- Title
- Smiley
- Creator
- Hamilton, Emma
- Relation
- Making Film and Television Histories: Australia and New Zealand p. 153-157
- Relation
- http://www.ibtauris.com/Books/The%20arts/Film%20TV%20%20radio/Television/Making%20Film%20and%20Television%20Histories%20Australia%20and%20New%20Zealand.aspx
- Publisher
- I. B. Tauris
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2011
- Description
- Smiley is neither a documentary film, nor is it situated in a real past time or around a definite historical event. Rather, Smiley is a fictional film set in the 1950s with a plot that revolves around the attempts of a nine-year-old boy, Smiley William Thomas Greevins (Colin Petersen), to save up enough money to buy his very own Raleigh bicycle. As such, this film raises important questions about historical evidence and the type of sources historians consider 'valid': most notably, are films that deal specifically with historical issues alone worthy of historical study, or are all films forms of historical evidence? Here Smiley, is used as evidence for the way in which film functions as a reflection of the time of its production, in this case as a reflection on issues in Australia during the 1950s. In this way all films can be utilised as important and valid evidence that is both a manifestation of then-contemporary historical issues and, in the case of Smiley, also as a reflection on the way in which society selectively interprets and creates self-serving narratives to cement notions of identity, often rooted in historically stable conceptualisations of the nation. Specifically, this essay considers the way in which representations of the child, in this case Smiley, are used as a symbol of further national and international discourses.
- Subject
- historical evidence; historical sources; Smiley; national discourses
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1062106
- Identifier
- uon:17043
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781848859449
- Language
- eng
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