Australian National Cinema

Tom O'Regan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134933488
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Tom O'Regan's book is the first of its kind on Australian post-war cinema. It takes as its starting point Bazin's question 'What is cinema?'and asks what the construct of a 'national' cinema means. It looks at the broader concept from a different angle, taking film beyond the confines of 'art' into the broader cultural world. O'Regan's analysis situates Australian cinema in its historical and cultural perspective producing a valuable insight into the issues that have been raised by film policy, the cinema market place and public discourse on film production strategies. Since 1970 Australian film has enjoyed a revival. This book contains detailed critiques of the key films of this period and uses them to illustrate the recent theories on the international and Australian cinema industries. Its conclusions on the nature of the nation's cinema and the discourses within it are relevant within a far wider context; film as a global phenomenon.

Chapter 1
Introducing Australian cinema

INTRODUCTION

Australian National Cinema reinterprets André Bazin's original question—‘What is cinema?’ in terms of Australian cinema. As the title of this book suggests Australian cinema is a type of cinema—a national cinema. It is one among a number of national cinemas: British, Japanese, Dutch, French and Indian. A national cinema is made of the films and film production industry of particular nations. National cinemas involve relations between, on the one hand, the national film texts and the national and international film industries and, on the other hand, their various social, political and cultural contexts. These supply a means of differentiating cinema product in domestic and international circulation: these are the Australian films, directors, actors and these are the French. National cinemas also partake of a broader ‘conversation’ with Hollywood and other national cinemas. They carve a space locally and internationally for themselves in the face of the dominant international cinema, Hollywood. National film-makers in- digenize genres, artistic movements and influences. So, for example, Strictly Ballroom (Luhrmann 1992), The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert (Elliott 1994) and Star Struck (Armstrong 1982) are not only Australian musicals but each can be seen to Australianize the form. Australian cinema is also a type of national cinema. Like the British and New Zealand cinemas, it is an English language cinema; like the Canadian and Dutch cinemas it is a medium-sized cinema.

Like all national cinemas Australian cinema is a collection of films and production strategies. It is a critical category to be explored. It is an industrial reality and a film production milieu for which governments develop policy. It is a marketing category to be exploited. It is an appreciation and consumption category for domestic and international audiences. Australian cinema is a container into which different film and cultural projects, energies, investments and institutions are assembled. It collects a range of elements—people and things, screen identities, knowledges, strategies, films—that are loosely related to each other; a raft of different institutions and relations, ranging from the complementary to the combative to the completely unrelated. It involves many different agents acting at a local, national and an international level who variously make, consume, produce, discuss, legislate and circulate Australian cinema. Heterogeneous ends, purposes, strategies and varieties of film-making are pursued under its rubric.

Australian cinema is a messy affair. It is a messiness not only in our ways of knowing, reading, consuming and producing films and the larger film-making milieu of which they are a part, but also a messiness among the films themselves with features as far apart as Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Bruce Beresford's Breaker Morant (1980), Dr George Miller's Mad Max films (1979, 1981, 1985 with George Ogilvie),¹ Jocelyn Moorhouse's Proof (1991), P.J. Hogan's Muriel's Wedding (1994) and Tracey Moffatt's beDevil (1993). Australian cinema is fundamentally dispersed. The issue facing those who coordinate Australian film is one of effectively handling this dispersal of films, strategies and ends for personal, financial, cultural, aesthetic, national and political benefit.

The study of Australian cinema asks: ‘What are the uses of Australian cinema for those who consume, speak, write about and produce its films?’; ‘What is Australian cinema in the situations it creates and finds itself located in?’ and ‘How do diverse actors make sense of Australian cinema?’ In this study, I will address the films, the audience (including the critical audience) for these films, the industry within which they are produced, the local and international markets where they circulate, and the strategic role of government in sustaining domestic production. Undertaking this task involves an interdisciplinarity that draws on film criticism, cultural studies, cultural policy studies and film economics. The discipline which has evolved to undertake this task is national cinema analysis.

National cinema studies examine films and their diverse conditions of production. Such studies routinely survey the connections between text and local and international production, reception and distribution, and between these and the local and international, among society, cultures and peoples. Susan Hayward's French National Cinema (1993) and Thomas Elsaesser's New German Cinema (1989) are unthinkable without their respective industrial, critical, cultural, social and political milieus. Some studies emphasize the films and/or the discourses of the national cinema; others the hard facts of production, distribution, exhibition and circulation; some the social dimensions of the national cinema. But all national cinema analyses situate the cinema simultaneously as a natural object in the film world (its production and industrial context), as a social object connecting and relating people to each other (its social and political context) and discursively through language, genre and knowledges (its representations).

The issue facing those who study Australian national cinema is akin to that routinely facing film producers and policy makers—one of how to handle and organize this dispersal of films, strategies, viewpoints and ends. The critic's problem is one of writing the national cinema as a hybrid form, the film worker's problem is one of coordinating it as a multifaceted entity. ‘National cinemas’ present themselves to audiences, film workers and critics alike as so many contingent links among disparate elements, disparate tellings, varied film-making projects. National cinemas are, in this sense, not so much coherent as dispersed.

At one time, this sort of dispersal was considered a problem disqualifying the study of national cinemas from screen theory. Christian Metz contends in his seminal book Language and Cinema (1974:9) that because the cinema was such a ‘multi-dimensional phenomenon’ it did not lend ‘itself to any rigorous and unified study, but only to a heteroclite collection of observations involving multiple and diverse points of view’. For him ‘“cinema”…is not a knowable object’. Under this view—and it is one which has persisted in various ways into the present—the study of a national cinema could be amenable only to observations and not to systematic knowledge.

Although I disagree with Metz, he does have a point. The national cinema writer must take on ‘multiple and diverse points of view’. This imposes practical limits on any analysis. If I examine the intersections of text, industry, policy, economics and public reputation, the films necessarily get the more limited attention of synoptic review and not detailed textual exegesis. The reader is confronted with something more, and something less, than journalism, film reviewing, policy analysis, economic analysis and film studies. National cinema analyses poach from these apparently more fully achieved domains, and are dependent on their innovations. They mix and match the concepts and the innovations drawn from each field (thereby running the risk of failing to apprehend each sufficiently).

Metz rightly observes that the insights developed from film criticism's extended discussion of film meaning are not as available to the writer who examines ‘the cinema’ as a whole. Without the lengthy discursive trajectories and purification of language made possible by concentrating on a particular aspect of the cinema, the national cinema writer cannot match policy studies, economic analysis, and textual analysis on its own terms. National cinemas cannot bracket off all those other components that shape the circulation of films, in order to concentrate on one or two. They need to combine, to give due weight to a heteroclite range of elements in one and the same place and at the same time. National cinema writing is that critical practice which thoroughly establishes and routinely works through the heteroclite nature of cinema.

A national cinema focus forces an analysis of the connections between these elements and insists, however unevenly, on their collocation. The hybrid analytical strategies demanded in examining national cinemas are also its strength. Significantly, national cinema writing is neither the analysis of a film text nor policy discourse; neither film industry journalism and economic analysis nor film reviewing, but a mixture of each. Because a national cinema study needs to deal with texts, technology, language, power and society, it has a chance of holding onto the multiple connections that make the cinema ‘possible’ and drive it forward. The national cinema writer addresses the multiple personae of the film-maker: as the one who creates with materials and technologies, who acts politically, who manipulates funding bodies, who lobbies, who needs to know the market, financing and the local and international works of the cinema. Like the national cinema itself, national cinema writing needs to combine the local and the international. The local conditions, the relative speeds of development of domestic infrastructures, the specific and local histories of cinema regulation, politics and governmental subsidies, the discursive fields in which the national cinema is inscribed—these conditions give an inflection to the public's understanding of that cinema.

National cinema analyses are predisposed in some fashion to local history and sociology, to emphasizing the local as well as (and sometimes at the expense of) the international. National cinema writers have no choice: they must deploy hybrid forms of analysis. The special local, critical, cultural, historical and industrial milieu of each cinema needs to be ‘translated’ into a form available for various kinds of local and international circulation. By showing how these elements are combined, it becomes an arena which can travel along diverse and often public corridors. It can have importance to general readers, to those who programme film retrospectives and film festivals, to film and cultural critics, to policy makers, educators, industry economists, film-makers, politicians, and lawyers in the entertainment industries. It can become essential reading for students of film whether they are film-makers, those involved in the film industry outside the film crew, or screen studies students.

The study of national cinemas is the proof that it is possible to do things with our recognition of the cinema as a multi-dimensional phenomenon. Multiple and diverse points of view can be the subject of our systematizing attention. Whereas Metz used his basic insight to legitimate his turn to the apparently more manageable and pure problems of film language, we use ours to lead cinema criticism back to the impure, admittedly eclectic, but none the less systematizing spaces of the cinema as a social practice. Those of us who do take part in it even think that such messy (John Hartley (1992:23) calls them ‘dirty’) spaces are more interesting.

The problem every national cinema analysis faces is one of how to do justice to Australian cinema as a hybrid assemblage of diverse elements, statuses and films. One solution-and this is one adopted in this study—is to demonstrate a film milieu made up of antagonistic, complementary and simply adjacent elements, which are to be made sense of in their own terms. This means keeping the question of ‘what is Australian cinema’ as firmly and permanently open as it is on the Australian (and international) public record. My task here is not one of deciding which way of seeing Australian cinema is the right one but of showing how each element explains and discloses something about it. When I examine strategies of Australian film production and circulation I do not see my task as one of choosing among them, but rather of elucidating them. The task of national cinema studies, therefore, is not only to make sense of the films produced under its aegis, but also to make sense of those dispersed elements, strategies and purposes that produce, frame and circulate these films.

THE ORGANIZATION OF THIS BOOK

In Chapter 2—‘Theorizing Australian cinema’—I argue that Australian cinema should be considered as naturalized by a combination of statuses. It is a ‘natural’ part of the screen world, it is a social bond circulating among people and defining that bond in their circulation, it is an object of knowledge and it is a problem of knowledge. Australian cinema is an assemblage which is simultaneously real, discursive and collective. I draw attention to the diverse knowledges about Australian cinema and how power is exercised through the application of knowledge.

The book then subdivides into three parts. In the first two parts, ‘Making a national cinema’ and ‘Making a distinct cinema’, I establish the nature of Australian cinema. In ‘Making a national cinema’, I consider Australian cinema as a particular kind of national cinema, sharing characteristics with other national cinemas. Here I foreground how certain knowledges, particular discursive figures, cinematic influences, formations of value and routine sense-making procedures normalize Australian national cinema on the horizons of diverse agents. In ‘Making a distinct cinema’, I consider the character of its diversity, its regularities, its cultural transfers (how it imports and indigenizes genres and film-making norms), and how they contribute to producing a distinct cinema. My emphasis in these first two parts is on those processes of naturalizing which make Australian cinema self-evident. These parts provide a map of the general field of Australian cinema within which the concerns of my third part—about how Australian cinema becomes a problem of knowledge—is established and maintained. In that part I ask: How does Australian cinema function as a vehicle for social problem solving? And how are knowledge, objects and people brought together in Australian cinema?

Making a national cinema

In Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 I consider Australian cinema as a national cinema. These chapters compare Australian cinema to other national cinemas and show how the concept of national cinema is made operational in the Australian context. In Chapter 3, ‘A national cinema’, I survey more generally those characteristics which Australian cinema shares with other national cinemas. I discuss it as a response to Hollywood dominance, as a local and international form, as in part a festival cinema, which has a relation with the nation and the state, and which is messy in its local, national and international involvements. National cinemas are identified as a relational term—a set of processes rather than an essence.

In Chapter 4, ‘A medium-sized English-language cinema’, I consider Australian cinema as a type of national cinema. Its cinema market, closely resembles that of Canada, the UK and the USA in its English language mainstream, and its ‘foreign language’ (art house) and ethnic cinemas in the minor stream. Like the Dutch and Swedish cinemas, it is a medium-sized cinema. Like the English-Canadian cinema, it is a medium-sized English-language cinema. And, like all small to medium-sized national cinemas, it is an antipodal cinema marked by unequal cultural exchange due to the pre-eminent role played by imports.

In Chapter 5, I consider the formations of value of Australian cinema generally. A diverse range of agents—critics, audiences and policy-makers—evaluate Australian national cinema as a whole through a limited number of conceptual means. These include:

1. a relation with a dominant Hollywood cinema in which the national cinema is situated under the sign of culture and Hollywood under the sign of the profane economy;
2. a division of value among national cinemas where some are seen to be prestigious, some ‘Other’ cinemas, and some simply mundane;
3. a division within the national cinema between its mainstream and its peripheral or independent cinemas; and
4. a positive evaluation of Hollywood and its legacy in local markets, which simultaneously values and devalues the local national cinema.

These four figures interact to produce unstable hierarchies of value. So while some find that Australian cinema lacks sufficient artfulness as a prestige cinema (it is seen to lack innovation at a formal and stylistic level), sufficient cultural difference to be an ‘Other’ cinema, and sufficient difference from Hollywood as a mundane cinema, others value Australian cinema as a cinema that is sometimes able to speak to the people of Australia and the world, successfully negotiating Hollywood genres, eschewing artiness and committed to entertainment values. Agents also discriminate within the local cinema between the mainstream and the minor stream, alternately favouring one over the other. The Australian national cinema is shown to be traversed by various wills to value.

In Chapter 6, ‘Making meaning’, I attend to how meaning and value is made from individual Australian titles. I show how particular kinds of Australian cinema and discursive figures are twinned, so as to create a changing public meaning and value for Australian cinema. film-makers, critics, audiences and policy makers routinely make meaning from and assign value to Australian cinema by interpreting it in a number of ways. They relate a film to society and public discourse (its social texts). They compare it to other Australian films, television productions, novels, theatre and poems (its local aesthetic intertexts). They think about its continuities and discontinuities with, on the one hand, British, European and Asian cinemas, and, on the other hand, Hollywood cinema and its production models (its international cinema intertexts). They find it either entertaining or informing; diverting or educational. They berate it for surrendering to commercial values. They castigate it for capitulating to middle-class ‘good intentions’. Through such diverse interpretative acts, films-like the larger audiovisual culture they are a part of-have diverse public careers.

Making a distinct cinema

In Chapters 7, 8, 9 and 10, I discuss the characteristics of Australian cinema which contribute to its production as a distinct cinema. I find Australian cinema's specificity to lie, not in any particular set of attributes, so much as in its relational character. This specificity emerges, on the one hand, from its diversifying, unifying, importing and indigenizing, blending and Othering dynamics, and, on the other hand, from its negotiation of its political and cultural weakness and the related importance to it of projecting Australian ugliness and ordinariness.

In Chapter 7, ‘Diversity’, I discuss the intrinsic diversity of Australian cinema. filmmakers typically contribute to this or that pathway of the cinema with varying degrees of intensity over time, with some contributions—to the documentary and the western—being continuous over film history and other contributions—to the science-fiction film and the thriller-being relatively recent. They draw on a range of cultur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• National Cinemas series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introducing Australian cinema
• Chapter 2: Theorizing Australian cinema
• Part I: Making a national cinema
• Part II: Making a distinct cinema
• Part III: Problematizing Australian cinema
• Notes
• List of films cited
• Bibliography