the movies has never diminished. His work has been in any number of the major international cinema journals of our time, the only such critic and scholar from these parts to achieve such a presence. From his now permanent base near Barcelona Adrian writes, he lectures, he does DVD commentary tracks, he sits on juries, he curates seasons, and, with his partner Cristina Alvarez López he produces visual essays. All activities reveal a deep love for and knowledge of the cinema’s history and a continuing enthusiasm for its discovery and re-discovery.

Adrian has now, with the aid of master webmeister Bill Mousoulis, managed to get much of his writing into one place in a very accessible form and with a good search engine. The website can be found if you click here.  A veritable treasure trove of reviews, essays, notes and writing of all kind opens up.

There is no catch but Adrian is hoping that people who use the site might like to contribute a little towards its maintenance and possibly his well-being. Independent scholarship is no easy road these days so I am urging everyone to have a look and a think.

Meanwhile here’s wishing good luck and the hope that the site will be updated regularly and that cinephiles everywhere will keep checking it for both the new and the old.