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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: CNCZ - The Wiley-Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas
- Sprache: Englisch
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.
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Table of Contents
Cover
About the Editors
Notes on Contributors
Foreword
A Companion to Australian Cinema
References
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Writing on Australian Cinema
Proposition 1: Australian Cinema is an Indigenous Screen Culture
Proposition 2: Australian Cinema is an International Cinema
Proposition 3: Australian Cinema is a Minor Transnational Cinema
Proposition 4: Australian Cinema is an Auteur–Genre–Landscape Cinema
Proposition 5: Australian Cinema is a Televisual Industry
Proposition 6: Australian Cinema is a Multiplatform Ecology
References
Part I: An Indigenous Screen Culture
1 You Are Here
Deep Time, Clock Time
Recognition Politics
You Are Here:
We Don’t Need a Map
You Are Here:
In My Own Words
You Are Here:
Connection to Country
You Are Here:
Occupation: Native
Which Way From Here?
Acknowledgement
References
2
Charlie’s Country
, Gulpilil’s Body
Performance As Process
Performance As Contingency
Performance As Encounter
References
3 Ivan Sen’s Cinematic Imaginary
Cutting to the Bone: a Narrative Aesthetics of Sparseness and Precision
Poetics and Politics, Time And History: a Musical Sensibility of Tempest and Restraint
Rhythm, Tempo and Complexity
Subtle Registers of Music and Knowing
Space, Place and Performance: the Emotional Registers of Sound and Silence
Genre and Art: Influence and Transformation
Genre as a Pivot
Photography, Cinematography and Place: the Vitality of the Image
A Counter‐Hegemonic Australian Cinema: Audience and Heterogeneity
Acknowledgements
References
4 Shadowing and Disruptive Temporality in Bangarra Dance Theatre’s
Spear
Bibliography
5 Beyond the Wonderland of Whiteness
Defining ‘Whiteness’ as ‘Norm’
# so white
The Birth of White Australia
Literally on Film
White Wonderland
A Camera With a Life of Its Own, Watching
Shooting From the Shore
Black Chicks Talking
Redfern Now – Promise Me
Black Panther Woman
References
Part II: An International Cinema
6 Another Green World
The Mad Max Trilogy
References
7 Is Everything Awesome?
Animation, Animal Logic and Hollywood
Piecing together
The LEGO Movie
References
8 Jane Campion
Career Context
International Auteur
Girlshine
Girls and the Shadowing of Innocence
Bright Star
: Butterflies and Rosebuds
Top of the
Lake: Campion’s [Re]turn To Television
References
9 Constructing Persona
Collective Construction
Publicness
Mediatisation
Performativity
Intentional Value
References
Part III: A Minor Transnational Imaginary
10 Interpreting Anzac and Gallipoli through a Century of Anglophone Screen Representations
References
11 Unsettling the Suburban
Whitlam’s Shadow
‘Inaction’ Cinema and Global Creativity
Creative Transformation and the Magic of Capital
‘The Dust of Life’
Movement – Immobility and a Double Maternal Function
The Future Family and Economic Revival
‘Where are the People? These Australians?’
The Ruined City of Refuge and the Multiplicity of Tongues
References
12 The Rocket
The Rocket
: Between Laos and Australia
Small Nation Cinema and Minor Transnationalism
References
13
Serangoon Road
Policy Contexts of Film–Television Convergence: Junior Partnerships
Renationalisation: Singapore
The Production Ecology of
Serangoon Road
: Minor Transnationalisms
Representing
Serangoon Road
: Australia’s Critical Approach to Denationalisation
References
Part IV: An Auteur‐Genre‐Landscape Cinema
14 An Independent Spirit
Masculinity and Social Responsibility in Robert Connolly’s Trilogy
Industry and Audience
Audience‐focused Innovation in
Paper Planes
References
15 Disruptive Daughters
The Daughter in Australian Cinema
The First Phase: The Journey of the Adult Daughters, Tilly and Furiosa
Making it Across the Threshold and Completing the Final Stage of Self Discovery
Terra Incognita: The Journeys of the Disruptive Teenage Daughters
The Obstacle of Adolescent Female Sexuality
References
16
Atopian
Landscapes
The Gothic Forest
The Gothic Desert
References
17 Spirits Do Come Back
The Gothic in Australia
Before
The Babadook
Monster Magic
Mister Babadook
The Gothic Bunyip
Domestic Gothic
Midnight Movies
References
Part V: A Televisual Industry
18 Between Public and Private
Regulating Processes of Film and Television Convergence
Independent Production and Public Broadcasting in Australia
Screen Australia and the Enterprise Program
References
19 Quality vs Value
Debating Quality
Value Judgements
Reframing Value
The Kettering Incident: A Case Study in Value
The Bottom Line
References
20 The Evolution of Matchbox Pictures
Creation of Matchbox Pictures: How it all Started
Adapting to Australia’s Changing Screen Business Environment
The Matchbox Pictures Business Model
How Matchbox Continues to Produce Quality Australian Drama
What Makes Matchbox Pictures Unique in the Australian Context?
Matchbox Productions
Film
References
21 Schapellevision
The Burden of Nation: Genre, Intertextuality, Spectacle
Schapellevision: Asian Drug Stories
Larger Visual Continuities
Tricks, Ticks and Texts
The Mini‐Series is the Message
Dadah is Death
Generative Australian Representation
References
Part VI: A Multiplatform Ecology
22 CHURN
23 Over the Horizon
Google in Australia
Creative Labour: Australian Online Creators
Australian Multichannel Networks (MCNs)
Skip Ahead: Where Youtube Culture Meets Australian Screen Culture
References
24 Digital Transmedia Forms and Transnational Documentary Networks
References
25 Ecological RelationsFalconCam
in Conversation with
The Back of Beyond
The Back of Beyond
: Desert, Life, Human Frailty and Agency
Wildlife Webcams: Rethinking Documentary
FalconCam
: Decentring the Human, Connectivity and Contemplation
Ecological Relations and (Australian) Documentary
References
26 Where Am I?
Remix as Composition
Remix as Revenge
Re‐composing Cultural History
‘Where Are We?’ … Whose Story is This?
Acknowledgement
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 Crossing the threshold into Yolngu country with Thornton and his g...
Figure 1.2 Waiting for the Aboriginal Adult Literacy Program to begin in Brew...
Figure 1.3 In the opening drone shot of Muruga, we hear the spirit of the lan...
Figure 1.4 Trisha Morton‐Thomas mirrors our history back to us.
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 The camera’s tracking movement coordinates with Charlie’s mobile p...
Figure 2.2 The dehumanising act of shaving Charlie/Gulpilil’s head.
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 Frame grab captured by Anne Rutherford from the 2002 DVD version.A...
Figure 3.2 There is a hint of knowing around the old lady, Ruby.
Figure 3.3 Pedersen takes the measure of the room, scoping the space, feeling...
Figure 3.4 There is ‘something stunningly beautiful and profound in the [dram...
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Djali (Hunter Page‐Lochard) and Old Man (Demala Wunungmurra) in th...
Figure 4.2 Djali and Romeo (Romeo Munyarryun) as doubles in ritual.
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 (a–b) Lorraine (Deborah Mailman) and Robyn (Rarriwuy Hick) share a...
Figure 5.2 Marlene Cummins in
Black Panther Woman
.
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 A relaunch, a reboot, a revisit: Max (Tom Hardy) surveys the road ...
Figure 6.2 (a–b) An interlude in which Max (Tom Hardy) and Furiosa (Charlize ...
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 Photorealistic digital version of analog animation in
The Lego Mov
...
Figure 7.2 Visual Effects and Animation Credits of selected animated and live...
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 Liminal phase of being a girl, becoming a woman in
Bright Star
. ...
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 Geoffrey Rush in
Shine
(1995).
Figure 9.2 Geoffrey Rush in
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black
...
Figure 9.3 Nicole Kidman in
Dead Calm
(1989).
Figure 9.4 Nicole Kidman in
The Hours
(2002). Directed by Stephen Daldry.
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 Sam Neill finds his ancestor’s headstone in the 2015 documentary
Figures 10.2 (a–b) A modern Trojan horse. British troops run from the grounde...
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1 ‘Non‐actors’ as affective markers of the real in
The Finished Peo
...
Figure 11.2 Brick walls and bare life in the detention zone of Sydney’s weste...
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1
Good Water
, an instructional video by Austral–Laotion consortium...
Figure 12.2 Ahlo builds a rocket and wins the rocket launching prize‐money fo...
Chapter 14
Figure 14.1 José Ramos‐Horta (Oscar Isaac) and Roger East (Anthony LaPaglia) ...
Figure 14.2 Dylan Webber (Ed Oxenbould) and Jack Webber (Sam Worthington) reu...
Figure 14.3 Eddie Harnovey (David Wenham) loses his job.
Figure 14.4 Dylan Webber (Ed Oxenbould).
Chapter 15
Figure 15.1 Furiosa as cyborg.
Figure 15.2 Dungatar Women as raptors.
Figure 15.3 Grace and the liminal space of the road.
Figure 15.4 Hedvig’s gothic forest.
Chapter 16
Figure 16.1 Lake Mungo’s ancient sand dunes: An Australian gothic location. ...
Figure 16.2 Developing a desert gothic: The Wolfe Creek crater.
Figure 16.3 The reek of the carrion in the desert heat at a
Wake in Fright
sh...
Chapter 17
Figure 17.1 Amelia reading Mister Babadook.
Figure 17.2 Mister Babadook, ‘a mutation of the bunyip’.
Chapter 19
Figure 19.1 Pre‐production sketch for
Les Témoins
.
Figure 19.2 On the set of
Les Témoins
.
Figure 19.3 Tasmanian gothic‐noir in
Kettering Incident
, episode five, ‘The F...
Chapter 20
Figure 20.1 Promotional still for
Ali’s Wedding
.
Figure 20.2 Promotional still for
The Family Law
.
Chapter 22
Figure 22.1 Rappertag_Bias_B_Leo.
Figure 22.2 Rappertag Front Page: The Official Australian Hip Hop Rappertag. ...
Chapter 23
Figure 23.1 Veritasium, Derek Muller popular science maestro – Australian You...
Figure 23.2 Skip Ahead: Axis of Awesome. Image courtesy of Lee Naimo.
Figure 23.3 Skip Ahead: Mighty Car Modders, Marty and Moog.
Chapter 24
Figure 24.1
Freedom Stories
as critical transnationalism and transmedia docum...
Chapter 25
Figure 25.1 A lizard looks to the sky where a falcon circles in the opening s...
Figure 25.2 The truck in the
Back of Beyond
is a symbol of agency and moderni...
Figure 25.3 The
FalconCam
is designed to capture images of the distinctive Pe...
Chapter 26
Figure 26.1 Sheep eating hands after stampeding.
Figure 26.2 Anthony LaPaglia crying as he listens to cassette tape in a car. ...
Figure 26.3 Bewildered refugees after landing on Australian shores.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas
The Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas showcase the rich film heritages of various countries across the globe. Each volume sets the agenda for what is now known as world cinema whilst challenging Hollywood’s lock on the popular and scholarly imagination. Whether exploring Spanish, German or Chinese film, or the broader traditions of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and Latin America the 20–25 newly commissioned essays comprising each volume include coverage of the dominant themes of canonical, controversial, and contemporary films; stars, directors, and writers; key influences; reception; and historiography and scholarship. Written in a sophisticated and authoritative style by leading experts they will appeal to an international audience of scholars, students, and general readers.
Published:
A Companion to Australian Cinema, edited by Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye
A Companion to African Cinema, edited by Kenneth W. Harrow and Carmela Garritano
A Companion to Italian Cinema, edited by Frank Burke
A Companion to Latin American Cinema, edited by Maria M. Delgado, Stephen M. Hart, and Randal Johnson
A Companion to Russian Cinema, edited by Birgit Beumers
A Companion to Nordic Cinema, edited by Mette Hjort and Ursula Lindqvist
A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, edited by Esther M. K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti, and Esther C.M. Yau
A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, edited by Alistair Fox, Michel Marie, Raphaëlle Moine, and Hilary Radner
A Companion to Spanish Cinema, edited by Jo Labanyi and Tatjana Pavlović
A Companion to Chinese Cinema, edited by Yingjin Zhang
A Companion to East European Cinemas, edited by Anikó Imre
A Companion to German Cinema, edited by Terri Ginsberg & Andrea Mensch
Forthcoming:
A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, edited by John Hill
A Companion to Korean Cinema, edited by Jihoon Kim and Seung‐hoon Jeong
A Companion to Indian Cinema, edited by Neepa Majumdar and Ranjani Mazumdar
A Companion to Japanese Cinema, edited by David Desser
A Companion to Australian Cinema
Edited by
Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye
This edition first published 2019© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Collins, Felicity, editor. | Landman, Jane, editor. | Bye, Susan, 1960– editor.Title: A companion to Australian cinema / edited by Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, Susan Bye.Description: Hoboken, NJ: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2019. | Series: Wiley Blackwell companions to national cinemas | Includes bibliographical references and index. |Identifiers: LCCN 2018046967 (print) | LCCN 2018050695 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118942543 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781118942550 (ePub) | ISBN 9781118942529 (hardcover)Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictiures–Australia–History and criticism.Classification: LCC PN1993.5.A83 (ebook) | LCC PN1993.5.A83 .C66 2019 (print) | DDC 791.430994–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046967
Cover Design: WileyCover Image: © Photograph of world’s oldest garden cinema, Sun Pictures in Broome, reproduced here with permission of Felicity Collins.
About the Editors
Felicity Collins has a PhD and is a Reader/Associate Professor in the Department of Creative Arts and English, La Trobe University. In the1980s she was commissioned by Filmnews to research articles on the origin, history and impact of the Australian Film Institute and the Australian Film and Television School. Her doctoral research in the 1990s drew on the archives of the Women’s Film Fund at the Australian Film Commission, and oral history interviews with members of the Sydney Women’s Film Group and Feminist Film Workers. This early work gave rise to an abiding interest in how screen cultures mediate identity, memory and history. She has written on women, cinema and modernity in The Films of Gillian Armstrong (ATOM/AFI, 1999), and on settler‐colonial memory and historical backtracking in Australian Cinema After Mabo (Cambridge University Press, 2004). She has co‐edited themed journal issues, including ‘Decolonizing Screens’, Studies in Australasian Cinema 7(2–3), and ‘Rethinking Witnessing Across History, Culture and Time’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 31(5). She has published a series of articles and chapters on the films of the Blak Wave and the politics of reconciliation, most recently in Critical Arts 31(5), The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics (Tzoumakis and Molloy, eds, 2016) and Contemporary Publics (Marshall, et al, eds, 2016). She was Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project ‘Screen Comedy and the National’ with Sue Turnbull and Susan Bye. Current collaborations include a recognition app, Where Do You Think You Are? and Looking Again, with Hester Joyce and La Trobe’s Centre for the Study of the Inland.
Jane Landman has a PhD and was a Senior Lecturer at Victoria University, Melbourne, teaching and coordinating programs in media and communication. She took retirement during the early stages of preparation of this book and now focuses on her garden in Victoria’s goldfields district. She is the author of The Tread of a White Man’s Foot: Australian Pacific Colonialism and the Cinema 1925–1962 (Pandanus Books, ANU, 2006), an historical reception and textual study of ‘resource adventures’ set in Australian colonial territories. She has published in various journals and edited books including Studies in Australasian Cinema (also guest editor), Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, and the Journal of Pacific History (also guest editor). She served on the Editorial Board of The Moving Image. The principal thread in Landman’s research is Australian film history, and the role of the cinema in the process and cultures of colonialism and decolonisation, with focus on intersections between political change and historical practices of public relations. This includes the filmic reporting and promotion of late colonial policy on Papua and New Guinea in productions made by the Commonwealth Film Unit. Landman’s other research thread concerns contemporary television formats, such as daytime chat shows, feminist comedy, serial SF television, and quality TV series set in the Torres Strait.
Susan Bye has a PhD and is an Education Programmer at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne. She is involved in building education programs for schools and teachers that foster creative and critical engagement with the moving image. In her role as programmer she has sustained a focus on extending student knowledge of Australian films and animation as well as supporting senior students studying English and Media. In consultation with ACMI curators, she has offered Education and Public Programs in relation to a wide range of exhibitions including Hollywood Costume, David Bowie is and Scorsese. At ACMI she has participated in the Melbourne Writers Festival (2012–2017), Screen Futures (2016) and the Arts Learning Festival (2017). An associate of La Trobe University, she completed a PhD (2004) focusing on the introduction of television into Australia and received a post‐doctoral fellowship (2006–2009) to work with Felicity Collins and Sue Turnbull on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project on Australian Screen Comedy. As part of this project she convened an international conference and symposium, and published a number of articles focusing on Australian television comedy. She was the Reviews Editor for Media International Australia (2008–2014) and is now an editorial adviser. She has published widely in the field of film, television, media history and screen education and has co‐edited special theme issues of Media International Australia (on Light Entertainment) and Continuum (on Television and the National). She has co‐convened international conferences in the area of Screen Studies and was a keynote speaker at the Australian Association for Teaching English Conference in 2017.
Notes on Contributors
James Bennett is Senior Lecturer in History at University of Newcastle, Australia. He is co‐editor of Making Film and Television Histories: Australia and New Zealand (2011) and co‐editor of the anthology Radical Newcastle (2015). His research interests include history through film and television, gender and sexuality, the labour movement, Australian and New Zealand history, transnational histories, and the First World War. He has had several articles published on screen representations of war in the Journal of New Zealand Studies (2012), Continuum (2014), and the Journal of Australian Studies (2014).
Susan Bye is a member of the Education Team at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and an Associate of La Trobe University. She has published extensively in the area of Australian Screen Comedy and Australian Media History.
Maddee Clark is a Yugambeh PhD student at the University of Melbourne, and a curator and freelance writer. She is one of the 2018 editors of Un Magazine, and writes on Indigenous Futurism and queer politics.
Felicity Collins is Reader/Associate Professor in Screen Studies in the Department of Creative Arts at La Trobe University. She is the author of Australian Cinema after Mabo with Therese Davis, and The Films of Gillian Armstrong. She has published widely on Australian screen culture, its institutions, feminist interventions, and popular genres. Her research on the Blak Wave of film and television production is informed by memory and trauma studies, and contributes to debates on decolonising ethics and aesthetics, as well as agonistic and transitional modes of reconciliation.
Corinn Columpar is Director of the Cinema Studies Institute and Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at University of Toronto. She is author of Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World on Film (2010), a monograph about the construction of Aboriginality in contemporary cinema, and co‐editor, with Sophie Mayer, of There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond (2009), an anthology dedicated to the flows and exchanges that characterise feminist cultural production. She has published in numerous anthologies and journals, including Camera Obscura, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Women Studies Quarterly, and Refractory.
Stuart Cunningham AM is Distinguished Professor of Media and Communications, Queensland University of Technology. Publications include Digital Disruption: Cinema Moves Online (with Dina Iordanova, 2012), Key Concepts in Creative Industries (with John Hartley, Jason Potts, Terry Flew, John Banks and Michael Keane, 2013), Hidden Innovation: Policy, Industry and the Creative Sector (2013), Screen Distribution and the New King Kongs of the Online World (with Jon Silver, 2013), The Media and Communications in Australia (with Sue Turnbull, 2014) and Media Economics (with Terry Flew and Adam Swift, 2015).
Felicity Ford is a PhD candidate in Screen and Cultural Studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne where she tutors in gender, media and film studies. Her research is primarily concerned with disruptions to cinematic form in relation to sound, movement, vision and time. She is interested in how contemporary film intersects with narratives of guilt, consent, trauma, criminality and sexuality. Her work has been published in Film Philosophy, Screen Education, Metro and Senses of Cinema. She is the Secretary for the Melbourne Cinematheque and a Project Co‐ordinator for the Graduate Researcher Network at the Graduate Student Association.
Lisa French is Dean, Media and Communication and Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. She is the co‐author of Shining a Light: 50 Years of the Australian Film Institute (2009), and editor of the anthology Womenvision: Women and the Moving Image in Australia (2003). Her professional history includes directing the St Kilda Film Festival, and nine years as a non‐executive director of the Australian Film Institute. Recently, she has worked with six industry partners on the status and representation of women in Victoria’s film and television industries, including digital media and games.
Stephen Gaunson is Head of Cinema Studies in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. His research explores the subject of adaptation on the screen. He is the author of The Ned Kelly Films: A Cultural History of Kelly History (Intellect, 2013) and is working on his next book, which will examine the distribution and exhibition of adaptation films in the global market.
Ross Gibson is Centenary Professor in Creative and Cultural Research at the University of Canberra. Recent works include the books The Summer Exercises and 26 Views of the Starburst World, both published by UWAP.
Ben Goldsmith is an Independent Scholar with expertise in film, television, media policy, creative labour and creative industries. He has held academic positions at University of the Sunshine Coast, University of Technology, Queensland and Swinburne University of Technology. His publications include the co‐edited Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand (2015), Creative Work Beyond the Creative Industries (2014), and the co‐authored book, Rating the Audience: The Business of Media (2011).
Helen Goritsas is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and Coordinator of Bachelor of Interactive Media at Academy of Information Technology in Sydney. She served as President of Women in Film and Television NSW, and Director of the Greek Film Festival. She has judged the 16th–20th WOW Film Festival and Tour, the 48 Hour Film Project, Dendy Awards, Sydney Film Festival, the Kidz Flicks International Film Festival, and the IPAF ATOM awards. She contributed an installation to VIVID, Sydney, http://www.vividsydney.com/event/light/lightwell and co‐produced the feature film Alex & Eve (2015).
Helen Grace is a new media artist, filmmaker, writer and academic. She is the author of Culture, Aesthetics and Affect in Ubiquitous Media: The Prosaic Image, and Founding Director of the MA in Visual Culture Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is associate in Gender and Cultural Studies and research affiliate of Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney; a co‐investigator on public space transformation in Hong Kong, and a member of the Film Advisory Board of Sydney International Film Festival, focusing on Asian and independent cinema.
Odette Kelada teaches in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She publishes in the area of race, whiteness and gender studies. Key interests include the constructions of nation, body and identity in creative representations and the teaching of racial literacy. Publications include Drawing Sybylla: The Real and Imagined Lives of Australia’s Women Writers, ‘The Stolen River: Possession and Race Representation in Grenville's Colonial Narrative’ (JASAL), ‘Is the Personal Still Political?’ (Australian Cultural History Journal) and ‘White Blindness: A National Emergency?' (ACRAWSA Journal).
Olivia Khoo is a Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University. She is the author of The Chinese Exotic: Modern Diasporic Femininity (Hong Kong University Press, 2007) and co‐author (with Belinda Smaill and Audrey Yue) of Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas (Lexington, 2013). She is co‐editor (with Sean Metzger) of Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures (Intellect, 2009) and (with Audrey Yue) of Sinophone Cinemas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Anthony Lambert teaches in the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University. He researches and has published widely in the areas of Australian film and Australian culture. He is co‐editor and author of Diasporas of Australian Cinema (Intellect, 2009), and editor‐in‐chief of the internationally refereed journal Studies in Australasian Cinema.
Jane Landman is an adjunct fellow at Victoria University. Her research in film history explores Australia and the Pacific. She is author of ‘The Tread of a White Man’s Foot’: Australian Pacific Colonialism and the Cinema (Pandanus Books, ANU, 2006). Recent work includes co‐editing a double issue of Studies in Australasian Cinema 7 (2–3) on ‘Decolonising Screens’, and publication of ‘Renewing Imperial Ties: The Queen in Australia’, in Mandy Merck (ed), The British Monarchy on Screen (2016).
Amanda Malel Trevisanut is an early career researcher and teaches in the School of Culture and Communications, University of Melbourne. Her doctoral thesis, SBS Independent: Productive Diversity and Countermemory analyses SBS Independent as a cultural institution in relation to policy developments, elucidating how the commissioning house shaped new practices of production, distribution and counter‐memorial representation in the independent film and public broadcasting sectors between 1994 and 2007. She is a research assistant for the Digital Humanities Research Incubator (DHI) at University of Melbourne.
P. David Marshall holds a research professorship and personal chair in new media, communication and cultural studies at Deakin University. He has published many books that have studied the public personality and celebrity including Celebrity and Power (2nd edition 2014), Companion to Celebrity (2015), Celebrity Culture Reader (2006), Fame Games (2000) and New Media Cultures (2004). His current work explores the area of Persona Studies and investigates the online construction and presentation of identity as well the proliferation of public personas throughout contemporary culture.
Marion McCutcheon is a Research Associate with the Queensland University of Technology and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wollongong. A communications economist with a background in telecommunications and broadcasting policy, her research interests include evaluating the benefits derived from cultural and creative goods and services, and the role of creative skills in economic systems.
Norie Neumark is a theorist and sound/media artist. Collaborating with Maria Miranda as out‐of‐sync (www.out‐of‐sync.com) their work has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally. Her 2017 monograph, Voicetracks: Attuning to Voice in Media and the Arts (MIT Press) explores voice and new materialism. Neumark co‐edited Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media (2010) and At a Distance: Precursors to Internet Art and Activism (2005). She is Honorary Professorial Fellow at VCA, Melbourne University and Emeritus Professor, La Trobe University. She is founding editor, Unlikely: Journal for Creative Artshttp://unlikely.net.au.
Anne Rutherford is Associate Professor in Cinema Studies, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney, and is the author of ‘What Makes a Film Tick?’: Cinematic Affect, Materiality and Mimetic Innervation. She has published widely on cinematic affect, embodiment and materiality, mise en scène, film sound and Indigenous cinema. Recent research explores affective dimensions of film sound in the work of Kobayashi Masaki and Takemitsu Toru; ‘animate thought’ in the ethnographic photographs of Donald Thomson and their heritage in Ten Canoes; and montage and performativity in the work of William Kentridge.
Diana Sandars is a lecturer in Screen, Gender, New Media and Cultural studies in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne. Her research focus is on the child in screen media. She has published widely, including book chapters on Ally McBeal and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Forthcoming publications include: ‘Aliens and Monstrous Girls in Lilo and Stitch’ in The Grimm Mouse: Violence in Post‐9/11 Animated Disney Films, and a chapter on SheZow in Superheroes and Me.
Belinda Smaill is Associate Professor of Film and Screen Studies at Monash University in Melbourne. She is the author of The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture (2010), co‐author of Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas (2013) and Regarding Life: Animals and the Documentary Moving Image (2016). Her essays have appeared in international journals including Camera Obscura, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film Criticism and Feminist Media Studies.
Jane Stadler is Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Media and Communication at Swinburne University, Australia. She led a collaborative Australian Research Council project on landscape and location in Australian narratives (2011–2014) and co‐authored a book on this topic (Imagined Landscapes, 2016). She is author of Pulling Focus (2008), co‐author of Screen Media (2009) and Media and Society (2016), and co‐editor of an anthology on adaptation, Pockets of Change (2011). Her research is informed by phenomenological and philosophical approaches to spectatorship.
Adam Swift has a PhD and is a Research Fellow at Queensland University of Technology’s Digital Media Research Centre. He is currently part of a team researching the disruptive and innovative forms of production and distribution in the new global screen ecology. Publications include Media Economics (with Stuart Cunningham and Terry Flew) and Politics, Media and Democracy in Australia (with Brian McNair, Terry Flew and Stephen Harrington).
Ana Tiwary is a director/producer based in Sydney, Australia. She runs a production company called 'indiVisual films' that specialises in making diverse content for Australian and international audiences. She began her career working as an Assistant Director on big budget feature films in the 'Bollywood' industry in India. She went on to work at National Geographic Channel and has directed several documentaries, including over 20 films for ABC TV. She is a full member of the Australian Directors Guild and was selected by Screen Australia for the 2018 Developing the Developer program.
Sue Turnbull is Professor of Communication and Media Studies, University of Wollongong. Publications include The Media and Communications in Australia (2014 edited with Stuart Cunningham) and The Television Crime Drama (Edinburgh University Press 2014). She is editor of the journal Media International Australia and joint editor of Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies. She is also a media commentator on television and radio in Australia and writes on crime fiction for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Constantine Verevis is Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies, Monash University. He is author of Film Remakes (2006), co‐author of Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Vol 1: Critical Positions (2013) and co‐editor of Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel (2010); After Taste: Cultural Value and the Moving Image (2011); Film Trilogies: New Critical Approaches (2012), Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions: Remake/Remodel (2012), B Is For Bad Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics and Cultural Value (2014) and US Independent Film After 1989: Possible Films (2015).
Deane Williams is Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies, Monash University. His recent books include the three‐volume Australian Film Theory and Criticism (with Noel King and Con Verevis) 2013–2015, The Grierson Effect: Tracing Documentary’s International Movement (with Zoë Druick) 2014, and The Cinema of Sean Penn: In and Out of Place (2015).
Audrey Yue is Professor in Communications and New Media, University of Singapore. Her books include Promoting Sustainable Living (with Karakiewicz & Paladino), Sinophone Cinemas (with Khoo), Transnational Australian Cinema (with Khoo and Smaill), Queer Singapore (with Pow), Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile, AsiaPacifiQueer (with Martin, Jackson and McLelland) and Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia (with Berry and Martin). She is on the board of Sexualities, Feminist Media Studies, International Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Cultural Studies Review and Hong Kong Studies.
Foreword
A Companion to Australian Cinema
Australian cinema has always provided a vantage point for making sense of the cinema more generally and its evolving character. In their own particular way national cinemas refract global trends in film production processes, screen practice, and cinema movements. Included in this are elements of genre and style, film funding, distribution, and the circumstances of film screening and relations with adjacent screen media – first theatre, then television and video, and then online. Australian cinema ceaselessly adjusts itself to this larger, insistent cinematic world, selectively taking up and adapting itself as a component, and inevitably subsidiary part. So, too, audiences, reviewers, commentators and scholars similarly refract global trends in their localised uptake of cinema in general and Australian cinema in particular.
So, in being profoundly and continuously shaped by an insistent internationalism and cinema’s preternatural interconnectedness, Australian cinema is a place to observe the evolving encounter between these wider story‐telling institutions and traditions and those of Australia. Australian filmmakers and film writers alike use these larger trends, norms, and insistent global political economies of production, funding, and circulation to mediate, connect with, comment upon, represent, select, and intervene in a story‐telling from Australia. Their resulting story‐telling is thus influenced by both the larger cinema conversation and the practical circumstances of their encounter with more specific nationally‐based and centred institutions, traditions, and movements.
The cinematic world‐making that is Australian cinema joins together broader trends in cinema with more nativist cinematic traditions. Not created in isolation these nativist traditions have also been shaped by previous conjunctions of the global, by local histories and traditions of story‐telling, by available visual repertoires rendering landscape, the built environment, and peoples, and by collections of both new stories and the familiar told and retold on screen. Australian cinema is here a vantage point for taking the “temperature” – aesthetic, cultural, social, political – of a national film culture that is both internationally connected and nationally‐based. This glocal – global and local – condition of the Australian cinema is also, of course, the condition of Australian film writing, whether on the cinema in general or Australian cinema. Cinema’s uptake in Australian discussion and review, public commentary, and scholarly criticism talks to these same encounters, global trends, made over through nation‐based – sometimes national, sometimes international – lenses.
In these ways Australian cinema is simultaneously a national cinema, a transnational cinema, a contributor to an international cinema and a cinema in conversation with Australia and the world. The cinema – and Australian cinema in particular – is always re‐inventing itself rather like the Mad Max cycle of films, in the light of its new circumstances. This combination of the global and the local is, arguably, what makes the cinema so important as a cultural form. It powerfully informs filmmakers’ practices, just as it shapes the very terms of audience and critic appreciation or opprobrium. Both sets of actors make sense of, variously domesticate, and pick and choose; and in doing so they inevitably extend the Australian national and transnational cinematic world in relations of contingency, dependency, and partial autonomy. In this double fashion Australian cinema becomes a vantage point from which to see both the general and particular in operation through cultural, social, political, and aesthetic lenses that are simultaneously international and local.
As a collection charting, grappling, and contending with Australian cinema in the 2000s A Companion to Australian Cinema provides a window on our contemporary cinema. It shows a cinema that is adjusting and mutating cinema’s cultural forms in the wake of changing intermedial relations with television, photography and online media. It shows the developing multiplatform ecologies in an era of screen media being anywhere, anytime and on any device. New sorts of international association, and new turns in globally dispersed international production are in evidence, whether through the bodies of actors, post‐production services, or international branding. It is a national cinema that has become a central participant through its Blak Wave in a now global movement for a Fourth Indigenous Cinema so passionately advocated by Aotearoa New Zealand Maori filmmaker Barry Barclay (2003, 1990) and provided with its Australian critical vocabulary by Aboriginal intellectual Marcia Langton’s (1993) careful parsing of filmmaking as an intercultural encounter. Australian cinema is also a cinema contributing its own minor internationalisms as a foreign‐language, non‐Anglophone cinema (here Laotian cinema) contributing, as essays in this collection claim, to a minor transnational imaginary straddling Australian and Asian cinemas.
Australian cinema of the 2000s also emerges in this collection as a cinema which variously contributes to, comments upon and negotiates ways of making and being Australian, being Indigenous, and being a foreign‐body in Australia. It discloses itself as a cinema responding and contributing in equal measure to Australia’s fractious social and political divisions. In taking up the rise of an Indigenous Fourth Cinema the Companion explores that cinema’s bracing challenge to Australia, its politics, its cultural formations and foundations, and its peoples. It is a cinema that simultaneously celebrates the imperial legacies of its national story in ANZAC while facing and not facing, the challenges that its increasingly multicultural character presents to it and that of its natural environment marked by an ever more insistent, though at times vigorously denied, logic of the Anthropocene. It is a cinema that is marked by unease, contention and anxiety. In this collection Helen Grace usefully calls it an ‘unsettled’ cinematic imaginary. It is a cinema less about staging unity as about staging the terms of division, disconnection and disagreement. It is a cinema produced, just as this Companion to that cinema is written, in the shadow of a national story with its own contemporary dynamics and versions of longstanding logics – part political, part cultural, part social and economic – of contention, of contrasting national imaginaries, of competing and uncertain national futures and national settlements.
While such a mixed condition of filmmaking and critical writing has been with us since the re‐emergence of a multi‐faceted cinema from the diverse strands of filmmaking and film aspiration that governed cultural and political contention in the late 1960s, Australian cinema’s messy assemblage has taken its own distinctive shape in the 2000s and 2010s. This Companion locates this as a cinema shaped by the various slipstreams of the cinema of the period. It is one also marked by the changing political economies of screen media production, circulation and exhibition as longstanding settlements associated with traditional media of the cinema, commercial television and pay‐TV, and public service broadcasters are being reconfigured and partially replaced by online alternatives such as YouTube and Netflix.
Like the filmmaking to which it refers A Companion to Australian Cinema is being written at a time when the architectonic plates of the world are shifting and with them, Australia’s place in that world. By 2007 China had overtaken Japan as Australia’s largest trading partner (DFAT, 2007). Chinese investment from a low base has now become significant across the economy including in the cinema, where leading cinema chain, Hoyts was acquired by the Chinese leisure and real estate conglomerate Wanda in 2015. Coupled with the renewed role played by American corporations in Australia’s media, including screen media courtesy of the CBS take‐over of the Ten Network and the formidable power of the FAANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) these new circumstances are generating new screen partnerships and patterns of infrastructure ownership, creating in the process new priorities and anxieties for the place of Australia not only in the world but how Australian contributions to film worlds are organized and the kinds of control Australian actors can exercise.
If, as I contended in Australian National Cinema (O’Regan 1996), Australian cinema as a national cinema is best seen as a messy assemblage of filmmaking projects, institutional and policy configurations, critical moves, and a container of diverse energies, then to do justice to Australian cinema of the last twenty years would require a multifaceted and generous approach capable of recognising this diversity and accommodating its several characteristics. A Companion to Australian Cinema is well suited to this task. The diverse angles of incidence of its different sections and the varied concerns of its authors promote recognition of Australian cinema’s mosaic form. A Companion provides a vehicle in which participation through post‐production and visual effects in The Lego Movie can sit alongside the work of auteur producer Robert Connolly, Aboriginal filmmaker Ivan Sen’s cinematic imaginary of place and landscape can abut the business models for Matchbox Pictures, YouTube’s Australian contributors can intersect with the strategies of Screen Australia, the ABC and SBS, the heroine journeys on the Australian screen can join Gothic tropes in Australian cinema, and Jane Campion’s feminist sensibilities as an international auteur can connect to television serial, Serangoon Road’s, minor transnationalism, and the multi‐media spectacles generated in response to Australians arrested on drug‐related offences in Asia can jostle with digital transmedia documentary forms. The sheer detail and the extent of the coverage undertaken here serves to remind us of the many pathways Australian cinema takes and what these pathways require in terms of an engaged exploration.
Australian cinema, courtesy of its size, is also manageable enough to be able to allow us to see in the one place how these very diverse projects and entrepreneurial energies, live together, knock against each other, contend, and simply slide by each other. As a medium‐sized cinema, Australian cinema is neither small as is New Zealand’s, or large as is that of the UK, Korea or France, or very large as is that of the USA, Japan and China. As an English language cinema, Australian cinema is simultaneously an insider producing in the dominant screen language of English and marginal as a minor English language cinema. This structural character might mean that it can do more than can a smaller cinema, and its films can travel at times unimpeded through cinema networks courtesy of being produced in the English language. But, at the same time, there are definite limits to what it can do. Such cinemas do more of some things than others at different times. Sometimes they have to choose what they do, and sometimes they have what they do chosen for them by dominant international players. While it only can do and only choose to do some things at different times, its smaller size has its advantages. In Australia various strands of screen production that are more distant from each other in a larger filmmaking milieu are more contiguous. Filmmakers have scope to contribute across a variety of film and television production, working over their careers across genres and forging intermedial screen careers. This makes Australian cinema valuable for thinking in the one place about various faultlines of film and television production.
Australian cinema also provides a useful viewpoint from which to gauge the consequences for filmmaking of screen media transformations. With less firmly established and more precarious screen production industries compared to their larger media counterparts, Australia’s medium‐sized cinema is affected in different ways than are its counterparts in larger countries. From the mid‐2000s, technological change has been altering both producer operating conditions and the circumstances under which viewers access films. Cinema began the 2000s with the settled screening combination of cinema, DVD/video, pay‐TV and free‐to‐air broadcast TV; but by the late 2010s it was as much a cinema on laptops, tablets, and smart TVs accessing asynchronous, on‐demand content online (in its various varieties of advertiser‐supported, pay‐per‐view, and subscription video‐on‐demand), eclipsing the more traditional venues for screen media. Australian cinema provides a related but distinct position from which to view these changes as they impact upon the ecologies of film production in a medium‐sized English language market.
A Companion to Australian Cinema starts with the basic question that confronts filmmakers and critics alike: how are we to make sense of Australian Cinema in the twenty‐first century? The answer they give here is partly synoptic. After all, this collection does comprehensively cover diverse strands of Australian film making and film writing of the new millennium. But its underlying priority is not to be summative or to condense a by now large volume of writing on Australian cinema and its history into more bite‐sized bits. It aim is rather to contribute fresh perspectives and to serve as a new point of departure for thinking about contemporary Australian cinema. A Companion to Australian Cinema’s is mostly concerned with adding to the literature on Australian cinema by variously challenging, redirecting, rechannelling, and retuning our attention to it. While it certainly conveys a strong sense of a continuity with previous writing, outlining as its authors do an improvising cinema and screen culture simultaneously connected with its past and negotiating its future, it does so by extending and opening up the conversation on Australian cinema and screen culture in new ways. Here, past filmmaking and critical work alike is not simply acknowledged but used in the best sense – entering as an active dialogue partner – to enable these contributions to be variously remade, repurposed, extended, and criticised through the critical encounter with contemporary cinema and television. With purposes of intervening in, as much as representing, Australian cinema A Companion’s authors seek to reinvent Australian cinema and Australian cinema writing for this time and this place.
To aid this task of reinvention A Companion to Australian Cinema is thematically, not chronologically, organised. This allows Australian cinema to be grasped as a cinema of a number of tendencies – its editors call these tendencies a set of ‘propositions’ about Australian cinema. These are that: Australian cinema has an indigenous screen culture; it is an international cinema; a minor transnational cinema; an auteur, genre, and landscape cinema; a televisual cinema; and a cinema shaped by new media platforms. Recognising and filling out these several tendencies allow Australian cinema’s messy assemblages to not only be established but negotiated and recognised in their positivity. What is especially good about this orientation is that while it calls for a new beginning this is not a shallow new beginning borne of ignorance of Australian films and filming and Australian film writing. Rather it is one borne of a sense of possession of and passion for a rich, diverse, sometimes distinct and occasionally distinguished filmmaking and film writing history. This gives depth to its authors’ investigation of diverse strands of contemporary filmmaking, their interrogation of intermedial and transnational dimensions, their understanding of strategies for viability concurrently pursued by filmmakers and film businesses, their charting of the changing policy and political environments of film support, and their interrogation of Australian cinema’s relation to broader national cultural formations and histories.
A Companion to Australian Cinema conveys then the protean character of Australian cinema. It discloses a cinema of the new millenium engaged in perpetually forming and reforming its filmmaking practices, its screen economy, and cultural and critical apparatuses. It also opens up a new chapter in our understanding of and writing about Australian cinema, serving to both set an agenda for future scholarship and show to an Australian and international readership why contemporary configurations of Australian cinema matter to any understanding of national cinemas in these the first two decades of the new millennium. In doing so A Companion to Australian Cinema also makes a contribution to film writing and scholarship generally. Like their filmmaking counterpart, the writer on cinema operating from an Australian base has long connected with global conversations about the cinema, critically engaging with the cinema of the day, negotiating aesthetic movements within film making and screen culture, contributing to contemporary screen theory, film maker projections and critical understandings alike (see King, Verevis and Williams 2013). For those writing on Australian cinema in this collection this cinema is always refracted through the lens of their experience of and writing on the cinema more generally. To be interested in the cinema in Australia is to be interested in this larger international cinematic world of which Australian cinema is but a part. This means that the writers in this collection not only write on Australian cinema but have also contributed to the exploration of a cinema that extends well beyond it. A Companion to Australian Cinema operates in a critical screen culture that mimes in a different register the very work of Australian cinema itself over this same period: its writers are also in the business of glocal refraction, adaptation and negotiation. If this brings those who write on Australian cinema closer to their filmmaking counterparts it also ensures that those writing for this collection are writers on and contributors to the dialogue on the cinema more generally. In this they are well suited to the task before them.
References
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