Draft:Metro (Australia)

This page is about the Australian film, TV and new media magazine. For the New Zealand lifestyle magazine, see Metro (magazine). For other uses, see Metro.

Metro

File:Metro no. 195 cover.jpg
Editor	David Heslin
Categories	Film, Television and New Media
Frequency	Quarterly
Publisher	Australian Teachers of Media
Founded	1964 (1964)
Country	Australia
Based in	Melbourne
Language	English
Website	metromagazine.com.au
ISSN	0312-2654 (print) 2207-8428 (web)

Metro is an Australian quarterly film, television and new media magazine published by Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM). It is Australia's oldest currently published film magazine.

History

Metro was first published in Melbourne, Australia, in March 1964 as Film Appreciation Newsletter, the journal of educational collective The Association of Teachers of Film Appreciation (later Association of Teachers of Film and Video, and today Australian Teachers of Media). It was initially published somewhat intermittently and, in its earlier years, consisted of a mixture of reprints of articles from international publications such as Screen and Film and some original content, primarily contributed by Victorian film and media teachers. Film Appreciation Newsletter’s mission is described in its first editorial as to "supply, to those teachers somewhat rusty on film technique, material designed not only to fill in the gaps in their own knowledge, but also give suggestions on how this material could be conveyed to a group of students". Over the decade that followed, this brief expanded to incorporate film criticism, media analysis, industry news, editorial cartoons and broader discussion of educational policy, and by 1972 the magazine had settled into a quarterly release cycle. In this period, it published work by notable critics and filmmakers such as John Flaus, Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, John Hughes, Phillip Adams and Peter Weir.

In 1974, Film Appreciation Newsletter was renamed Metro, a decision explained by then editor Dawn Brown as having "connotations of the Paris Metro, good old M.G.M., metra (womb), metropolis (mother city) [and] metronome (device to mark time)"; she added a disclaimer that "even if the relevance escapes you, it sounds zippy and zingy anyway". Brown was one of many women involved in editing and writing articles for the magazine in the 1970s and 1980s; film scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas writes that "with a strongly academic and educational slant, Metro was notably progressive with its gender politics" in the 1980s, and that the publication's "male critics seem[ed] just as interested as their female counterparts in gender issues and the work of women filmmakers".

From the 1970s through to the early 1990s, Metro primarily covered film, TV and advertising through a media education lens, but its purpose shifted after Australian Teachers of Media launched a second quarterly magazine, Metro Education (later known as Australian Screen Education and then, for most of its existence, simply Screen Education), in 1995. From this point on, Metro's remit turned to long-form critical analysis, initially of both Australian and international cinema and television before narrowing its focus to new Australian, New Zealand and Asian screen content in the early 2000s.

In 2008, Metro began publishing a regular series titled the NFSA's Kodak/Atlab Cinema Collection (later known as The NFSA Restores Collection), consisting of 6000 to 8000 word essays on films that have been restored by the National Film and Sound Archive. These were commissioned and introduced by Australian film scholar Brian McFarlane from the section's inception until 2021.

In early 2020, Screen Education was placed on hiatus, and a section of the same name was added to Metro, carrying three to four articles per issue. In November 2021, a new Metro website was launched, providing digital access to print editions along with archival material from the magazine's early years.

Metro is one of a number of long-running film publications to have emerged in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s, around the time of the Australian New Wave; others included the now-defunct Cinema Papers, Cantrills Filmnotes and Filmnews. In The Oxford Companion to Australian Film, McFarlane describes the magazine as having offered "one of the rare sites in Australia for serious discussion of films and film-makers who are not necessarily buzzwords of the moment", and notes that while "there is some overlap with Cinema Papers […] the avowed educational imperative of Metro ensures a significant area of difference". In the twenty-first century, Metro exists alongside fellow general-readership online film publications such as news and review websites FilmInk and ScreenHub, and the more scholarly, internationally focused Senses of Cinema. As of November 2022, the magazine has published 214 issues, and remains available in print as well as online.

Content

Metro primarily consists of long-form critical analysis of screen productions, with a heavy focus on Australian releases. Recent issues are divided into nine sections: Scope (a collection of short columns covering recent screen industry news and issues); Australian and New Zealand Cinema; Documentary; Beyond the Big Screen (incorporating television, web series, VR and videogames); Focus on Asia and the Middle East; Screen Education; Critical Views (reappraisals of classic or overlooked Australian films); The NFSA Restores Collection; and Industry Perspectives.

Awards

Metro articles have received regular accolades at the Australian Film Critics Association Awards, receiving the Ivan Hutchinson Award for Writing on Australian Film in 2014, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2022. Authors of Metro articles awarded include Glenn Dunks, Adrian Martin, Gabrielle O'Brien and Heller-Nicholas.