DARK CITY (1998). Alex Proyas was one of the screenplay writers, and also producer and director for this science fiction film, which was filmed in Fox Studios, Sydney, as well as Los Angeles. Its claim to listing is that it was, in many respects, an Australian film in a genre where few Australians are represented. Critics claim that it goes further than Blade Runner. While Blade Runner extrapolates current trends, Dark City presents a unique vision of dystopia. Starring Rufus Sewell, Jennifer Conwell, Kiefer Sutherland, and William Hurt, the film tells the story of a person’s discovery of the world around him, and the presence of the Strangers, aliens who had come to Earth when their own planet was dying. Memory and its significance in culture play a large part in this film, and Murdoch (Sewell) tries to unravel the bits of reality that lie in tatters in his memories. But these memories might be real, or part of the fabrication of illusion. Proyas creates a realistic world through careful cinematography and mise-en-scene, even though the sense of comic-book, noir-ish characters and sets remains. The film won the Saturn award for best science fiction film, from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films in 1999.
DAVIS, JUDY (1955– ). Like Nicole Kidman and Mel Gibson, for example, Judy Davis has established her reputation as one of the best performers on both the small and wide screens. In the first part of her career in Australia, her rise to stardom parallels the development and maturing of the Australian film industry since the revival. She has been likened to other great character actresses like Bette Davis, and her work is often marked by a sense of tension with directors, but this tension results in performances that are something special. She has a reputation for speaking frankly, as do many of her characters, and performs with passion and genuine artistry. Her ability has been recognized in the numerous accolades that the industry has given her.
Born in Perth, Western Australia, she attended drama school with Gibson in that state, and played in Romeo and Juliet with him, and they both then attended the National Institute of Dramatic Art. She first appeared on the screen in a short film directed and cowritten by Gillian Armstrong, Clean Straw for Nothing (1976). A small part in High Rolling (1977) followed, before she teamed up with Armstrong again in the leading role of the freethinking, strong-willed writer Sybylla Melvyn in the adaptation of Miles Franklin’s novel, My Brilliant Career (1979). In 1981, she won the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) film awards for best newcomer and best actress for this role, and was nominated for best leading actress by the Australian Film Institute (AFI) in 1979.
Continuing to play self-assured and eccentric women, Davis starred in two films directed by Australians. In John Duigan’s The Winter of Our Dreams (1981), she played a prostitute desperate to escape the pincers of a destructive environment, in Hoodwink (1981), the sexually repressed, lay-preachers wife, and in Phillip Noyce’s Heatwave (1983), she played an anarchist urban militant searching out corruption and murder. In 1981, the AFI bestowed two awards on her: best actress in a supporting role for Hoodwink, and best actress in a lead role for The Winter of Our Dreams. Davis’s career was not enhanced greatly by her first international appearance in Who Dares Wins (also The Final Option) (1982), a thriller that does not challenge either cast or audience, but her next role as the repressed Adele Quested in David Lean’s A Passage to India (1984) was the opposite, where she worked with grace, skill, and subtlety in giving life to Adele. As a result, in 1985, she was nominated for an Oscar for best actress in a lead role.
Returning to Australia, Davis played in another brilliant literary role as Harriet Somers, D.H. Lawrence’s wife in Kangaroo (1986) and reunited with Armstrong in High Tide (1987), as a worn-out singer who encounters the daughter she had abandoned as a child. She won another AFI award for best actress in a lead role for this performance. Much of her work since then has been outside Australia, but she has returned on various occasions. First, for Georgia (1988), and then the farcical comedy about an Australian’s romance with Stalin, resulting in a love-child, in Children of the Revolution (1996). More recently, she played alongside Billy Connolly, as Anna Redmond in the comedy—about a battle between the unfeeling insurance corporation and the average person—The Man Who Sued God (2001). In a drama about a swimming family in Queensland, Australia, Swimming Upstream (2003), she played Dora Fingleton, winning another best actress award from the AFI in the process, and adding to that she won for Children of the Revolution. Her work overseas has led her to work with Woody Allen in Alice (1990), Husbands and Wives (1992), Deconstructing Harry (1997), and Celebrity (1998). She worked with the Coen brothers in Barton Fink (1991), and with David Cronenberg in Naked Lunch (1991).
Yet this brief summary of her work in film is only one half of Davis’s oeuvre. She is an accomplished and in-demand performer on television, featuring in television docudramas and series in Australia and overseas that are too numerous to mention here. Suffice to say that her work is applauded in that medium, with five Emmy nominations and two awards, the most recent being for her portrayal of Judy Garland in Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows (2001).
Other films include On My Own (1992), Impromptu (1991), Dark Blood (1993), The Ref (1994), The New Age (1994), Blood and Wine (1996), Absolute Power (1997), Deconstructing Harry (1997), and Gaudi Afternoon (2001).
DEATH IN BRUNSWICK (1991). Based on a novel by Boyd Oxlade and directed by John Ruane, Death in Brunswick is a black comedy of a type not often seen in Australian filmmaking, driven by a narrative of surprising convolutions, and quirky characters who are recognizable as real, or at least one step removed. Carl (*Sam Neill) is a shiftless cook who works by night in a squalid nightclub in the inner-city Melbourne suburb of Brunswick. By day he stays at home with his dominating mother and visits his best friend Dave (*John Clarke), who is, by contrast only, a model of domesticity. However, by a strange twist of fate, Carl is involved in the killing of the Turkish kitchen-hand Mustafa (Nico Lathouris), whom he then has to secretly bury with the help of his grave-digger friend, Dave. Complicating matters is his falling in love with Sophie (Zoë Carides).
DE HEER, ROLF (1951– ). Working in the industry as writer, director, and producer, de Heer has not won many critical fans—except for The Tracker (2002)—although his career, especially in its most recent phase, continues to be worth following. Born in the Netherlands, he moved to Australia in 1959. He cut his directorial teeth in 1984 on two features, the ABC telefeature Thank You, Jack and a children’s film Tail of a Tiger. There followed, in 1988, the underrated Incident at Raven’s Gate (a.k.a. Encounter at Raven’s Gate), a story set in the South Australian outback that traced the effect of aliens (never seen) on a small community. De Heer both wrote and directed this work. In 1991, he made Dingo and followed this in 1993 with Bad Boy Bubby. Depicting the picaresque adventures of an infantile adult, this was a low-budget, almost surreal, presentation of incest and murder. Nevertheless, overlaid with irony and black humor, Bubby produces a strong critique of contemporary Australian society. There followed The Quiet Room (1996), Episolom (a.k.a. Alien Visitor [1997]), Dance Me to My Song (1998), The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2001), The Tracker, and Alexandra’s Project (2003). In general, de Heer has had strong backing from the South Australian Film Corporation and, in recent years, it has been coproductions between the latter and interests from the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere that have financed his films. De Heer himself has usually written and produced these, suggesting that this is a strong creative personality in a classical European auteur tradition.
DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND, THE (1976). Fred Schepisi wrote the script, produced, and directed this autobiographical coming-of-age film that centered on growing up in a Roman Catholic seminary. Like Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), the institution of civilization was set amongst the rural peace of Australia. Yet, within this institution seethed the seemingly unnatural undercurrents of repression and an overlay of evil. The young Tom Allen, who feels for a time a strong sense of vocation, also feels a longing for the freedoms of a changing world outside the seminary, freedoms that are constantly challenged inside the walls by even harsher training. At the same time, the lives of the priests are not depicted as other than men who have fought, or are fighting, their own battles of chastity and obedience. That is, Schepisi does not demonize them.
In 1976, The Devil’s Playground became the first Australian film to be invited to the director’s fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. It won six of the newly established Australia Film Institute (AFI) awards, including best film, best director, best screenplay, and best actor in a lead role (Simon Burke and Nick Tate). The film established Schepisi’s reputation as a director of world standard. See also REVIVAL.
DIMITRIADES, ALEX (1973– ). Dimitriades’s first appearance in film was a starring role as the Greek teenager in The Heartbreak Kid (1993), a coming-of-age story about a high school student falling in love with his teacher. It seemed to herald great success for Dimitriades, and indeed, that success did manifest in lead roles in television series. He was nominated for best actor in the Australian Film Institute awards for the role of Ari in Head On (1998), but further success was not guaranteed. He played in the lamentable comedy Let’s Get Skase (2001), which had little for Dimitriades to work on. The film’s plot centered around an attempt to bring the Australian Gordon Gecko, Christopher Skase, back to stand trial in Australia, where he had fleeced many of their savings through failed investments. A starring role as Conrad followed in the R-rated science fiction thriller Subterano (2002), a German-Australian coproduction about 11 people trapped by remote-controlled toys in an underground car park. He followed this with a supporting role in the uneven Ghost Ship (2002), a horror story about the salvaging of a ship that disappeared in 1962.
DISH, THE (2000). The Dish is the sixth most successful Australian film, earning $18.0 million at the Australian box office. The film won the Film Critics Circle of Australia awards for best music score and best original screenplay in 2001, and the Australian Film Institute nominated it for best film and best original music score in the same year.
Directed by Rob Sitch—who also directed The Castle (1997)—The Dish tells the story of the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969 from a different perspective; that is, the dramas surrounding the transmission of the pictures of the landing using the 110 foot receiving dish installation at Parkes, New South Wales. This dish was the backup for the NASA dish at Goldstone, California. Six hundred million viewers watched this event, but the film relates how the transmission of the moon landing was almost botched through human flaws and the vagaries of Mother Nature. The team at Parkes is led by the quiet and introspective Cliff Buxton (*Sam Neill), with support from the technician Mitch (Kevin Harrington) and plotter Glenn (Tom Long). The NASA liaison person, Al Burnett (Patrick Warburton), helps the team deal with the problems, both actual and contrived for the film, that threaten to prevent the transmission of television pictures to the expectant audience.
DOCUMENTARY. Australian documentary cinema is the sprawling, frequently unrecognized twin of Australian feature film. Like its sibling, it has been present from the birth of filmmaking. Yet, it has tended to flourish while the other languished and vice versa. Of course, this bifurcation of cinema into these two types has been widely recognized. Thus, for example, documentary has been seen to lean toward information and education while the other strives toward entertainment; the one prefers realism while the other verges toward fantasy; the former adopts factualism while the latter employs fiction. Clearly, the actual history of documentary—including its employment in Australia—contradicts these binaries. The 1952 classic, Mike and Stefani, for example, employs a narrative mode of presentation and engages in a fiction of re-creation. Equally, the “father” of British documentary, John Grierson’s formulation of this kind of filmmaking as “the creative treatment of actuality” cautions against too strict an application of a rigid binarism.
Grierson’s name is apposite here not only because of his articulation of an ideology of documentary very influential in Australia but also because of his dramatic intervention in 1940 in the institutional course of Australian documentary cinema. However, to grasp the significance of advice he gave to the Australian government about the present and future of documentary, it is necessary to understand the earlier development of this mode of filmmaking in Australia.
Unlike commercial feature film production, which lacked any state support before the period of the revival, documentary film was early recognized as a mode that easily made itself available to a newly created state committed to developing a centralist ideology and a national identity. To that end, the Australian government employed information/documentary filmmakers from as early as 1901 to record and present various events and activities that further legitimated the state. For example, The Salvation Army Limelight Department was one of the most prolific documentary filmmakers in this period up to 1904, making some 50 films, including The Inauguration of the [Australian] Commonwealth (1901) and Under Southern Skies (1902), the most elaborate film presentation of its time. In 1911, the federal government appointed an official film cameraman and photographer whose purpose it was to produce moving and still images of various aspects of Australia, frequently for purposes of promoting immigration from and sales of agricultural produce to the United Kingdom. In 1919, a permanent unit attached to the Department of Agriculture was established and this in turn became the Cinema and Photographic Branch in 1932. The output of these years up to 1940 has mostly been neglected, although some documentarists, especially Frank Hurley, have provoked critical interest.
Grierson’s 1940 visit to Australia, then, constituted a decisive intervention for reasons of institution and ideology. Sponsored by the Imperial Relations Trust, a body concerned to reaffirm the old bonds of the British Empire, Grierson wrote a report on his visit, offering the Australian government much the same advice that he had recently furnished to those in Canada and New Zealand. Sealing a lid on feature film making, he suggested that Australia should not attempt to compete with or emulate Hollywood. Instead, it should concentrate on the distribution and production of shorter information or documentary films for purposes of presenting the nation to itself and to the rest of the world. At war’s end, the government acted on this advice, following Grierson’s Canadian institutional framework, and reconstituting the existing film bodies as the Australian National Film Board. Some of the successors to Grierson’s initiative are the Commonwealth Film Unit and Film Australia.
Four related points are worth mentioning. First, since the 1950s and, especially the 1960s, documentary film institutions, particularly Film Australia, have come to seem like de facto film schools where young practitioners can learn their craft before moving on to feature film. However, the traffic has not always been one way. Some resolutely remain in documentary while others have moved back to this mode and institutional framework.
Secondly, there is the fact that from the late 1960s onward, television became an important institutional player in this field. Television has become a major source for the exhibition, financing and production of documentary films both for the government production body and for independent companies and individual filmmakers.
Thirdly, over and above these agencies, there have also been other institutional sites of documentary including the Shell Film Unit—responsible for the 1954 classic The Back of Beyond—the Institute of Aboriginal Studies, and the Methodist Overseas Studies. These last two worked in the area of ethnographic film. At the same time, other agencies such as the Waterside Worker’s Film Unit in the 1950s produced a series of films dealing with various aspects of the postwar Australian labor struggle. It is also worth recording some of the distinguished filmmakers who have produced documentaries under the aegis of these and other agencies over the past 50 years. A partial roll call includes Martha Ansara, Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, Ian Dunlop, John Heyer, Cecil Holmes, John Hughes, Joris Ivens, David McDougall, Mike Rubbo, Dennis O’Rourke, and Tom Zubricki.
Finally, it is worth mentioning the stylistic variety found in Australian documentary cinema in these years. The dominant or classic expository mode engages in direct audience addresses, frequently through a narrator whose commentary guides the viewer’s attention and understanding. Limited sound-recording technology until the early 1960s and institutional imperatives ensured that this mode became the preferred style of many hundreds of Australian documentary films. More recently, this type has been complemented by a kind of neoexpository mode that varies the style through softer commentary voices and the interspersion of commentary and on-screen interview. From the late 1960s on, Film Australia also engaged in an observational or direct cinema found, for example, in Changing (1976). A further kind of fracturing of the preferred mode was in God Knows Why but It Works (1975), a more interactive kind of documentary with the interview of subject occurring before the camera. In summary, then, Australian documentary cinema has been responsive to traditions and pressures not only within the field of documentary but also within the twin trajectories of institution and changing technology.
DUNLOP, IAN (1927– ). Born in London in 1927, Ian Dunlop took a BA at Cambridge University. In 1948, he moved to Sydney where he enrolled at the University. However, the degree was cut short and he joined the ABC, working in Sydney, Adelaide, and Canberra. In 1957, he took up a position as production assistant with the Commonwealth Film Unit (CFU), and two years later was assistant director. Meanwhile, his first visit to Central Australia occurred in 1957 to complete the film Balloons and Spinifex on a remote weather station. By this time, with the CFU expanding rapidly, Dunlop was being allowed to specialize in ethnographic film. His first such project concerned the Aboriginal settlement known as Aurukun. Among the films produced between 1962 and 1964 were Five Aboriginal Dances and Dances at Aurukun. In turn, sponsored by the Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Dunlop completed 19 archival films on People of the Australian Western Desert (1966–1969), and a shorter, more popular version titled Desert People (1966). Dunlop organized the CFU-sponsored UNESCO Round Table on ethnographic filmmaking in the Pacific Area in 1967. Australian ethnographic film, including Dunlop’s own work, was received with great acclaim. In turn, for the next meeting in Florence, Dunlop compiled a comprehensive Retrospective Review of Australian Ethnographic Film and toured this around Europe. He made 23 films in the Yirrkala Film Project (1970–1982), and two large cycles of 26 films in the Baruya project in New Guinea, in association with French anthropologist Maurice Godelier. Some of these links suggest the fact that Dunlop has a highly prestigious international reputation in his field while only receiving moderate acclaim in Australia. Hence, for example, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1991. Meanwhile, at home, he gained the Australian Film Institute’s Raymond Longford Award (1968) and the Medal of the Order of Australia in 1986.