KT 076: A Certain Tendency of The Australian Cinema
Polemics for a New, New Australian Cinema
Words by Digby Houghton
Me·di·o·cre (mē′dē-ō’kər) adj. Of ordinary or undistinguished quality.
Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills are forever immortalised by a bronze statue that Charles Summers erected in 1865. The statue commemorated the ill-fated explorers’ expedition to the centre of Australia in an attempt to search for some inland ocean or tidal wave that, in fact, never existed, rendering them destitute and dying of thirst against the urgings of the Indigenous peoples they encountered. Whilst the mythical proportions of the explorers’ feats once held an important memory in settler-colonials minds the statue itself never really felt ‘in place’. It has moved five times. It was unveiled on the corner of Collins and Russell Street but the laying of tram tracks in 1886 led to its removal. It then moved to a reserve in Spring Street, and later to the corner of Swanston and Collins in City Square in 1979. Finally, the statue found asylum on the corner of Swanston and Collins Streets in 1994, before Daniel Andrews’ Big Build for the Metro tunnel drove it into storage more recently.
The reason I raise this anecdote is to show that Australians don’t know what stories we want to tell about ourselves. We want our cinema to be both pluralistic and singular at the same time; we want to champion the stories of first-generation migrants, of Queer and First Nations people but we still haven’t come to terms with the colonial roots of our national ethos. For a long time – perhaps still to this day – the most common Australian export was ‘social realism’ – or as Kristian Greif suggested in last week’s KinoTopia, ‘Australian Gothic’. These genres are remnants from our colonial rulers and the strands of the Australian documentary tradition seen in the Commonwealth Film Unit (1940 – 1973). This is most evident in the films of John Duigan, John Ruane, Brian McKenzie and more recently Justin Kurzel, Thomas Wright and the gritty docu-realism of Amiel Courtin-Wilson. These directors embody a masculine, desaturated, Bressonian aesthetic that prioritises minimalist dialogue and an obsession with everyday characters. All these directors are white men. So how does Australia encompass the divergent and conflicting elements of its national cinema? By producing a pluralism that is outside the mainstream.
One notable example includes the Garden Reflexxxx’s Grape Steak which screened at ACMI more recently and whose directors (Jen Atherton and André Shannon) I interviewed prior to the screening for a KinoTopia Bonus Edition. Their film blends naturalistic gossip with a documentary technique that is both engaging and radical. Such sophisticated experimentations are rare to come by in mainstream cinemas but it’s worth championing.
Which brings me to the topic of the critic – whose precarious profession has been attacked by TikTok influencers and powerful studios aiming for positive press rather than incisive criticism. In Australia we continue to be plagued by the unending debate of what is good and what is bad in our national cinema. When I confronted the ‘elephant in the room’ that Australian critics are afraid to address – namely the inevitable 3-star reviews that are attached to local films and distorting the overall perception of our films – I was viciously attacked online. One ‘independent’ editor removed my entire body of work from their website due to their irreconcilable anger – which exactly proved my point. A film culture cannot function if it’s not honest. The role of the critic is to keep a film industry healthy.
I think Paul Schrader was right in a BAFTA lecture from 2018, soon after the release of First Reformed where he spoke about screenwriting before joining a Q and A with Tanya Seghatchian. Seghatchian asked about the 1970s and why the cinema was arguably so much better. He responded that, to some extent, it boiled down to the audience demanded good cinema. Film critics (like Schrader himself at the LA Times), spurred on by the French New Wave and other nouveaux cinemas across the globe – Czech-Slovakian, Brazilian, Iranian and the subsequent New Hollywood Cinema – wanted stronger stories.
Expressing a similar sentiment in a 2016 article for Film Comment, contributor Kent Jones discusses the “marginalisation of cinema,” arguing that studio filmmaking together with modes of consumption are shifting. According to Jones, who shares Schraders’ opinion, film cultures no longer produce the same quantity of good films they once did, leaving cinema as a marginalised art form: “the measure of a vibrant, living cinema culture is not the number of great films being made, which is always small, but the number of good ones.” Something is not right.
Judging by the recent Screen Australia statistics it seems we are heading for the same palatable succession of movies – funded by state agencies – at least for the foreseeable future. The Dry Part III I’m sure will eventually get made. Wog Boy IV will eventually get made. Talk to Me with all the favourable press and considerable international accolade, despite it being a genre film, will be supported in a sequel (in fact the Philippou brohers have already started shooting a sequel sponsored by the South Australian Film Commission).
My cynicism perhaps stems from what the experimental pioneer (and pariah) of Australian underground cinema Albie Thoms declared in the final chapters of his compiled writings Polemics for a New Cinema published in 1978. In eruditely excavating the foundation of the Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative, Thoms laments that the Australian Film Revival was never interested in fostering or building an ecology in which cinema would thrive. He uses the example of the Co-operatives’ 100-seat independent cinema in St Peter’s Lane Darlinghurst that exhibited Marxist films, Co-op members’ films and Feminist films. He also notes that in 1973 the Film and Television board spent “about 40% on production, 20% on maintaining their libraries and %10 on exhibition,” illustrating the resoundingly feeble support for exhibition.
Vis à vis the Australian Film Institute’s Vincent Library, Thoms illustrates the unfair distribution of funds. The Vincent Library (named after Senator Seddon Vincent from Western Australia who chaired the Senate Select Committee on the Encouragement of Australian Productions for Television in 1963) operated like the co-op in that they acquired and leased prints of films. However, the Vincent collection received a disproportionate amount of government funds even though there was higher demand for items from the Sydney Filmmaker’s Co-operative. So, an entire co-operative was underprivileged in favour of a national institute’s library.
So, if film production can be seen as a tree, production is the trunk, distribution and exhibition are the branches, and the critical reception is like the leaves on the branches. To some extent, all elements need to be in a healthy state for the entire organism to thrive. Lauren Carroll Harris’ damming book – published in 2013 – Not Showing in a Theatre Near You, picks up where Thoms left off…because few have heeded Thoms’ thesis. Her argument is that Australian features thrive in the post-theatrical market and the question is why is there no effort on behalf of the government to support this branch of distribution. She says self-distribution of films is equally as bad as a marketed approach where the exhibitor takes 75% plus of your revenue after the first two weeks. So, we aren’t kicking any goals.
Which is why the picture is so muddled and we keep regressing and making the same mistakes. Yes, the Film Revival was seminal and produced talent like Philip Noyce and Gillian Armstrong (both graduates of the state funded film school AFTRS). And the offshoots of the 10BA tax incentives like Razorback and BMX Bandits are kitsch remnants of a time past; and the Film Finance Corporation – established under Bob Hawke in 1988 – commissioned some of our most favoured 90s productions like Muriel’s Wedding and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert…both in 1994!
However, we need an ecology that offers fertile grounds for critics, exhibition, distribution and lastly production to be a viable national cinema that is more than just mediocre. One which tackles our stories head on with both vigour and breadth, so we’re not left languishing year after year forgetting why we decided to immortalise one story in favour of another in the first place – like the Bourke and Wills monument.
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