Ivan Sen's cinematic imaginary : restraint, complexity, and a politics of place

Ivan Sen is an important contemporary Australian filmmaker, whose work offers many challenges for the reinvention of Australian cinema and for future directions in international cinema. He is an important figure in what has been called the Blak Wave in Australian cinema" the rise over the last few decades of a growing number of talented Indigenous filmmakers who are redefining long"held conceptions about what Australian cinema is and can be, and challenging hegemonic definitions of Australia at their core. The premise underpinning this chapter is that we cannot understand the significance of how Sen's films take up cultural and political issues until we understand the cinematic strategies they use to do so. The chapter aims to think and write these levels together, to prise open a different kind of space that is not defined by long"standing dichotomies between cultural and aesthetic analysis, but to read the two together. Sen is a profoundly political filmmaker, but he has developed a very specific cinematic aesthetics to achieve his political ends. As a cineaste, Sen is thinking with light, camera framing and movement, performance, scripting, timing, and musical pacing. He says, 'ultimately I have love of cinema', and it is through an exploration of his love affair with film that we can come closer to more fully understanding the richness and the subtlety of what his films are doing, and their political and cultural resonance (Maddox 2013).