Australian Cinema and National Identity

The massive dominance of Hollywood over the worldwide film industry has left the film industries of other countries facing a choice between two different options for survival. On the one hand there was the possibility of attempting to emulate Hollywood and to trying to steal some business through direct competition. The other option was to make films that were dramatically different, highlighting the unique qualities of the nation's cinema (Neale, 1981). Germany, France, and Italy, perhaps due to the inherent barrier created by their respective language differences, took the latter option with great success. Australian cinema has traditionally charted something of a middle course, avoiding the extremes of arthouse cinema (Picnic at Hanging Rock notwithstanding) yet not quite embracing the full Hollywood paradigm. The films of the last fifteen years, however, have veered sharply towards the imitation of Hollywood and the adoption of its genres. To what extent, in that context, has the industry retained its "Australianness?"

In 1969, the Interim Report of the Australian Council for the Arts Film Committee recommended the establishment of the Australian Film and Television Development Corporation (later the Australian Film Commission). This funded a great number of films throughout the seventies and did successfully lead to a new wave of talent and films. Yet there was some dissatisfaction with this new wave, which relied heavily on the wholesome period dramas dubbed the "AFC Genre" by Dermody & Jacka (1988a and 1988b). In 1981, legislation was introduced to implement the 10BA tax scheme, which provided extremely attractive tax relief for those investing in films. This led to massive increases in production (Australian Film Commission, 1989), though the effect on quality was variable, with many films financed largely as tax shelters. Yet the 10BA period (which more or less exactly spanned the eighties) did lead to a cycle of extremely successful films. The trend in these films (and those of the current post-10BA films) has been toward a more commercial, Hollywood inspired style of narrative. Yet there remains a great deal that is Australian in these films.

George Miller's Mad Max cycle is central to an understanding of these films. The original Mad Max, made in 1979, has been cited as the key film in Australian cinema's return to genre material (O'Regan, 1989). O'Regan, of course, is using the term as shorthand for distinctly American genres such as the bikie film or the Western, as opposed to the uniquely Australian genres such as the "ocker" films or the "AFC genre." There are earlier examples, even aside from the foreign-financed "kangaroo westerns" of the forties and fifties. Sandy Harbutt's Stone (1974), for example, explored very similar genre material several years earlier. Yet Stone was very much a cult success: Mad Max was a huge international hit and was therefore far more influential. Its first sequel, Mad Max 2 (1981), was even more so, gaining a major release in the United States (as The Road Warrior). Mad Max 2 was the first film to hit major paydirt by keeping a major focus on the mainstream American market.

The film is cunning in the way in which it does this. The original had been distinctly Australian in its settings (in and around Anakie, west of Melbourne), characters (especially Steve Bisley's Goose) and subject matter (the Australian car culture). The sequel, by shifting to desert outside Broken Hill and making the setting a post-apocalyptic world, manages to explain away its setting. Miller has claimed that the film is not set in a post-nuclear world, but the film is left ambiguous enough for the casual American viewer to assume that the desert may represent the American wheat belt, post atomic bomb. Even more critically, Miller (and his late producer, Byron Kennedy) shifts the characters and subject matter away from distinctly Australian archetypes. In interviews at the time Miller consistently stressed the "universality" of the story and its characters, selling Max as a universal myth hero (examples of discussion along these lines are: Peary, 1981, pp 215-218 and 1988, pp 211-216; Kael, 1986, pp 384-389, and Broderick, 1993).

American critics found a great number of non Australian films to cite as influences upon Miller. Peary alone, in the two sources listed above, mentions Stagecoach (1939), Shane (1953), Hondo (1953), The Wild One (1954), Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (1955), Hercules (1960), Yojimbo (1960), The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1967), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and A Boy and His Dog (1974), along with several others (Peary was not aware of, or did not see fit to mention, Harbutt's Stone, the only likely Australian influence). This eccentric list is only partly valid (Peary confirms Miller hadn't even seen A Boy and His Dog) but it does suggest that Miller had successfully hidden the films' Australianness underneath a veneer of mythology. It is also interesting to note that a number of the films Peary lists are other foreign films that managed the same feat of cross-cultural success.

Miller's own views on the films Australianness are quoted by White (1984, p. 96):

One of the questions that continuously comes up is whether or not films should be indigenously Australian. . . I think that the film industry is indigenous to the globe. The kinds of thing in which I am interested in film is really the new mythology. . . the stories that are told over and over again - across all time and space. . .I think, without even trying, the Australianness comes through in the film. . . you can never get around it.

Miller is clearly interested in filmmaking for the world, and his disparaging reference to Australianness as if it were an obstacle that he needs to "get around," hints he has little interest in films as a way of promoting their country of origin abroad. Yet underneath the obvious surface details noted already, there is a surprising amount of Australian iconography to be found in the film. Dermody and Jacka (1989, p.176) identify several examples, including Max's cattle dog, the Bonza dog food and the Feral Kid's boomerang (somehow, they miss the kangaroo carcass next to the tanker wreck in the first few minutes). It is as if Miller, having inveigled his way to an international audience, is nevertheless trying to advertise his country in the best AFC tradition. He is a closet Australian.

If Australian films, then, were continuing their subliminal advertising of our country, it is somehow appropriate that one of the other Australian films to gain major commercial success abroad featured Paul Hogan, Australia's tourism representative. Crocodile Dundee, the brainchild of Hogan and writer / producer John Cornell, was even more cunningly calculated to achieve overseas success, and did so even more spectacularly. Like Mad Max 2, the film played up the universal elements of its story and central character. Hogan's character, Mick Dundee, is therefore both an "everyman" and a modern Tarzan. Yet Crocodile Dundee does not hide its Australianness as Mad Max 2: it makes it a selling point. The films ingenious mirror structure - with an American in Australia in the first half, and an Australian in America in the second - clearly made it accessible enough that American audiences could enjoy the exotic locale without feeling they were watching a foreign film.

This accessibility leads to a degree of cultural androgyny. The opening of the film is like a tourism campaign, with an American representative touring our country and experiencing the wonders it has to offer: Tom O'Regan (in Dermody and Jacka, 1988a, p. 173) confirms that the film did indeed lead to an increased number of tourists in Kakadu national park. This section of the film definitely seems Australian. Yet when the situation is reversed and the setting is New York, it suddenly seems as if this might, after all, be an American film that just happens to be about an Australian. The audience can not fully resolve this question based on information in the film: if not for the massive publicity the film received it is likely that it would have been greeted as home grown product in both countries.

It is clear, then, that in the eighties there was an increasing awareness that outside eyes might actually see our films. Attempting to harness this foreign audience led to a subtle repositioning: the other major film to successfully break the American market was The Man From Snowy River (1982), which used other techniques such as the adoption of an American star (Kirk Douglas) and genre (the western). Hollywood trappings are used in these films because they are universal, and open up the hope of a universal audience. Australianness, here, is something to be either hidden or used as a selling point. To what extent, though, do these films actually explore Australianness?

The answer, of course, is not a great deal. How can they, if an international audience is being sought? Why would the Americans want to know about such questions? True, Crocodile Dundee does, through Mick Dundee, explore some aspects of the Australian character. Yet it is a limited, comic book survey, and Hogan is unable to decide whether the essence of Australian male is superhero or con-artist (note Dundee's vacillating between legitimate superman, who can effortlessly fell a thief with a thrown tin, and shameless faker, who actually tells the time in the bush by looking at his watch). Similarly, The Man From Snowy River manages to avoid any close examination of the Australian ethos, despite two of its main characters ("The Man" himself, and Jack Thompson's "Clancy") being drawn from the classic depictions of the Australian male found in Banjo Patterson's near mythical poems.

Australia was present in its films during the eighties, then, but in a peripheral way, and not as the subject matter. Even in the more locally oriented films of the eighties (such as the Nadia Tass / David Parker films Malcolm, 1986, and The Big Steal, 1989) there is not the kind of intense self deliberation that the AFC genre or ocker films inherently seemed to produce. Hence the comment by Dermody and Jacka (1988a, p. 128) that "[o]ne of the striking things about Australian cinema is its relative lack of engagement with contemporary social and political issues or circumstances." With the internationalisation of the media, this argument goes, there is little scope for a national cinema. The relentless drive for profits which creates movies "made here whose `souls' are trying very hard to lie elsewhere" (Dermody and Jacka, 1988a, p. 124) doesn't help either.

Yet since the eighties, the situation has changed somewhat. The demise of 10BA eliminated a whole sub-class of mediocre thrillers, for a start. The tendency to chase after Hollywood success declined (perhaps as a result of Paul Hogan's unsuccessful attempts to repeat his Crocodile Dundee success). The trend, in the last five years, has been to more "local" films, that aim at the Australian market and feature recognisable, everyday settings. The engagement of Hollywood genres often remains, but is no longer done in an attempt to emulate Hollywood slavishly. Strictly Ballroom, for example, takes the musical genre (almost unseen in Australian cinema, Gillian Armstrong's Starstruck, 1982, and this year's Billy's Holiday being the exceptions) but makes no attempt to sell it internationally. The setting is clearly Australia, neither hidden or used a selling point. This is very much a feature made for an Australian audience.

Turner (1994) states that "in most Australian films today, national identity is simply not an issue." That is to say, the current crop of Australian films (Turner's list includes The Sum of Us, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Bad Boy Bubby, Spider and Rose, The Heartbreak Kid, Death in Brunswick, The Piano, Romper Stomper and The Big Steal, to which I would add Muriel's Wedding and Metal Skin) do not make a point of explicitly and endlessly mulling over it. They take the approach of telling stories in a local context and letting questions of national identity resolve themselves in the background through the working of their various different narratives. The question of "what does it mean to be Australian?" is answered by showing different Australians, in different circumstances, with different problems. Hollywood is still present, but now the genres are adapted for local use and twisted in various ways.

Ironically, several of these films (Strictly Ballroom, Muriel's Wedding, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and, if you claim it as Australian, The Piano) have been successful in international markets. Yet it is significant that this is no longer seen as the primary issue. There is not the same level of hysterical, proud excitement at cracking the foreign marketplace as there was in the eighties. This is partly, of course, because these films have not been as successful as those earlier blockbusters (Australian films overseas are once again art-house successes, not mainstream ones). Yet there is also a sense that these films are for Australia, and foreign success is secondary. Muriel's Wedding, for example, received a fairly prominent release in America, yet could hardly be claimed to have even one eye on their market. A great deal of the humour of the film depends on the characterisations of Australian character types (Bill Hunter's ghastly patriarch) and settings (the kitschy sub-Gold Coast town of Porpoise Spit).

Australian films have backed off, then, from the attempts to clone Hollywood that occurred during the eighties. The "Hollywoodization" of Australian films no longer means that they try to emulate Hollywood. Our films now take a knowing, selective approach to American culture, and use Hollywood genres and paradigms as a basis upon which to build unique, Australia specific films. The films of the eighties were valuable in reinjecting a certain populism to the industry that had been lacking from AFC genre films (just as the AFC genre films had injected a certain class that had been lacking from the ocker comedies). At the end of this educative process we have been left with a film industry that is considerably richer, in cultural terms at least.

References

Australian Film Commision, 1989, Get the Picture: Essential Data on Australian Film, Television and Video, Australian Film Commision, Sydney.

Broderick, Mick, 1993, "Heroic Apocalypse: Mad Max, Mythology and the Millennium," in Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmodern Narrative Film, ed Christopher Sharret, Maisonneuve Press, Washington.

Cunningham, Stuart, 1983, "Hollywood Genres: Australian Movies" in An Australian Film Reader, ed Albert Moran and Tom O'Regan, Currency Press, Sydney

Dermody, Susan, & Jacka, Elizabeth (eds), 1988a, The Imaginary Industry: Australian Film in the Late '80s, AFTRS Publications, North Ryde.

Dermody, Susan, & Jacka, Elizabeth, 1988b, The Screening of Australia: Anatomy of a National Cinema, Volume 2, Currency Press, Sydney.

Kael, Pauline, 1986, Taking it All In, Arena, London.

Neale, Steve, 1981, "Art Cinema as Institution," Screen, vol 22, no 1, pp 11 - 39.

O'Regan, Tom, 1989, "The Enchantment with Cinema: Film in the 1980s", in The Australian Screen, ed Albert Moran and Tom O'Regan, Penguin, Melbourne.

Peary, Danny, 1981, Cult Movies, Delta, New York.

Peary, Danny, 1988, Cult Movies 3, Simon and Schuster, New York.

Turner, Graeme, 1994, "Whatever Happened to National Identity?" Metro, no 100, Summer 1994, pp 32 - 35.

White, David, 1984, Australian Movies to the World, Fontana Australia, Sydney, and Cinema Papers, Melbourne.

Filmography

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, 1993, Stephen Elliot.

The Big Steal, 1989, Nadia Tass.

Crocodile Dundee, 1986, Peter Faiman.

Mad Max, 1979, George Miller.

Mad Max 2, 1981, George Miller.

The Man From Snowy River, 1982, George Miller.

Muriel's Wedding, 1994, P.J. Hogan.

The Piano, 1993, Jane Campion.

Starstruck, 1982, Gillian Armstrong.

Stone, 1974, Sandy Harbutt.

Strictly Ballroom, 1992, Baz Luhrmann.