A Companion to Australian Cinema

Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, Susan Bye, Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, Susan Bye

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781118942529
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118942550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

The first comprehensive volume of original essays on Australian screen culture in the twenty-first century.

A Companion to Australian Cinema is an anthology of original essays by new and established authors on the contemporary state and future directions of a well-established national cinema. A timely intervention that challenges and expands the idea of cinema, this book brings into sharp focus those facets of Australian cinema that have endured, evolved and emerged in the twenty-first century.

The essays address six thematically-organized propositions – that Australian cinema is an Indigenous screen culture, an international cinema, a minor transnational imaginary, an enduring auteur-genre-landscape tradition, a televisual industry and a multiplatform ecology. Offering fresh critical perspectives and extending previous scholarship, case studies range from The Lego Movie, Mad Max, and Australian stars in Hollywood, to transnational co-productions, YouTube channels, transmedia and nature-cam documentaries. New research on trends – such as the convergence of television and film, digital transformations of screen production and the shifting roles of women on and off-screen – highlight how established precedents have been influenced by new realities beyond both cinema and the national.

• Written in an accessible style that does not require knowledge of cinema studies or Australian studies
• Presents original research on Australian actors, such as Cate Blanchett and Chris Hemsworth, their training, branding, and path from Australia to Hollywood
• Explores the films and filmmakers of the Blak Wave and their challenge to Australian settler-colonial history and white identity
• Expands the critical definition of cinema to include YouTube channels, transmedia documentaries, multiplatform changescapes and cinematic remix
• Introduces readers to founding texts in Australian screen studies

A Companion to Australian Cinema is an ideal introductory text for teachers and students in areas including film and media studies, cultural and gender studies, and Australian history and politics, as well as a valuable resource for educators and other professionals in the humanities and creative arts.

Part I
An Indigenous Screen Culture

1
You Are Here: Living Maps of Deep Time, Clock Time

Felicity Collins

Let me begin with an aside, with a scene from Warwick Thornton’s frontier western, Sweet Country (released in Australia in January 2018). Early in the film there is a startling moment – a scene, a performance, a sequence of gestures – where a skinny Aboriginal boy is given a hiding. In a short, sharp sequence, the boy is held tight in the grip of a grey‐bearded Aboriginal man (an overseer, a station hand) while the white station boss uses a thick leather belt to punish him. After a single preview screening, the boy’s misdemeanour is hard to recall. Perhaps it was for stealing a watermelon from the station’s desert garden patch, or maybe the boss just felt like giving the boy ‘a good hiding’. A scene or two later, the boy is handcuffed and chained to a rock for prying into a saddlebag. These punishments are presented as ordinary, inviting no sympathy from the white boss or the Aboriginal overseer. They occur early in the film as part of an iconography of frontier violence that looks more like slavery in the American south than conquest of the west. The slave iconography persists as the boy unbolts the chain and makes his escape across the sandy desert to the next station, still handcuffed with the chain trailing behind him. Arriving at the neighbouring station, the boy lurks in an outhouse from where he witnesses a shootout. This scene of violence draws on the American western’s classic iconography of ‘innocent’ homesteaders defending themselves from an attack by ‘crazed’ Indians. But in Sweet Country’s twenty‐first century, Australian iteration of the western, it is the innocent ‘natives’ who are trapped inside the timber homestead, desperately dodging the bullets fired by the crazed ‘homesteader’ outside.

Based on true events that occurred in Central Australia in the 1920s, Sweet Country’s main storyline appears to hang on the fate, not of the boy, Philomac, but of a mild‐mannered blackfella, Sam Hamilton, who goes on the run with his young wife after he shoots the ‘homesteader’. They elude the law by crossing the frontier into hostile country, but eventually Sam and his wife turn themselves in, and Sam is charged with murder. Found not guilty, frontier justice nevertheless seals Sam’s fate. Sam’s storyline, however, is only one thread in a film that looks a bit like an American western and a lot like a southern slave film. What makes Sweet Country something other than both those American genres is its location in landscapes, or more specifically in ‘country’, that Australians are beginning to recognise as a ‘living map’ created by the ancestors (Tilley qtd in Stadler et. al. 2015, 182).

The question of how Blak Wave filmmakers and their culturally diverse audiences are making sense of and encountering themselves in this ‘living map’ is at the heart of the television event, You Are Here (NITV and SBS‐TV, 2017). The event consisted of four documentaries – We Don’t Need a Map (Warwick Thornton, Barefoot Communications), In My Own Words (Erica Glynn, Blackfella Films), Connection to Country (Tyson Mowarin, Weerianna Street Media) and Occupation: Native (Trisha Morton‐Thomas, Brindle Films) – along with panel discussions and interviews with the directors (The Point: You Are Here Interviews, Eps. 1–4, 2017). Marketed as ‘films for Australians to find their bearings’ (Screen Australia 2017b), three of the documentaries were launched at the 2017 Sydney Film Festival as part of its First Nations focus (Screen Australia 2017a), and all four were screened on SBS and NITV in July–August 2017. You Are Here, then, is a simultaneous cinematic and televisual event in Australian screen culture.

Deep Time, Clock Time

While You Are Here is the main focus of this chapter, I am not yet quite done with Philomac. Sweet Country, in its very title, seems like a good place to start my account of the central task faced by the filmmakers of the Blak Wave, and in particular those involved in You Are Here – the task of orienting Australian audiences to where we are as a settler‐colonial nation, to what has gone on here in the colonial era, and to what persists here from upwards of 65 000 years of continuous occupation by the world’s oldest living culture. Set in central Australia, Sweet Country was filmed within a 50 kilometre radius of Alice Springs. It features the ‘visual splendour’ of landscapes such as the MacDonnell Ranges and Simpson’s Gap that have become part of the nation’s cultural imaginary, not only via popular reproductions of famous watercolours by Albert Namatjira, but via the paintings, outback films, television travel series and tourist brochures that, during the course of the twentieth century, transformed the ‘dead centre’ of Australia into something akin to the nation’s spiritual heartland.

While recent Australian outback films such as John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (2005), Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008) and Ivan Sen’s Mystery Road (2013) and Goldstone (2016) have rendered their landscapes as barren, flyblown, dilapidated, sparsely‐populated, drought‐stricken and treacherous, Sweet Country renders the desert landscapes of central Australia as richly photogenic and teeming with life – and with stories waiting to be told. Framed in wide‐shot, these geological formations are widely recognised by Australians not only as photogenic landscapes, but as ‘country’ in the Indigenous sense:

These landscapes are defined and bound by custom and hereditary rights, shaped by a priori spiritual forces and imbued with spiritual power. ‘Country’ may include landscapes, seascapes and riverscapes, and may have one or more focal sacred sites. […] Customary management of ‘country’ involves special knowledge and practices that traditional owners bring to the task.

(Davis and Langton 2016, 1–2)

In Sweet Country, wide‐shots convey the vast scale and spiritual power of rock formations that stretch horizontally across the screen, towering over human actions set up for the camera in the middle ground. Human actions arising from outside the frame unfold on a diagonal into the foreground. But whether located in the middle or foreground, the narrow plane of human action is diminished by, estranged from, and subject to the spiritual forces of ‘country’ in which the film’s actions are performed.

If the classic John Ford western claimed as its territory the imagined frontier between nature and culture, wilderness and garden, the outlaw and the law, then Sweet Country is a western insofar as it borrows some of Ford’s tropes, such as the raising of the gallows and the raising of the church steeple. But the forms of violence in which Sweet Country trades resonate with history rather than myth, and the Australian audiences addressed by the film are deeply implicated in that violence rather than safely distanced from it. Of the many acts of violence performed and presented in Sweet Country – including a determined rape committed in furtive silence under the cover of darkness – the one that lingers is the hiding meted out to the boy, Philomac, who is then chained up like a dog. This act of violence lingers because it is shockingly familiar. Unlike public floggings and hangings, or frontier spearings, shootouts and beheadings, ‘a good hiding’ was an ordinary part of childhood in nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century Australia, witnessed and suffered in schools and homes across the country, as well as on outback stations using Aboriginal workers as slave labour.

Witnessing Philomac’s casual hiding in Sweet Country involves both a shock of recognition and a moment of reorientation. It implicates us¹ and aligns us ethically and affectively with three figures in the scene: the boss who delivers the hiding, the station hand who holds the boy and enables the hiding, and the boy who suffers the hiding. As an allegory of colonialism, this scene goes to the heart of the settler‐colonial imaginary, at the very moment when the politics of recognition in Australia enters a new, highly contested phase. At the same time, the scene offers something other than the chance to witness an allegory of race relations. Under cover of the hiding, Philomac sneaks a small object into his pocket, an object that will come in handy when he needs to unshackle his chains. After witnessing the shootout at the neighbouring station, Philomac takes two more objects from a saddlebag – a tobacco pouch and a gold pocket watch. The tobacco is quickly dispensed with, but Philomac holds onto the precious watch until the very end of the film. As it turns out, Philomac is the unacknowledged son of the white boss who gave him the hiding. There is a moment of affiliation between them, however, as the story of frontier ‘justice’ unfolds, deep time wins over clock time. Philomac’s final, pensive gesture in the film is to contemplate and then relinquish the beautifully crafted watch by casting it into a waterhole. In this gesture of relinquishment, the film suggests that colonial clock time is but a dro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• About the Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: An Indigenous Screen Culture
• Part II: An International Cinema
• Part III: A Minor Transnational Imaginary
• Part IV: An Auteur-Genre-Landscape Cinema
• Part V: A Televisual Industry
• Part VI: A Multiplatform Ecology
• Index
• End User License Agreement