ABORIGINES AND FILM. Aboriginal history is a history of the conquered, and contains all the elements that appear in such histories, including stories of brutality, rape, and murder, generally on the part of the conqueror, and sometimes enacted by the conquered. Historians and cultural critics argue the extent of such maltreatment, and no clear consensus is apparent. The films where Aborigines appeared or starred reflect, through a glass darkly, different elements of their stories. Aborigines appeared only rarely in the first 70 years of Australian film. Early documentaries explore Aboriginal culture ethnographically, creating a sense of otherness and strangeness, from which the viewer may have drawn conclusions about the ability of that culture to survive in a Social Darwinist universe. In silent films such as Robbery under Arms (1907) and Dan Morgan (1911), Aborigines were the sidekicks of white protagonists, exhibiting contemporary “qualities” of loyalty and subservience. They were white actors in blackface, a tradition that continued in various films up to 1967, in Journey out of Darkness. The films included Australian and United Kingdom coproductions by Ealing studios such as The Overlanders (1946) and Bitter Springs (1950). The narrative of the latter film prefigures, in a general sense, the land rights debates of the 1990s, as it is a story about the conflict between white settlers and Aborigines over a limited water supply.
Charles Chauvel’s Uncivilised (1936) was a clumsy film about race and desire, while Jedda (1955) was a much more effective film in its representation of Aboriginal culture and the juxtaposition with white culture. As well as being the first Australian color film, this was the first to feature Aborigines in leading roles, and was significant for its exploration of issues surrounding assimilation and integration of Aboriginal people into the particular white culture depicted in the film. The film deals with these questions in a balanced way, while the tragic finale has its seeds in that balance. Jedda was the first Australian film exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival.
Since the revival, Aborigines have had more and diverse treatments. Directors who have gained an international reputation—for example, Charles Chauvel, Peter Weir, Phillip Noyce—have often returned to, or sometimes began their careers with, films featuring Aboriginal actors and focused on Aboriginal issues as a kind of interrogation of their understanding of the treatment of the indigenous people of Australia.
Weir’s The Last Wave (1977) exhibits elements of the supernatural, the surreal, that infuse his early work. Here, Aboriginal spirituality generates the supernatural strangeness that provides the film’s coherence, rather than the usual classical style of linear narrative. Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1978) retells events in 1901—significantly, the year that the separate states federated to become the Commonwealth of Australia. Both the traditional Aboriginal community and the white community reject a part-Aborigine, and the white community’s rejection of him because of his race results in an explosion of hatred and violence. The reality of the rejection and dehumanizing of a person based on color, and its consequences, are Schepisi’s concern in this film. With a similar realism, Bruce Beresford’s The Fringe Dwellers (1986) is a serious narrative that does not romanticize Aboriginal culture. Rather, the film portrays Aboriginal culture as complex, contradictory, and essentially human, through a story of the life of an adolescent daughter within a family, which is part of an Aboriginal community in a camp or settlement on the outskirts of a country town in northern Australia. Few whites appear in this film; rather it is a story about the effect of the juxtaposition of cultures, from an Aboriginal perspective as seen by Beresford.
Noyce made two films, Backroads (1977) and Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002). Backroads explores the matrices of race, class, and gender through the story of two fringe-dwelling Aborigines and a white itinerant, who is racist and sexist, but like the Aborigines Gary and Joe, is a social misfit, abandoned by his tribe. The film explores the commonalities, differences, and outgrowths resulting from this juxtaposition of character and culture. Rabbit-Proof Fence is an award-winning film derived from a true story in the period of Australian history when bureaucrats removed part-Aboriginal children from their parents and resettled them in institutions where they could learn the ways of white society, and learn a menial role that would enable them to survive in that society. The film is a narrative about the indomitableness of the human spirit, in this case, in three Aboriginal girls who escape from such an institution to return to their mothers deep in outback Australia. The film romanticizes Aboriginal culture while portraying white culture as essentially evil, and while ascribing positive motivations to Aboriginal characters and culture, the film ascribes negative motivations to white characters. As in Rabbit-Proof Fence, Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker (2002) has David Gulpilil once again playing the part of the tracker, this time in a lead role, and now on the trail of a murderer rather than escaped girls. The characters have no names, only roles, and the film’s plot derives from the confluence and shuddering interaction of the Tracker with the Fanatic, the Veteran, the Follower, and the Fugitive, leaving the non-Aboriginal Australian viewer with a sense of shame about the history of the relationship between Aboriginal people and white people. The last scenes, however, remove any sense of guilt and points to a different future.
Other recent films are less successful in their reconstruction of history and culture. Black and White (2002) is based on a true story of the trial and appeal of a part-Aborigine accused of the rape and murder of a young girl in the 1950s (see NGOOMBUJARRA, DAVID). Australian Rules (2002) is a simplistic story with good characters comprising all Aborigines, bad characters comprising all white adult fathers, victims (of white men) comprising white women, and children. As a result of such stereotyping, the film loses any credibility as an interrogation of the issues of relations between Aborigines and others in Australia.
Two films have popularized Aboriginal characters for international audiences: Crocodile Dundee (1986) and Crocodile Dundee II (1988). Dundee is a popular, mainstream comedy that constructs an Aboriginal character, Nev, in the same mould as other, non-Aboriginal people; that is, he participates in a traditional ceremony—a corroboree—because his parents expect it. He subverts the stereotype of the “noble savage,” revealing instead a cosmopolitan, nonromantic character. Paul Hogan played Crocodile Dundee and David Gulpilil played Nev. The Aboriginal character Charlie in Crocodile Dundee II is less significant to the narrative, because Mick Dundee attempts to speak on behalf of Aborigines, voicing a particular position about the contemporary and controversial issue of land claims.
Recently, Aboriginal filmmakers have made films like the documentary Black Chicks Talking (2001). Brendan Fletcher and Leah Purcell record the lives of five Aboriginal women who are not accepting the victim stereotype, but who are carving their lives into the totem of contemporary Australia.
While filmmakers wrestle with issues concerning the juxtaposition of Aboriginal culture with Australian-European culture, on the level of the film industry, Aboriginal actors appear to suffer from lower remuneration than others. For example, Gulpilil reportedly earned only US$6,500 playing the role of Nev in Crocodile Dundee.
Other films are Walkabout (1971), Eliza Fraser (1976), Storm Boy (1976), Journey among Women (1977), Maganinnie (1980), Wrong Side of the Road (1981), We of the Never Never (1982), Backlash (1986), Deadly (1992), and Blackfellas (1993).
See also ADAPTATIONS.
ACTION/ADVENTURE. Action/adventure is one of the broadest generic classifications, and contains films where the Australian twist or characteristic is quite evident as the grounding of the narrative. The term “action-adventure” suggests a number of qualities about masculinity common to this group of films. These include a propensity for physical action; in recent times—and budget permitting—of spectacular special effects; narratives including fights, chases, and explosions; and acting performances that include physical feats and stunts. The Mad Max trilogy, especially The Road Warrior (1981) and Beyond Thunderdome (1985), is the quintessential example of the genre since the revival. In turn, patterns of action and character relationships link these representative elements. Like the romance of medieval literature, a protagonist either has or develops great and special skills and overcomes insurmountable obstacles in extraordinary situations to successfully achieve some desired goal, usually the restitution of order to the world invoked by the narrative. Whether it is driving a mob of cattle across Australia in The Overlanders (1946) or the duels in The Matrix (1999), the protagonists confront human, natural, or supernatural forces that have improperly assumed control over the world and, in many cases, eventually defeat them. In some instances they do not, as in Ned Kelly (2003) and Gallipoli (1981).
The earliest action/adventure films involved bushrangers. The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) makes some claim to being the world’s first feature length movie. Its subject, Ned Kelly, is a national icon, reflected in the fact that seven films have been made about the gang. The penultimate Ned Kelly (1970) starred Mick Jagger, but this did not help the film to achieve any success. Many other films portrayed bushrangers sympathetically, as resourceful, brave and chivalric; few were unsympathetic. Because of this sympathetic portrayal, the New South Wales Police requested the state censors ban such films, to which that body agreed in 1912. The excision of a likely 30 percent of the potential audience was a powerful disincentive to the production of more films of the genre, and production stopped until the 1950s.
Films about convicts were a symbolic catharsis of the new nation coming to grips with a past that was somewhat disreputable. For the Term of His Natural Life (1908) ushered in a genre of melodrama that centered on the trials and tribulations of convicts transported to Australia. The convicts were generally innocent, or shown to be acting with the highest motives, such as saving the lives of their families, even if their act contravened the law.
Another action/adventure subgenre of early Australian filmmaking was the “new chum” films. Few films still exist, yet they were significant before World War II. The new chum genre is recycled in the films of other countries; in the Australian manifestation new arrivals to Australia, generally from the aristocracy in the United Kingdom, arrive in outback Australia filled with the cultural baggage of superiority that was no longer appropriate in egalitarian Australia. Manners of speech and other reflections of an English class system are lampooned, and the unfortunate “new chum” undergoes a series of humiliating incidents that serve to show the need for a different set of behaviors in the new country. In the end, the Englishman is changed by the frontier and becomes a “real” person, like those already inhabiting the film. Filmmaker Franklyn Barret made the first of these films, The Life of a Jackaroo (1913), with others following with at least 10 films. The send-up of the monocled English twit in The Adventures of Algy (1925) is recycled as “Pommy bashing” in later films, such as The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), My Brilliant Career (1979), Gallipoli (1981), and Breaker Morant (1980). None of these later films could be classified as “new chum” films; however, the dislike of the Englishman is a theme, an element of narrative, rather than a generic marker as some of the films are comedies, such as The Adventures of Barry McKenzie.
An early subgenre closely associated with the bush—related to those genres described above—involved mates and larrikins. Antiauthoritarianism is arguably a strong thread in Australian culture, and the working-class larrikin is a distinctly Australian character, enshrined in film in The Sentimental Bloke (1919). For the larrikin, vulgarity was the defense against pretension, exhibited in the ocker films of the 1970s such as Stork (1971) and The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972). Although Wake in Fright (1971) showed the excesses and dark undercurrents in this larrikinism, Sunday Too Far Away (1975) explored the mateship and unique unionism of the shearing sheds of the 1950s. The democratic, egalitarian, larrikin bushman became the digger in war films like Charles Chauvel’s Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940), Breaker Morant, Gallipoli, and, to a lesser extent, The Lighthorsemen (1987), which focused on the experiences of four participants in the mythic Charge of the Light Brigade.
Not all films of the early period were concerned with the new settlers alone. A corpus of films explored the earlier settlers, the Aborigines, and interrogated the stresses and consequences of two cultures grinding in juxtaposition. As one would expect, the narrative arguments adopted by the films over time have changed considerably. Charles Chauvel made Uncivilised (1936) and Jedda (1955), Ealing studios co-produced The Overlanders and Bitter Springs (1950), which was the first film to deal seriously with the question of land rights. Since the revival of the 1970s, films dealing with this cultural dislocation and its consequences been made regularly and will continue to be made until the issues are resolved. These films include The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1978), Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002), and The Tracker (2002).
The plots in recent Australian action/adventure films are usually episodic, allowing for wide variations in tone, the inclusion of different locations and incidentally introduced characters, and moments of spectacle, generally involving fights, explosions, or other types of violence. Even where locations are restricted, the control of space and the ability to move freely through space or from one space to another is always important. Indeed, given the budgetary limitations that are generally placed on the genre in its Australian adaptation, the hero is defined as much by his physical expressiveness as by his heroic deeds. Although most Australian films that fall into the category of action/adventure appear to accept its characteristic emphasis on white male mastery, several of the more interesting qualify and modify such assertions. Crocodile Dundee (1986), for example, deliberately slips into comedy and parody such as to interrogate this kind of myth. Similarly, Shame (1987) also inverts the gendering by making the protagonist a very capable woman who, in terms of ingenuity, skill, and intelligence, is able to meet the more brutal forms of masculinity that come her way. Finally, too, Razorback (1984) also engages in parody pitting the protagonists against a monster that is so gigantic that it constitutes a parody and caricature of more serious action/adventure films.
As suggested in passing above, the action and adventure genre is well represented in Australian filmmaking. However, two factors militated against Australian work in action/adventure as currently defined. The first of these is budgetary. For the most part, unless there is substantial international production finance available, Australian producers are unable to afford the high cost special effects spectacle and mise-en-scene available elsewhere. Secondly, Australian government sources of film finance, often aided by film critics, have not looked on this genre with approval until recently (see FILM FINANCE CORPORATION). Thus, work in other genres including the period/soft art film and social realism gained greater cultural legitimacy even if audiences often stayed away. Nevertheless, despite these handicaps, Australian film producers have shown a distinct capacity to work in this most international of film genres, and the new commercial imperatives of the Film Finance Corporation give such films a greater chance of receiving funding. These factors probably account for the fact that there have been no intensive cycles of production. Rather, most of the later films that conform to the type have been produced as one-offs; the singular exceptions are those of the Mad Max trilogy and the Man from Snowy River quartet.
Historically and in the period of the revival, then, Australian film history is dotted with examples of the action/adventure films. The period since 1970 also includes others that conform to the type including at least one swashbuckler, The Pirate Movie (1981). More to the point is the fact that the genre in Australia also includes a good deal of overlap and hybridism with other genres. Thus, for example, part of the genius of Crocodile Dundee is its ability to balance and reconcile the generic demands of action/adventure, comedy, and romance.
ADAPTATIONS. While film has become the dominant mode of storytelling in the 20th and early 21st centuries, much of the material for the stories is adapted from written sources, particularly the novel. Australian films draw on both literary and popular novels, and occasionally plays and poems, to provide the raw material for the narratives of film. This tradition is long embedded in the industry: Rolf Boldrewood’s novel Robbery under Arms had wide and enduring appeal, and five films with this title have been made, from 1907 to 1985. While the films depicted the bushranging life in some detail, Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life wove a story around the life of a convict transported to New South Wales, and was the basis for three feature films from 1908 to 1927. These history-based novels captured significant elements of early Australian life, and the narratives of bushranging and convict life have been noteworthy themes in Australian filmmaking (see also GENRE). Other elements of country life, such as the events that comprised the life of simple farming families on small farms, or “blocks” (selections), and the comedy that arises from interactions of such characters are significant chapters in the Australian legend. The characters, plots, and locations from Steele Rudd’s stories were the basis for the “Dad and Dave” series of films: Dad and Dave Come to Town (1938), Dad Rudd, M.P. (1940), and Dad and Dave: On Our Selection (1995).
Novels were not the only source for early Australian film. Comic strip characters such as Fatty Finn found motion picture life in The Kid Stakes (1927), as did Ginger Meggs. In addition, popular poetry, especially long narrative poems, has been a rich lode for Australian film. The feature film The Sentimental Bloke (1919) drew on the series of popular poems, The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke by C.J. Dennis, for characters and narratives. Other versions were made in 1932, 1968, and 1982, suggesting the enduring attraction of the narrative over time. Bush poet A.B. “Banjo” Paterson wrote one of the most popular poems in the Australian legend, The Man from Snowy River. George Miller turned this into an internationally successful commercial film in 1982, where he combined the narrative of the poem with traditional dramas of love and action in a high-country, western environment (see MAN FROM SNOWY RIVER). Occasionally, plays have been used as the source of films. John Powers wrote the play from which The Last of the Knucklemen (1979) was derived.
Before the revival, the relatively few films that emerged from the industry continued to draw on print sources. D’Arcy Niland’s novel was the basis for Ealing studio’s production of The Shiralee (1957), a quite topical story of adultery, divorce, child custody arguments, and the adventures of an itinerant country worker and his daughter. New possibilities for an Australian film industry arose in the 1970s, and an obvious source of Australian material lay in the novels and plays—popular and literary, historical, and contemporary—about Australian life and characters. One of the first films of the revival, Wake in Fright (1971), was based on a Kenneth Cook novel. Stork (1971), another film about aspects of the Australian male character, was based on the David Williamson play, The Coming of Stork. Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), based on Joan Lindsay’s novel, was a counterpoint to the masculine focus of other films of the time, and was grounded in a literary tradition, firmly ensconced in an artfully reworked past, and defined by tales of gentility. Picnic catapulted the Australian film industry into national and international markets.
It was followed by other period films where any critique was muted and placed in a gentler past. That subject of that past is often the coming-of-age, or maturing, of the character, a theme that is relatively common in this phase of the Australian industry. Colin Thiele’s children’s novels were the basis for Storm Boy (1976) and Blue Fin (1978); Henry Handel Richardson’s novel was adapted for Bruce Beresford’s The Getting of Wisdom (1977), and Colin McKie’s novel was the source of The Mango Tree (1977). Elizabeth O’Connor wrote the novel that gave rise to The Irishman (1978), while Gillian Armstrong’s feminist film My Brilliant Career (1979) came from a Miles Franklin novel. Sumner Locke Elliott’s novel about the life of a young boy caught in a custody battle between two diametrically opposed aunts was the source for Careful, He Might Hear You (1983). Peter Carey’s novel Bliss was the source for the 1985 film of the same name, and more recently, Gillian Armstrong directed the US-Australian coproduction of Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1998). Although Carey wrote about Ned Kelly, the latest version of the legend, Gregor Jordan’s Ned Kelly (2003) was based on Robert Drewe’s Our Sunshine.
Less literary, but nonetheless popular, novels transmogrified into films from the same time. Bruce Beresford directed the adaptation of the novel by Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey, Puberty Blues (1981). Ken Cameron’s Monkey Grip (1982) arose from Helen Garner’s novel. In the same year, Peter Weir’s adaptation of C.J. Koch’s novel, The Year of Living Dangerously, launched his international career as a director. The comedy Death in Brunswick (1991) arose out of a novel by Boyd Oxlade.
Novels by non-Australian authors have provided the screenplays for films made in Australia. Tim Burstall adapted D.H. Lawrence’s novel about Australia, Kangaroo, into a film of the same name in 1986. Dead Calm (1989), directed by Phillip Noyce, starring Nicole Kidman and *Sam Neill, and filmed by Dean Semler, was an adaptation of a novel by American author Charles Williams.
Novels about the juxtaposition of Aboriginal and white cultures have reached a wider audience on the silver screen. The confronting and violent Fred Schepisi film about an Aboriginal man’s attempt to come to terms with white society, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1978), was based on Thomas Keneally’s novel of the same name. Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) was based on the book by Doris Pilkington Garimara. Phillip Gwynne wrote the novel Deadly Unna, made into Australian Rules (2002).
The narratives and themes of Australian cultural history, initially limited to a reading audience, have been recycled as visual narrative, ensuring their enduring presence within that history.
ADVENTURES OF PRISCILLA: QUEEN OF THE DESERT, THE (1994). Priscilla is the eighth most popular film at the Australian box office, grossing $16.5 million to January 2003. Directed by Stephan Elliott, the film relates the adventures of an aging transsexual (Terence Stamp) and two drag queens (Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce) on their way to a gig in central Australia. Priscilla is the name they give to the bus, which is their home and mode of transport from Sydney through the desert—both geographically and culturally—to Alice Springs. As in all road movies, trouble ghosts their passage as they battle the outback environment and human cultural differences. Cinematographer Brian Breheny revels in the color and big sky isolation of the outback dunes and hills. The spectacular scenery is matched by the spectacular, gaudy, and overwhelming costumes; yet while the scenery is spectacular in its emptiness and desolation, the costumes are spectacular for their riotous, contrasting color. Shots of the bus speeding along dirt tracks to the sounds of classical music as Guy Pearce sits atop a stiletto-throne with yards of silver fabric trailing behind him contrast dramatically with the subdued outback tones, mirroring the cultural rift that exists between this flamboyant minority group and the strong but straight people of the Australian outback. Priscilla is not just a diatribe about the characters of straight Australia: the film explores the nature of love on the one hand; on the other, it is a high-camp display of bitchiness and excess.
Costume design won the film an Oscar and a BAFTA award in 1995 and an Australian Film Institute (AFI) award in 1994. In 1994, the film was nominated for seven AFI awards, including best film, best director, and best actor for both Stamp and Weaving. BAFTA nominated Priscilla for four awards, including best actor (Stamp) and best screenplay.
ALISON, DOROTHY (1925–1992). Alison was born in New South Wales, and appeared in Eureka Stockade (1949) and Sons of Matthew (1949). To further her career, she traveled to the United Kingdom, appearing in Mandy (1952) and Reach for the Sky (1956), as Douglas Bader’s nurse. On returning to Australia, she played in the minor films Two Brothers Running (1988), Rikky and Pete (1988), and Malpractice (1989). Her tenderness and sincerity underpinned her characters, especially Lindy Chamberlain’s mother in Evil Angels (1988).
ALVIN PURPLE (1973). Alvin Purple—touted accurately as the “Ocker smut classic!”—was a significant production in the Australian film industry for two reasons. First, it was the most successful film at the Australian box office between 1971 and 1977. Second, it was, arguably, the most significant film in the ocker cycle of films that emerged and then fell from favor in the first half of the 1970s. The film was popular in part because it reflected and defined the Australian male’s attitude and wish-fantasies about sex, which made the film a soft-core porn film without it degenerating into the category of the straight porn that was to come later. Although he just wants to live the quiet normal life of suburbia, Alvin (Graeme Blundell) is constantly pursued by girls who cannot refrain from offering themselves to him, or ravishing him. As a normal man, wanting both to respond to a request from a woman—no matter what the request—and to respond as a sexual being, there is little choice for Alvin. His psychiatrist, Dr. Liz Sort, has a voracious sexual appetite, and as the only authority figure in the film, she plays a large part in his final downfall.
The film was the third directed by Tim Burstall and paved the way for Australian films being accepted by mainstream distributors and exhibitors. Distributors Village Roadshow formed a partnership with Burstall after his success with his previous ocker film, Stork (1971), in order to profit from Alvin’s marketing in mainstream cinemas, but also to show the other funding bodies, the state funded bureaucracies, that they were not averse to supporting the local industry. Unfortunately though for Village Roadshow, Alvin was one of the last of the cycle. A tidal wave of influence arising from both a backlash to this kind of humor and stereotyping of men, women, and the relationships between them, and some embarrassment at the representation of Australians, forced funding bodies to change the criteria for funding, resulting in the rise of the art and period film. Doubtless though, the ocker cycle made possible the success of later cycles in establishing that Australian films would draw audience and critical attention, both domestically and overseas.
ANGEL BABY (1995). Like Shine (1996), Angel Baby deals with the effect of mental illness on those who suffer from it, and their families. Unlike Shine though, this film did not find a US distributor, possibly because there is no uplifting denouement; rather, the raw and jagged lives are not relieved. The schizophrenic Harry (John Lynch), becomes attracted to a new client, Kate (Jacqueline McKenzie), at the psychiatric outpatient facility he attends and, after some tentative meetings, they fall in love. Their feelings are powerful and intense, and while they believe that love can overcome anything—even their need for medication—it is clear that the reality is far less auspicious and doom is impending. Colin Friels plays Harry’s brother and Deborra-Lee Furness his sister-in-law. Although unsuccessful at the box office in Australia and overseas, the film won six Australian Film Institute (AFI) awards in 1995, including best film, best director (Michael Rymer), best lead actress (McKenzie), and best original screenplay (Rymer).
ANNIE’S COMING OUT (1984). Based on a true story written by the central figure, this feature is one of the very few commercial ventures produced by the government documentary production company, Film Australia. Also known as A Test of Love, it stars Angela Punch McGregor as Jessica and Tina Arhondis as Annie. The story concerns the protracted attempt to allow a disabled, deaf and dumb young woman to live in the community. This “coming out” is achieved mainly through the efforts of Jessica, a sympathetic teacher. However, over and above human effort, the film is also symptomatic of its time in terms of its emphasis on the central role of communication in this process. Thus, Annie’s Coming Out divides into three sections. First Jessica teaches Annie to use her tongue to say “yes” and “no.” At an art gallery, Jessica senses the girl’s intelligence when Annie responds to a caricature. In turn, she then learns how to spell, using the latter’s body as instrument. As Jessica realizes Annie’s intelligence, the film moves into its second phase wherein the teacher attempts to have Annie released from the hospital into her care. Gradually convincing some others of Annie’s intelligence, Jessica still faces bureaucratic obstruction and refusal. However, in a third stage of the film, the matter goes to court in an appeal against Annie’s incarceration. She is tested twice by the judge and passes. Jessica is able to take her out of the hospital, which was closed subsequently, and the children were placed in special homes in the community. Overall, then, Annie’s Coming Out can be seen as part of a pluralist discourse about Australian society. Just as women, gays, and others have come out in the past 30 or so years, so too have the disabled, as human beings entitled to the same respect and dignity as others.
ARMSTRONG, GILLIAN (1950– ). Gillian Armstrong was one of the wave of filmmakers that included Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford, and Fred Schepisi to begin their career in the early days of the revival. She was also the only woman to come to the fore at this time. Born in 1950 in Melbourne, she graduated from the film school at Swinburne Institute of Technology, completing the short The Roof Needs Mowing in 1971. In turn, she was a student in the first interim intake at the newly constituted Australian Film Television and Radio School in Sydney in 1973. There she cut her directorial teeth on One Hundred a Day (1973) and The Singer and the Dancer (1974). The fact that both of these short films were adaptations of literary sources—short stories by Alan Marshall—was a clue to what was to be a recurring feature of her career, the literary basis of a significant number of her feature films. However, before moving to features, she directed the documentary study of young teenage girls in Adelaide, Smokes and Lollies (1976). Finally, after several years in preparation, she and producer Margaret Fink brought Miles Franklin’s classic Australian novel My Brilliant Career to the screen in 1979 to much critical and popular acclaim.
The film launched Armstrong’s career on the international stage and highlighted her capacity to work with women here including writer Elinor Whitcomb and later producers Sandra Levy and Jan Chapman and writers Laura Jones and Helen Garner. Now began a flow of important works from Armstrong. These included a follow-up to the earlier documentary that picked up the real life story of the Adelaide teenage women some four years later—14’s Good, 18’s Better (1981)—and Australia’s only feature musical of the 1980s, the underrated Star Struck (1982). By then, Armstrong was in Hollywood undertaking her first feature there, Mrs. Soffel (1984). However, despite this successful career move, Armstrong did not abandon her roots. Indeed, she remained interested in documentary as was evidenced by Bob Dylan in Concert (1986) and, most especially, two further follow-ups to the true-life “diary” type portraits of the young Adelaide women, Bingo, Bridesmaids and Braces (1988), and Not 14 Again (1996). Moving backward and forward across the Pacific, she survived the “10BA” period, where her oeuvre included Hightide (1987). Films produced under the reign of the Film Finance Corporation included The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992) and the less than glorious Oscar and Lucinda (1996), the latter under producer Chapman based on the novel by Peter Carey. Meanwhile in Hollywood there have been a string of films, most notably Fires Within (1991) and Little Women (1994). Altogether, Gillian Armstrong is a giant in the landscape that is Australian cinema. Equally at home with period settings and modern subjects, she shows herself to have a special affinity and insight into the plight of her women characters and figures, not only as single subjects but also in their intergenerational relationships. Not surprisingly she has been highly important in the screen career of several actors including Judy Davis, Claudia Karvan, and Cate Blanchett, as well as *Sam Neill.
ART AND PERIOD FILMS. The first films of the revival—that is, those released between 1970 and 1973—were the ocker comedies like Stork (1971), The Adventures of Barry Mackenzie (1972), and Alvin Purple (1973), which celebrated the more vulgar side to an alleged typical “Australianness.” These films had financial success at home and were popular overseas, and thus pointed the way to the possibility of a revived Australian film industry. However, critics and the relatively new federal and state government funding bodies were less than enamored; their desire was that Australian films would represent Australia as a sophisticated place with manners and a style that approximated the best European traditions. A review of government financial assistance in 1975 changed the criteria for that assistance, so that commercial success was no longer as important as the ability of the films to act as cultural lighthouses; to generate some form of cultural capital (Turner 1989: 99–101). Thus, over the next five years, approval for financing was given to films that had a distinctive visual and narrative style, and such films became known as the “AFC genre” (Australian Film Commission genre) because of this favoritism.
The model for emulation was the European art film, but the stories were often sourced from literary novels. The films were set in the past, they highlighted Australianness through re-creations of history and the representation of landscapes, they were lyrically and beautifully shot, with many long, atmospheric takes, and they avoided direct action or sustained conflict. Key films include Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Donald Crombie’s Caddie (1976), Bruce Beresford’s The Getting of Wisdom (1977), Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979), and Phillip Noyce’s Newsfront (1978). Other films include Between Wars (1974), Ken Hannam’s Sunday Too Far Away (1975) and Break of Day (1976), Mad Dog Morgan (1975), Fred Schepisi’s The Devil’s Playground (1976) and The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1978), Tim Burstall’s Eliza Fraser (1976), The Mango Tree (1977), Journey among Women (1977), Raw Deal (1976), The Picture Show Man (1976), and Crombie’s The Irishman (1978). Thus, although not always given the status of a genre, the art film in Australian cinema history assumes an importance that makes a separate generic title appropriate.
At the edges of the spectrum, art films have elements in common with both the classical Hollywood cinema and the modernist films of Europe. Generally though, they do not have the same fixation with cause-effect linkages of events that the classical narrative has. Nevertheless, the art film is realistic, in that its characters are psychologically complex, and the problems that it addresses are real problems of alienation, of lack of communication, for example. In the art film, the author becomes a formal component, the consciousness that constructs and composes the film, which is then presented to the audience for consideration. Thus, the films often have authorial codes, and the audience asks questions like: who is telling this story? How is the story being told? Why is the story being told this way? (Bordwell 1979: 57). A further property of the art film is ambiguity, leading to an open-ended narrative, so that the story often lacks a clear-cut resolution. Mysticism, or some kind of supernatural presence, is often a key element of art cinema and, in the Australian version, the characterization of Aborigines suggests a mystical strain, rather than the more common social realist perspective. The camera too becomes significant in the narrative, using techniques to suggest themes and moods. For example, in The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, the camera work suggests containment, entrapment, and enclosure, by using shots through eyeholes in prison doors and claustrophobic shots inside houses, for example.
Yet, Picnic at Hanging Rock remains the most well known of the art/period films, with long shots, visually stunning and evocative scenes of fog in the Australian landscape juxtaposed with the European values epitomized in the Victorian architecture of the buildings. The content of the story is ambiguous; events can be seen in a number of different organizing structures. Disappearances are not explained, nor are they shown on screen; all is implied, rather than asserted. The film contained other elements that assisted its marketing in the United States and the United Kingdom, and that were demanded by those markets (Walsh 2000–2001: 36). For various reasons, in the late 1970s there was a recession in the American art film circuit, and Australia was seen to be a possible supplier. Thus, in that market, the “British” quality is important, often manifesting as a timeless Victorian past, and these qualities are apparent in many Australian films. It is significant that many of these films were screened in the American art theater circuits, and the films were submitted and acclaimed at Cannes and other European festivals.
These films began a tradition in Australian filmmaking that has continued in the work of some filmmakers. Jonathan Teplitzky’s Better Than Sex (2000) was filmed almost entirely within a single location, a studio apartment in Sydney, and comprised a three-day blossoming of love between two people, one of whom (David Wenham) might be judged to be physically attractive, while the other (Susie Porter) does not have the qualities of traditional Hollywood femininity. Writer, producer, and director Rolf de Heer could be classified as an auteur filmmaker, with films like The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2001), The Tracker (2002), and Alexandra’s Project (2003) as contenders for the art film appellation. The Tracker, for example, had no characters, just types: The Tracker, The Fanatic, The Follower, The Veteran, and The Fugitive. The characters had no history, apart from that suggested by their type. Scenes of violence were replaced by paintings of those events. Cause-effect relationships were never clear, while the interpolation of Aboriginal Australians was often mystic, rather than socially realist. The acceptance of de Heer’s films, especially in European film festivals, attests to his expertise in this genre.
ASIA. Despite its geographic proximity to Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand are regions of recent white settlement that retain strong cultural, linguistic, and historical ties with Europe, most especially the United Kingdom, but also the eastern Mediterranean region as well as northern and eastern Europe. Thus, it should come as no surprise to find a relative paucity of films, whether features or documentaries, that deal with the region. Indeed, five of the six feature films that have appeared only in the past two decades tend to follow a familiar narrative trajectory. Frequently taking the form of a thriller or mystery melodrama, the archetypal film follows the adventures of a white Australian soldier of fortune, whether he is an investigator or photographic journalist, seeking to get to the root of injustice and corruption and save some helpless Asians from this threat. Romantic melodrama is also favored as this crusade involves romance with a white woman often against an Asian setting which if indistinguishable is definitely exotic and threat-laden. It is also confined to that part of the region closest to Australia, there being no film engagement with either East Asia or South Asia.
Meanwhile, the Asians of the proximate are relegated to the background where they function in minor roles or in crowd scenes. The feature films that constitute this cycle can be summarily noticed here. Far East (1982) is a remake of Warner’s Casablanca exchanging that location for Manila and Humphrey Bogart for actor Bryan Brown. The latter, initially cynical and passive in the face of political and social oppression, is stirred into action by the presence of an old girlfriend and her investigative journalist husband. A character added to the original format is an Asian woman activist who is potentially a heroine but is reduced to victim status by being raped and brutalized. The same year also saw a second Asian feature, The Year of Living Dangerously, which turned Indonesia’s political crisis around the downfall of Sukarno into the background for a suspense thriller. Again, there is a splitting of hero. Foreign correspondent Mel Gibson pursues romance with British diplomat Sigourney Weaver. Meanwhile, Billie, a Chinese-Australian photojournalist supporter of Sukarno ultimately falls victim to forces of reaction and is killed. Indonesia is both beautiful and sinister, densely populated with large crowd scenes adding to the deliberate feeling of “foreignness.” In turn, this is compounded further by the casting of a female in the male role of Billie, a decision that also invokes the myth of the androgyny of Asians.
In 1990, Asia was featured again in Blood Oath, a courtroom drama set on the island of Ambon in Indonesia. The film was set in the immediate aftermath of World War II and concerned an Australian court prosecutor, Bryan Brown, who has to put various Japanese on trial for war crimes against Australian prisoners of war. The film deliberately avoids controversy in its dramatization of these issues of power and abuse differentiating between both American and Japanese forces. It also finds dramatic space to differentiate between the Japanese officers themselves and finds a “good” Japanese in the shape of a Christian. Meanwhile, Turtle Beach (1992) used the same formula of crusading white journalist exposing Asian corruption. By way of variation, this film concerned the plight of Vietnamese boat people, was set in Malaysia, and starred a woman actress, Greta Scacchi.
However, if this group of films defines a structure of narrative and feeling, two other features vary the pattern. The first of these, Echoes of Paradise (1987), is a woman’s melodrama. The central figure is a middle-aged housewife (Wendy Hughes) who departs Sydney and a philandering husband for Thailand. Here she responds to Thailand in all its variety and otherness. An androgynous Asian gigolo sensuously arouses her, enabling her to return to her former life with newfound confidence and sexuality. Finally, Traps (1994) is set in former Indochina in 1954 with the Vietminh struggling against French colonial rulers. Australian husband, journalist Michael, and British wife, photojournalist Louise, again find themselves caught up in this struggle. However, this film is in fact much more sensitive to issues of orientalism and subtly critiques the thinking and actions of the couple rather than endorsing them as the other films in this cycle are want to do. In addition, there is a stream of documentary films having to do with Asia that offer a much wider range of subjects and a more interesting diversity of perspective. Undoubtedly, an important precursor of the latter is the feature length documentary, Indonesia Calling (1946), directed by noted Dutch documentarist Joris Ivens with extensive support from Australian trade unions, political activists, and filmmakers. Appointed Film Commissioner by the Dutch government, Ivens found that the Indonesian peoples wanted not the reimposition of Dutch colonial rule after the Japanese defeat but independence. His film graphically highlights their plight. By the 1970s, other notable filmmakers had begun to make films in the region. These included James Darling on Bali, Solrun Hoaas on Japan, Curtis Levy on Indonesia, Dennis O’Rourke on the Pacific, and Mike Rubbo on Vietnam and Indonesia. Thus to round out this account, three recent documentaries that indicate this greater outlook can be identified. In 1989 appeared John Mercen’s Road to Xanadu, which looks at a three-way interchange between China, the West, and Japan over a millennium. Similarly, in 1992, appeared Christine Olsen and Curtis Levy’s Riding the Tiger, a meditation on what is Indonesia. The film traces the influence of both the Dutch and the Japanese in shaping modern-day Indonesia and subtly raises the epistemological problem of nationalist knowledge. Finally, the controversial The Good Woman of Bangkok (1992), Dennis O’Rourke’s complex interrogation not only of the subject of Thai prostitution but also of his own motives as failed savior of Aoi, the central figure of the film’s title. Altogether, then, Australia has had only a fleeting engagement with Asia in cinema in the past 50 years. Still, if more of the open, exploratory impulse to be found in documentaries were to find its way into feature films, then there would be more chance of breaking free of the stereotypes to be found there.
AUSTRALIAN CENTRE FOR THE MOVING IMAGE (ACMI). The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) was established on 1 January 2002 by the Film Act 2001 (Victoria), which provided for a new cultural institution in Victoria dedicated to the moving image in all its forms. ACMI (formerly CineMedia) promotes the moving image and has a charter to develop collections, exhibitions, events, and educational resources in Victoria within a national and global environment. The focus of its activities is within its new facility at Federation Square, in the center of Melbourne, but the Centre is also a lending collection, an online presence, and an international contributor to research and development of screen works. This new cultural body brings together leading-edge digital technology and the screen, providing its visitors, both in person and online, with access to the creation and viewing of the moving image. ACMI features the world’s largest screen gallery—over 1,500 square meters; two multi-format cinemas; hands-on interactive, education, and production zones; and the largest public lending collection of moving image for ACMI members. A four-story purpose built venue at Federation Square houses the Screen Gallery, Cinemas, and public activity spaces. The ACMI Lending Collection is located elsewhere. ACMI presents a program of regular free screenings in the cinemas.
A visit to Australia in 1940 by Dr. John Grierson led to the establishment of the Australian National Film Board in 1945. Dr. Grierson’s recommendations also led to the formation of state-based government film bodies and the State Film Centre of Victoria was established (see COMMONWEALTH FILM UNIT; FILM AUSTRALIA). The aims of the Centre were to maintain “a list of all suitable documentary and educational films” with a responsibility to promote the material for public consumption. It was in this capacity that the State Film Centre established and maintained its own film library in addition to supporting regional lending services, especially for schools, and mobile projection units that screened films to isolated audiences.
The introduction of television to Melbourne in 1956 saw the State Film Centre become involved in television production. The organization also played a valuable role as an archive of important Australian films such as The Sentimental Bloke (1919)—acquired in 1957—and On Our Selection (1920) in 1958. During the 1960s, the State Film Centre increasingly provided advice on film treatments, production, scripts, and distribution outlets to local filmmakers, demonstrating the growing importance of the facility to the local industry. In 1969, the Centre assumed management of the newly constructed State Film Theatre, providing the community with an important facility exhibiting material not screened in commercial cinemas. In the 1970s, the scope for the State Film Centre’s acquisitions changed to include examples of student films generated by the introduction of film studies to universities. During this period, the Australian production industry experienced significant change, driven by new levels of government funding and emerging filmmakers producing confident, original films drawing acclaim from Australian and international audiences (see REVIVAL).
In 1983, The State Film Centre of Victoria Council Act 1983 facilitated a new governing structure for the State Film Centre and foreshadowed a change in direction in terms of its policy. The initial push for development recognized the changing nature of screen industries in an environment of emergent digital media forms, and a need for an exhibition space free of the restrictions imposed in traditional display facilities. The State Film Centre further developed plans for the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in the early 1990s, evaluating several sites around Melbourne for suitability, finally settling on Federation Square. On 1 January 2002, the ACMI was established by the Film Act 2001 (Victoria). On 26 October, the first stage of the ACMI was opened. On 17 November, the ACMI cinemas officially opened.
AUSTRALIAN CHILDREN’S TELEVISION FOUNDATION (ACTF). The ACTF is a national nonprofit organization, created to encourage development, production, and dissemination of high-quality television programs, films, and other audiovisual media for children. It promotes these productions in the community. Since 1982, the ACTF has assisted in the development of a production environment and of children’s programming. The foundation has supported 165 hours of programs, which have been sold in more than 100 countries. These productions have received 70 nominations and have won 90 national and international awards, including an International Emmy Award and Prix Jeunesse.
The role of the ACTF includes the initiation, development, and production of innovative programs; the provision of development finance to writers and filmmakers; the undertaking of research into and evaluation of productions; advice to filmmakers; marketing of programs in Australia and overseas; and promotion of programs in the community. Although the major thrust of the Foundation’s work has been in television, it is supporting feature length films and telemovies. The Foundation’s first action feature film was Jolngu Boy (2001).
AUSTRALIAN FILM COMMISSION (AFC). The Australian Film Commission is the federal government agency that supports the development of projects in film, television, and the interactive digital media, particularly in the independent sector. The AFC provides financial and information resources to assist people in developing projects.
The federal government established the AFC in 1975 because of the Tariff Board’s inquiry into the industry, to address issues of national identity and culture. The Commission was preceded by the Australian Film Development Corporation, which provided direct financial assistance to commercial film production. The AFC has a much wider brief and is the most powerful of the plethora of federal and state government agencies concerned with film. It has many responsibilities: project development through script and other preproduction assistance; postproduction grants, and low-budget production funding; grants in support of a vigorous and diverse screen culture; international promotion of Australian productions and marketing advice; creative, interactive media development, production and exhibition; development of indigenous film and television program makers; monitoring of film, television, and multimedia industry performance; and information services.
The AFC provides direct financial assistance to project development, including script development and production financing, using cultural and commercial criteria. Offices in Los Angeles and in the United Kingdom, as well as the Australian office, handle the promotion of films at the Cannes and other film festivals. Less commercial films, such as experimental and documentary film, may be funded through the commission. Recently, like other Australian government agencies, the commission has entered into multimedia as well.
Critics of the AFC argue that it has forced the development of films in a particular mould, that it has indulged in cronyism, and that it is providing subsidies in what should be a purely commercial industry. On the other hand, argue others, it has provided a strong impetus for the development of the industry, and without the AFC, the Australian industry might have withered on the vine.
Some of the criticisms are pertinent. The AFC was established at a time when the commercial criteria used by the Australian Film Development Corporation resulted in funding for films like those of the ocker cycle. The AFC changed the criteria so that the commercial imperative gave way to cultural and aesthetic criteria in the determination of funding (see ART AND PERIOD FILMS). At the same time, the AFC ignored certain films, and some directors were marginalized, for whatever reason (see STONE).
AUSTRALIAN FILM DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION. See AUSTRALIAN FILM COMMISSION.
AUSTRALIAN FILM FINANCE CORPORATION (FFC). See FILM FINANCE CORPORATION AUSTRALIA.
AUSTRALIAN FILM INSTITUTE (AFI). The Australian Film Institute is proof of Melbourne’s importance in the national film industry and culture and also proof of its marginality. Incorporated in 1958 as an offshoot of the Melbourne Film Festival, a clone of the prestigious British Film Institute, the AFI quickly managed to find a reason for its existence in the shape of an industry award event. This took the form of the organization of annual awards for achievements in film production. In its early years and often, indeed, since, the AFI has managed to continue to do this often when there is little or no competition because of low levels of industry output. Until around 1972, the AFI operated much as a private club for members, which was not open to the general public. By then, however, the federal government had decided to kick start a film industry and a film culture. To do so, it needed a pre-existing instrument to administer such programs as its newly created Experimental Film Fund. The AFI took over this function and prospered over the next decade adding film distribution, film exhibition venues in Melbourne, Hobart, and Sydney, a Melbourne Research and Information Centre, and the operation of the National Film Theatre of Australia.
Meanwhile, the jewel in the crown continued to be the annual AFI awards, an event that then and now falls somewhere between the cultural prestige of a Venice or Cannes film festival and the commercial ballyhoo of the Hollywood Oscars. However, starting in 1975 and accelerating in the second half of the decade, the federal government began trimming the budgets that it made available to its various film instrumentalities. One by one, the AFI lost its various programs, sometimes because of broader bureaucratic restructuring and sometimes because of budget constraints. However, with most federal agencies in the overlapping areas of film, media, and culture generally located in Sydney, the continued existence of the AFI was, in effect, not negotiable. In any case, in order ensure its own survival, the AFI had adopted a new constitution that made membership available to all who would pay an annual membership fee. Hence, the body continues down to the present, still running the annual awards, research library, distribution of shorts and documentaries, a modest exhibition program, and cinemas in Hobart and Sydney.
AUSTRALIAN FILM TELEVISION AND RADIO SCHOOL (AFTRS). The Commonwealth Government established the AFTRS as a statutory authority in 1973. The school is the national center for professional education and advanced training in film, broadcasting, and interactive media. The main campus is in Sydney, where full-time postgraduate students study aspects of the film industry, such as scriptwriting, producing, directing, cinematography, editing and sound, in graduate diploma and masters-level programs. In other cities, the school offers short courses for industry professionals who wish to broaden their area of expertise, upgrade current skills, or learn new skills.
The alumni are a who’s who of Australian film. Directors include *Jane Campion, Phillip Noyce, P.J. Hogan, Rolf de Heer, and Alex Proyas; scriptwriters include Chris Noonan and Denny Lawrence; cinematographers include Andrew Lesnie and Dion Beebe.
AUZINS, IGOR (1949– ). Auzins was a cinematographer, director, and producer for the Crawfords television production house in the 1970s. He directed High Rolling (1977), and later, telemovies, miniseries, and documentaries for the South Australian Film Corporation. He directed a number of films for television: All at Sea (1977), The Night Nurse (1978), The Death Train (1978), and Water Under the Bridge (1980). He has since directed two feature films, We of the Never Never (1982) and The Coolangatta Gold (1984).