As a tribute to the recent passing of the prolific and excessively underrated Ted Kotcheff, this seminar will strive to offer a retracing and reevaluation of the director’s phenomenal career. It is stranger than his variegated filmography that there is a total absence of any academic book critically engaging with his works. From psychological horror in Wake in Fright (1971) kickstarting the Australian New Wave along with Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971), to The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, winner of the Golden Bear at the 24th Berlin International Film Festival, through the genre-defining action film First Blood (1982) and the black comedy Weekend at Bernie's (1989), we find ourselves in the middle of an engulfing alienation, moral disintegration, individuals tussling with hostile environments and a deep crisis of masculinity. Often regarded as a skilled journeyman — or, to borrow Godard's phrase, “a professional of the profession” — Kotcheff demands more scholarly focus and artistic reappraisal due to the unconventionality and versatility of his body of work, one that is not auteurist in the classical sense. Hence, Kotcheff’s filmography invites a number of diverse interpretive angles and research foci: the second-generation émigré filmmaker; the transnational director who worked across Canada, the United States, Australia, Europe, and the Middle East; a filmmaker equally at home with independent, personal cinema and with genre filmmaking, including the creation of one of the most influential action franchises in film history with First Blood (1982). Kotcheff, as a nomadic director, could be immensely difficult to assess or index. Our seminar acknowledges Kotcheff’s prowess, a director capable of both box-office hits and festival successes (action war movies, westerns, thrillers, black and slapstick comedies, sports movies — some of which anticipated cinematic trends for the years that followed). Many of these films became iconic and universally familiar through frequent television broadcast, as well as of unconventional and neglected works still waiting to be rediscovered. In a 1975 interview with L.A. Times, Kotcheff once remarked that “All my pictures deal with people outside or people who don’t know what’s driving them.” It is this outside and living as an outsider in Kotcheff’s films that create an atmosphere of psychological realism, environmental disorientation, and documentary observation. Kotcheff unsettles us with his out-of-hand melodrama on the one hand and a collapsing civilizational order on the other. 

We welcome individual or joint papers from researchers across the academic spectrum.  

To pique your curiosity, we have provided some topics below:

• Kotcheff and Transnational Cinema
• Kotcheff and Masculinity
• Kotcheff and Violence
• Kotcheff and Australian New Wave
• Kotcheff and Independent Cinema
• Kotcheff, Genre and Authorship
• Kotcheff and Environment
• Kotcheff and the Outsider
• Kotcheff and Television