Brodie Lancaster, editor, Filmme Fatales
When Brodie Lancaster launched Filmme Fatales in 2013, there was a universal sign of relief amongst female film fanatics - finally, a magazine that passes the Bechdel test. The title set out to explore how film and feminism intersect, cleverly combining the girlish teen spirit championed by Rookie Magazine with a theoretical outlook spearheaded by Laura Mulvey.
New Filmme Fatales number eight, poignantly themed 'The Future', is Brodie's farewell (for now) issue. We caught up with the Melbourne based editor and writer to find out which magazines inspire her and have been important to the development of her beloved film zine.
Here’s Brodie's choices: an old issue, a new issue, and one other thing...
An old issue: LIP, 2 and 3 (double issue), 1977
I received a stack of these magazines for my birthday recently, and have become obsessed with digging into the history of LIP, ‘a feminist collective whose fundamental concern is with the cultural conditions and lives of Australian women’, since then.
The four issues I got feel so contemporary – design-wise, they have lift-out elements and cut-out covers; content-wise they’re filled with articles about women's work in the arts and representation on stage and screen, and photo series of young 1970s women with their mothers – but they’re also concerned with the past and their place in the context of women’s history.
This issue in particular features an essay about the history of Australian Women Filmmakers from 1920 to 1977. I feel proud to think that Filmme Fatales is in some way a continuation of the work that LIP was doing decades before I was born.
A new issue: Little White Lies, issue 44: The Master
Little White Lies was a major inspiration for me when I first starting piecing together the disparate ideas that would eventually become Filmme Fatales, and this issue, which came out in 2012, totally blew apart what I thought a magazine could be.
Themed around Paul Thomas Anderson’s film ‘The Master’, a film loosely based around Scientology that deals with deception and clashing perceptions of reality, the issue came with a set of 3D glasses that allowed you to see two or three different things on many pages of the magazine. It was an incredible melding of form and content and I’m so mad that I couldn’t find my copy of the issue to photograph here!
And another thing: Another Man, issue 23, 2016
It’s no secret that I’m a massive fan of One Direction, so when Another Man featured sweet angel heartthrob Harry Styles on their cover, I called my troops (aka friends in the UK) to head to the front lines (aka their local newsagents) for me.
The section of this issue I love most is “The Harry Styles Archive”, a curation of mementos (like his favourite worn leather boots and the lipstick stain on a shearling coat), people he admires (Stevie Nicks and, sigh, Charles Bukowski) and music (including a mixtape he designed), plus an interview with Tomo Campbell, an artist whose work Harry collects.
The editorial team did such a lovely job of allowing Harry to be a thoughtful feature of the magazine, and not just a cover star. In an interview they moderated between him and Paul McCartney, there’s a moment when Harry asks if he can ask Paul a question, and what he wants to know is how Paul expressed his creativity solo, after the dissolution of The Beatles. It says so much about Harry, and I love that this magazine gave him that space. Cos I’m a big sap!!