Robert Cettl

Robert Cettl is an experimental auto-ethnographic digital filmmaker / videographer. Non-narrative, his works are unconventional and not-for-profit research films. Cettl's work eschews traditional professionalism in favor of a mix of social media aesthetics (hand-held camera, natural light and sound, authentic locations, naturally occurring spoken language), avant-garde ethnography ala Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, and (de-)constructive montage blending impressionism and photo-realism. Working without scripts and on little to no budget, he produces, films and edits his own work. Robert began his filmmaking by documenting the underground performance poetry scene of his Adelaide, South Australia hometown. Inserting himself into the social scene documented in the film, Cettl subsequently was the central figure in a literary scandal in Adelaide in 2007 when he was denounced as "transgressive". Thereafter, he made several short films exploring the Adelaide underground club scene, finally anthologized into an ethnographic exploration of the South Australian counter-culture performance art / filmmaking nexus. Following his second book for US Academic Publisher McFarland & Co., Cettl was accepted as a SAR Fellow at Australia's National Film & Sound Archive in Canberra in 2010. Though his film of Adelaide's transgressive art underground remained restricted from public exhibition due to its aesthetic combination of iconographic material at the cutting edge of Australia's censorship laws, it was acquired by the National Film & Sound Archive on the grounds of historical, cultural and education interest. So too was Cettl's subsequent feature, an ethnographic biopic chronicling one of the underground performers, a transgender punk author. Always intrigued by censored aesthetics and their socially transgressive function, and himself once the subject of a literary scandal, Cettl gained access to the highly restricted Eros Collection at the Flinders University of South Australia. Over several years of research, he completed a comprehensive chronological history of film classification and censorship in Australia, which he published as an ebook. He subsequently donated his personal collection of erotica to the Eros Archive. Following simultaneous completion of a Masters Degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (MTESOL), Cettl relocated to China in 2013 where his filmmaking shifted to chronicle the concepts of "inter-cultural communication" and "global citizenship", beginning with an examination of international tertiary student identity expressed through musical performance. Much of his initial film work in China was correspondingly of a pedagogic nature, although he continued to make auto-ethnographic features. Despite a brief period of notoriety and controversy, Cettl's digital film work remains generally unseen except by researchers, or within ethnography circles. He remains better known, if at all, for his first published book for McFarland, a pioneering analytical filmography of serial killer cinema. His published film writing is collected by the US Library of Congress and the National Libraries of China and Australia.