Diasporas of Australian Cinema

Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska, Anthony Lambert, Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska, Anthony Lambert

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781841501970
• eBook ISBN: 9781841503363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This volume is the first to focus exclusively on diasporic filmmaking and the rich cultural diversity within Australian cinema, and it contains previously unpublished articles by some of the foremost experts on Australian cinema in the world. Contributors to Diasporas of Australian Cinema discuss a variety of contemporary and historical filmmaking, encompassing documentaries, features and short films. A number of key feature films are discussed including Forty Thousand Horsemen, Silver City, Wog Boy, Head On, Russian Doll, Japanese Story, and Lucky Miles.  Opening with a comprehensive chapter that introduces the organizing concept of this volume, diasporic hybridity, the essays go on to explore migration, Asian-Australian subjectivity, cross-cultural romance, Islamic-Australian identity and "wogsploitation" comedy. A useful reference source for scholars of film, migration, cultural, and Australian studies, Diasporas of Australian Cinema also features a comprehensive filmography listing Australian features, documentaries and shorts with significant diasporic content.

PART ONE: THEORIES

1

INTRODUCTION: RETHINKING DIASPORA – AUSTRALIAN CINEMA, HISTORY AND SOCIETY

Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska and Anthony Lambert

The inspiration for Diasporas of Australian Cinema emanates from the diverse range of films dealing with diasporic experience produced in Australia over the past century. The vital relationship between migration and the moving image is often melancholically invoked, as in films such as Michael Bates’ acclaimed short film The Projectionist (2002), in which a projectionist traipses through Sydney’s darkened laneways as haunting memories flash across the surface of city buildings. Sergei Rachmaninoff’s symphonic poem Isle of the Dead accompanies this ‘gallery of ghostly visions’ that includes images of migrant workers, a ‘woman in pain’, a ‘man in despair’ and refugees who have been forcibly displaced (Much Ado Films 2002). Using the live-action animation technique of ‘Pixilation’, these poetic images render urban Sydney an uncanny space, while at the same time hinting at both the animated origins of cinema and the imminent death of the cinema projectionist – a last vestige of modernity. The Projectionist exemplifies the ways film can evoke memories of things past, but shows how it can also be a way to make sense of the present and to imagine the future. In this case, the migrant projectionist’s origins are never named. He is the modern Everyman who embodies the traumas of the twentieth century, and the subsequent cultural formations that have developed within a specifically Australian context. While these images haunt the projectionist, they are also liberating as they are cast out and shared with others, a diasporic visibility that becomes part of our collective memory.

This collection necessarily springs from Australia’s specificity as an immigrant society, simultaneously celebrated and suppressed in the Australian social and cinematic imaginary. A comprehensive list of films that reflect the ethnic diversity of directors’ backgrounds, as well as filmic representations, now spans hundreds of titles, some of which we capture in Garry Gillard and Anthony Lambert’s annotated ‘Diasporic Filmography’ at the back of this volume. The commercial success of films such as They’re A Weird Mob (Michael Powell 1966), Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrman 1992), or The Wog Boy (Aleksi Vellis 2000) attest to the popular appeal of films representing non-mainstream Australian cultures. Also, the critical appeal of films such as Clara Law’s Floating Life (1995) or Ana Kokkinos’s Head On (1997) is evidenced by an ever-expanding body of intellectual work devoted to them (e.g. Siemienowicz 1999; Yue 2000; Mitchell 2003; Berry 1999; Bennett 2007). The less-celebrated genres of documentary, short and experimental film-making have nonetheless been the most prolific in dealing with diasporic identities, and this book attempts to attend to their relative absence from critical attention with half the chapters addressing these formats.

Few entire collections deal with diaspora in cinema, and fewer still engage with specific diasporic national cinemas. In his influential Accented Cinema, Hamid Naficy (2001) considers how displacement affects film-makers, predominantly from the developing world, who move (by necessity or voluntarily) to developed countries. Naficy makes a distinction between three types of accented films/film-makers: exilic, diasporic and postcolonial ethnic. He argues that exilic film-makers tend to define homeland in political terms in their early films, while diasporic film-makers have a sense of collective identity. On the other hand, postcolonial ethnic film-makers are those born to non-white, non-western parents since the 1960s and emphasize ethnic identity within their host country. Naficy argues that the artisanal production mode and stylistic tendencies of ‘accented film-makers’ include such things as the ‘accented’ use of speech; asynchronous sound and multilinguality; the textual presence of the lost homeland; an emphasis on journeying, border subjectivities and hybrid identities; a split relationship with the body; epistolarity as potential conflict/disruption in the narrative; and the self-inscription of the film-maker within the film’s text.

Likewise, Laura Marks in Under the Skin of the Film (2001) focuses on the techniques used in ‘intercultural cinema’; this has emerged ‘from the new cultural formations of Western metropolitan centres which in turn have resulted from global flows of immigration, exile and diaspora’ (Marks 2001: 1). Intercultural films embrace the proximal as a means of embodying knowledge and memories through ‘haptic visuality’, which focuses on things such as the texture, tactility and sensuality of objects, ‘as if touching a film with one’s eyes’ (Marks 2001: 162). This moves the viewer closer to the body/human sensorium and is a way of representing memories or longing which many intercultural film-makers negotiate in their displacement.

Naficy’s and Marks’ theories of ‘accented’ and ‘intercultural’ cinema complement one another by arguing that diasporic films and film-makers conform to/seek out a set of formal and stylistic tendencies. Subsequent collections such as Rueschmann’s (2003) Moving Pictures, Migrating Identities further suggest radically different trajectories of diasporic experience in the cinema. This in itself marks the limited capacity of such work to locate the diasporic within the Australian cinematic and cultural context, beyond the identification of conditions that produce embodied responses to exilic displacement. A ‘danger’ of diaspora as an organizing principle of visual culture is, according to Mirzoeff (1999b: 8), the promotion of ‘a new universalism in contrast to the formal structures of national culture’. The interstitial conditions that produce a third cinema and film-makers from the developing world are not interchangeable with those in Australia.

The Australian diasporic context is not, however, uncharted critical terrain, and much recent work addresses at least some aspects of diasporic identity and multiculturalism in Australian film-making (e.g. Conomos 1992; O’Regan 1996; Turner 1997; Rattigan 1998; Ang et al. 2000; Ang 2001a; Gilbert, Khoo and Lo 2000; Cunningham and Sinclair 2000; Bertone, Keating and Mullaly 2000; Hynes 2000; Madan 2000; Lee and Tapp 2004; Rutland 2005; Carniel 2006; Smaill 2006; Bennett 2007; Rando 2007). However, none of the notable books on Australian cinema allows for any substantial focus on the significant role diasporic qualities have played in Australian cinema’s history and industry. Diasporas of Australian Cinema is the first volume to do so. This collection of essays is not intended to be an exhaustive treatment of the subject but to open up the critical terrain and present fresh insights into some of the diasporic aspects of Australian cinema, offering foundations for future discussions on the topic.

Cinema and the diasporic society

Defining Australian cinema has proven a challenging task for theorists, critics and government financiers. With those films that sit at national borders – in terms of origins of creative talent, cast and crew, themes, locations and financing – definitions of the national are fluid with respect to the constant movement of capital and personnel. Deciding where Australian cinema ends and international cinema starts is not the concern of this book. By their diasporic nature, many of the films examined in this volume sit at the borders of Australian and other national cinemas. For this reason, we have adopted a similar approach to Tom O’Regan (1996), where we regard ‘Australian cinema’ as a loose category that is not overly prescriptive in definition. In his landmark text, Australian National Cinema, O’Regan breaks open the national cinema category, positioning Australian cinema as inclusive and inherently diverse.

As a postcolonial immigrant society, contemporary Australia has come a long way from its British penal colony origins. The federation of five states and two territories into a nation in 1901 coincided with the fostering of a British-derived identity and ethnicity through the Immigration Restriction Act 1901. This Act, widely known as the ‘White Australia’ policy, sought to limit the immigration of ‘non-Europeans’ and ‘coloured races’ to Australia (Stratton and Ang 1994). Such thinking impacted on the representation and treatment of Asian characters in the early cinema, a racism evidenced in well-known films such as A Girl of the Bush (Raymond Longford 1921) and Phil K. Walsh’s now infamous The Birth of White Australia (1928), which ends with Anglo-Celtic lovers framed by the plait of a Chinese man, presumably scalped on the goldfields.

The policy was progressively dismantled after World War II, with increased migration (predominantly from war-torn Europe) encouraged, although it persisted until the early 1970s. In order to cope with the diversifying population, a policy of cultural assimilation governed official rhetoric during the post-war period, arguing that ‘new Australians’ would be absorbed socially and culturally into the mainstream Anglo-Australian community.

At the 1968 Citizen Convention, Polish immigrant Professor Jerzy Zubrzycki first advocated multiculturalism, a proposal later consolidated in his Department of Immigration submission Australia as a Multicultural Society (AEAC 1977). Multiculturalism emerged from the perceived failure of assimilation and was a pragmatic response to a society that could no longer sustain national identity dependent on the myth of British origin (Stratton and Ang 1994). The cultural diversity of contemporary Australia belies its own origins in the United Kingdom’s historical inability to meet Australia’s growing workforce demand, especially in the second half of the twentieth century (Jupp 2001: 62–6). This led to the first official national policy of multiculturalism in 1978 and government endorsement in 1989 of the report National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia, which contained principles of ‘cultural identity’, ‘social justice’ and ‘economic efficiency’ with the aim being to ‘promote an environment that is tolerant and accepting of cultural and social diversity’ (ACMA 1989). However, Australian multiculturalism differs from that of countries such as the United States in its concern with the synthesizing of unruly and unpredictable cultural identities and differences into a harmonious unity-in-diversity, which serves to protect the nation-state of many cultures (Stratton and Ang 1994). Commentators have since begun to replace multicultural ideals with those of a transient, diasporic collective affiliated with the Australian state (Hugo 2006). With this conceptual revision of state and identity came more prolific filmic representations of the non-core (non-British originated) Australians. The boundaries of Australian national cinema have evolved to reflect and encompass these changes and, as this collection demonstrates, the maturing diasporic hybridity of its constituents.

Extending O’Regan’s (1996) understanding of Australian cinema as messy and diverse, an even more significant dialogical contribution to this book’s theoretical framework is his conceptualization of four pathways for Australian nationhood and its filmic translations: as a European-derived society; a settler society; a New World society; and a diasporic society (O’Regan 1996: 305). The first two pathways imply a Eurocentrism reflective of the persistence of the ‘White Australia’ policy well into the 1970s, while the third – despite its attempts to de-emphasize ethnicity through its ‘melting pot’ definition of Australian society – no longer reflects the cultural dominance of an ethnically unnamed Australian core. The diasporic pathway to Australian nationhood, O’Regan notes, is also wrought with problems. On the one hand, almost consistently throughout Australian history since white settlement, around one-quarter of the Australian population have been born overseas (with the exception of the 1940s), with another quarter having at least one parent born overseas. On the other hand, the most significant number of new or second-generation Australians come from the United Kingdom, suggesting a continuing Anglo-Celtic bias in line with the cohesive rather than diversified concept of nationhood implied by the term ‘diasporic’. Additionally, O’Regan argues that claiming the predominance of a diasporic cinema as a conceptual framework for Australian cinema could lead to the neglect of ‘Australia’s indigenous people or the absurdity of calling a “diaspora” people of several ancestries who [do not identify diasporically and] are now in their tenth generation in the country’ (O’Regan 1996: 305), a claim further problematized by various intra-Australia migrations, or micro-diasporas, of its Aboriginal peoples (Harrison 2003). Labelling Australia and its cinema as primarily ‘diasporic’ misrepresents both in the same way as the approach that focuses predominantly on an ethnically unnamed ‘settler’ or New World ‘Australian’ culture. The subsection of Australian cinema that can loosely be categorized within a diasporic framework is the focus of this book.

From diasporas to diasporic hybridity

In the first instance, this volume relies on three particular characteristics of the term diaspora: the scattering of a people (forced or unforced, asylum-seekers or economic migrants) across different new homelands; the maintenance of real or imaginary relations with homeland; and the shared self-awareness of belonging to a dispersed people as its members remain collectively away from their original homeland for beyond one generation (Butler 2001: 192). Homeland can be a micro-location, such as a particular town or settlement, and a macro-location, such as a nation (Butler 2001: 192–6). We complement these understandings with Zygmunt Bauman’s claim that the greatest identity challenge of this new century is not how to subscribe to a particular identity, but which one(s) to choose (Bauman 2001: 147).

In Australia towards the end of the twentieth century, emphasizing diasporic origins started to serve an authenticating objective, partly as a backlash against the discriminations suffered by children of immigrants in previous decades, and partly because of the opening up of Australia to non-assimilationist ideas of national integration embedded in multiculturalism. Consequently, multilayered identities have the potential to do away with the fixity of a singular ethnicity or homeland (Kalra 2005: 16) and the exclusion of other forms of identity (cf. Ang 2003: 145). More interestingly, the category ‘diasporic people’ superimposes a network of transnationalities on to a territorially bound nation-state. These networks do not negate a nation-state as much as adding a dimension of diversity to it that simultaneously enriches and unsettles its more habitual assimilationist sense of identity (Cohen 1997: x). Thus, as Brubaker (2005: 12) observes, ‘diaspora can be seen as an alternative to the essentialization of belonging, but it can also represent a non-territorial form of essentialized belonging’ as ‘a category of practice’. This explains the contrasting impulses evident in celebrating and suppressing the awareness of diasporic contributions to Australian cinema mentioned earlier.

Within an understanding of identity as multi-layered, Australianness is complemented and complicated by one or more diasporic points of reference, which are in conversation with one another. This use of diaspora is exemplified by Stuart Hall’s (1990: 31) seminal essay ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in which he famously argues that diasporic identity is ‘defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity’. Hall adds that ‘diaspora identities are those that are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew through transformation and difference’ (1990: 31).

Previously, the types of identities encompassed in this volume may have been described as ‘multicultural’, ‘minority’ ‘(im)migrant’, ‘ethnic’, ‘transnational’ or simply ‘hybrid’. As Ien Ang (2001) writes, ‘the terms “migrants” and “ethnics” as such are strangely distancing, as if these people were, en bloc, a category apart, not really a part of Australian culture and society’ (2001: 14). David Callahan (2001) also emphasizes patterns of victimization and alienation inherent in representations of ‘ethnics’ in Australian film (2001: 95–107). The term ‘ethnicity’, especially within the context of multiculturalism, maintains an ontological assumption of ethnic purity (Gilroy 1994: 54–5), through its popular use as a differentiator from the ethnically unnamed Australian core. ‘Minority’ often implies relegation to the margins of socio-cultural power, ‘transnationalism’ denies the possibility of loyalty to the residential homeland, neglecting the positioning of ‘transnationals’ within a culture or a nation-state (Rueschmann 2003: ix–xi) and ‘multiculturalism’ unwillingly homogenizes the diversity that is this term’s main constituent.

The discursive limits of diaspora are likewise notable concerns within critical explorations of cultural identities. Ien Ang (2003) argues that the discourse of diaspora is fundamentally proto-nationalist and essentialist, and as such ‘feeds into a transnationalist nationalism based on the presumption of internal ethnic sameness and exter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: Diasporas of Australian Cinema – A Provocation
• Part One: Theories
• Part Two: Representations
• Part Three: Film-Makers
• Diasporic Filmography
• References
• Notes on Contributors
• Index