EALING STUDIOS. Like other British studios, Ealing suffered a loss of skilled technicians during World War II. At the height of this problem, two thirds of the British film industry’s technicians were on active service; for Ealing, this meant a loss of 50 workers out of a small workforce of approximately 200 (Perry 1981:52). To help remedy the situation, Ealing’s head of production Michael Balcon looked for skilled labor in the British documentary movement, specifically the Crown Film Unit of the Ministry of Information. The most important of these new staff was the producer and director Alberto Cavalcanti, who had worked with Grierson in the 1930s, and later with Harry Watt (director of Night Mail, 1936) at the CFU. Attracted to Ealing by Cavalcani’s growing influence there, Watt joined a pool of new directors who, with other directors fostered from within Ealing’s own ranks, were to form the core of the studio’s subsequent expansion. This group included Watt, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Charles Frend, Alexander Mackendrick, and Robert Hamer (Barr 1977:46–7).
In 1946, Balcon was approached by Jack Baddington, head of the CFU, to look for suitable stories on Australia’s contribution to the war effort. Watt was dispatched to Australia, in the expectation of making a semidocumentary feature along the lines of his first Ealing film, Nine Men (1943). On arrival, he found the Australians already making a film of this type—The Rats of Tobruk—but was pleased to find a suitable story of a less conventional kind; that is, the story of how, in 1942, 100,000 head of cattle were driven from the Northern Territory before the threatened landing and advance south of Japanese forces. The Royal Australian Air Force loaned Ralph Smart to the production, as associate producer. Smart, who had worked in the British film industry in the 1920s, and who later divided his working life between the Australian and British film and television industries, went on to direct Bush Christmas (1947) and—this time for Ealing—Bitter Springs (1950). The Overlanders (1946), starring Chips Rafferty and shot on location in the Australian outback, was a success and convinced Balcon of the feasibility of making features in Australia. The cycle lasted until 1959 and comprised five films: The Overlanders (Watt, 1946), Eureka Stockade (Watt, 1949), Bitter Springs (Ralph Smart, 1950), The Shiralee (Leslie Norman, 1957), and The Siege of Pinchgut (Watt, 1959).
The Overlanders incidental adventures were played out in a spectacularly photographed Australian outback landscape. Audiences in metropolitan Britain were suitably impressed and this image of an Australian frontier was to feed into the postwar marketing of Australia as a land of opportunity. Ealing films like Where No Vultures Fly (Watt, 1951) and West of Zanzibar (Watt, 1954) were filmed in another site of colonial fantasy, South Africa. Other Ealing features—Whiskey Galore (Alexander Mackendrick, 1949) and The Maggie (Mackendrick, 1949)—were set in the comic hinterlands of the Celtic north and west of the British Isles; they had more in common with the charming small community comedies like Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius, 1949) or The Titfield Thunderbolt (Charles Crichton, 1953).
Ealing’s corporate decline stemmed from the increasing irreconcilability of its two main strategies: to make films of an ambitious, patriotic nature that, in Balcon’s words, embodied Britain’s “postwar aspirations” and showed it as a “questing explorer,” and to make “films of a modest nature” (Barr 1977:62–3). By the late 1940s, the American market had begun a love affair with the Ealing comedies that was to exacerbate this strategic instability. Ealing’s Australian venture was never really secure; after its initial success with The Overlanders, its stocks had declined with Eureka Stockade and Bitter Springs. The situation began to become serious when the Federal Government refused to renew the lease on the Pagewood studio that Ealing had equipped at considerable expense, on the grounds that filmmaking was not an essential industry and the leaseholders were, in any case, not Australian residents. The fate of the Australian venture was sealed in 1952 when Balcon dispatched the accountant John Davis to assess its financial viability. Davis had helped Rank—which underwrote Ealing’s finances and distribution deals—restructure in the late 1940s. His report was negative and his personal opinion was that, in any case, “I could never understand why it was considered necessary to make pictures in Australia . . . After all, we in England have four or five modern, well-equipped studios, and nearly 4,000 people employed. We can make all the pictures you [Australians] need” (Perry 1981:148). Ealing went on to film two more features in Australia: The Shiralee (1957) and The Siege of Pinchgut (1959).
EDGERTON, JOEL (1974– ). Joel Edgerton is a graduate of Sydney’s Theatre Nepean. He is an accomplished Shakespearean actor and has worked in the Sydney Theatre Company as well as appearing in a number of popular Australian television series. His film credits include the unstable armed robber Shane Twentyman in A Hard Word (2002), Owen Lars in Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones (2002), Leo in Praise (1998), and Wayne in Erskineville Kings (1999). Other films include Ned Kelly (2003), The Pitch (2002) and as writer, Gate (2000), Sample People (2000), Dogwatch (1999), Bloodlock (1998) (also writer and producer), and Race the Sun (1996).
EFFTEE PRODUCTIONS. Efftee Productions was an optimistic attempt to take advantage of the introduction of sound to Australian cinema, which was to founder under the combined effect both of the Depression and the stranglehold that American distributors had over film exhibition by the 1930s. The finance to launch the company came from Frank Thring Sr. after he had sold his shares in Hoyts cinema chain in the early 1930s. In 1931, the company opened its production facilities in what had formerly been Her Majesty’s Theatre after the latter had been affected by fire. The company’s manager Tom Holt brought the latest in sound production equipment which was installed, complete with staff training, by American Dan Blombard. Thring himself directed all films with the exception of an early two and employed silent veteran Raymond Longford as uncredited assistant. Meanwhile, Efftee also employed the same production team including Alan Mill (sound) and Arthur Higgins (cameraman).
The company was also involved in documentaries produced by Noel Monkman as well as making newsreel inserts. What Efftee aimed at was supplying an exhibition package that included a feature film as well as other items and entertaining novelties. In late 1933, the company moved to a refurbished studio in St. Kilda but the next year saw production halted when release difficulties set in. By 1936, Thring was contemplating a move to Sydney when he died. Without the principal, creditors had no option but to wind up the company.
ETHNIC REPRESENTATION. Since 1788, successive waves of immigration, beginning with the settlement in Australia by convicts and soldiers from England in that year, formed and molded Australian history and culture. These waves of immigrants, over time, displaced those whose ancestors had themselves immigrated into Australia over 50,000 years before.
Free settlers followed slowly the first wave of convicts and their jailers, but the first population explosion occurred in the mid-19th century, when gold was discovered in Australia, attracting people from all over the world, especially those who were employed in shipping. Included in this group were many Chinese people, and the first interethnic tension occurred when the industry was contracting, and the Chinese were content to rework mines thus making a living. This conflict, stemming in part from a belief that Chinese workers would lower the standards for workers in Australia, produced a national xenophobia that found expression in the first law passed by the newly federated Australian nation in 1901, restricting the immigration of people to those of Anglo-Saxon descent through a ubiquitous language test. This policy was relaxed somewhat to allow European refugees from World War II to settle in Australia, and this began an immigration program that, with changes to overall numbers, continues. From 1960, the immigration laws were gradually relaxed so that by 1965 all mention of restrictions on “non-Europeans” was removed.
Given these patterns of immigration, Australia is now a multicultural society, and has policies that reflect that. For many immigrants with non-English speaking backgrounds, learning English may have been difficult; for their children it was much easier, but the downside was that the children tended to move away from the culture of their parents. Many films examine this search for a cultural identity among the sometimes competing cultures found in the broader Australian culture. At the same time, the juxtaposition of these two cultures does not always exhibit an easy acceptance and understanding. Yet such a juxtaposition cannot do other than change both cultures in some way; for example, on one level people from both cultures take parts of the other culture to use and adapt as they see fit.
These issues are represented in films, not always to the benefit of any or both cultures. For example, one of the earliest representations of Chinese people is in A Girl of the Bush (1921), with crude caricatures representing common views of Chinese culture in Australia. These crude caricatures were also found in political cartoons of the period. One ethnic group that did a great deal to open up the outback were people from Afghanistan, who brought camels into Australia. They are represented in The Squatter’s Daughter (1933) in the characters of Jebal Zim, a licensed hawker, and his daughter, Xena, who travel through the outback in a gypsylike caravan selling wares. Costumes and speech assist in establishing identity. Xena is in love with Jimmy, who is the crippled brother of station-owner Jean, and the difficulties of this liaison are a significant element in the narrative of this film.
Later films explore similar issues. Significantly, actors who are from ethnic backgrounds often play in films about different cultures. Alex Dimitriades is one of these, as the son of first generation immigrants from Greece, who grew up in the working class suburb of Earlwood in Sydney. His first film role was in The Heartbreak Kid (1993), which critiques the conservatism and narrowness of middle-class Greek culture, at the same time decrying the bigotry that was a significant element of Australian culture, and that found expression in such terms as “dago” and “wog.” Christina (Claudia Karvan) is a recently graduated school teacher coming to grips with an urge to find the liberation promised to her by the times and culture she lives in, but to do so she has to free herself from the constraints of her Greek parents and the culture they are a part of. Interestingly, she sleeps with her student (Dimitriades), a situation which, if the roles were reversed, would have caused some moral outrage. In Head On (1998), Dimitriades plays a young gay Greek man alienated from the immigrant culture of his parents and their home, but also his own friends. His ethnic and cultural dilemma is vaguely mediated through a rollercoaster of passion, anger, and lust. A film that is similarly violent, Romper Stomper (1992), focused on the anti-Asian racism and profascist skinhead culture of its main protagonist. The chief skinhead, Hando (Russell Crowe), portrays a deep-seated resentment common to those who have little, and he and his thugs violently confront and destroy what they perceive to be the cause of their resentment; namely, Asians and Asian culture.
However, not all films are so violent. Different ethnicities are a source of comedy arising out of the fish-out-of-water situation. They’re a Weird Mob (1966) is a good-humored narrative around the experiences of a recently arrived Italian immigrant, Nino Culotta (Walter Chiari), his working life in the building industry and his romance with his boss’s daughter. Elements of Australian culture are thrown into sharp relief in this examination. Three notable comedies examine cultures in juxtaposition, and the change that each culture causes to the other at this site of contact. Death in Brunswick (1991) is a story about the seedier side of life in working-class Brunswick, an inner-city suburb of Melbourne where many immigrant families settled in the postwar years. In 1970, for example, Brunswick High School counted 26 nationalities in its student population. No hierarchies of culture exist in this film; all are essentially strange. Wog Boy (2000) and Fat Pizza (2003) celebrate, in sometimes bizarre ways in the case of Pizza, the ethnic elements of Australian culture from the perspective of those ethnic elements. Those cultures are undergoing change, but an important element of change is the richness of its product. While Wog Boy pokes fun at the dishonesty in elements of Australian politics, Pizza sends up elements of all cultures. Looking for Alibrandi (1998) is a comedy that follows the lives of three generations of women of Italian-Australian descent, their loves, their dramas, and their family support mechanisms.
Two other films deserve mention. Silver City (1984) dramatizes the experiences of postwar Polish immigrants who were herded into exarmy Nissan huts before being resettled in mainstream Australian cities. The xenophobia, corruption, and bloody-mindedness the film ascribes to most (male) characters is inaccurate, but the film deals with issues that are once again extant in Australia, in the case of refugees who are incarcerated in similar huts behind barbed wire in the Australian desert. Strictly Ballroom (1992) is not generally regarded as being a film about ethnic culture. However, the film looks at the way mainstream Australian culture views immigrant cultures, and the reverse. The film draws on Spanish culture, and while this is generally disregarded as irrelevant, the film does address the common issues of belonging: one’s personal, social and cultural identity, and relationships between generations that may be affected by ethnic backgrounds. The film is an example of the degree to which ethnic difference (and similarity) underpins narratives about Australian culture.
EUROPE. Unlike Asia, which although geographically proximate has only a fleeting screen presence here, Europe (including the United Kingdom) is a permanent, often pervasive element in the Australian film landscape. For the period since the end of World War II, one Australian film, the feature-length documentary Mike and Stefani (1952), forms an obvious reference point, telling about not only the war but also the plight of refugees and the massive immigration drive undertaken by the Australian government immediately after 1945. However, even over and above its narrative concerns, the film—with its reworkings of British documentary and Italian neorealist practices—also signals a rich European cultural and cinematic tradition from which Australia continues to be nourished. One of the important themes of Australian film has been immigration, especially that from Europe, with a large number of government information films produced up to around 1960. Even beyond that, as later series such as The Migrant Experience (1976) disclose, this flood of people from Europe has been a constitutive experience for the contemporary Australian imagination.
One of the first of these documentaries was the comedy Double Trouble (1949), which forced two Australians, ignorant of the linguistic difficulties facing European immigrants, to sample what life might be like in an unidentified European country if they could not speak the language. In turn, by the 1960s, this comedy of the “fish out of water” could give rise to two comedy features looking at the Italian migrant newcomer in They’re a Weird Mob (1966) and the lesser-known Squeeze a Flower (1970). Meanwhile, The Golden Cage (1976) was a more somber take on the same subject, this time tracing the lives of three Turkish migrants in Australia. Yet, another part of this film cycle concerned with first generation European immigrants focused on some of the cultural gaps complicating romantic and marital relationships between immigrant men and women. Thus, for example, two social realist features in this period—Sposerebbo Compaesana Illibata (Girl in Australia) (1971) and Promised Woman (1975)—examined arranged marriages between a migrant and a woman from the old country. However, with growing pluralism in Australian society, the immigrant was no longer a “dago” or “wog” as is evidenced in Kostas (1979). Unlike the figure in Weird Mob who becomes a manual laborer, the Greek hero of the title, although first discovered as a taxi-driver, turns out to be a professional, a trained journalist who ultimately wins the heart of the most ultimate Anglo-Saxon, a rich Toorak divorcee. By the 1980s, the migrant flow from Europe was a thing of the past so that Silver City (1984), set in a migrant camp in 1949, was a bitter-sweet re-creation, a period film, an elegy to this period of massive intake of European peoples and culture.
However, there still remains a cinematic space for other related legacies of World War II in Europe. One of these concerns the second generation European migrant experience in Australia as is exemplified in more recent Australian features such as the romantic drama of The Heartbreak Kid (1993) and the comedy of The Wog Boy (2000) and Fat Pizza (2003). Finally, too, to round out this narrative legacy, mention should be made of two recent features whose generic influences are elsewhere. Father (1989) begins with the Polish holocaust of the Jews and the escape of one young victim. She traces the camp commander to Australia. In the present, Joe Mueller (the great Swedish actor Max von Sydow) is a frail, loving, family figure. Put on trial, the evidence against him is discredited and charges are dropped. However, he then reveals to daughter Anne that he was in fact guilty although he has no remorse for his crime. Meanwhile, by contrast, in Hostage: The Christine Maresch Story (1983), the connection with Europe proves to be contemporary. A German neo-Nazi, Walter Maresch, on the run in Australia, tricks new wife Christine into returning with him to Germany. There he exposes his involvement with the neo-Nazis and forces his wife into bank robbery to support the political ambitions of the group. There is further trouble for the two in Turkey and they return briefly to Australia only to have Walter again attempt to return to Germany, this time by sailboat.
Even beyond this subject and narrative legacy from Europe, there also exists another tradition to do with the lasting cultural repertoire that Europe makes available to Australian artists, including its filmmakers. Breakfast in Paris (1982) is a romantic comedy although while set in Europe owes more to the genre of romantic comedy found in both British and Hollywood films rather than in Europe. On the other hand, there are others such as Devil in the Flesh (1989), set in Paris, based on a French novel that had been made already into both a French and an Italian film. At this level also might be included Esben Storm’s In Search of Anna (1979). The latter is deliberate in its references to the traditions of the European art film, most especially Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), which concerned another missing woman called Anna.
To complete this account of contact between Australian and European cinemas, mention should be made of the particular instance of filmmakers with a distinctly European outlook and their Australian films. Thus, on the one hand, there are several Australian directors with what might be called a European sensibility. The best known and most prolific is Paul Cox. Hailed in the Netherlands as a Dutch filmmaker although often working in Australia, his is the most distinct and consistent cinematic workings in the European art film tradition, resulting in a steady stream of films, including Illuminations (1976), Inside Looking Out (1977), Man of Flowers (1983), My First Wife (1984), Cactus (1986), Island (1989), Golden Braid (1990), Exile (1994), Molokai: The Story of Father Damien (1999), and The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky (2001). Another in the same mold, although more interested in abstract questions and issues in the tradition of Werner Hertzog is Ian Pringle. He has written and directed three notable features. The Plains of Heaven (1982) is an ambiguous essay in metaphysics inscribed inside a narrative depicting two men coping both as they man a tracking station and when they return to city life. The Prisoner of St. Petersburg (1988) concerns an Australian who has ended up in Berlin after failing to discover his dream city of prerevolution St. Petersburg. More recently, Isabelle Eberhardt (1992) a French Australian coproduction, concerns a young Frenchwoman’s adventures in North Africa around 1900, examining a host of social and political issues in its complex narrative including political manipulation, colonization, intercultural conflict, and an inner search for peace.
Finally, mention should also be made of three films made in Australia concerning local subjects by visiting European auteurs. Werner Hertzog’s Where the Green Ants Dream (1984) explores a clash of culture between Aborigines and whites. Dusan Makajeve’s The Cocoa Cola Kid (1985) based on short stories by Frank Moorehouse details a comic clash of culture, this time between the American figure of the title and Australian bureaucrats and bohemians. Meanwhile, Wim Wenders Until the End of the World (1992) trips across four continents with a central figure who wants to make his blind mother see. In summary, then, Europe has been a fertile source and inspiration as far as Australian cinema in the past half century is concerned. See also ETHNIC REPRESENTATION.
EVIL ANGELS (ALSO A CRY IN THE DARK) (1988). Director Fred Schepisi returned to Australia to make this film, which was based on a true story about the disappearance and assumed death of Azaria Chamberlain. The 10-week old baby was taken and killed by dingoes at Uluru, the world’s largest rock, Aboriginal sacred site, and tourist destination in central Australia. Flawed forensic evidence was used to convict the mother, Lindy Chamberlain (Meryl Streep) and husband Michael (*Sam Neill) of murder. After inquiries and further evidence, the two were found not guilty and released. The trial was a saga in Australian cultural history. Rumors of child sacrifice and obscure religious practices, the seeming coldness of Lindy, the disbelief that dingoes could carry off children, and the site of the event produced a cacophony of interest in the media, which both obscured the truth and finally pressed for its uncovering.
Evil Angels was critically applauded both in Australia and overseas. In 1989, it was nominated for four Golden Globes including best director and best picture–drama. Schepisi was nominated for a Golden Palm, and Streep won the best actress award at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival. In the same year, the film was nominated for three Australian Film Institute awards and won five: best actor (Neill), best actress (Streep), best director, best film, and best adapted screenplay. In addition, Streep was nominated for an Oscar for best leading actress.
EVISON, PAT. See entry in New Zealand section.