Adrian Martin

My website Film Critic: Adrian Martin (http://www.filmcritic.com.au) was launched 26 July 2017. It is, essentially, a collection of my film reviews and short essays written over a period of over 40 years, in many different styles and originally for many sorts of publications and occasions (newspapers, radio, specialist magazines, unpublished notes, online journals, classroom handouts, etc) in many countries of the world. It currently contains around 2,300 entries, but there are at least 1,000 more that are ready to be entered into the site - as well as all the new entries I am writing now, and into the future.

There are various ascending reward levels (see the column on the right), but you can support my project by contributing anything from $1 upwards - click BECOME A PATRON to see this option listed that exists below the first Reward benchmark. Alternatively, if you would prefer to make a direct one-off payment (not via this Patreon system), please contact me at [email protected], and I'll be happy to arrange that with you,

Who am I? I first appeared in print at age 19, in a 1979 issue of Cinema Papers magazine. During the 1980s and 1990s I wrote, mainly, for many Australian magazines (most of these, especially from the pre-digital era, very hard to access now), covering cinema, art, pop culture, sometimes music or literature; but I also began to appear beyond Australia in places like Sight and Sound (UK), Film Comment (USA) and Trafic (France). From my teenage days, I have always tried to combine the evaluation of individual films with a consideration of larger contexts and ideas.

Between 1995 and 2006 I was one of the film reviewers on the Melbourne newspaper The Age and, from 1995 to 1997, I presented “The Week in Film” on ABC Radio National. These last two media jobs alone are the source of thousands of unpublished film review texts by me. Since the end of the 1990s, I have written a great deal for (sometimes ephemeral) Internet sites. Through all these years, I have diligently preserved and digitised my original manuscripts of almost everything I have done, often longer and more detailed than the published or broadcast versions.

These days, living in Europe, I am a freelance writer and speaker, and I have no regular, salaried ‘gig’. But I am still very much involved with film criticism and film culture. So this is what I seek your help and support for, via Patreon: not to initially build the website (that has already been done, thanks to my faithful, tireless Webmaster, the Australian filmmaker Bill Mousoulis) but to maintain it on a regular basis, and continually add to it, not only with old pieces, but new ones as well. For that, I need some time and energy that will not be a ‘waste’; I need the website itself to be a help in earning a (very) modest, freelance living. For this support via Patreon, I am offering exclusive Rewards that comprise booklets in PDF form, ranging from 10 to 100 pages each, featuring long essays by me that are either unpublished, or extremely hard to access in print, on topics ranging from cinephilia and film criticism to surrealism and film theory.

I am therefore asking you to support the ongoing future of the Film Critic: Adrian Martin website – and the ongoing future of this particular film critic, Adrian Martin, talking to you right now!