Feature film in Australia in the last decade can be said to have taken the form of a 'cultural romance.' Not so much the Alvin Purple films (1973 and 1974) and the Barry McKenzie films (1972 and 1974), but rather Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Caddie (1976), My Brilliant Career (1979), Newsfront (1978) and Gallipoli (1982). Each of these films enabled a set of cultural tropes around identity, culture and national maturity to be mobilized. Of course many more films than these were produced. Some of them, like the Mad Max films (1979, 1982 and 1985) and The Man from Snowy River (1982) were more successful; but nowhere near the same kinds of cultural discourses accrued to them. This article is about those celebrated films: their production strategies and the discourses that surrounded them.
The subject of my analysis is a particular historical conjuncture. Arenas as diverse as film policy, film industry discussions, production strategies, film and cultural criticism, and textual and narrative form, coalesced to produce a particular definition of Australian film: the 'film of worth and quality.' Many, perhaps most, of the films made in this period escaped (whether intentionally or not) that definition. Yet all of them were made sense of in relation to this norm.
The Moment of Picnic at Hanging Rock
Picnic at Hanging Rock marked the 'arrival' of Australian film and was crucial to literate investment in the feature film. Picnic had quality stamped on it and the box-office figures to guarantee it. Unlike its popular predecessors, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie and Alvin Purple, it could be lauded. As P.R. McGuinness's (1975) National Times review of the film put it: 'It will, thank goodness, demonstrate that Australian film-makers are capable of much more than the coarse vulgar rubbish like Barry McKenzie and Alvin Purple.'1 Picnic relieved anxieties about Australian cultural capacities in general and film-makers' capacities in particular. With it Australian film had come to maturity: '... the Australian film has truly entered into the field of open and equal international comparisons, needing no allowances for inexperience, nor special considerations for having been
55 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
home produced' (Ibid). And because this film did not need any critical allowance for inexperience, Australian feature films no longer did.
Picnic thus achieved the double gaze of local and international appreciation that the ocker films had not been able to attain. Australian film could now be part of international culture. As such, the film represented an Australian passage: to literacy, to sensibility, and to intelligence. It was a leap forward to be savoured:
It is rarely that a comparison of style between the infant Australian film industry and a foreign film is possible; but it is no detraction of Weir's film to say that it is in many ways reminiscent of the films of the Swedish director, Bo Biederberg, though in Weir there is an added dimension of horror (Ibid).
So, too, the Australian audience was able to recognise 'real quality' in an Australian-made film, and this expectation of Australian excellence allegedly broke down the ingrained local resistance to things Australian (Moffitt, 1976:36). At last, and as if no Australian filmmaking had hitherto achieved it, the barriers against public acceptance of the Australian produce were being removed. A sense of starting from scratch, of embarking upon unchartered cultural waters, was put into circulation. As the film-maker Jim Sharmon put it: 'It's an exciting time, an emerging time, our culture has been overlaid with other cultures for so long, but we're now beginning to see it' {Ibid:32). On the evidence of Picnic film-making seemed to be in the vanguard of Australian society. The film-maker/artist, expressing him/herself in a medium that was the image of modernity, had an important role to play in articulating an Australian culture freed of its traditional encumbrances. The feature film could be placed, like Patrick White, in the forefront of a wider cultural renaissance. The subsequent popular critical successes such as Breaker Morant (1980), My Brilliant Career, Newsfront, and Gallipoli, confirmed this place.
When Australian film is discussed and recalled, the pivotal text of the revival is always Picnic. Perhaps here one can discern a deeper current to the revival — the articulation of middle-class Australian audiences to their own country. The reluctance to have Picnic criticised reflected upon the social function of, and indeed the libidinal investment in, that film and what it permitted in the way that Australia could now be imagined.2
Australian film, for its part, needed to capture this minority audience within the cinema's local clientele. The middle-class audience played a crucial role in asserting the culture's values and transmitting the aesthetic judgements upon which the legitimacy of government-subsidised film-making was dependent.
56 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
The Film Policy: The 1975 Report of the Interim Board of the Australian Film Commission (AFC)
Both the newly formed AFC and the South Australian Film Corporation (SAFC) had their existence and production policies vindicated with Picnic. Their stated policy for film-making was one which reconciled cultural and aesthetic considerations to commercial ones in the long term interests of the industry.
The Interim Board Report of the AFC (1975:6) advocated quality film-making at the expense of 'sure-fire box-office formula films.' The targets here seem to have been the ocker films, international films made on Australian location, and any other formula film' making. The initial period of government-subsidised film-making, beginning in 1969, was characterized by low budget film-making, concerned principally with developing and establishing viability in the local market (O'Regan, 1985). Quality film-making, on the other hand, meant higher budgets. It also meant a market reorientation to international release, since this would enable higher budget films to be made by tapping additional sources of revenue. It would also shunt to one side the parochial forms of address that attention to the specifically local had produced in the earlier phase of the ocker films. The guiding assumption here was that only the quality film would be capable of gaining access to overseas markets. This was not seen as pandering to overseas tastes because, to put it crudely, being represented at Cannes became a way of securing Australian cultural standards. Thus selling overseas was not the end in itself that it later became. Instead it was a by-product of the adoption of the quality film mandate.
The Interim Board Report (p.6) justified its insistence that the quality film was in the industry's long-term interest by claiming that 'As the most universal language in the world, film carries a heavy social responsibility. It can exploit us and corrupt us, or enrich our lives by leading us to deeper self-understanding, and deeper understanding of the human conditions.' The notion of social responsibility entailed an aesthetic that was acceptable in a way that alternatives such as the ocker films had not been. On making assessments of a film project, the future AFC was thus urged to 'consider in addition to a project's commercial potential, its thematic importance, Australian content, artistic value and the contribution the project will make to the development of an Australian film industry of high international standing' {Ibid). This could mean foregoing 'sure-fire box-office' films. A film-making policy was thus enunciated which cautioned against compromise for commercial gain. Government involvement was to cushion film-making against the full commercial pressures of
57 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
the market. An extension of this was that Australian locations needed to be preserved for local film-making:
The Australian scene is as much a national resource as Australian minerals. Locations should not be given away to make decorations for overseas films, but kept as a vital part of those films to be made by Australians (Ibid:36).
In formulating its policy this way, the report was asserting the existence of an objective need for an 'indigenous cinema' (Ibid:36). 'Australia, as a nation, cannot accept, in this powerful and persuasive medium, the current flood of other nations' productions on our screen without it constituting a very serious threat to our national identity' (Ibid:6). This kind of populist cultural nationalism need not imply quality cinema. Similar sentiments had, after all, been part of demands for increased levels of Australian film and TV content. What the report was doing here was yoking these cultural nationalist sentiments to the service of quality cinema.
The Report thus firmly positioned Australian film apart from co-productions, the formula/genre film, and the excesses of the ocker films. It was to be respectful and respectable; authentic and aesthetic. Burstall later called this new phase 'town councillor art' (Bromby, 1979:87) whilst Sam Rohdie said that an unself-conscious film-making was replaced by a self-conscious one (Rohdie, 1982:40).
When film critics such as Sylvia Lawson, Michael Thornhill and Phillip Adams began to argue for a national film industry in the 1960s, they did so in terms of notions of self-recognition, identity, reflection of an Australian reality, and social message. In a delayed action, the 1975 Interim Board Report marked the ascendancy of this discourse at a film policy level. Of course, the quality cinema that was produced did not always fulfil their expectations. The notion is sufficiently loose to include a variety of films, yet specific enough to exclude much cinema.
Picnic made the quality film policy a reality. With its mannered film style, its literary symbolisations and its pre-sale, it fitted the aesthetic bill. Its commercial success legitimated a non-ocker filmmaking predicated upon higher budgets.
The history of the film's production is a good indication of the kind of changes within the industry that the film policy was responding to. The AFC's predecessor, the Australian Film Development Corporation, initially knocked back the Picnic at Hanging Rock
58 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
proposal in January 1974, on the basis that its $443,000 budget was then too expensive for substantial government underwriting (Strat-ton, 1980:69). Later that year the Development Corporation agreed to finance a third of its budget, with the SAFC and Greater Union financing the other two thirds. The Interim Board Report's prognostications for the AFC thus provided an imprimatur for the kind of thinking that had gone into the production and funding of Picnic.
Picnic's critical and commercial success enabled government support to continue after the change of Federal Government in 1975. The Fraser Government saw no reason substantially to alter what seemed to be a successful film policy, so political support for the film industry continued at a time when so many other Whitlam projects were dismantled. Indeed, the Fraser Government used its support for Australian film as evidence of its concern for culture.
Industry Discussions
Picnic's success marked the ascendancy of 'quality film-making' over other industry positions. A year after its appearance it could confidently be asserted that 'we have left the Alvin era behind us as we dive into more intelligent movies' (Moffitt, 1976:36). Successes like Caddie (1976) and The Devil's Playground (1976) confirmed the dominant formula for local and international audiences.
The same terms we find used in both Picnic's critical reception and in the Interim Board Report were repeated in industry discussions. The major difference now is that the object was viability. It showed commercial acumen to make 'self-consciously' Australian films with 'authenticity of speech' (McGuinness, 1975:55). It became common sense to say that ocker films were unsaleable overseas and that those who supposed that a 'kangaroo western' was what the overseas market required were being naive (Ibid:54). Hal McElroy, a respected figure after his success as one of Picnic's producers, was only articulating this standpoint when he told an industry seminar on film export what the industry should be doing:
What England and America can't do is a Caddie, a Devil's Playground or a Picnic at Hanging Rock. All of these films have unique and appealing story-lines that any nationality will understand. I'm not suggesting we make mid-Atlantic formula films, but initially we can't just make Aussie ocker films. The middle course is the right one — making films that are intrinsically Australian but thematically have international subjects (McElroy, 1976:44).
59 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
This then was the formula: ockerism was too parochial, the kangaroo western and mid-Atlantic formula films were too international. Only the quality film had the right local and international inflection. In the mid-seventies international prospects did look good. Australian films were well received at Cannes and some international sales had been accomplished. The Australian film's share of the domestic box office was at an all time high. The industry looked set to take off.
The Production Strategy
A film package is assembled, presented, argued for and ultimately sold on the basis of its commercial viability within particular markets. Unlike the TV serial that can pick up audiences with successive episodes, a feature film is a one-off phenomenon. It relies upon people going out and paying to see it. Film consumption in theatrical release is, as a consequence, both individuated and unpredictable. Securing an audience for a film is difficult. Out of this has come a world-wide tendency for feature film-making to minimise risks, for cycles to dominate — in other words for there to be imitations of successful movie themes and formats — and for movie-makers to look to successes in other media (literature, radio, TV, poetry and music) for inspiration and vice versa (Jowett, et al., 1980:30). To be positively registered on their investors' and audiences' horizon, films generally have to conform to prevailing film schedules and yet be sufficiently different from them to justify investment and viewing (Monaco, 1979:14-16). For Australian film production this similarity/difference axis lay in two directions: in relation to Hollywood film-making, and in relation to other Australian films.
Australian film, as non-Hollywood product, defined itself in relation to the dominant presence of Hollywood product in the Australian cinema market. Because this local market is oriented to the general release of predominantly Hollywood films through the centralized organisation of the major chains, Australian film production needed to be geared towards exhibition in their cinemas. Films were to be screened to audiences whose expectations about the cinema were informed by watching Hollywood films. This made the Australian situation quite unlike that obtaining in many European countries, where viable alternate circuits for cultural/art film existed.
In order for Australian films to reach local audiences effectively, they had to be similar to the general release Hollywood films Australian audiences were used to seeing. But in order to sell overseas they had to be capable of being launched within art cinemas and cultural TV markets (which is how non-Hollywood product circulates outside
60 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
its country of origin). Accordingly, the Australian film had to accomplish a difficult balancing act.
Films like Picnic at Hanging Rock, My Brilliant Career, Breaker Morant, Gallopoli and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith did just that. The fact that these films were successfully directed at both a general Australian audience and a cultural international one gave a particular inflection to Australian production. This inflection is discernible in Max Harris' (1980) effusive accolade:
We have surprised the world. We simple, sun-bronzed vulgar yobs are producing films characterized by a delicate portraiture of human sensibilities. We have taken over and developed the idiom of Losey without falling into the trap of being arty-crafty after the fashion of French film-making.
Sam Rohdie (1982:39) suggests that the favourable overseas reception accorded to films such as Gallipoli and Picnic at Hanging Rock was a direct consequence of achieving the balance between art and entertainment:
The films get doubly sold: within an art market (world bourgeois film festivals, Berlin, Cannes, New York), and as conventional mass entertainment. One has the alibi of art while enjoying more common pleasure (in touch with the 'others') with the secret enjoyment of a self-congratulatory, more sophisticated taste. Consequently, we see the discriminating New Yorker queuing to watch Gallipoli and Picnic at Hanging Rock screened in the art-house cinema-d'essai circuit in Italy — a film seriously considered by 'serious' critics not a film for the bin of film 'spazzatura.'
International circulation was sought after the completion of the film. The trip to Cannes, which became a regular feature of the Australian film landscape in the latter half of the seventies, not only gained much needed overseas exposure (and so sales), but also certified the quality of the film for local audiences who were still the principal source of revenue. This audience was addressed as Australian. They were urged to see these films as our films. Australianness for the quality film meant an Australian location, story, accent, and culture. These constituted its store of difference from Hollywood that could be used to attract local audiences.
Even if it only required the camera to be trained upon the Australian landscape to produce the difference from Hollywood, the problem, as Ross Gibson (1983:47) has pointed out, still remained one of
61 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
historicising that landscape, of putting in play stories within it. The cultural archive that Australian quality film producers could draw on was comparatively meagre.
In the context of an import-culture, Australian-produced writing, drama, film and television were at the margins rather than at the centre of cultural activity in Australia. This does not mean that Australian-produced culture has not been popular with its local audiences at different times — only that it has not been dominant. Quality film producers, already facing a meagre archive, were further limited inasmuch as a big part of the contemporary representations of the Australian — local television drama and the ocker films — could not be drawn upon.
Out of this situation came a pressure for Australian film to be defined as a particular kind of product rather than, say, a gamut of products. In the wake of Picnic's international success, Australian films were constructed on the basis of their similarity with, but difference from, Picnic itself. Its success was variously construed for emulation: it was due to Picnic's location in the past, to its rural setting, to its literary source, to its production personnel. This combination came to be known as the nostalgia film.
Setting a film in the past could circumvent problems of accent. For overseas sales American, British and Irish accents were legitimately possible. Well-known foreign actors could be employed. Australian actors could play different nationals. The film could thus be sold in English-speaking markets on the basis of 'us over there.' Furthermore, the setting of these accents in the past also diminished the possibility of their presence being regarded as a compromising of a film's Australianness. A film set in the present, and dominated by English and American accents, would be considered culturally offensive by some.
The nostalgia film also had an international currency in the art cinema market and a television counterpart in the quality serials of great novels and plays that had enabled British television to penetrate the American market. The past setting is, as Rohdie (1982:39) aptly described it, 'distanced and distancing.' It allows for higher audience tolerance levels. By being different the past can have strange locations and unknown actors. This is the attraction of such an assemblage of elements.
62 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
Textual Strategies in the Film of Worth and Quality
Particular textual and narrative strategies made these films amenable to enthusiastic culturalist readings. Stuart Cunningham has mapped out some of them:
Prototypically, we are invited to follow the growth through childhood/adolescence/struggling young maturity of a central character against the background of personalism, made all the stronger by the placement of character or groups of characters in a privileged position — and the corresponding invitation for audience identification with this position (1979:44).
A personal history set against the background of historical events, social and natural changes can be noted in a variety of films. The Irishman (1978) deals with social upheavals accompanying mechanization in the bush; Newsfront the cold war; The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith the historical treatment of Aborigines; Breaker Morant the Boer War.
Generally, a particular relation between personal history and these more general historical events/mores is posed. Rohdie has put it: 'History functions [in these films] to validate the personal fiction, to 'lend it' its truth, whereas the fiction ... 'dramatises History, makes it (by the conventions of the novelistic narrative) relevant, meaningful, real'(1982:38).
The films 'are neither real nor fictional, but a game of disbelief between the two' (Ibid). When they work effectively they produce responses like this one of Phillip Adams: 'Until I saw Gallipoli, I subconsciously believed that the campaign had been conducted in scratchy monochrome by soldiers in their sixties wearing double breasted suits, Akubra hats and rows of medals' (1982:33). The narrational level dramatises the past, enabling the audience to identify itself in it. This rememoration is possessed as 'our past.' The films' history — the youthful passage to maturity in the nostalgia films — is linked to the emergence of Australian culture and nationalism. So we find Robert Helpmann playing an exiled Englishman, publicly embracing Australia as his home towards the end of The Mango Tree (1977). Even when they do not have an explicit cultural nationalism, these films were readable in these terms. An emerging culture, Australian nationalism, the film renaissance, like these films' central characters — all have the connotations of birth and development through to maturation.
63 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
The films were often marked by a concern with representative characters who are marked by their ordinariness and who are confined to their immediate social environment which they negotiate, are affected by, but themselves rarely effect. The films were read in two related ways. On the one hand they were marked by their concern for alienation and moral sensibility (Harris, 1980), on the other hand, they furthered the national stereotypes of the battler, the little man or woman who struggles through over-riding social and historical situations and events but maintains his/her integrity in the process (Ryan, 1980:125-6). Their capacity to attract both readings was a function of their ability to bridge a minority and a majority public. Caddie is a good case in point. It was the story of a Sydney barmaid, but it was also about women's oppression made in International Women's Year.
Cunningham (1979:34) notes that the literary genre which the nostalgia film most closely resembles is the pastoral. The films contained the chief characteristics associated with this form: the ambiance of town and country, the significance of the landscape, the return to a natural order, the construction of community, the emphasis upon an ordinary but representative social reality.
Relatively unknown actors can enhance the representative claims of these films, affirming thereby the authenticity of the story. The films did not become star vehicles. The actors were in proportion to their surroundings, they were 'real, not overblown' as Max Harris (1980) put it. Actors such as Helen Morse, Judy Punch-McGregor, Jack Thompson and John Mellion were 'in the business of being ordinary' (Ibid). But this was no disadvantage as 'they are there to demonstrate that sensibility can be more astoundingly present in the ordinary than the extraordinary' (Ibid).
To achieve its representative effects, scrupulous attention was paid to the mise-en-scene. Authenticity was established through the meticulous reconstruction of 'bric-a-brac, costume, accent, architecture and gesture' (Cunningham, 1979:41), and the Australian landscape was an important element. Attention to mise-en-scene was not just an appropriate backdrop for the acting, but carried its own narrative weight. The fictional level anthropomorphized the landscape, whilst the landscape validated the historicity and Australianness of the characters.
In Picnic the mise-en-scene even resolves the narrative. The rock that the girls have disappeared into is called in to furnish the film's inexplicable resolution. Picnic was an extreme, but all the nostalgia
64 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
films foregrounded the landscape, using it and its changes as expressive values symbolising a natural order: lush and ordered/dry in The Getting of Wisdom; good years/drought in My Brilliant Career; bush-fire/floods in Newsfront. It became the films' Australianness, and filmmakers went on location within Australia — to Bundaberg, to Charters Towers, to the Lamington National Park, to Mount Macedon and to the Northern Territory to capture it.
With such locations these films were reproducing a dominant cultural paradigm about the centrality of Australians' relations to their landscape. The bush was invariably lyricized. The national identity was collapsed into the Australian landscape, into becoming at one with it. Hence it was possible for John Carroll (1982:223) to criticise Picnic for being 'visually dull' compared to 'the uncanny and mysterious, wild beauty of the rock itself.' The film's failure was generalized to be a measure of Australians' failure to 'submit to a nature with implacable and punitive powers' (Ibid:224).
The above characteristics would also allow negative culturalist evaluations. A general criticism levelled at these films was that their defeated detumescent heroes did not provide good role-models. The absence of commanding heroes capable of effecting personal and social change reflected an Australian cultural distrust for excellence and authority. Running through such criticism was a yearning for Hollywood modes of characterization where characters win against the odds and achieve their goals. Australian film needed to be a cinema of optimism rather than pessimism. An active and purposeful, rather than a static and anecdotal film-making was called for. Through it the 'land of spiritual status quo' could be displaced by a more active and enriched Australia (Clancy, 1982:170).
The textual and narrative strategies employed in these films made them amenable to both negative and positive evaluations. Both assumed the important role Australian film could play in shaping the values of Australian society. One praised their difference from Hollywood modes of characterisation and motivation, while the other saw in this difference something of a problem.
Maintaining the Standard: Quality Film Reviewing
The regular supply of features up until the hiatus of 1979/80 was reviewed in relation to the quality cultural standards Picnic seemed to set. The most general feature of this reviewing was the care it displayed for the state of Australian film-making. Films could 'help' the cause of Australian film-making, they could 'set it back' years. The
65 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
critic responsibly arbitrated the use of the public purse in underwriting film-making. Films were praised as 'our money well spent.' Responsibility often passed into sanctimoniousness as directives were issued to Australian film-makers. Critics like P.P. McGuinness and Colin Bennett of The Age had built up an emotional investment out of the moral highground offered by public subsidy — of national culture. Hence failures relative to the ideals held out for film were expressed more intensely than they might have been.
Taking the necessity of a quality film-making for long term viability as their critical yardstick, critics arraigned Australian films before their imaginary tribunal where they located lapses, failures and successes. The priorities, images and trajectory of the Australian film were explicit. The Australian cinema needed to keep Hollywood, television and Australian popular culture at arm's length. The cinema was a separate cultural/aesthetic institution. Its existence as such needed to be policed.
Many films which did not achieve that delicate balance between the art film and general release entertainment were accused of commercialism. They were expelled from the film world as interlopers (Dawn:1979):
... is like a Women's Weekly feature translated directly to the screen without any intervening human intelligence or sensitivity. And it is clearly made for the mass magazine market. There is every chance it will be immensely successful with that market, like the Weekly but to anyone outside Australian it will be equally laughable (McGuinness, 1979).
Summerfield (1977) on the other hand was 'a TV quickie which strayed onto a film set' (McGuinness, 1977). Colin Bennett (Stratton, 1980:33) scorned Petersen (1974) as a Hollywood film.
Without aesthetic properties and aspirations, Australian filmmaking could have no foreseeable right to exist., The Irishman (1978) was 'A complete waste of time and money ... It will probably do well at the box-office ... But this will be at the expense of their [the filmmakers'] complete surrender to the slick commercial values of the New Australian nostalgia film boom' (McGuinness, 1978a). Films not only needed to depict their society but they also needed to analyse and comment upon it. The feature film's job was to accomplish what other media could not do because of commercial constraints.
A handful of films were praised for achieving just this. Newsfront was one: 'For once, an Australian has managed to show us clearly
66 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
what is good in ourselves, and anyone with eyes to see can realize that these are qualities which are not a product of propaganda, or hatred of the rest of the world, or official cant' (McGuinness, 1978b). Newsfronts positive qualities emerge through a series of negations. It is not propaganda, not jingoism, not a repetition of Australianism. The film speaks its truths directly; the audience only has to see it to verify them. The film goes beyond popularized notions of the period it depicts to give Australianism a good name by redefining it. In terms of an explicit interrogation and assertion of Australianism, Newsfront is exemplary: Tt does more to establish the Australian ethos on film than any number of braying caricatures and plodding pastorals' (Connolly, 1978:57). Newsfront, then, did all the things required of the new Australian cinema. It was a film which commented upon an Australian reality as it depicted it; which analysed Australian culture and its influences as it itself contributed to it. Phil Noyce, its director, characterized it as The first Australian film which has attempted to define the mores and sensibilities of an Australian generation. The critics have recognized it as a product of a truly Australian cinema' (Bromby, 1979:86).
The task of the Australian feature film as evidenced by Newsfront, Career, Breaker Morant and Gallipoli was to contribute effectively to the development of Australian culture. Australians had lacked images and information about their own culture and history. That cultural lack was being filled by films that 'tell us where we come from:' 'Films like The Irishman, with a sense of historical seriousness towards the visual store they're prising open, may help locate Australians in their own country' (Dermody, 1978:355). This cultural role for Australian features could even carry its own time-table. As Noyce put it: 'We'll make contemporary films as soon as we have sorted out the past' (Bromby, 1979:87). But the failure of some films to accomplish this cultural mission became increasingly attributed to their past setting. What Australian culture needed was contemporary representations, not 'nostalgia films.' The nostalgia film went against the grain of the project of cultural renewal inasmuch as it repeated outmoded, clichéd images of Australia rather than creating more relevant ones: 'They perpetuate the kind of stereotypes and myths that go to make up the Australian Legend, the Aussie battler, mateship, the tension between European gentility and emerging Australian values, and the harsh unrelenting landscape' (Donaldson et al., 1976:172). Australians needed to be resituated within their own culture and history with a new set of symbols. Critics declared that the Australian industry must make films 'that deal with now — with what it means or feels like to be alive in Australia' (Bennett, 1979). Film-making needed to deal with 'the structure and fabric of Austral-
67 AustJ. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
ian society and stimulate us by exploring contemporary individuals, institutions, issues' (Ibid). It needed to be tougher-minded so that it could respond 'to the threat of the Australian landscape rather than lyricising it, or the potential excitement of its cities, instead of ignoring it' (McFarlane, 1980:61).
It was in this context that some films — often with a minority circulation — were praised for their modernity. Oz (1976) for example, updated 'certain models of cultural analysis to include the dynamics of the here and now' by including the presence of rock'n'roll, Hollywood and urbanisation in Australian culture (Donaldson et al., 1976:172). And films such as Mouth to Mouth (1978), Love Letters from Teralba Road (1977), Backroads (1977), Stir (1980), were praised both for their topicality and their willingness to investigate contemporary Australian life (Ricketson, 1979:5; Pike, 1979:206-207).
But this critical rejection of films set in the past was not fundamentally opposed to critical celebrations of such films. The difference did not arise from alternative critical criteria but from different priorities within the same aesthetic. This aesthetic was the discursive means by which the educated middle-classes were bound to Australian filmmaking. It underscored the production strategy of quality filmmaking and so contributed to its maintenance through the latter half of the 1970s. As an aesthetic norm it provided an incitement to speak about and a means of making sense of Australian films, but it also limited what could be spoken about. Its emphasis upon the filmic expression of an Australian reality ruled out of court pro-filmic considerations such as genre and technique. As a consequence, some films, like Mad Max, had to be contorted to fit this representational aesthetic. Barry Jones, for instance, claimed that Mad Max had the characteristics of his Lalor electorate.
The Australian Film and Australian Culture
The emergence of a quality Australian film-making was taken to be a symptom of a wider Australian cultural emergence and feature film-making was its visible trend-setter. But it was alleged that there were other cultural renaissances across the fields of cultural production. Together with feature film-making they reflected a 'new sophistication' that was both domestically popular (and profitable) and internationally valued (Sturgess, 1982:66).
Books were published celebrating the emergence of a vibrant culture and a mature nationhood (Daalder et al., 1981). Television stations celebrated the important part they had played in securing a
68 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
television renaissance (FACTS, 1979:70). The television adaptation of Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice (1981) was introduced as an Australian masterpiece of which we should be proud. Not only did articles, books and programmes see a renaissance in films, television, literature and the theatre, but they also saw them in pop music and advertising (Sturgess, 1982:66). Molly Meldrum, on Countdown, spoke of Australian pop groups 'showing the world we aren't just a little country' and stressed the amount and quality of the talent in the Australian rock industry. The judges of the National Book Council Awards could say:
Not so long ago there were two literatures: literature proper, English literature with a capital 'L' and Australian literature with a small '1.' Now if one wants to use the word Australian at all, it can be used as a selection for quality. This year's crop emphasizes the quality of Australian writing. Our top six
books are of extreme standard ... We are proud judges (McKay, 1981).
The nation was now the site for the socially valued activity of the production and appreciation of culture. Quite simply the educated middle-classes that were once thought to be missing from Australian culture were now gloriously present, unashamed of their intellectual pretensions and firmly ensconced within the fabric of Australian society.
There is something curious about this discourse. Though spoken affirmatively, it nonetheless draws upon a sense of an historic absence of confidence in Australian culture to produce meritorious work. The present exists as a difference, mounted upon and contrasted to an all too recent absence of culture when the institutions of the cinema, literature and television were not properly understood and valued in Australia. It is as if these institutions found themselves and renewed their cultural capital through their acts of Australianization. Consequently Australian culture is now incorporated within, rather than being disjunct from or opposed to, the existing formation of literary, film and television institutions. Integration, comparison, internationalism are all possible as Australian cultural production is now seemingly assured of its international cultural membership.
The outside is no longer the alien force that had been seen to stultify and suppress local cultural expression. There is instead a sense of the different contributions that overseas culture has made to the shape of Australian culture. This polemic, such as it is, extends no further than to an Australian confirmation and extension of those institutions. It is not attached to reformist aspirations. The criticism
69 A ust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
of culture and the cultural market-place that had been part of the reformist campaigns for increased Australian participation in the media and the Arts in the 1960s and early 1970s were now absent. But despite the absence of references to it, the patterns of overseas exploitation of the Australian market have not in fact changed. It is just that their impact, their influence were no longer in question.
But the celebration of emergent Australian culture was made possible not because the Australian audiences had at last become appreciative, not because Australian culture had at last thrown up genuine talent, but because Australian cultural production was so massively underwritten by government — federal governments, state governments and local governments.
Despite all the talk of cultural emergence and feature film revivals, Australian-produced culture (with the possible exception of the soap opera and quiz shows on television) is still crucially peripheral to the markets for culture in Australia. As Sue Dermody has put it for film: 'Local distribution and exhibition are vital to local production, but local production is still reasonably incidental to the local trade' (1983:5).
These remarks could apply equally to just about any culture industry in Australia. The problem is not so much to do with the psychology of the Australian audience as with the fact that nationwide audiences have proved structurally very difficult to achieve in the context of an import culture and jealously guarded regional identities.
Nowhere was this gap between market performance and cultural aspiration more evident than in the feature film industry of the late 1970s which, at the height of the celebration of cultural emergence (1975-1980), was in increasing financial crisis, a crisis that needed to be 'resolved' by generous tax concessions in 1981/2.
The problem here arose because the cinema had become a minority cultural form and because of the related difficulty of securing both local and international sales with a higher quality, higher budget product. The difficulty for the industry became one of reconciling what an Australian cultural, aesthetic public imagined international standards to be and what they in fact were. The necessity of overseas export for viability, inscribed into the Australian film revival right from its refutation of Alvin Purple, carried within it the seeds of Australian film's eventual demise and its increasing susceptibility to commercial pressures — the very thing it was in fact set up to oppose.
70 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
Departures and Recapitulations
If the feature film in Australia in the last decade has been a cultural romance, it is equally certain that in the present it is becoming much less so. Film critics faced with the industry's 'privatization' through the tax concessions can no longer sustain the fiction of their authority and involvement in the industry. The television mini-series has taken over some of cinema's cultural role. What I have mapped out in this article, then, can be regarded as a chapter in Australian film history. Given that this is so, in what longer continuum of audio-visual culture in Australia can we place this chapter? What has led to its (potential) displacement and what has taken its place? I think a number of tentative suggestions are possible.
The new chapter that has opened is the incorporation of the Australian spectator into television. The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS 0/28) and the historical mini-series on television are important recent developments which took over aspects of Australian film's work whilst simultaneously rendering it more redundant. Perhaps the demise of feature film is signalled by the inclusion of its cultural functions within television (particularly commercial television), aided to a significant extent by the government 'subsidy' of the tax concessions. The social and cultural role that Australian film once occupied seems to have disappeared and to have been replaced by television.
The demise of feature film can also be signalled by the growing incapacity of the minority audience institution of the cinema to sustain commercially (even with subsidy) productions which could serve the role of binding Australian audiences to film. Furthermore, this demise reflects the triumph of the film industry over film-making, as the industry sought to disengage itself from the cultural demands made upon it and thereby secure its necessity as an industry. There is, so one reads, now a concern for the business of film-making, and a sense that it is a career with paths already mapped out and institutions firmly established. There is a disregard for film critics noted by Meaghan Morris,3 which would have been unthinkable at an earlier stage, when it was important to mobilize cultural and aesthetic discourses. Indeed, professional ideologies have solidified as the AFC moves into a phase of selective professionally-oriented film investment (Dermody, 1981 passim). In this scenario, Australian film reappears not as a film-making aimed at a minority segment of a minority cultural form (the cinema) but as one which is crucially geared to securing for the cinema the maximum possible audience.
71 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
Examples of this are the 'blockbuster' films, The Man from Snowy River, Mad Max 2, Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), Gallipoli, Coolangatta Gold (1984) and Crocodile Dundee (1986). Their task is not to bind a middle-class audience to consumption within the cinematic institution but to reposition the Australian audience around the increasingly fetishized specular relations of current film-making. These relations owe more to the effect upon cinema of the textual strategies, special effects, and fetishising of the spectacle so prevalent in advertising, television and the video-clip, than to cinema itself.
Any investigation of this new phenomena of film history needs to pay due regard to the fact that 'bingo halls and video games' have to some extent subsumed 'the traditional spaces and audiences of the cinema' (Thomas Elsaesser (1984:52). Clearly, producers are still attempting 'to find fictional and narrative forms in which the predominant audience of the day could recognize itself ideologically (i.e., in its class- or sex-specific imaginary)' (Ibid:69). But their means of achieving it may be shifting with these new technologies and cultural forms. If so, Australian films such as Mad Max 2 and The Man from Snowy River are part of this new phase, which supercedes what we have come to call the Australian film revival.
Tom O'Regan teaches at Murdoch University
Notes
1. McGuiness' review was typical of the critical reception accord
ed Picnic. See also: Scott Murray's review (1975:264-265) and
David Stratton's (1980:72-73) excerpting of the film's critical
reception.
2. Two instances come to mind here. Firstly, an older student
dropped out of an Australian film course that I was involved in
(in 1984) because among other things, the criticism of Picnic
was seen to be negative and destructive. And secondly, Cinema
Papers relegated Ian Hunter's (1976:271) damning criticism of
that film to the status of letter to the editor.
3. Personal correspondence, June, 1984.
References
Adams, Phillip (1982), 'The Importance of Remaining Australian,' The Bulletin, 12/1/1982, pp.32-34.
72 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
Bennett, Colin (1979), 'Cloud Hangs over our Silver Screen,' The Age, 20/5/1979.
Bromby, Robin (1979), 'Test for Australia,' Sight and Sound, Vol. 48, No. 2, pp.85-98.
Carrol, John (1982), 'National Identity,' in J. Carroll (ed.) (1982) Intruders in the Bush, Melbourne: Oxford University Press pp.209-225.
... , (1982), (ed.) Intruders in the Bush, Melbourne: Oxford Uni
versity Press, pp.209-225.
Clancy, Jack (1982) 'The Renaissance of the Seventies,' in J. Carroll (ed.) pp.168-179.
Connolly, Keith (1978) Review, Cinema Papers, Vol. 5, Issue 17, p.57.
Cunningham, Stuart (1979) 'Australian Film,' Australian Journal of Screen Theory, Nos. 5 and 6, pp.36-47.
Daalder, Joost and Fryar, Michele (1982) Aspects of Australian Culture, Adelaide: Abel Tasman Press.
Dermody, Susan (1978) Review, Cinema Papers, Vol. 5, Issue 16 (1983), p.355., 'Australianness and the Film Industry,' Media Papers, Sydney: NSW Institute of Technology, June.
Donaldson, Beryl and Langer, John (1976) Review, Cinema Papers, Vol.3, Issue 10, p.172.
Elsaesser, Thomas (1984) 'Film History and Visual Pleasure: Weimer Cinema,' in P. Mellancamp and P. Rosen (eds.) Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices, Los Angeles: American Film Institute, pp.47-84.
FACTS (Federation of Australian Commercial Television Stations) (1979), Annual Report, 1978/1979, Sydney: FACTS.
Gibson, Ross (1983) 'Camera Natura: Landscape in Australian Feature Films,' Framework, Nos. 22/23, p.47-51.
Ginnane, Antony, I, and Murray, Scott (1976) 'Cannes — 76 — Selling Australia,' (interview with Alan Wardrope), Cinema Papers, Vol. 3, Issue 10, p.147.
73 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
Harris, Max (1979) 'Sense and Sensibility in the Film World,' Weekend Australian, 21-22/4/79.
....... , (1980) 'What's Yank for Stupid?' Weekend Australian,
3-4/5/1980).
Hunter, Ian (1976) 'Corsetway to Heaven,' Cinema Papers, Vol. 3, Issue 10, p.147.
Interim Board of the AFC (1975), Report of the Interim Board of the AFC, February, 1975.
Jowett, Garth and Linton, James (1980) Movies as Mass Communication, Beverley Hills: Sage.
McElroy, Hal (1976) 'Entertainment as Export,' in M. Walsh (ed.) Seminar: Entertainment is Big Business, Let's Invest in It, Sydney: Producers and Directors Guild of Australia.
McFarlane, Brian (1980) 'Horror and Suspense,' in S. Murray (ed.) (1980) pp.61-77.
McGuiness, P.P. (1975) Review, National Times, 20-25/10/1975, (1976), 'Entertainment as Export', in M. Walsh (ed.), Seminar: Entertainment is Big Business, Let's Invest in It, pp.53-60.
(1977) Review, National Times, 10-16/10/1977. (1978a) Review, National Times, 20-26/3/1978. (1978b) Review, National Times, 12-18/8/1978. (1979) Review, National Times, 24-30/3/1979.
McKay, Andrew (1981) 'The National Book Council Awards,' The Weekend Australian, 10-11/1981
Moffitt, Ian (1976) 'Australia's Golden Age of Film,' The Bulletin, 3/4/1976, pp.32-36.
Monaco, James (1979) American Film Now, New York: Plume.
Murray, Scott (1975) Review, Cinema Papers, Vol. 2, Issue 7, pp.264-265.
... (ed.) (1980) The New Australian Cinema, Melbourne: Nelson-
Cinema Papers.
74 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
O'Regan, Tom (1985) 'Ocker and the Tariff Board: The Politics of Import Culture', Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 3, No. l,pp.72-88.
Pike, Andrew (1979) 'Australian Feature Films: Towards a Local Cinema,' Meanjin, Vol. 38, No. 2, pp.206-212.
Ricketson, James (1979) 'Poor Movies, Rich Movies,' Filmnews, Vol. 9, No. l,p.5.
Rohdie, Sam (1982) 'Gallipoli as World Cinema Fodder,' Arena, No. 60, pp.36-55.
Ryan, Tom (1980) 'Historical Films,' in S. Murray (ed.) (1980) pp.113-137.
Stratton, David (1980) The Last New Wave, Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
Sturgess, Gary (1982) 'The Emerging New Nationalism,' The Bulle-, tin, 2/2/1982, pp.58-70.
New: 20 October, 2019 | Now: 6 November, 2019