Reviews on Australian Film Industry
IMAGINED IDENTITIES: FOCUS ON AUSTRALIAN CINEMA
Mückler Hermann and Gabriele Weichart (eds). Forthcoming 2012.
Australien. Geschichte und Gesellschaft 18. bis 20. Jahrhundert. [Australia. History and Society from the 18th to the 20th Centuries].
Edition Weltregionen, Institut für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, Universität Wien [University of Vienna].
Annette Hamilton
March 2012
National cinemas are generally contrasted with a universal cinema which refers largely to US/Hollywood films. National identities are reflected on film through the use of distinctive symbols and narratives which convey hegemonic meanings underpinning a sense of collectivity and mutual recognition. The national cinema approach is useful in some ways, but in the case of Australia fails to grasp the complex interplay of narratives and myths which construct Australia in the broader historical context (cf O’Regan 2002). Australian films brim with complex meditations on the question of “Australian’s”, rarely celebratory, more often full of ambivalence, silences, doubt, irony, parody and the embrace of failure.
There have been many book-length studies of Australian cinema (Pike and Cooper 1980; Shirley and Adams 1983; Moran and O’Regan 1989; Jacka and Dermody 1998a and 1998b; O’Regan 1996; McFarlane Mayer and Bertrand 1999; ; Rayner 2000; Moran and Vieth 2006). These works usually include historical elements, consideration of industry development, funding, genre, production and acting. This paper will not engage with industry issues, except where these have materially affected the kind of films being made, but rather will focus on the films themselves, pursuing a cultural analysis. Australian films do appeal to a system of conventional symbols and representations, but these are often inconsistent and contradictory, reflecting anxiety and traumatic residues of unresolved historical events and struggles over their memorialization.
In an earlier paper (Hamilton 1991) I referred to the contradictory and ambivalent attitudes towards culturally constructed “Otherness” in Australian cinema. That paper was concerned with the dilemmas of representation with regard to the indigenous inhabitants (“Aborigines”) and the Asian immigrants who had settled much more recently. I proposed the use of the concept of the national imaginary to refer to the way contemporary social orders produce images of themselves against others through new screen technologies which circulate as commodities both internally and internationally. This followed from Benedict Anderson’s insights into the way imagined communities arise from the spread of representations through print media (1983) and has been widely applied in the context of contemporary mass media and national identity.
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In the following discussion I will focus on the way the Australian cinema has engaged in a constant struggle for self-definition both with, and against, an outside world of Anglophone societies especially the United Kingdom and the United States. The suppressed presence of the indigenous Other creates a third element.[1] Australian film seeks to perpetuate an identity as a “white” society, defining its inherent qualities as egalitarianism, fairness, courage in the face of impossible odds, abilities to survive in a dangerous physical environment, commitment to justice and a hatred of snobbery, fakery and elitism. Yet, in order to sustain these images, which make the Australian a “better kind of white man”, the suppressed presence of non-white alterity has increasingly demanded recognition. A crisis point was reached during the years of the Howard Liberal Government (1996-2007) with acts of violence and racism particularly against Muslims seemingly reflected in national policy. Hage suggests that the struggle over national identity reflects a “white fantasy” (Hage 1998). In cinema, the “white fantasy” has only slightly been displaced in the past decade or so. Most of Australian film history has reflected a kind of adolescent struggle against a parental order represented by the UK and the US, with occasional recognition of the problem of internal alterities. In the ambivalent silences of Australian film history, the question returns again and again: What is a “real” Australian?
Early cinema: 1890-1914.
A travelling German exhibition showed the first films in Australia in 1896, but filmmakers were soon at work in several arenas, experimenting with the potential of the new technology to tell both universal and specifically Australian stories. Some of the first filmmaking in the world occurred when the Haddon Expedition to the Torres Straits Islands, north of Australia, took remarkable ethnographic footage of an Aboriginal ceremonial dance in 1888. Four and a half minutes of this footage survives, some of which can be seen on Youtube. [2]
Pioneering anthropologist Sir Baldwin Spencer and his associate F. G. Gillen also grasped the potential of film for showing what Aboriginal societies and people did. First in 1901, and later in 1912, in the face of unbelievable difficulties many hours of film were shot as Central Australian tribesmen were inveigled into performing sacred ceremonies for the purposes of the camera (Dunlop 1983).
Later, as a feature film industry emerged, the conflicts between the immigrant settler society and the indigenous inhabitants were almost entirely ignored. Even when filmmakers began to address these issues the most sincere efforts at sympathetic narratives and characters constantly foundered on a reluctance to fully explore the dangerous terrain of racism and genocide which lay at the heart of the historical record. In the 1960s and 1970s, largely due to the efforts of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Studies, ethnographic reflection sought a dialogic relation using ‘participatory cinema’. This included indigenous people but did not belong to them (Bryson 2002). Only in the very recent past have indigenous people themselves been able to take up the camera and make their own films, to be discussed later in this paper.
Early Days: the Silent Era.
Prior to the beginning of World War One (1914-18), Australia had one of the largest film industries in the world.[3] In 1911, 51 locally-made movies were released. A global market for films had sprung up, and Australian films were soon circulating in many exhibition markets. Silent movies had no language barrier. It was easy to present a film with live commentary in the host country’s language. Inter-titles, texts on screen between scenes, were also used to tell the story. The developing industry was interrupted by the war, and then the intrusion of the Hollywood distribution system, which arrived in Australia in 1915. By 1918 all the major Hollywood distributors had opened offices, and the import of cheaply made American film quickly monopolized the Australian cinema screens.
Nevertheless, locally-made films still attracted Australian audiences. If ethnographers began by making films of indigenous customs and practices, other filmmakers were not far behind in recording the customs and culture of the “white” Australians, who provided an endless source of fascination. The world’s first feature film was the quintessential Australian tale The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906). It has recently been partially restored and an excellent copy is available on Youtube. Information about the making of he film is also available.[4]
Ned Kelly was, and remains, a great “underclass” hero in Australian legend, a bushranger of Irish origins who defended his family against the depredations of the colonial authorities. Bushrangers remained a popular theme in Australian film for many years and in many styles. The story of the Kelly gang was made over and again. Censorship was in place by 1920 as so many bushranger films depicted the bushrangers as heroes and denigrated the police and judicial system. For a time bushranger movies were banned by the police for encouraging and glamorizing anti-social and criminal activities (Goldsmith and Lealand 2010 p. 91). Underclass heroes including convicts, bushrangers and urban and suburban criminals have occupied a central place in Australian cinema ever since. In the 2000s the “criminal” films included Chopper (Andrew Dominick, 2000), Dirty Deeds (David Caesar 2002) and Getting Square (Jonathon Teplitzky 2003). While convict origins were considered a source of shame by the ruling class British and their elite descendants, today a convict history is recognized as something to be celebrated, if only for the courage and endurance shown by the unfortunate convicts in the face of almost unbearable cruelty from their jailers. For the Term of his Natural Life (Norman Dawn, 1927) adapted from a popular novel by Marcus Clarke, was the earliest major film to establish this proposition.
Australian audiences sought their own self-reflection, one which might make little sense to international audiences. “Australian’s” took on a particular quality. Although Australia by 1920 was becoming an increasingly suburbanized nation, with an affluent and largely British-identified middle class in its main cities, films did not take these people or their lives as subject. Even when the central characters were not convicts or criminals, they were usually uncouth, ill-educated and part of the poor working class or its rural counterpart. Australians preferred these films, which spoke to their own sense of self, although international audiences were more interested in films showing kangaroos, emus, and noble white bushmen.
A romantic comedy The Sentimental Bloke (Raymond Longford and Lotte Lyell 1918) based on a popular poem by C. J. Dennis was a big hit (Bertrand 1989; Brisbane 1991). Its characters were exaggeratedly low-class people living in the slums and tenements of Melbourne (although it was filmed in the Sydney slum area of Woolloomooloo). Its romance between the lead characters, “the Bloke”, a classic inner city larrikin and his lady love who works in a pickle factory was absurd, a parody of traditional romances.[5] The inner-city slum theme remained popular for decades. The Kid Stakes (Tal Ordell 1931) told a charming tale based on a popular graphic artist’s work which appeared in the local Sydney newspapers. The main characters were a gang of young children wanting to enter their prize animal in a goat-race. The elite with their glamorous houses overlooking Sydney harbor provided the counterpart to the poor crowded tenements in which the children live.
Another popular series was known as the Dad and Dave comedies. The first On Our Selection (Ken Hall 1932) shows the Rudd family pioneering untouched bushland to develop a farm. Dad is a strong father figure, and Mum struggles to keep a civilized domestic environment in the rough circumstances of the bush. Dave, the son, is a simpleton, but one of the daughters is a strong bushwoman, capable and able to work hard and triumph against the odds. Dad and Dave re-appeared in the 1970s but the sense of anachronism was too strong for the late twentieth century and no more Dad and Dave films have ever been made (although one later film, The Castle, discussed below, owes much to the Dad and Dave sensibility).
These films and others like them began the customary depiction of “real” Australian characters through a kind of gross stereotyping, offering simplified images supposedly typically Australian although everyone in Australia recognizes them as highly exaggerated and unrealistic. They become a kind of reverse parody, as if the viewer is able to laugh at the characters’ mistakes and misapprehensions because in spite of their similarities, they are not the same. In later years some of the most successful films internationally have utilized the same exaggerated parodic figuration most notably the hugely successful Crocodile Dundee (1986). Australian audiences took a kind of pride in identifying with this supposedly intrepid bushman, while recognizing that its lead actor Paul Hogan was a famous local comedy figure renowned for his exaggerated “Australian” style and the events shown in the film were mostly absurd. Moreover, Hogan was also Australia’s official tourism representative (Rattigan 1988; Lucas 1998).
Crocodile Dundee can be seen as a kind of national advertising directed at the external world, mainly the United States. The first half features an American in Australia (the female love interest, played by Linda Koslowski) and the second half features an Australian in America (Mick Dundee in New York). In The Man From Snowy River (1982) George Miller had tried to do the same, employing a famous American star (Kirk Douglas) and playing with the conventional Western genre to the extent that it is often termed a “Kangaroo Western”. [6] The film is based on a much-loved Australian bush poem which many to this day can recite by heart. Although it did well enough at the Australian box office, some critics were scathing. Tom O’Regan described it as “ideologically bad, technically bad, masculinist, poorly scripted and shamelessly commercial” (O’Regan 1996: 137). The desire to meld with US traditions (and markets) was too obvious; the film went too far in its attempted seduction of a foreign audience.
Embracing defeat: the war film
In the creation of its imagined identity, Australian participation in war has been a leitmotif. While nations frequently draw strength from their war history, in Australia memory is revived not to trumpet victory but to celebrate defeat. Australians may have been on the winning side, but the moments which provide core film narratives reflect failure, and often incarceration, cruelty and death. The key element is the self-sustaining quality of the Australian troops, and their defiance of their superiors, usually depicted as effete British upper-class officers who have no idea how to manage a campaign. The fundamental value of male collectivity, the construction of authentic masculinity, and the ethics of mateship underpin the cinematic representation of these events. The First World War has provided continued inspiration for Australian film for eighty years now, although with significant transformations (Reynaud 2007).
Popular observance of military history in Australia is centered on the annual celebration of ANZAC day. ANZAC stands for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, and is held on 25 April each year to commemorate the anniversary of the Gallipoli landings in 1915. The motto of ANZAC Day is “Lest We Forget”. During World War One thousands of young Australians were called to defend the interests of the British Empire in the distant fields of battle in Europe and North Africa, where they usually joined the British working class as cannon fodder. The Australians, however, according to the legend, were able to overcome this destiny and rather than dying passively in the slaughter found ways to defy the odds magnificently.
Among the critical moments in Australia’s military history no event has been more formative than the story of Gallipoli. The popularization of the Gallipoli story can in part be attributed to the sequence of movies taking this short episode as theme (cf Ward 2004). It is often thought that Charles Chauvel’s epic film Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940) began the process, conveying a gripping sense of the wartime experience at a time when the world was preparing for yet another World War. In fact, Forty Thousand Horsemen was not about Gallipoli, but depicted the amazing bravery of the Australian Light Horse in the attack on Beersheba in 1917, two years after the Anzac evacuation. Nevertheless, the film clearly refers to the context of Gallipoli, especially when the Turkish officers try to convince the Germans that the Australians are a dreaded foe who should not be underestimated. The fighting qualities of the soldiers, the strong commitment to each other through the bond of mateship and egalitarianism, and the larrikin qualities which are seen as a lack of discipline by the officers are all evident in Chauvel’s reconstruction.
Although Forty Thousand Horsemen focused on the special qualities of the Australian soldiers, it did not question the legitimacy of the links with Britain. Australians at that time still largely regarded themselves as “British”, not merely in origin but in race. The violent racism of the Federation period remained well into the 1940s. If Australians were able to prevail at Beersheba, it was in some part due to the fact that their enemies were Turks, who were by definition not “white men”, and equally to the fact that their pioneer prowess at surviving in the hostile Australian bush had elevated them above the normal run of the Britishers who were hampered by their hidebound ideas of class and traditional custom. In this depiction, Australians were superior both to “Turks” and to other “white men” including Germans, as well as the British.
During World War Two the Australian film industry was given over mainly to propaganda and documentaries. Among the rare feature films was Charles Chauvel’s The Rats of Tobruk (1944) starring famous Australian actors Chips Rafferty and Peter Finch. Chips Rafferty also starred in The Overlanders (Harry Watt 1946), a British-Australian co-production showing a wartime cattle drive in the north of Australia under the imminent threat of Japanese invasion. This melded the Australians at War theme with the heroic bushman story, triumphing against the threat of an overwhelmingly superior enemy. The link to Britain, with Australians as loyal subjects, remained evident.
Some twenty years later Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli (1981) was considered a cultural event of enormous importance, renewing the meaning of ANZAC for another generation. Mel Gibson played one of the two central roles, beginning his movie career as the epitome of virtuous but defiant Australian masculinity, to be reiterated in his roles in the Mad Max movies until the Hollywood system snatched him away from his Australian purity.
Gallipoli won every major film award and proved enormously successful at the box office. It received Government support and remains a popular resource for teaching High School history. To some extent it must be regarded as an “official” statement of public culture. In Gallipoli new themes can be observed. The enthusiastic militarism evident in Chauvel’s film is replaced by a focus on individual character and the random and meaningless elements of wartime events. The film recounts the greatest failure of the entire campaign, where hundreds of soldiers perished in a few minutes. In many respects it is an anti-war film. War is shown as stupid and pointless, but the moral purity and superior qualities of the Australian heroes are undiminished. The film suggests that the real enemy was the despicable British, whose ineptitude resulted in the disaster that resulted from this phase of the campaign. Although the exercise was futile, the Australians nevertheless undertook it because of their own indomitable courage even in the face of certain defeat. Astute critics noted immediately that the audience was being manipulated into a specific construction of the historical record (eg Lawson 1981 and see further discussion in Reynaud)[7].
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