In the opening pages of his seminal book, Australian National Cinema, Tom O’Regan poses a series of pertinent questions to help foreground and reframe the study of Australian cinema: “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?” “How do diverse actors make sense of Australian cinema?” 1 In this book, American-Australian Cinema: Transnational Connections, we test and expand O’Regan’s overarching national cinema thesis by focusing on the notion of Australian cinema as an international industry profoundly influenced by and dependent on the United States. Some 20 years after the publication of O’Regan’s book, in an increasingly convergent, globalized Hollywood, these questions remain of enduring importance for scholars of Australian cinema as a national film culture, cultural industry and key player in world cinema.
Such an approach is, of course, not unprecedented. For example, in 1968, writing upon the American influence on Australian cinema management, Ruth Megaw argued that the history of the local “national” industry was dominated and defined by US production, distribution and exhibition. 2 This dependence is an outcome of Australia’s stunted “boom and bust” production history and shared language with Hollywood as well as the failure of an often closely aligned British cinema to achieve the levels of success and productivity of the USA in terms of film production and exhibition practices. The Australian cinema-going public mostly watches films from the US and about the US. Over the passage of the last 100 years, little has changed. The US has continued to be a key reference point and sphere of influence for many Australian institutions, cultural industries and works of popular entertainment. Even some of the country’s most distinctively “Australian” identities and products are American in origin. While both Nicole Kidman and Mel Gibson were born in the US, two New York brothers, William M. and Ralph R. Foster, also founded Foster’s Lager, the iconic Australian beer brewing company, in the 1880s. One of Australia’s most famous institutions and brands of the nineteenth century, the transportation stagecoach company, Cobb & Co., was also of US origin—initially trading under the name of the American Telegraph Line of Coaches. Nevertheless, close examination of the cultures’ ongoing connections, particularly in regards to film production and culture, remains limited.
Australian cinema has been little different in terms of the profound impact of these ongoing American cultural influences. Though Australia produced cinema’s first feature film—Charles Tait’s The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906—the industry that developed in its wake has continued to operate in the shadow of Hollywood-controlled production, distribution and exhibition. Since at least the 1920s, Australian cinema has been marked by an ongoing series of imperial, offshore, international and transnational productions that have sometimes dominated its international reputation, ranging from For the Term of His Natural Life (Norman Dawn, 1927), The Overlanders (Harry Watt, 1946) and On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959) to Babe (Chris Noonan, 1995), The Matrix (The Wachowski Brothers, 1999) and Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015). Nevertheless, as Deb Verhoeven argues, what Australian consumers want and seek out most often “has almost no relationship to the national agenda or the general quest for a national cultural identity in the cinema.” 3 Regardless of these mercurial tastes and cultural and economic imperatives, there has been insufficient research conducted on the diversity of Australian audiences and filmmakers or that examines the US’s culturally rewarding and significant influence upon the sustainability of the Australian film industry.
As this book explores, the Australian cinema, largely through the practices of production, distribution, exhibition and reception, has continued to be indebted and attached to US cinema as well as to a more broadly defined Hollywood style of filmmaking. Although Britain also cast a significant influence on the Australian film industry from the 1920s through the 1960s, the increased dominance of US modes of production, exhibition and distribution, as well as the tastes of local audiences, reflect a shift in core “Australian” values, economic imperatives and spheres of influence towards the US across the mid-twentieth century. This is a development melancholically critiqued, through the dramatization of the fate of rival Australian newsreel companies (based on the two major Australian outfits, Cinesound and Movietone News) in the 1940s and 1950s, in one of the most celebrated and emblematic works of the 1970s feature film “revival,” Phillip Noyce’s Newsfront (1978). The vision summoned by Noyce’s ultimately deflating narrative is of a marginalized Australian film industry struggling to maintain a local perspective while being squeezed out by the imperial dominance of British and American production, distribution and exhibition interests (with the US largely winning out). Newsfront highlights the perennial dilemma of trying to get Australian content onto screens dominated by increasingly globalized modes of film consumption.
Many films made in Australia also reflect the inspiration of other significant cinemas and filmmaking movements such as the nouvelle vague, Griersonian documentary, contemporary Asian cinemas, European art cinema and international variations on the western. However, Hollywood has long provided the key source of stylistic and narrative influence on Australian filmmaking as well as a significant point of reference and aspiration for various actors, directors and other production personnel including figures such as J. P. McGowan, Errol Flynn, John Farrow, Shirley Ann Richards, Hugh Jackman, Orry-Kelly, Mel Gibson, Dion Beebe, Gillian Armstrong, Bruce Beresford, James Wan, Toni Collette and Cate Blanchett. Because Australian films rarely achieve more than negligible penetration of the US market, Australian cinema commonly celebrates figures working successfully in America, such as in Gillian Armstrong’s documentary championing Australian costume designer Orry-Kelly, Women He’s Undressed (2015), or embraces the influence of American genre movies through documentaries such as Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (Mark Hartley, 2008) and Into the Shadows (Andrew Scarano, 2009). As outlined above, over the last 100 years US cinema has also come to define the core expectations of most Australian audiences. This is still true despite the increased presence of a variety of other large-scale film industries in Australia such as Bollywood and its use of the country as a location for both post-production and to stage narratives about the burgeoning global Indian diaspora.
But relying on a deferential, even dependent relationship is not the most useful strategy for understanding the enduring industrial and cultural relationship between Australian and American cinemas. The preference for the more commonly used term “Hollywood cinema” over “American” or “US cinema” reflects a notion of US-produced cinema as a largely symbolic center; though much business is still conducted in Los Angeles, the funding, talent and inspirations for these films come from around the world, and many of the most successful Hollywood movies in recent years have been filmed or digitally produced outside of Hollywood and even the USA itself. Particularly significant Australia-filmed productions in this mode include The Matrix (The Wachowski Brothers, 1999 and 2003) series, the three Star Wars (George Lucas, 1999, 2002, 2005) prequels, Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001), Peter Pan (P. J. Hogan, 2003), Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze, 2009) and The Great Gatsby (Luhrmann, 2013). Over the last 30 years, the majority of these productions have utilized the state-of-the-art studios built in Sydney, Melbourne and on the Gold Coast: Fox Studios, Docklands Studios and Village Roadshow Studios, respectively. In response, we should now aim to pursue an examination of “national cinema” that simultaneously acknowledges this creative and economic interdependence as well as the tenuousness of a stubborn insistence on the firm boundaries and borders of national cinema. Following the lead of scholars such as Ben Goldsmith, it is more effective to think of Australian cinema through the parameters of a vibrant and ever-shifting international cinema rather than a stunted “boom and bust” national cinema. 4
Whereas many previous studies, such as those by Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper, Graham Shirley and Brian Adams, Jonathan Rayner, David Stratton and Brian McFarlane, have attempted to distinguish the specificity of Australian cinema, 5 particularly in light of understandings and conceptualizations of national identity and iconicity, the purpose of this edited collection is to celebrate and critically discuss the synergies, complexities and points of similarity and difference between the cinemas of Australia and the US. In doing so, it does not take the common “quantifiable” approach of dividing the films up into particular periods. Instead, this book takes a case study approach to examine a series of connections between Australian and US cinema, moving well beyond the common focus on large-scale international productions such as Kangaroo (Lewis Milestone, 1952), The Sundowners (Fred Zinnemann, 1960), Mission: Impossible II (John Woo, 2000) and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg, 2017) that have used Australia as an exotic or economically convenient and lucrative location. It provides a focus on two specific moments in time—the 1920s and 1930s and the last 20 years—that are particularly important to the cross-fertilization, shared influence, globalization, technological enhancement and economic redevelopment of Australian and US cinemas. This book pointedly and deliberately prioritizes the Australian experience and largely focuses on the impact of Hollywood cinema on Australian-based film production, screen culture and personnel across the last 100 years. It looks beyond the typical narrative of the Australian cinema’s failures and hard-won triumphs to explore the positive and significant relationship that Australia has continued to share with US cinema. Furthermore, it considers the strategies around film exhibition, distribution and even reception to be equally important when appreciating the association between the two cinemas as well as how and why commercial American cinema has remained a staple diet for Australian film consumers.
This book becomes a working example of what Verhoeven defines as “Industry 3.” Whereas the influential two-industry model outlined by Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka in the late 1980s was concerned with finding national identity through local cinema, 6 Verhoeven’s “Industry 3” is more concerned with the international rather than the national. Through this framework, everyone becomes a transnational citizen, “where actors and crew might find success both locally and internationally.” 7 While Verhoeven is predominately interested in the changes that have occurred since the 1990s, accelerated by digital production and exhibition technologies, there is, as Verhoeven would undoubtedly agree, a strong and profound link to earlier cycles and types of production and exhibition across the history of an “outward”-looking Australian cinema.
Many of the chapters in this book look beyond the limitations and problems of defining or reading particular “things” as either for or against the concept of the “national.” As Goldsmith argued in 2006, such chauvinistic and even jingoistic responses to particular movies and modes of production severely restrict what Australian film does do and also aspires to achieve:
“National cinema” is no longer a useful or adequate term because it can limit, prescribe and proscribe the kinds of films that are Australian “in the sense that matters;” that is, the idea of “national cinema” imposes from outside a set of expectations and critical standards on films and filmmakers that may be anachronistic, politically driven, and insensitive to the actual contemporary cultural diversity of Australia. 8
The key point Goldsmith makes is that Australian cinema needs to be discussed in terms of its international connections and points of comparison, rather than drawn and defined by exclusive boundaries that take possession of it as an essentialist set of cultural references, production processes and modes of representation. Goldsmith’s critique of the concept of national cinema builds upon the work of O’Regan in attempting to expand and comp...