A companion to Australian cinema 9781118942543, 111894254X, 9781118942550, 9781118942529

Table of contents :
Content: About the Editors viiiNotes on Contributors xForeword xviTom O'ReganAcknowledgments xxiiiIntroduction: Australian Cinema Now 1Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan ByePart I An Indigenous Screen Culture 291 You Are Here: Living Maps of Deep Time, Clock Time 31Felicity Collins2 Charlie's Country, Gulpilil's Body 54Corinn Columpar3 Ivan Sen's Cinematic Imaginary: Restraint, Complexity, and a Politics of Place 68Anne Rutherford4 Shadowing and Disruptive Temporality in Bangarra Dance Theatre's Spear 89Felicity Ford5 Beyond the Wonderland of Whiteness: The Blak Wave of Indigenous Women Shaping Race on Screen 107Odette Kelada and Maddee ClarkPart II An International Cinema 1316 Another Green World: The Mad Max Series 133Constantine Verevis7 Is Everything Awesome?: The LEGO Movie and the Australian Film Industry 149Ben Goldsmith8 Jane Campion: Girlshine and the International Auteur 165Lisa French9 Constructing Persona: Mediatisation, Performativity, Quality, and Branding in Australian Film Actors' Migration to Hollywood 184P. David MarshallPart III A Minor Transnational Imaginary 20510 Interpreting Anzac and Gallipoli through a Century of Anglophone Screen Representations 207James Bennett11 Unsettling the Suburban: Space, Sentiment, and Migration in National Cinematic Imaginaries 228Helen Grace12 The Rocket: Small, Foreign?Language Cinema 248Olivia Khoo13 Serangoon Road: The Convergent Culture of Minor Transnationalism 262Audrey YuePart IV An Auteur?Genre?Landscape Cinema 28514 An Independent Spirit: Robert Connolly as Auteur?Producer 287Susan Bye15 Disruptive Daughters: The Heroine's Journey in Four Films 313Diana Sandars16 Atopian Landscapes: Gothic Tropes in Australian Cinema 336Jane Stadler17 Spirits Do Come Back: Bunyips and the European Gothic in The Babadook 355Stephen GaunsonPart V A Televisual Industry 37118 Between Public and Private: How Screen Australia, the ABC and SBS have shaped Film and Television Convergence 373Amanda Malel Trevisanut19 Quality vs Value: The Case of The Kettering Incident 391Sue Turnbull and Marion McCutcheon20 The Evolution of Matchbox Pictures: A New Business Model 416Helen Goritsas and Ana Tiwary21 Schapellevision: Screen Aesthetics and Asian Drug Stories 442Anthony LambertPart VI A Multiplatform Ecology 46122 CHURN: Cinema Made Sometime Last Night 463Ross Gibson23 Over the Horizon: YouTube Culture Meets Australian Screen Culture 472Stuart Cunningham and Adam Swift24 Digital Transmedia Forms and Transnational Documentary Networks 493Deane Williams25 Ecological Relations: FalconCam in Conversation with The Back of Beyond 508Belinda Smaill26 Where Am I?: The Terror of Terra Nullius 525Norie NeumarkIndex 537

Citation preview

A Companion to Australian Cinema

Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas The Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas showcase the rich film heritages of various countries across the globe. Each volume sets the agenda for what is now known as world cinema whilst challenging Hollywood’s lock on the popular and scholarly imagination. Whether exploring Spanish, German or Chinese film, or the broader traditions of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and Latin America the 20–25 newly commissioned essays comprising each volume include coverage of the dominant themes of canonical, controversial, and contemporary films; stars, directors, and writers; key influences; reception; and historiography and scholarship. Written in a sophisticated and authoritative style by leading experts they will appeal to an international audience of scholars, students, and general readers. Published: A Companion to Australian Cinema, edited by Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye A Companion to African Cinema, edited by Kenneth W. Harrow and Carmela Garritano A Companion to Italian Cinema, edited by Frank Burke A Companion to Latin American Cinema, edited by Maria M. Delgado, Stephen M. Hart, and Randal Johnson A Companion to Russian Cinema, edited by Birgit Beumers A Companion to Nordic Cinema, edited by Mette Hjort and Ursula Lindqvist A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, edited by Esther M. K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti, and Esther C.M. Yau A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, edited by Alistair Fox, Michel Marie, Raphaëlle Moine, and Hilary Radner A Companion to Spanish Cinema, edited by Jo Labanyi and Tatjana Pavlović A Companion to Chinese Cinema, edited by Yingjin Zhang A Companion to East European Cinemas, edited by Anikó Imre A Companion to German Cinema, edited by Terri Ginsberg & Andrea Mensch Forthcoming: A Companion to British and Irish Cinema, edited by John Hill A Companion to Korean Cinema, edited by Jihoon Kim and Seung‐hoon Jeong A Companion to Indian Cinema, edited by Neepa Majumdar and Ranjani Mazumdar A Companion to Japanese Cinema, edited by David Desser

A Companion to

Australian Cinema Edited by

Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye

This edition first published 2019 © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA Editorial Office The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Names: Collins, Felicity, editor. | Landman, Jane, editor. | Bye, Susan, 1960– editor. Title: A companion to Australian cinema / edited by Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, Susan Bye. Description: Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019. | Series: Wiley Blackwell companions to national cinemas | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018046967 (print) | LCCN 2018050695 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118942543 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781118942550 (ePub) | ISBN 9781118942529 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictiures–Australia–History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN1993.5.A83 (ebook) | LCC PN1993.5.A83 .C66 2019 (print) | DDC 791.430994–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046967 Cover Design: Wiley Cover Image: © Photograph of world’s oldest garden cinema, Sun Pictures in Broome, reproduced here with permission of Felicity Collins and Jane Stadler. Set in 11/13pt Dante by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

About the Editors viii Notes on Contributors x Forewordxvi Tom O’Regan Acknowledgmentsxxiii

Introduction: Australian Cinema Now Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye

1

Part I  An Indigenous Screen Culture

29

1 You Are Here: Living Maps of Deep Time, Clock Time Felicity Collins

31

2 Charlie’s Country, Gulpilil’s Body Corinn Columpar

54

3 Ivan Sen’s Cinematic Imaginary: Restraint, Complexity, and a Politics of Place Anne Rutherford

68

4 Shadowing and Disruptive Temporality in Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Spear Felicity Ford

89

5 Beyond the Wonderland of Whiteness: The Blak Wave of Indigenous Women Shaping Race on Screen Odette Kelada and Maddee Clark

107

Part II  An International Cinema

131

6 Another Green World: The Mad Max Series Constantine Verevis

133

vi Contents   7 Is Everything Awesome?: The LEGO Movie and the Australian Film Industry 149 Ben Goldsmith   8 Jane Campion: Girlshine and the International Auteur Lisa French

165

  9 Constructing Persona: Mediatisation, Performativity, Quality, and Branding in Australian Film Actors’ Migration to Hollywood P. David Marshall

184

Part III  A Minor Transnational Imaginary

205

10 Interpreting Anzac and Gallipoli through a Century of Anglophone Screen Representations James Bennett

207

11 Unsettling the Suburban: Space, Sentiment, and Migration in National Cinematic Imaginaries Helen Grace

228

12 The Rocket: Small, Foreign‐Language Cinema Olivia Khoo

248

13 Serangoon Road: The Convergent Culture of Minor Transnationalism Audrey Yue

262

Part IV  An Auteur‐Genre‐Landscape Cinema

285

14 An Independent Spirit: Robert Connolly as Auteur‐Producer Susan Bye

287

15 Disruptive Daughters: The Heroine’s Journey in Four Films Diana Sandars

313

16 Atopian Landscapes: Gothic Tropes in Australian Cinema Jane Stadler

336

17 Spirits Do Come Back: Bunyips and the European Gothic in The Babadook 355 Stephen Gaunson Part V  A Televisual Industry

371

18 Between Public and Private: How Screen Australia, the ABC and SBS have shaped Film and Television Convergence Amanda Malel Trevisanut

373

19 Quality vs Value: The Case of The Kettering Incident Sue Turnbull and Marion McCutcheon

391

Contents

vii

20 The Evolution of Matchbox Pictures: A New Business Model Helen Goritsas and Ana Tiwary

416

21 Schapellevision: Screen Aesthetics and Asian Drug Stories Anthony Lambert

442

Part VI  A Multiplatform Ecology

461

22 CHURN: Cinema Made Sometime Last Night Ross Gibson

463

23 Over the Horizon: YouTube Culture Meets Australian Screen Culture Stuart Cunningham and Adam Swift

472

24 Digital Transmedia Forms and Transnational Documentary Networks 493 Deane Williams 25 Ecological Relations: FalconCam in Conversation with The Back of Beyond 508 Belinda Smaill 26 Where Am I?: The Terror of Terra Nullius Norie Neumark

525

Index537

About the Editors

Felicity Collins has a PhD and is a Reader/Associate Professor in the Department of Creative Arts and English, La Trobe University. In the1980s she was commissioned by Filmnews to research articles on the origin, history and impact of the Australian Film Institute and the Australian Film and Television School. Her doctoral research in the 1990s drew on the archives of the Women’s Film Fund at the Australian Film Commission, and oral history interviews with members of the Sydney Women’s Film Group and Feminist Film Workers. This early work gave rise to an abiding interest in how screen cultures mediate identity, memory and history. She has written on women, cinema and modernity in The Films of Gillian Armstrong (ATOM/ AFI, 1999), and on settler‐colonial memory and historical backtracking in Australian Cinema After Mabo (Cambridge University Press, 2004). She has co‐edited themed journal issues, including ‘Decolonizing Screens’, Studies in Australasian Cinema 7(2–3), and ‘Rethinking Witnessing Across History, Culture and Time’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 31(5). She has published a series of articles and chapters on the films of the Blak Wave and the politics of reconciliation, most recently in Critical Arts 31(5), The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics (Tzoumakis and Molloy, eds, 2016) and Contemporary Publics (Marshall, et al, eds, 2016). She was Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project ‘Screen Comedy and the National’ with Sue Turnbull and Susan Bye. Current collaborations include a recognition app, Where Do You Think You Are? and Looking Again, with Hester Joyce and La Trobe’s Centre for the Study of the Inland. Jane Landman has a PhD and was a Senior Lecturer at Victoria University, Melbourne, teaching and coordinating programs in media and communication. She took retirement during the early stages of preparation of this book and now focuses on her garden in Victoria’s goldfields district. She is the author of The Tread of a White Man’s Foot: Australian Pacific Colonialism and the Cinema 1925–1962 (Pandanus Books, ANU, 2006), an historical reception and textual study of ‘resource adventures’ set in Australian colonial territories. She has published in various



About the Editors

ix

journals and edited books including Studies in Australasian Cinema (also guest editor), Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, and the Journal of Pacific History (also guest editor). She served on the Editorial Board of The Moving Image. The principal thread in Landman’s research is Australian film history, and the role of the cinema in the process and cultures of colonialism and decolonisation, with focus on intersections between political change and historical practices of public relations. This includes the filmic reporting and promotion of late colonial policy on Papua and New Guinea in productions made by the Commonwealth Film Unit. Landman’s other research thread concerns contemporary television formats, such as daytime chat shows, feminist comedy, serial SF television, and quality TV series set in the Torres Strait. Susan Bye has a PhD and is an Education Programmer at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne. She is involved in building education programs for schools and teachers that foster creative and critical engagement with the moving image. In her role as programmer she has sustained a focus on extending student knowledge of Australian films and animation as well as supporting senior students studying English and Media. In consultation with ACMI curators, she has offered Education and Public Programs in relation to a wide range of exhibitions including Hollywood Costume, David Bowie is and Scorsese. At ACMI she has participated in the Melbourne Writers Festival (2012–2017), Screen Futures (2016) and the Arts Learning Festival (2017). An associate of La Trobe University, she completed a PhD (2004) focusing on the introduction of television into Australia and received a post‐doctoral fellowship (2006–2009) to work with Felicity Collins and Sue Turnbull on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project on Australian Screen Comedy. As part of this project she convened an international conference and symposium, and published a number of articles focusing on Australian television comedy. She was the Reviews Editor for Media International Australia (2008–2014) and is now an editorial adviser. She has published widely in the field of film, television, media history and screen education and has co‐edited special theme issues of Media International Australia (on Light Entertainment) and Continuum (on Television and the National). She has co‐convened international conferences in the area of Screen Studies and was a keynote speaker at the Australian Association for Teaching English Conference in 2017.

­Notes on Contributors

James Bennett is Senior Lecturer in History at University of Newcastle, Australia. He is co‐editor of Making Film and Television Histories: Australia and New Zealand (2011) and co‐editor of the anthology Radical Newcastle (2015). His research interests include history through film and television, gender and sexuality, the labour movement, Australian and New Zealand history, transnational histories, and the First World War. He has had several articles published on screen representations of war in the Journal of New Zealand Studies (2012), Continuum (2014), and the Journal of Australian Studies (2014). Susan Bye is a member of the Education Team at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and an Associate of La Trobe University. She has published extensively in the area of Australian Screen Comedy and Australian Media History. Maddee Clark is a Yugambeh PhD student at the University of Melbourne, and a curator and freelance writer. She is one of the 2018 editors of Un Magazine, and writes on Indigenous Futurism and queer politics. Felicity Collins is Reader/Associate Professor in Screen Studies in the Department of Creative Arts at La Trobe University. She is the author of Australian Cinema after Mabo with Therese Davis, and The Films of Gillian Armstrong. She has published widely on Australian screen culture, its institutions, feminist interventions, and popular genres. Her research on the Blak Wave of film and television production is informed by memory and trauma studies, and contributes to debates on ­decolonising ethics and aesthetics, as well as agonistic and transitional modes of reconciliation. Corinn Columpar is Director of the Cinema Studies Institute and Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at University of Toronto. She is author of Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World on Film (2010), a monograph about the construction

­Notes on Contributor

xi

of Aboriginality in contemporary cinema, and co‐editor, with Sophie Mayer, of There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond (2009), an anthology dedicated to the flows and exchanges that characterise feminist cultural production. She has published in numerous anthologies and journals, including Camera Obscura, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Women Studies Quarterly, and Refractory. Stuart Cunningham AM is Distinguished Professor of Media and Communications, Queensland University of Technology. Publications include Digital Disruption: Cinema Moves Online (with Dina Iordanova, 2012), Key Concepts in Creative Industries (with John Hartley, Jason Potts, Terry Flew, John Banks and Michael Keane, 2013), Hidden Innovation: Policy, Industry and the Creative Sector (2013), Screen Distribution and the New King Kongs of the Online World (with Jon Silver, 2013), The Media and Communications in Australia (with Sue Turnbull, 2014) and Media Economics (with Terry Flew and Adam Swift, 2015). Felicity Ford is a PhD candidate in Screen and Cultural Studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne where she tutors in gender, media and film studies. Her research is primarily concerned with disruptions to cinematic form in relation to sound, movement, vision and time. She is interested in how contemporary film intersects with narratives of guilt, consent, trauma, criminality and sexuality. Her work has been published in Film Philosophy, Screen Education, Metro and Senses of Cinema. She is the Secretary for the Melbourne Cinematheque and a Project Co‐ordinator for the Graduate Researcher Network at the Graduate Student Association. Lisa French is Dean, Media and Communication and Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. She is the co‐author of Shining a Light: 50 Years of the Australian Film Institute (2009), and editor of the anthology Womenvision: Women and the Moving Image in Australia (2003). Her professional history includes directing the St Kilda Film Festival, and nine years as a non‐executive director of the Australian Film Institute. Recently, she has worked with six industry partners on the status and representation of women in Victoria’s film and television industries, including digital media and games. Stephen Gaunson is Head of Cinema Studies in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. His research explores the subject of adaptation on the screen. He is the author of The Ned Kelly Films: A Cultural History of Kelly History (Intellect, 2013) and is working on his next book, which will examine the distribution and exhibition of adaptation films in the global market. Ross Gibson is Centenary Professor in Creative and Cultural Research at the University of Canberra. Recent works include the books The Summer Exercises and 26 Views of the Starburst World, both published by UWAP.

xii ­Notes on Contributor Ben Goldsmith is an Independent Scholar with expertise in film, television, media policy, creative labour and creative industries. He has held academic positions at University of the Sunshine Coast, University of Technology, Queensland and Swinburne University of Technology. His publications include the co‐edited Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand (2015), Creative Work Beyond the Creative Industries (2014), and the co‐authored book, Rating the Audience: The Business of Media (2011). Helen Goritsas is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and Coordinator of Bachelor of Interactive Media at Academy of Information Technology in Sydney. She served as President of Women in Film and Television NSW, and Director of the Greek Film Festival. She has judged the 16th–20th WOW Film Festival and Tour, the 48 Hour Film Project, Dendy Awards, Sydney Film Festival, the Kidz Flicks International Film Festival, and the IPAF ATOM awards. She contributed an installation to VIVID, Sydney, http://www.vividsydney.com/event/light/lightwell and co‐ produced the feature film Alex & Eve (2015). Helen Grace is a new media artist, filmmaker, writer and academic. She is the author of Culture, Aesthetics and Affect in Ubiquitous Media: The Prosaic Image, and Founding Director of the MA in Visual Culture Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is associate in Gender and Cultural Studies and research affiliate of Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney; a co‐investigator on public space transformation in Hong Kong, and a member of the Film Advisory Board of Sydney International Film Festival, focusing on Asian and independent cinema. Odette Kelada teaches in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She publishes in the area of race, whiteness and gender studies. Key interests include the constructions of nation, body and identity in creative representations and the teaching of racial literacy. Publications include Drawing Sybylla: The Real and Imagined Lives of Australia’s Women Writers, ‘The Stolen River: Possession and Race Representation in Grenville’s Colonial Narrative’ (JASAL), ‘Is the Personal Still Political?’ (Australian Cultural History Journal) and ‘White Blindness: A National Emergency?’ (ACRAWSA Journal). Olivia Khoo is a Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University. She is the author of The Chinese Exotic: Modern Diasporic Femininity (Hong Kong University Press, 2007) and co‐author (with Belinda Smaill and Audrey Yue) of Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas (Lexington, 2013). She is co‐editor (with Sean Metzger) of Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures (Intellect, 2009) and (with Audrey Yue) of Sinophone Cinemas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

­Notes on Contributor

xiii

Anthony Lambert teaches in the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University. He researches and has published widely in the areas of Australian film and Australian culture. He is co‐editor and author of Diasporas of Australian Cinema (Intellect, 2009), and editor‐in‐chief of the internationally refereed journal Studies in Australasian Cinema. Jane Landman is an adjunct fellow at Victoria University. Her research in film history explores Australia and the Pacific. She is author of ‘The Tread of a White Man’s Foot’: Australian Pacific Colonialism and the Cinema (Pandanus Books, ANU, 2006). Recent work includes co‐editing a double issue of Studies in Australasian Cinema 7  (2–3) on ‘Decolonising Screens’, and publication of ‘Renewing Imperial Ties: The Queen in Australia’, in Mandy Merck (ed), The British Monarchy on Screen (2016). Amanda Malel Trevisanut is an early career researcher and teaches in the School of Culture and Communications, University of Melbourne. Her doctoral thesis, SBS Independent: Productive Diversity and Countermemory analyses SBS Independent as a cultural institution in relation to policy developments, elucidating how the commissioning house shaped new practices of production, distribution and counter‐memorial representation in the independent film and public broadcasting sectors between 1994 and 2007. She is a research assistant for the Digital Humanities Research Incubator (DHI) at University of Melbourne. P. David Marshall holds a research professorship and personal chair in new media, communication and cultural studies at Deakin University. He has published many books that have studied the public personality and celebrity including Celebrity and Power (2nd edition 2014), Companion to Celebrity (2015), Celebrity Culture Reader (2006), Fame Games (2000) and New Media Cultures (2004). His current work explores the area of Persona Studies and investigates the online construction and presentation of identity as well the proliferation of public personas throughout contemporary culture. Marion McCutcheon is a Research Associate with the Queensland University of Technology and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wollongong. A  communications economist with a background in telecommunications and broadcasting policy, her research interests include evaluating the benefits derived from cultural and creative goods and services, and the role of creative skills in economic systems. Norie Neumark is a theorist and sound/media artist. Collaborating with Maria Miranda as out‐of‐sync (www.out‐of‐sync.com) their work has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally. Her 2017 monograph, Voicetracks: Attuning to Voice in Media and the Arts (MIT Press) explores voice and new materialism.

xiv ­Notes on Contributor Neumark co‐edited Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media (2010) and At  a  Distance: Precursors to Internet Art and Activism (2005). She is Honorary Professorial Fellow at VCA, Melbourne University and Emeritus Professor, La  Trobe University. She is founding editor, Unlikely: Journal for Creative Arts http://unlikely.net.au. Anne Rutherford is Associate Professor in Cinema Studies, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney, and is the author of ‘What Makes a Film Tick?’: Cinematic Affect, Materiality and Mimetic Innervation. She has published widely on cinematic affect, embodiment and materiality, mise en scène, film sound and Indigenous cinema. Recent research explores affective dimensions of film sound in the work of Kobayashi Masaki and Takemitsu Toru; ‘animate thought’ in the ethnographic photographs of Donald Thomson and their heritage in Ten Canoes; and montage and performativity in the work of William Kentridge. Diana Sandars is a lecturer in Screen, Gender, New Media and Cultural studies in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne. Her research focus is on the child in screen media. She has published widely, including book chapters on Ally McBeal and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Forthcoming ­publications include: ‘Aliens and Monstrous Girls in Lilo and Stitch’ in The Grimm Mouse: Violence in Post‐9/11 Animated Disney Films, and a chapter on SheZow in Superheroes and Me. Belinda Smaill is Associate Professor of Film and Screen Studies at Monash University in Melbourne. She is the author of The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture (2010), co‐author of Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas (2013) and Regarding Life: Animals and the Documentary Moving Image (2016). Her essays have appeared in international journals including Camera Obscura, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film Criticism and Feminist Media Studies. Jane Stadler is Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Media and Communication at Swinburne University, Australia. She led a collaborative Australian Research Council project on landscape and location in Australian narratives (2011–2014) and co‐authored a book on this topic (Imagined Landscapes, 2016). She is author of Pulling Focus (2008), co‐author of Screen Media (2009) and Media and Society (2016), and co‐editor of an anthology on adaptation, Pockets of Change (2011). Her research is informed by phenomenological and philosophical approaches to spectatorship. Adam Swift has a PhD and is a Research Fellow at Queensland University of Technology’s Digital Media Research Centre. He is currently part of a team researching the disruptive and innovative forms of production and distribution in

­Notes on Contributor

xv

the new global screen ecology. Publications include Media Economics (with Stuart Cunningham and Terry Flew) and Politics, Media and Democracy in Australia (with Brian McNair, Terry Flew and Stephen Harrington). Ana Tiwary is a director/producer based in Sydney, Australia. She runs a production company called ’indiVisual films’ that specialises in making diverse content for Australian and international audiences. She began her career working as an Assistant Director on big budget feature films in the ’Bollywood’ industry in India. She went on to work at National Geographic Channel and has directed several documentaries, including over 20 films for ABC TV. She is a full member of the Australian Directors Guild and was selected by Screen Australia for the 2018 Developing the Developer program. Sue Turnbull is Professor of Communication and Media Studies, University of Wollongong. Publications include The Media and Communications in Australia (2014 edited with Stuart Cunningham) and The Television Crime Drama (Edinburgh University Press 2014). She is editor of the journal Media International Australia and joint editor of Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies. She is also a media commentator on television and radio in Australia and writes on crime fiction for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Constantine Verevis is Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies, Monash University. He is author of Film Remakes (2006), co‐author of Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Vol 1: Critical Positions (2013) and co‐editor of Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel (2010); After Taste: Cultural Value and the Moving Image (2011); Film Trilogies: New Critical Approaches (2012), Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions: Remake/Remodel (2012), B Is For Bad Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics and Cultural Value (2014) and US Independent Film After 1989: Possible Films (2015). Deane Williams is Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies, Monash University. His recent books include the three‐volume Australian Film Theory and Criticism (with Noel King and Con Verevis) 2013–2015, The Grierson Effect: Tracing Documentary’s International Movement (with Zoë Druick) 2014, and The Cinema of Sean Penn: In and Out of Place (2015). Audrey Yue is Professor in Communications and New Media, University of Singapore. Her books include Promoting Sustainable Living (with Karakiewicz & Paladino), Sinophone Cinemas (with Khoo), Transnational Australian Cinema (with Khoo and Smaill), Queer Singapore (with Pow), Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile, AsiaPacifiQueer (with Martin, Jackson and McLelland) and Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia (with Berry and Martin). She is on the board of Sexualities, Feminist Media Studies, International Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Cultural Studies Review and Hong Kong Studies.

­Foreword

A Companion to Australian Cinema Australian cinema has always provided a vantage point for making sense of the cinema more generally and its evolving character. In their own particular way national cinemas refract global trends in film production processes, screen practice, and cinema movements. Included in this are elements of genre and style, film funding, distribution, and the circumstances of film screening and relations with adjacent screen media – first theatre, then television and video, and then online. Australian cinema ceaselessly adjusts itself to this larger, insistent cinematic world, selectively taking up and adapting itself as a component, and inevitably subsidiary part. So, too, audiences, reviewers, commentators and scholars similarly refract global trends in their localised uptake of cinema in general and Australian cinema in particular. So, in being profoundly and continuously shaped by an insistent internationalism and cinema’s preternatural interconnectedness, Australian cinema is a place to observe the evolving encounter between these wider story‐telling institutions and traditions and those of Australia. Australian filmmakers and film writers alike use these larger trends, norms, and insistent global political economies of production, funding, and circulation to mediate, connect with, comment upon, represent, select, and intervene in a story‐telling from Australia. Their resulting story‐telling is thus influenced by both the larger cinema conversation and the practical circumstances of their encounter with more specific nationally‐based and centred institutions, traditions, and movements. The cinematic world‐making that is Australian cinema joins together broader trends in cinema with more nativist cinematic traditions. Not created in isolation these nativist traditions have also been shaped by previous conjunctions of the global, by local histories and traditions of story‐telling, by available visual repertoires rendering landscape, the built environment, and peoples, and by collections of both new stories and the familiar told and retold on screen. Australian cinema

­Forewor

xvii

is here a vantage point for taking the “temperature” – aesthetic, cultural, social, political – of a national film culture that is both internationally connected and nationally‐based. This glocal – global and local – condition of the Australian cinema is also, of course, the condition of Australian film writing, whether on the cinema in general or Australian cinema. Cinema’s uptake in Australian discussion and review, public commentary, and scholarly criticism talks to these same encounters, global trends, made over through nation‐based – sometimes national, sometimes international – lenses. In these ways Australian cinema is simultaneously a national cinema, a transnational cinema, a contributor to an international cinema and a cinema in conversation with Australia and the world. The cinema – and Australian cinema in particular – is always re‐inventing itself rather like the Mad Max cycle of films, in the light of its new circumstances. This combination of the global and the local is, arguably, what makes the cinema so important as a cultural form. It powerfully informs filmmakers’ practices, just as it shapes the very terms of audience and critic appreciation or opprobrium. Both sets of actors make sense of, variously domesticate, and pick and choose; and in doing so they inevitably extend the Australian national and transnational cinematic world in relations of contingency, dependency, and partial autonomy. In this double fashion Australian cinema becomes a vantage point from which to see both the general and particular in operation through cultural, social, political, and aesthetic lenses that are simultaneously international and local. As a collection charting, grappling, and contending with Australian cinema in the 2000s A Companion to Australian Cinema provides a window on our contemporary cinema. It shows a cinema that is adjusting and mutating cinema’s cultural forms in the wake of changing intermedial relations with television, photography and online media. It shows the developing multiplatform ecologies in an era of screen media being anywhere, anytime and on any device. New sorts of international association, and new turns in globally dispersed international production are in evidence, whether through the bodies of actors, post‐production services, or international branding. It is a national cinema that has become a central participant through its Blak Wave in a now global movement for a Fourth Indigenous Cinema so passionately advocated by Aotearoa New Zealand Maori filmmaker Barry Barclay (2003, 1990) and provided with its Australian critical vocabulary by Aboriginal intellectual Marcia Langton’s (1993) careful parsing of filmmaking as an intercultural encounter. Australian cinema is also a cinema contributing its own minor internationalisms as a foreign‐language, non‐Anglophone cinema (here Laotian cinema) contributing, as essays in this collection claim, to a minor transnational imaginary straddling Australian and Asian cinemas. Australian cinema of the 2000s also emerges in this collection as a cinema which variously contributes to, comments upon and negotiates ways of making and being Australian, being Indigenous, and being a foreign‐body in Australia. It discloses itself as a cinema responding and contributing in equal measure to Australia’s fractious social and political divisions. In taking up the rise of an Indigenous Fourth Cinema the Companion explores that cinema’s bracing challenge to Australia, its

xviii ­Forewor politics, its cultural formations and foundations, and its peoples. It is a cinema that simultaneously celebrates the imperial legacies of its national story in ANZAC while facing and not facing, the challenges that its increasingly multicultural character presents to it and that of its natural environment marked by an ever more insistent, though at times vigorously denied, logic of the Anthropocene. It is a cinema that is marked by unease, contention and anxiety. In this collection Helen Grace usefully calls it an ‘unsettled’ cinematic imaginary. It is a cinema less about staging unity as about staging the terms of division, disconnection and disagreement. It is a cinema produced, just as this Companion to that cinema is written, in the shadow of a national story with its own contemporary dynamics and versions of longstanding logics – part political, part cultural, part social and economic – of contention, of contrasting national imaginaries, of competing and uncertain national futures and national settlements. While such a mixed condition of filmmaking and critical writing has been with us since the re‐emergence of a multi‐faceted cinema from the diverse strands of filmmaking and film aspiration that governed cultural and political contention in the late 1960s, Australian cinema’s messy assemblage has taken its own distinctive shape in the 2000s and 2010s. This Companion locates this as a cinema shaped by the various slipstreams of the cinema of the period. It is one also marked by the changing political economies of screen media production, circulation and exhibition as longstanding settlements associated with traditional media of the cinema, commercial television and pay‐TV, and public service broadcasters are being reconfigured and partially replaced by online alternatives such as YouTube and Netflix. Like the filmmaking to which it refers A Companion to Australian Cinema is being written at a time when the architectonic plates of the world are shifting and with them, Australia’s place in that world. By 2007 China had overtaken Japan as Australia’s largest trading partner (DFAT, 2007). Chinese investment from a low base has now become significant across the economy including in the cinema, where leading cinema chain, Hoyts was acquired by the Chinese leisure and real estate conglomerate Wanda in 2015. Coupled with the renewed role played by American corporations in Australia’s media, including screen media courtesy of the CBS take‐over of the Ten Network and the formidable power of the FAANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) these new circumstances are generating new screen partnerships and patterns of infrastructure ownership, creating in the process new priorities and anxieties for the place of Australia not only in the world but how Australian contributions to film worlds are organized and the kinds of control Australian actors can exercise. If, as I contended in Australian National Cinema (O’Regan 1996), Australian cinema as a national cinema is best seen as a messy assemblage of filmmaking projects, institutional and policy configurations, critical moves, and a container of diverse energies, then to do justice to Australian cinema of the last twenty years would require a multifaceted and generous approach capable of recognising this diversity and accommodating its several characteristics. A Companion to Australian

­Forewor

xix

Cinema is well suited to this task. The diverse angles of incidence of its different sections and the varied concerns of its authors promote recognition of Australian cinema’s mosaic form. A Companion provides a vehicle in which participation through post‐production and visual effects in The Lego Movie can sit alongside the work of auteur producer Robert Connolly, Aboriginal filmmaker Ivan Sen’s cinematic imaginary of place and landscape can abut the business models for Matchbox Pictures, YouTube’s Australian contributors can intersect with the strategies of Screen Australia, the ABC and SBS, the heroine journeys on the Australian screen can join Gothic tropes in Australian cinema, and Jane Campion’s feminist sensibilities as an international auteur can connect to television serial, Serangoon Road’s, minor transnationalism, and the multi‐media spectacles generated in response to Australians arrested on drug‐related offences in Asia can jostle with digital transmedia documentary forms. The sheer detail and the extent of the coverage undertaken here serves to remind us of the many pathways Australian cinema takes and what these pathways require in terms of an engaged exploration. Australian cinema, courtesy of its size, is also manageable enough to be able to allow us to see in the one place how these very diverse projects and entrepreneurial energies, live together, knock against each other, contend, and simply slide by each other. As a medium‐sized cinema, Australian cinema is neither small as is New Zealand’s, or large as is that of the UK, Korea or France, or very large as is that of the USA, Japan and China. As an English language cinema, Australian cinema is simultaneously an insider producing in the dominant screen language of English and marginal as a minor English language cinema. This structural character might mean that it can do more than can a smaller cinema, and its films can travel at times unimpeded through cinema networks courtesy of being produced in the English language. But, at the same time, there are definite limits to what it can do. Such cinemas do more of some things than others at different times. Sometimes they have to choose what they do, and sometimes they have what they do chosen for them by dominant international players. While it only can do and only choose to do some things at different times, its smaller size has its advantages. In Australia various strands of screen production that are more distant from each other in a larger filmmaking milieu are more contiguous. Filmmakers have scope to contribute across a variety of film and television production, working over their careers across genres and forging intermedial screen careers. This makes Australian cinema valuable for thinking in the one place about various faultlines of film and television production. Australian cinema also provides a useful viewpoint from which to gauge the consequences for filmmaking of screen media transformations. With less firmly established and more precarious screen production industries compared to their larger media counterparts, Australia’s medium‐sized cinema is affected in different ways than are its counterparts in larger countries. From the mid‐2000s, technological change has been altering both producer operating conditions and the circumstances under which viewers access films. Cinema began the 2000s with the settled

xx ­Forewor screening combination of cinema, DVD/video, pay‐TV and free‐to‐air broadcast TV; but by the late 2010s it was as much a cinema on laptops, tablets, and smart TVs accessing asynchronous, on‐demand content online (in its various varieties of advertiser‐supported, pay‐per‐view, and subscription video‐on‐demand), eclipsing the more traditional venues for screen media. Australian cinema provides a related but distinct position from which to view these changes as they impact upon the ecologies of film production in a medium‐sized English language market. A Companion to Australian Cinema starts with the basic question that confronts filmmakers and critics alike: how are we to make sense of Australian Cinema in the twenty‐first century? The answer they give here is partly synoptic. After all, this collection does comprehensively cover diverse strands of Australian film making and film writing of the new millennium. But its underlying priority is not to be summative or to condense a by now large volume of writing on Australian cinema and its history into more bite‐sized bits. It aim is rather to contribute fresh perspectives and to serve as a new point of departure for thinking about contemporary Australian cinema. A Companion to Australian Cinema’s is mostly concerned with adding to the literature on Australian cinema by variously challenging, redirecting, rechannelling, and retuning our attention to it. While it certainly conveys a strong sense of a continuity with previous writing, outlining as its authors do an improvising cinema and screen culture simultaneously connected with its past and negotiating its future, it does so by extending and opening up the conversation on Australian cinema and screen culture in new ways. Here, past filmmaking and critical work alike is not simply acknowledged but used in the best sense – entering as an active dialogue partner – to enable these contributions to be variously remade, repurposed, extended, and criticised through the critical encounter with contemporary cinema and television. With purposes of intervening in, as much as representing, Australian cinema A Companion’s authors seek to reinvent Australian cinema and Australian cinema writing for this time and this place. To aid this task of reinvention A Companion to Australian Cinema is thematically, not chronologically, organised. This allows Australian cinema to be grasped as a cinema of a number of tendencies – its editors call these tendencies a set of ‘propositions’ about Australian cinema. These are that: Australian cinema has an indigenous screen culture; it is an international cinema; a minor transnational cinema; an auteur, genre, and landscape cinema; a televisual cinema; and a cinema shaped by new media platforms. Recognising and filling out these several tendencies allow Australian cinema’s messy assemblages to not only be established but negotiated and recognised in their positivity. What is especially good about this orientation is that while it calls for a new beginning this is not a shallow new beginning borne of ignorance of Australian films and filming and Australian film writing. Rather it is one borne of a sense of possession of and passion for a rich, diverse, sometimes distinct and occasionally distinguished filmmaking and film writing history. This gives depth to its authors’ investigation of diverse strands of contemporary filmmaking, their interrogation of intermedial and transnational dimensions, their

­Forewor

xxi

understanding of strategies for viability concurrently pursued by filmmakers and film businesses, their charting of the changing policy and political environments of film support, and their interrogation of Australian cinema’s relation to broader national cultural formations and histories. A Companion to Australian Cinema conveys then the protean character of Australian cinema. It discloses a cinema of the new millenium engaged in perpetually forming and reforming its filmmaking practices, its screen economy, and cultural and critical apparatuses. It also opens up a new chapter in our understanding of and writing about Australian cinema, serving to both set an agenda for future scholarship and show to an Australian and international readership why contemporary configurations of Australian cinema matter to any understanding of national cinemas in these the first two decades of the new millennium. In doing so A Companion to Australian Cinema also makes a contribution to film writing and scholarship generally. Like their filmmaking counterpart, the writer on cinema operating from an Australian base has long connected with global conversations about the cinema, critically engaging with the cinema of the day, negotiating aesthetic movements within film making and screen culture, contributing to contemporary screen theory, film maker projections and critical understandings alike (see King, Verevis and Williams 2013). For those writing on Australian cinema in this collection this cinema is always refracted through the lens of their experience of and writing on the cinema more generally. To be interested in the cinema in Australia is to be interested in this larger international cinematic world of which Australian cinema is but a part. This means that the writers in this collection not only write on Australian cinema but have also contributed to the exploration of a cinema that extends well beyond it. A Companion to Australian Cinema operates in a critical screen culture that mimes in a different register the very work of Australian cinema itself over this same period: its writers are also in the business of glocal refraction, adaptation and negotiation. If this brings those who write on Australian cinema closer to their filmmaking counterparts it also ensures that those writing for this collection are writers on and contributors to the dialogue on the cinema more generally. In this they are well suited to the task before them.

­References Barclay, Barry. 1990. Our Own Image. Auckland: Longman Paul. Barclay, Barry. 2003. ‘Celebrating Fourth Cinema.’ Illusions 35: 7–11. Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). 2008. ‘Australia’s Composition of Trade’. Media Release. 19 May. Canberra: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. https:// dfat.gov.au/news/media/Pages/australia‐s‐composition‐of‐trade‐2007.aspx. Accessed 13 November 2018.

xxii ­Forewor King, Noel, Con Verevis, Con and Deane Williams. 2013. Australian Film Theory and Criticism vol 1., Critical Positions. Bristol: Intellect. Langton, Marcia. 1993. ‘Well, I Heard it on the Radio and I saw it on the Television…’: An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by and about Aboriginal People and Things. North Sydney: Australian Film Commission. O’Regan, Tom. 1996. Australian National Cinema. London and New York: Routledge.

­Acknowledgments

The editors would like to acknowledge Jayne Fargnoli whose powers of persuasion overcame our initial resistance to signing up for the challenge of editing the Australian volume of Wiley Blackwell’s Companions to National Cinemas. We are indebted to the steady hand of Elisha Benjamin who became our project editor at Wiley in August 2017 and has worked tirelessly with us to finalise the manuscript. We thank Helen Krionas for invaluable editorial assistance in the final stages of compiling the manuscript, and particularly for wrangling image permissions and capturing frame grabs over her summer break, as well as organising chapter and image folders. Together, Elisha and Helen made it possible for us to get over the final hurdles and we are very grateful to them. Many thanks also to our copy editor Mary Malin and the production team at Wiley who saw this project through to publication. We would like to thank Marion McCutcheon for bringing her sharp eye and industry expertise to the editing of material included in Part V. Our personal thanks go to Susannah Radstone and Paul Salzman who supported and encouraged our efforts in many different ways, over many late nights and lost weekends. We thank them in particular for their astute comments on our own chapters and the Introduction. We are grateful to ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) and La Trobe University’s Department of Creative Arts and English for ongoing support and access to resources over the life of this project. The editors thank Madeleine Davis (Member of The Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers (ANZSI) for her sterling work compiling the index to this Collection. More than anything this Companion owes its final form to our authors, some of whom have been with us since the beginning of the project, while others came on board as the volume took shape: we thank you for your generosity and patience with our many editorial queries and interventions, and for the transformative way that each of you engaged with our propositions on Australian cinema in the twenty‐first century. It has been our pleasure and privilege to work with everyone who has c­ ontributed to the publication of this Companion to Australian Cinema.

Introduction Australian Cinema Now Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye

Since 1896, there has been a film production industry of some kind in Australia, from early street scenes captured by travelling showmen to George Miller’s Mad Max trilogy (1979–85) and its recent American–Australian reboot Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). There has also been a film distribution and exhibition industry in Australia, with a world‐leading vertical integration of production, distribution, and exhibition by Australasian Films in the 1910s  –  until it was eclipsed by Hollywood’s vertical integration and international expansion in the 1920s. It is ­possible to point to certain films, documentaries and television drama series as ‘Australian productions’ on the basis of their funding sources, creative talent, location and content, but international cross‐overs and market dominance (whether creative, financial, or technological) have been a given of Australian cinema for almost a century. At the Royal Commission into the Moving Picture Industry in Australia (1927–1928), filmmaker–producers promoted the making and screening of Australian (and British) films in Australia as a cultural and industrial buffer against the imperialising and otherwise demoralising influence of Hollywood cinema (see Delamoir and Gaunson 2015, 225–229). The defence of local production as tactical and cultural work has proved enduring, not only in Australia but wherever small to medium‐sized national cinemas seek to thrive. Calls for government financial support to underpin Australia’s capacity to ’tell its own stories’ have recurred since the Royal Commission delivered its report in 1928. In 2018, the rapid growth of Netflix, with 3.5 million subscribers in Australia  –  together with a renewed campaign by conservatives to sell off the national public broadcaster  –  have ­presented an acute challenge to Australian cinema’s nexus with the nation.

A Companion to Australian Cinema, First Edition. Edited by Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

2

Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye

In  April 2018, the Make it Australian lobby launched a campaign to maintain Australian content quotas on television, and to expand those requirements to new media including Netflix, Amazon, telcos and internet service providers. Notably, the campaign to protect distinctively ‘Australian’ stories was strengthened by the support of mobile and expatriate ‘creatives’ working across borders, with Cate Blanchett and Chris Hemsworth taking the limelight. While the commercial ­television networks lobbied for: the Australian content quota to be replaced, the Make it Australian campaign lobbied for an end to cuts to Screen Australia and the public broadcasters (ABC, SBS, and NITV); ‘the raising of tax incentives for Australian TV and foreign productions’; and the imposition of Australian content quotas on Netflix and other streaming services. At the same time, the Queensland government argued for an increase in the ‘location offset’ to attract more offshore productions, particularly Hollywood blockbusters (Broinowski, 2018). The idea of a ‘national Australian cinema’ occupies a peculiar place in campaigns such as Make it Australian. Such campaigns foreground Australian filmmakers and stars with international reputations. They acknowledge that filmmaking in Australia depends on television commissioning a wide range of productions across genres and formats. And they support subsidies for offshore Hollywood blockbusters to shore up local production facilities and crews. These slippages – between film and television, telling our own stories and subsidising Hollywood productions – are symptomatic of what Tom O’Regan (1996, 1–5) describes as the ‘messy’ assemblage of a medium‐sized national cinema, differentiating itself from other English language cinemas and responding to the dominance of Hollywood with a variety of strategies and policies: The aim of a national cinema is one of producing a local presence alongside the dominant imported presence in both the local and international markets. […] The aim of a national cinema in this market and cultural environment is not to replace Hollywood films with say Australian films so much as to provide a viable and healthy local supplement to Hollywood cinema. […] The local cinema needs to be worked for anew and presented to every new generation of critics, viewers, exhibitors, ­distributors and politicians. (O’Regan 1996, 48)

This Companion, then, presents a new generation with six propositions that seek to renew and extend the work of those who came before us and attuned us to Australian film as part of our social imaginary as well as a presence in world cinema. Before we turn to our six organising propositions, we want to offer our readers an introduction to key texts that seeded our interest in writing about Australian cinema. This Companion is a supplement to the substantial literature on Australian film and television. It is neither comprehensive nor encyclopedic. Rather, it draws attention to certain aspects of Australian cinema that have ­persisted, changed shape or emerged in the twenty‐first century.



Introduction: Australian Cinema Now

3

­Writing on Australian Cinema Scholarship on Australian cinema flourished in the 1980s, sparked by the 1970s revival of feature film production. Film history approaches were entwined with industry–text–nation approaches, beginning with Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper’s reference work, Australian Film 1900–1977 (1980), Ina Bertrand and Diane Collins’s Government and Film in Australia (1981), John Tulloch’s Legends on the Screen (1981) and Graham Shirley and Brian Adams’s Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years (1983). Building on this rediscovered film history, Tulloch (1982), Graeme Turner (1986), Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka (1987; 1988a; 1988b) and Stuart Cunningham (1991), developed a cultural studies approach to conjunctures of industry–text–nation. Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan produced two definitive anthologies, fleshing out forgotten histories and expanding the industry–text– culture approach in An Australian Film Reader (1985) and The Australian Screen (1989). In 1996 the p­ ublication of O’Regan’s Australian National Cinema made an unsurpassed contribution to the way we think about ‘national cinema’ in general and the Australian case, in particular. While Dermody and Jacka’s The Screening of Australia (1987; 1988a) and edited collection, The Imaginary Industry (1988b) were ground‐breaking critiques that unpacked the contrary notions of a national industry and a national cinema, and challenged both commercial and cultural complacencies, The Australian Screen (Moran and O’Regan 1989) remains the exemplary introduction to production cycles and critical pre‐occupations that have inspired teaching and writing on Australian film and television. The anthology begins with a chapter on the silent era from 1896–1929, by two of Australia’s finest film scholars, Ina Bertrand and William D. Routt. In the ‘The Big Bad Combine’, they champion three of Australia’s contributions to world cinema: the formation of a vertically integrated company, Australasian Films/Union Theatres by 1913, well before Hollywood managed the same feat; the production of a uniquely Australian (bushranger) genre and cinema’s first ‘feature‐length’ film, The Story of the Kelly Gang (Charles Tait 1906); and the production of a world cinema classic, The Sentimental Bloke (Raymond Longford 1919), described as ‘among the very best films made anywhere before 1920’ (Bertrand and Routt 1989, 20) and praised for matching Swedish cinema’s command of cinema as ‘an art of atmosphere’ (Bardeche and Brasillach in Bertrand and Routt 1989, 20). In Chapter 2, Routt makes a persuasive case for a further distinctive element of Australian cinema: the prominence of the father–daughter bond in over 60% of films made in the 1920s–30s, a pattern that Routt interprets in terms of the ‘split identity’ of ‘dominion colonialism’ which effectively negates ‘the legitimate claims of the indigenous population’ and establishes racism as a feature of colonial cultures  –  figured through narratives of miscegenation (Routt 1989, 39–40).

4

Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye

The four decades that followed these early achievements have been widely considered a wasteland in Australian film history, however, Cunningham’s chapter (in Moran and O’Regan 1989, 53–74) goes against the grain, reframing 1930–70 as the ‘decades of survival’ characterised by three trends: productions that grappled with Australia’s British colonial heritage; innovative landscape films including two classics, John Heyer’s poetic, outback documentary, The Back of Beyond (1954) and Charles Chauvel’s Technicolor, assimilationist melodrama, Jedda (1955); and the emergence of international co‐productions in the Pacific region, as well as ‘location’ films made by non‐Australian production companies – notably, a number of British Ealing films including The Overlanders (Harry Watt 1946) and Bitter Springs (Ralph Smart 1950). The Australian Screen’s chronological account then takes a new turn with ­chapters on the ‘ocker’ comedies, state‐funded cultural nationalism in the period film, and the commercial turn to tax incentives and genre filmmaking in the 1980s. Graeme Turner (1989, 99–117) argues that Australian cinema gained an international profile in the 1970s with a ‘golden age’ of young directors who were celebrated for their art‐directed period films, featuring Australian stories set in the recent past. Highlights of this costume–landscape genre include Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Ken Hannam’s Sunday Too Far Away (1975), Fred Schepisi’s The Devil’s Playground (1976) and The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1978), Phillip Noyce’s Newsfront (1978), Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979) and Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant (1980). These auteur–directors delivered a distinctive landscape cinema that promoted cultural nationalism at home and the antipodean period film abroad. The arthouse period film, as O’Regan argues in ‘Cinema Oz’ (1989a) eclipsed the popular, picaresque comedies, whose ‘ocker’ characters, Dame Edna Everage, Stork, Bazza McKenzie and Alvin Purple, were displaced by ethereal schoolgirls, laconic shearers, nascent writers, intrepid newsmen and headstrong soldiers. In the 1980s, as the period film waned and the national cinema project (and its audience) migrated to television and the historical mini-series, Paul Hogan’s Crocodile Dundee (1986) found a new playing field for the ocker comedy by breaking into the coveted US market (O’Regan 1989b). The introduction of tax incentives in the 1980s heralded the return of Australian audiences, by way of Australianised genre films, making Mel Gibson an international star and Paul Hogan the face of Australian ordinariness. The privatising of production through the 10BA tax scheme culminated in four breakthrough films that brought Australian audiences back to Australian cinema: Gallipoli (Peter Weir 1981), The Man From Snowy River (George T. Miller 1982), Mad Max 2 (George Miller 1982) and Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman 1986). The 1980s also witnessed the phenomenon of successful television mini-series focused on Australian historical and political themes, from Against the Wind (Seven Network, 1978) and Women of the Sun (SBS‐TV 1981) to Vietnam (Kennedy‐Miller 1987). The Australian Screen’s account of the major trends and successes that characterised Australian cinema ends in 1988, before the revival of the ocker sensibility that



Introduction: Australian Cinema Now

5

revels in the ‘ugliness and ordinariness’ of Australian suburban and rural life. This revival took a dark turn in Jane Campion’s debut feature film, Sweetie (1989) and a wry tone in The Road to Nhill (Sue Brooks 1997). While comedies of female entrapment in sprawling suburbs and small towns proved fertile ground in women’s filmmaking over several decades (see French 2003), in the early 1990s the ocker sensibility found a new home in the ‘glitter cycle’ of Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrmann 1992), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliott 1994) and Muriel’s Wedding (Paul J. Hogan 1994). This trilogy not only drew Australian audiences to suburban, queer, and bogan comedy–musicals, it redefined Australian cinema in the last decade of the twentieth century as ‘emergent’ or ‘new world’. The idea of a new world cinema is indebted to Pauline Kael’s characterisation of Australians and Americans as ‘peoples who are outcasts, exiles, or bums, people with the excitement of going to a new place’ (quoted in O’Regan 1996, 317). For O’Regan, this new world‐ish condition of ‘a perpetual becoming, a coming into being in the here and now, continually differentiating, incorporating and moving on’ (1996, 318) is grounded in a provisional sense of national identity – one that produces a populist, utopian and inclusive ‘melting pot’ cinema, epitomised by the ‘glitter’ trilogy. In contrast to the cultural nationalism that underpinned the 1970s landscape– period films, a new world cinema ‘is consumer and fashion driven, it is ephemeral, it is utopian, it is not serious, it is hegemonic’ (O’Regan 1996, 324). This irreverent attitude towards national identity and cultural diversity in settler–immigrant nations demarcates a ‘melting pot’ cinema from O’Regan’s other concepts of nationhood that shaped twentieth‐century Australian cinema as not only ‘new world’, but as European‐derived, diasporic and multicultural. A cursory look at prominent Australian films since 2010 suggests that these twentieth-century concepts of nationhood are still in play, with the European‐derived sense of Australian identity evident in films such as The Daughter (Simon Stone 2015), a diasporic sense of double‐identity at stake in The Lion (Garth Davis 2017), and multicultural entanglements at the heart of Ali’s Wedding ( Jeffrey Walker 2017) and Top of the Lake: China Girl ( Jane Campion 2017). An Indigenous challenge to settler–colonial nationhood, drawing on new world and multicultural tropes, is evident in popular musicals, Bran Nue Dae (Rachel Perkins 2009) and The Sapphires (Wayne Blair 2012). What else might be on the reading list for a new generation? Mutable and ­mobile identities have been explored in Womenvision (French 2003), Australian Cinema After Mabo (Collins and Davis 2004), and Diasporas of Australian Cinema (Simpson, Murawska, Lambert 2009). External relationships have been surveyed, for example, the British and American connection in New Australian Cinema (McFarlane and Mayer 1992), the Australia–New Zealand connection in Twin Peeks (Verhoeven 1999), the Pacific region in The Tread of a White Man’s Foot (Landman 2006) and the global in Loving and Hating Hollywood (Mills 2009). Genre–textual– auteurist analyses can be found in anthologies, Film in Australia (Moran and Vieth 2006) and The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand (Mayer and Beattie 2007), and in

6

Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye

two monograph series, The Moving Image (ATOM) and Australian Screen Classics (Currency Press). The establishment in 2006 of the journal, Studies in Australasian Cinema, has attracted a new generation of film scholars, providing a focus for ­special issues across a range of themes from genre and new media, to religion and decolonisation. Recent publications testify to trends in contemporary scholarship. Australian Film Theory and Criticism (King, Verevis and Williams 2013) is the first of a three‐ volume study mapping the uptake of transnational film theory in Australia. Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas (Khoo, Smaill and Yue 2013) seeks to fill a gap in the literature on Australian diasporic multiculturalism by highlighting Australia’s cinematic engagement with Asia. Local Hollywood: Global Film Production and the Gold Coast (Goldsmith, Ward and O’Regan 2010) travels in the opposite direction – from conglomerate Hollywood to the Warner Roadshow Studio in Queensland. Turning away from the big screen, Pertierra and Turner’s Locating Television: Zones of Consumption (2013) places television and community, rather than cinema and nation, at the centre of multiplatform screen consumption. An earlier body of work on Australian television also needs to be taken into account when considering the proposition that Australian cinema is a televisual industry, including The ABC of Drama: 1975–1989 ( Jacka 1991), Australian Television Culture (O’Regan 1993), The Australian TV Book (Turner and Cunningham 2002), The SBS Story (Ang and Hawkins 2008) and Television Studies after TV (Turner and Tay 2009). This Companion to Australian Cinema has an apparent precedent in The Oxford Companion to Australian Film (McFarlane, Mayer and Bertrand 1999). However, there is no comparison. The Oxford volume offers a wide‐ranging mix of ­encyclopaedic entries and short essays on key historical, industrial and cultural figures, films, genres and institutions that comprised the assemblage of Australian cinema in the twentieth century. In contrast, Wiley Blackwell commissioned this companion as an anthology of original essays by new and established authors. We seek to supplement the existing literature but do not pretend to offer a comprehensive account of the present moment or its origins. Contributing authors were invited to focus on a twenty‐first century screen production or industry trend in relation to one of six propositions, outlined below.

­Proposition 1: Australian Cinema is an Indigenous Screen Culture This companion opens with the proposition that an Indigenous screen culture has emerged as the most distinctive and transformative feature of Australian national cinema in the first decades of the twenty‐first century. In previous books and anthologies on Australian cinema, the national has long been defined and critiqued



Introduction: Australian Cinema Now

7

as a white, masculine, nation‐building enterprise, producing a handful of classic Australian films based on nineteenth and early twentieth century character types, including the bushman, the soldier, the father’s daughter, and the larrikin. Along with avant‐garde filmmakers, women and ethnic communities, Indigenous Australians found themselves at the back of the book where they were invoked to problematise the national rather than transform it. While film critics and scholars have long contested the myths that underpin the idea of national types and the accompanying notion of an Australian way of life, the proposition that Indigenous characters, stories and filmmakers might subtend Australian screen culture is yet to have its day. Yet, internationally, Indigenous films including Beneath Clouds (Ivan Sen 2002), Bran Nue Dae (Rachel Perkins 2009), Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr 2006), Samson & Delilah (Warwick Thornton 2009) and The Sapphires (Wayne Blair 2012), and television series including Redfern Now (Blackfella Films 2012, 2013, 2015) and Cleverman (Goalpost Pictures  2016, 2017) are said to be ‘leading the charge when it comes to creating diverse entertainment’ (Cooper and Lieu 2016). A brief survey of the film literature over the last three decades produces some startling claims that testify to both the presence and absence of Indigenous characters, stories, and filmmakers. In 1989, Sean Maynard (a pseudonym for a Melbourne film writer and actor) wrote a chapter on ‘Aborigines and Film’ for The Australian Screen (216–235). The chapter focuses almost exclusively on films by non‐Indigenous Australians, beginning with Chauvel’s Jedda (1955) and ending with experimental films by Mick Glasheen, Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, and Michael Lee that feature the Australian landscape and, in particular, Uluru. Bound by his critical obligation to judge films as artefacts, regardless of their social or political significance, Maynard makes some egregious claims about (mostly un‐named) films ‘made either by blacks or with blacks collaborating with whites’ (Maynard 1989, 231): The problem with many of these documentaries … is that when blacks address white society about discrimination and injustice, too often a kind of whingeing quality comes into the films. It’s as though they protest too shrilly. This is a very white‐centred thing to say, but they parade their anger without dignity. […] It’s  like a damage claim that wants something extra for pain and suffering. (Maynard 1989, 231–2)

Apart from ‘self‐pity’, the other fault that Maynard finds in black and white collaborative projects such as the breakthrough mini-series, Women of the Sun (SBS‐TV 1981) is a ‘certain self‐consciousness of performance and direction’ (Maynard 1989, 228). He extends this criticism of ‘unconvincing performances’ to the cine‐verite documentary, Wrong Side of the Road (Ned Lander 1981) and laments there is ‘no wiser, more secure perspective that looks upon their situation’ (232). Whether or not the 6,000 or so ethnographic films made about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders offer a ‘wiser, more secure perspective’ lies outside Maynard’s brief

8

Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye

survey of key feature films, documentaries and experimental films made about Aboriginal Australians, but rarely in collaboration with them. In 1993 the ‘white‐centred’ critical landscape described above was challenged head‐on when the Australian Film Commission published Marcia Langton’s ‘Well, I Heard it on the Radio and I saw it on the Television …’ Crossing disciplinary and cultural boundaries, Langton’s essay‐monograph upended previous attempts to address ‘the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking about Aboriginal people and things’. It appeared a decade before Barry Barclay’s influential treatise, ‘Celebrating Fourth Cinema’ (2003), and a decade after anthropologist Eric Michaels began publishing on the use of video, television, and art by Warlpiri people at Yuendumu in Central Australia. Langton makes three important interventions in her essay. The first is to draw attention to the ‘enormous output of visual art, film, video, music and performing arts currently produced by Aboriginal people [… as] a modern development of the great value they have traditionally placed on the visual and oral arts’ (Langton 1993, 9). The second is to insist there is ‘no one kind of Aboriginal person or community’ (11). Rather, there is a wide diversity of language groups and communities that have survived the gradual extension, between 1770 and the 1930s, of colonial frontiers, from the coastal arc to central and northern Australia. As a consequence, Indigenous film and video‐making has taken different forms and serves different purposes in ‘settled’ and ‘remote’ Australia (11–20). Langton’s third intervention is to demonstrate the necessity of an ethical and anti‐colonial critique of Aboriginal representation. She begins this task by drawing on the work of bell hooks, Michelle Wallace, E. Ann Kaplan in the USA, and closer to home, Eric Michaels, Michael Lee, Laleen Jayamanne, Tracey Moffatt, and Destiny Deacon (23–26). At the core of Langton’s proposition that ‘an ethical, post‐colonial critique and practice among their non‐Aboriginal colleagues is possible and achievable’ is her redefinition of ‘Aboriginality’ as a relational thing rather than a racial identity. ‘Aboriginality’ is not just a label to do with skin colour or the particular ideas a person carries around in his/her head which might be labeled Aboriginal such as an Aboriginal language or kinship system. ‘Aboriginality’ is a social thing in the sense used by the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim. ‘Aboriginality’ arises from the subjective experience of both Aboriginal people and non‐Aboriginal people who engage in any intercultural dialogue, whether in actual lived experience or through a mediated experience such as a white person watching a program about Aboriginal people on television or reading a book. Moreover, the creation of ‘Aboriginality’ is not a fixed thing. It is created from our histories. It arises from the intersubjectivity of black and white in a dialogue. (Langton 1993, 31)

Also published in 1993, Sites of Difference: Cinematic Representations of Aboriginality and Gender, by Karen Jennings, crossed paths with Langton’s paradigm‐shifting essay. Focused mainly on the 1980s, Jennings took a cultural studies approach to



Introduction: Australian Cinema Now

9

films made about, with and by Indigenous Australians, bringing race and gender into the frame while steering readers away from positive v. negative images of ‘the other’. In Australian National Cinema, O’Regan includes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander filmmaking at different points throughout the book. In ‘Problematising the Social’ he looks at a series of social ‘cleavages’ that have been taken up in Australian cinema, including the Aboriginal and Islander/settler cleavage that ‘has become increasingly central since 1970’ (O’Regan 1996, 275–280). The cleavage can be seen in film policies encouraging collaboration and Indigenous‐ led projects, and in diverse responses to controversial films such as David Bradbury’s State of Shock (1989). In ‘Problematising Nationhood’ O’Regan includes Aboriginal and Islander filmmakers in the shift from ‘the stultifying sameness of a monocultural nation’ to multiculturalism’s embrace of ‘social and cultural mixing, hybrid identities, hybrid cultural forms and cultural crossovers.’ (324) He proposes that ‘post‐national multiculturalism promises a bringing together of the Aboriginal and the ethnic … as part of a larger accommodation of the logic of first peoples and various forms of difference – ethnic and otherwise.’ (326) In this post‐national multicultural space Tracey Moffatt’s work across photography, visual arts and cinema are exemplary, as they were for Langton and Jennings. For O’Regan, Moffatt’s avant‐garde films are projections of ‘serial public identities’, inviting and undercutting our interpretations of them (327). Twenty‐five years down the track, the policies sparked by Langton’s 1993 essay for the Australian Film Commission have produced an unprecedented body of ­feature films, television series and documentaries known as the Blak Wave. It is beyond the scope of this companion to offer an historical overview and survey of the extensive body of work on Screen Australia’s Black List (2014). Rather, in keeping with the twenty‐first century focus of this companion, each writer engages with just one aspect of the Blak Wave. Chapter  1 opens with Sweet Country (Warwick Thornton 2018) as a portal into You Are Here (2017), a provocative, poignant, riotous and visceral documentary series commissioned by Screen Australia, NITV and SBS‐TV in anticipation of a national referendum on constitutional ­recognition of Indigenous Australians. In this opening chapter, Felicity Collins ‘goes travelling’ with filmmakers Warwick Thornton, Erica Glynn, Tyson Mowarin, and Trisha Morton‐Thomas, continuing the ‘intercultural dialogue’ she unwittingly embarked upon in ‘Bringing the Ancestors Home’ (1999) and Australian Cinema After Mabo (2004). She argues that You Are Here invites the spectator–viewer into living maps of Indigenous Australia so that we might ‘find our bearings’ in the encounter between deep time and clock time, in the context of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart. In Chapter  2, Corinn Columpar, author of Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World on Film (2010), offers an eloquent and astute response to David Gulpilil’s performance in Charlie’s Country (Rolf de Heer 2013). Gulpilil, she argues, presents us with a way of life, and a way of being that predates colonial times and persists into the present as an alternative to postcolonial norms. Focusing on Gulpilil’s micro‐expressions and restrained gestures, Columpar draws on

10

Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye

theories of performance as ‘a vital act of transfer’ of knowledge, meaning and identity to the spectator as an ‘engaged witness’  –  in contrast to ethnographic recordings of Indigenous performances for the archive. In Chapter  3, Anne Rutherford, too, expands on an earlier work, What Makes a Film Tick? (2011), asking us to ‘think cinematically’ with rather than about the films of Ivan Sen. Tuning into the ‘energetic dynamics’ of rhythm and pace that choreograph affect  –  and lead to flashes of cultural and political understanding  –  Rutherford draws the reader into a haptic relationship with Sen’s films. In Chapter 4, Felicity Ford draws on her doctoral research to locate Bangarra Dance Theatre’s first film, Spear (Stephen Page 2015), in relation to the Sydney 2000 Olympics, the intercultural collaboration between Brown Cab Productions and producer Robert Connolly, and the indigenisation of screen space. Focusing on colonisation as temporal disruption, Ford looks closely at the interface of dance and cinema in a film that prioritises memory and movement over narrative continuity. Part I closes with an incisive critique by emerging scholars, Odette Kelada and Maddee Clark, of the uninterrupted whiteness of Australian screen culture. Looking beyond token moments of public recognition of the work of Indigenous actors, such as popular Logie winner Miranda Tapsell, Kelada and Clark reveal racism and whiteness as the ongoing deep structure of Australian society. After exposing the contemporary media landscape as a ‘wonderland of whiteness’, they turn to the prodigious efforts of three Indigenous women (director, producer and writer, Rachel Perkins; writer, actor and director, Leah Purcell; and actor, Deborah Mailman) to challenge the dominance of white, patriarchal narratives and decolonise the representation of Indigenous women on screen. Together, the five chapters in Part I attest to the transformative force of twenty‐first century, Blak Wave film and television. Acknowledging their origins in Indigenous communities and media, Blak Wave filmmakers are building on the work of those who came before them – and opening up new genres and platforms for Indigenous‐led dialogues on ‘Aboriginality’ as a meaningful thing for all Australians.

­Proposition 2: Australian Cinema is an International Cinema Our second proposition is that contemporary Australian cinema is at once national, post‐national, and international. There is a strong body of research on historical iterations of foreign/Hollywood relations with local distribution, exhibition and production, as well as earlier international links, co‐production ventures and practices (see Shirley and Adams 1983; Bertrand and Routt 1989; Landman 2006). A turning point was the economic recession following the stock market crash of the late 1980s, which squeezed the previously generous tax concessions of the 1970s and 80s, and which led to more international film financing and a



Introduction: Australian Cinema Now

11

consequent blurring of the boundaries of ‘Australian film’ ( Jacka 1988). The late 1980s and onwards saw an intensification of concern over the access of foreign companies to state and federal investment, in the growing practice of ‘runaway’ or off-shore production, lured by tax offsets to Gold Coast and Sydney studios built for just this purpose (Herd 2004; Miller et al. 2001; Goldsmith, Ward and O’Regan 2010). Paralleling or complementing this shift was a turn away from the inward‐ looking cultural nationalism of many of the films of 1970s and 80s, with a slate of films featuring and addressing a more culturally diverse nation and outward‐ looking audience (Wark 1995; Goldsmith 2010). For Deb Verhoeven ‘post‐national’ ambivalence replays recurring fears about ‘in‐distinction’ in a body of films whose ‘greatest [critical] interest’ is their ‘national‐ness’ (1999, 3). Verhoeven urges attention away from a narrow or regressive focus on the national, to ‘the fluidity of cultural invention’ (1999, 12), a challenge taken up by chapters in this section. In a reflective reckoning with 1970s–80s cinema, Elizabeth Jacka (1988, 3) muses on the ‘slippery fish’ created by two decades of tax subsidy for a popular industry. The desire for a distinctly national and culturally worthy cinema (often code for a certain middle‐brow taste culture) arose in partial opposition to desires for genre films exportable to international markets ( Jacka 1988; Martin 2003). The Mad Max series exemplifies such tensions, as well as historical shifts in understandings of Australia as an international industry. Adrian Martin shows how contemporary criticisms of Mad Max (George Miller 1979) as generic, imitative and crassly commercial, gave way to critical embrace of the ‘postmodern aesthetic’ of Mad Max 2 (George Miller 1981), exemplifying a shift that lengthened the rope tethering national ­production to self‐evidently ‘Australian’ moorings (Martin 2003, 1–4). Demonstrating such shifts, Con Verevis’s opening chapter in Part II begins with  Martin’s description of the Mad Max films as Australia’s most influential ­contribution to world cinema. Verevis cites extensively from reviews that laud the series’ balance of Australian humour and sensibility, along with genre mastery, however, his main focus is on strategies for seriality in this attenuated ‘accidental series’. Verevis establishes that each iteration of Mad Max ‘includes all its versions’ such that: Fury Road is characterised by a strategy of repetition with difference, rearticulating the Mad Max myth to exhibit a productive pull, or tension, in the series between continuous movement and the assemblage of its fragments.

The chapter also traces Fury Road’s production trajectory, as incentivising tax offsets drew the production to competing locations; in the end, it was shot in Namibia with the studio work done in Sydney. In Global Hollywood, Toby Miller et  al. (2001) trace the fracturing and global ­dispersal of modes of production that see segments of film production performed at various  –  cheapest or most regulation friendly  –  locations across the globe,

12

Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye

leading in their account to a ‘discounting of labour, cultural assets and taxes with the incongruous result that public resources contribute to the profits of international entertainment conglomerates’ (Landman 2009, 141). In Chapter  7, Ben Goldsmith furthers his research on dispersed studio production (Goldsmith and O’Regan 2005). He suggests that The Lego Movie (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller 2014) is better understood not in terms of its ‘national origin’ but ‘as a metaphor for broader processes and practices at work in global film production.’ Outlining the mix of business acumen, commitment to research and innovation that have led to Animal Logic’s international success, Goldsmith proposes that the digital film services sector be considered a player in its own right, further broadening out how ‘Australian production’ might be understood. And he argues that while the cultural value of tax incentives to international production cannot be proved, it is clear that such deals were important to the success of Animal Logic. As Lisa French establishes in Chapter 8, Jane Campion is one of Australia/New Zealand’s most prestigious international directors. French takes an auteurist approach, tracing Campion’s early development in the context of the formative policies supporting women to make films in the 1980s. This policy context underpins French’s analysis of how Campion was able to bring a distinctive perspective to a career‐long exploration of feminine subjectivity, in formation and often under duress. Working with the trope of ‘girlshine’ French argues that Campion’s unique sensibility is gifted to global cinema, such that her antipodean sensitivities and interests bring valuable insight into female subjectivity for global audiences. Part II concludes with David Marshall’s celebrity‐studies chapter on the highly visible work of Australian actors in Hollywood. Making the point that such hyper‐ mobility is restricted to white actors, Marshall demonstrates the formative role of Australian experience, connections and training conditions in shaping career transitions. He notes that an extraordinary number of contemporary actors graduated from long‐running, Australian television serials, Home and Away and Neighbours, directly into American film and television. Marshall argues that these actors ‘had already developed strategically positioned public personas that served them well in their efforts to migrate into the American scene.’ Meanwhile, an earlier generation of actors was positioned for stardom by Australian cinema’s ‘status for producing quality films.’ He argues that: part of the success of Australian actors in Hollywood is a performativity persona that is a blend of Australian egalitarianism and British acting intensity through manners and mannerisms … [such that they] gradually inhabited a privileged and distinctive performative space in Hollywood beautifully linked with the perception of acting quality.

For Marshall, actors such as Cate Blanchett and Toni Collette ‘have helped expand this formation of performative distinctiveness and allowed it to be attached to Australian performance more widely’.



Introduction: Australian Cinema Now

13

­Proposition 3: Australian Cinema is a Minor Transnational Cinema Contributors to Part III aim to re‐orient the dominant international focus on Australian–Hollywood connections by deploying a transnational, rather than global model. They draw on the transnational to yield new insights into and perspectives on the cultural and industrial nature of national cinema within postcolonial, diasporic and regional contexts. They explore Australian film policies, practices and representations as part of a ‘minor’ film culture, and in relation to ‘other’ minor film cultures. The term ‘minor’ here is used in two senses: firstly, in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) original sense of how a minority reworks and even repurposes the major language of the dominant culture as a collective form of expression and as a means of developing (and varying) its own cultural and political identity, and potentially destabilising the oppressive order. Secondly, minor is used in the sense of Lionette and Shih’s ‘minor transnationalism’ which advocates a shift away from constructing ‘minor’ identities (in the context of Western‐led ­globalisation) in terms of centre and margin, dominant and other. Instead, they look to non‐binary, lateral, cross‐border, minority‐to‐minority interactions (Lionette and Shih 2005). In this lateral, cross‐border sense, documentary films made by activist Australian filmmakers, such as Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson in the late colonial period and post‐independence in Papua New Guinea, are important in their attempts to deconstruct authorial and perspectival relations (Connolly 2005; see MacDougall 1998). In terms of feature films, Clara Law’s Floating Life (1996) – the first Australian feature not made in English – is ‘some kind of turning point in Australian cinema in that it establishes a signpost towards a still nascent movement in this country, which is the creation of an Asian–Australian cinema’ (Teo 2001). Diasporas of Australian Cinema (Simpson, Murawska and Lambert 2009) re‐reads both familiar films and contemporary cinema in its exploration of ethnicities, race relations, diasporic hybridities and narratives of migration. Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas (Khoo, Smaill and Yue 2013) also re‐reads key moments, ­movements and cycles from the archive as well as contemporary cinema. It presents an ‘alternative historiography of the national cinema prior to the 1970s film renaissance’ (Khoo, Smaill and Yue 2013, 61) and transnational perspectives on contemporary cinematic engagement with Asia. James Bennett’s opening chapter in Part III emphasises the imperial and the transnational, rather than the minor, in its survey of films made about Gallipoli and Anzac over the last century. There is perhaps no more perfect summation of culturally nationalist myth‐making in Australian cinema than Peter Weir’s 1981 film Gallipoli, and the years since its release have seen an ever‐growing memorialisation of Anzac Day as a surrogate national day. The centenary year of 2018 has further inflated the vast archive of World War One commemoration, while adding

14

Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye

little new knowledge, in Bennett’s view. His chapter is framed by an interest in exploring ‘the neglect [of New Zealand] and juxtaposing the two screen cultures [and] adopting a more nuanced and inclusive framework.’ This last point leads him to trace the ‘local–global turn in both historiography and filmmaking’ that offers a transnational frame for telling such stories in documentary form. In the following chapter, Helen Grace draws attention to the aftermath of more recent wars by focusing on the neglected (or disavowed) landscapes of detention in three Australian films, Finished People (Khoa Do 2003), Little Fish (Rowan Woods 2005) and Lucky Miles (Michael James Rowland 2007). The first two are set in multicultural, suburban Sydney and reference the Vietnam war, while the third references more recent conflicts resulting in the ‘illegal’ arrival of ‘boat people’. For Grace, these films are part of a dialogue about the residual losers of globalisation, and the anxious tenacity of white privilege and its cultural appropriations. Closely attentive to aesthetic strategies and the conditioning influence of political change, Grace shows how the three films ‘intertextually register the distance traveled in national sentiment’ in the aftermath of the 1960s mining boom, to a certain ‘dissolution of national spirit’ following a second mining boom that ended in 2012. Grace proposes that the three films belong to a ‘minor’ cinema within the kind of transnational imaginary that evolves when a ‘monocultural’ settler nation becomes a node in a global network of diasporas. Under the rubric of ‘minor cinema’ Olivia Khoo’s chapter on The Rocket (Kim  Mordaunt 2013) ranges widely as she explores the positive qualities of the ‘smallness’ of this ‘Australian’ film set in Northern Laos. Khoo intends ‘small’ here to indicate a strategy for small‐nation industries to produce films about issues, peoples and neglected histories (for instance, the legacies of US military intervention). These co‐ventures combine the resources of transnational minor industries and/or cultures, and achieve considerable box‐office success. The approach to such collaborations, outlined by Khoo, lies in‐between or across postcolonial, third or Fourth Cinemas and ‘embedded’ white filmmakers making sympathetic projects about other cultures. Audrey Yue’s chapter also concerns Australia’s modes of engagement with Asia, taking as her case study the official Singapore/Australia/HBO coproduction, Serangoon Road (ABC‐TV and HBO Asia, 2013). Her research brings together a comparative policy analysis of television/cinema convergence in Singapore and Australia, co‐production policy in Asia in light of China’s rise, and a minor transnationalism framework. Citing O’Regan and Potter (2013), Yue notes that in ­contemporary Australian policy: production resources are being concentrated in the hands of international production companies… [and] screen policies are facilitating these processes … formats and settings which are considered “local” are now oriented towards global systems … leading to the subtle process of denationalisation.



Introduction: Australian Cinema Now

15

Along with denationalising industrial policy, the major perspectival shift of the series de‐centres conventional Australian/British perspectives on the Cold War in Asia, permitting ‘Australia to forge a third position [that] problematises the legacy of its domination in the region’. Yue argues that, while Australia is a junior partner in a collaboration that takes production away from ‘national logics’, ‘Serangoon Road’s production ecology has renationalised Singapore through runaway and clustering practices … that support Singapore’s ambition to be an international media hub.’

­ roposition 4: Australian Cinema is P an Auteur–Genre–Landscape Cinema In responding to the proposition that Australian Cinema is an auteur–genre– landscape cinema, the chapters that make up Part IV position twenty‐first century screen texts and production practices in the context of Australian screen histories and traditions, tracking continuities, ruptures and reinventions. As O’Regan points out, few Australian filmmakers accrue auteur–director status because of their participation in a ‘mundane’ cinema, ‘compromised and complicit with Hollywood’ (1996, 121–2). He argues that ‘Australia and British auteur directors are seen as exceptions … confirmed by their subsequent career in North America’ (1996, 125). While there is still prestige in receiving the imprimatur of Hollywood, the global playing field has broken down the idea of coming from the margins to the centre, as was the case with George Miller, Baz Luhrmann and Jane Campion. Just as distinctive in the complex network of relations that make up the global screen industry is Robert Connolly’s entrepreneurial self‐fashioning as an independent producer–auteur based in Australia, and Jennifer Kent’s adoption of a defamiliarising European sensibility, almost as a disguise, in the creation of The Babadook ( Jennifer Kent 2014). As both ‘an art house film and a psychological thriller slash horror’ Babadook had a very limited release in Australia, ‘As such films don’t traditionally do that well in Australia’ (Tan 2014). Kent’s film disrupted the conventional association of Australian suburbia with social realism or comedy, a disruption that foregrounds genre expectations as inflected by screen culture and context. Indeed, Australian films can be perceived as a genre in their own right, particularly it seems in their home country. […] the comparing and contrasting work we sometimes do during and after watching a film necessarily involve us in making comparisons with other Australian films: this exercise is fundamental to establishing the intertextual character of genre and to creating a sense of the character of Australian cinema. (O’Regan 1996, 194–5)

16

Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye

For some viewers this has led to a perception that Australian feature films are a homogeneous group, and a matter of taste. So much so, that in 2014, filmmaker Josh Lawson attempted to find an audience for his comedy The Little Death, with the catchphrase: ‘If you are an Australian who doesn’t like Australian films, this is the film you should watch. Because neither do I’ (Quinn 2014). Following Mark Hartley’s influential reappraisal of 1970s–80s ‘Ozploitation’ films in his documentary, Not Quite Hollywood (2008), previous accounts of the dominance of those decades by the AFC genre (Dermody and Jacka 1987, 1988) have been recalibrated to include the explosion of genre films supported by 10BA tax incentives. Ozploitation, as a retrospective category, found an audience through re‐releases on DVD (see Coffell 2018). Coffell’s eclectic list includes: outback classic, Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff 1971); ocker comedy, Alvin Purple (Tim Burstall 1973); biker film, Stone (Sandy Harbutt 1974); action film, The Man from Hong Kong (Brian Trenchard‐Smith 1975) and eco‐horror, The Long Weekend (Colin Eggleston 1978). The genteel torpor of the ‘AFC genre’ was finally trumped by the international and local success of Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman 1986). For Meaghan Morris (1989, 109), the Australianness of Crocodile Dundee relates to its ‘positive unoriginality’ as a distinctive take on Hollywood tropes and conventions. Graeme Turner took up the idea of ‘indigenising’ Hollywood genre conventions to identify a body of films that refused ‘the official responsibilities of a culturally significant artform’ and were notable for ‘their range of styles and subjects, their disrespect for the generic markers of “art film”, and their equally disrespectful indigenisation of mainstream commercial genres’ (1994, 33). The chapters in Part IV attest to the productive potential of imported generic conventions to tell Australian stories. Susan Bye’s chapter on auteur–producer, Robert Connolly, identifies his repurposing of genre to engage with Australian themes. Looking at re‐visions of the ‘daughter’, a longstanding figure in Australian cinema, first identified by Routt (1989), Diana Sandars draws on the mythic template of the heroine’s journey to discuss four films. Jane Stadler identifies the Australian gothic as a ‘subgenre of landscape cinema that forms part of a settler colonial Gothic imaginary’, observing that its representation of alienation has the effect of characterising the ‘populous cities of the south‐eastern seaboard’ as places of belonging. Gaunson’s chapter on The Babadook forms a kind of addendum to Stadler’s discussion, as he considers Kent’s deployment of gothic horror conventions to heighten the dislocating impact of the eruption of the monstrous babadook within the ‘settled’ Australian urban landscape. As with genre, the discussion of landscape as a ‘character’ in Australian cinema has changed over time. The distinctive character of Australian landscape, in terms of light, space and topography, has been attributed to the artistry of local cinematographers, including Russell Boyd, Donald McAlpine, John Seale, Dean Semler, Geoffrey Simpson, Warwick Thornton and Mandy Walker – a number of whom have effectively relayed ‘this visual sensibility’ to American projects (O’Regan 1996, 206). Perspectives on landscape in both film and literature have been profoundly



Introduction: Australian Cinema Now

17

influenced by the work of Ross Gibson over three decades. In his pioneering essay ‘Formative Landscapes’ he observes that ‘the majority of Australian features have been about landscape’ (1988, 45) and suggests that this preoccupation was linked to a sense of dislocation – ‘a persistent national neurosis’ (1988, 50) – emanating from the unsettling history of Australian colonisation. In Australian Cinema after Mabo (2004) Collins and Davis describe the cinematic landscapes of the 1990s–2000s in terms of ‘backtracking’, a process that registers the aftershock of the High Court’s 1992 Mabo decision which refuted the nation’s founding myth of terra ­nullius (2004, 75–78). In their introduction to Imagined Landscapes: Geovisualizing Australian Spatial Narratives, Jane Stadler, Peta Mitchell and Stephen Carleton connect with this discussion to present an ‘historicized conception of screen space’, employing geocriticism to ‘shift […] the focus of narrative analysis away from its traditionally privileged sites of plot and character to setting’ (2015, 17). In this companion, Stadler considers the persistence of the gothic as a trope in both literary and screen narratives to engage with the perception that the Australian landscape is haunted by the unacknowledged history of colonisation. Taking up the concept of atopos, Stadler reflects on ‘the recurring figure of the outsider, immigrant, convict, or traveller who is alienated, exiled, or stranded in an alien landscape’. Stretching across genres and time in texts as diverse as Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff 1971), The Daughter (Simon Stone 2015) and the Wolf Creek franchise (Greg McLean 2005, 2013, 2016–), the representation of displaced ‘protagonists such as convicts, tourists, and travellers in the strange land’ offers audiences a working through of their own fears of estrangement. It also increasingly involves a self‐reflexive acknowledgement of Indigenous trauma as the repressed source of gothic unease. Stadler provocatively suggests in her conclusion that the self‐reflexive recognition of the ideological ‘work’ of the gothic has opened the door to parody, an observation that begs questions about the affective power of gothic tropes within contemporary narratives. Ross Gibson forecast the demise of this form of mythmaking as early as 1988 with his observation that Australian cinema was moving away from symbolic ‘boundaries that could theoretically separate the nation from the remainder of the international community’ (59). Stephen Gaunson makes a similar point in his discussion of Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, a gothic horror film that explicitly activates the conventions of European and American gothic horror and positions itself within an international cinema history. Rather than referencing the uncanniness of the untamed landscape of the outback or the bush, Kent not only moves inside the family home, but inside the mind of her tormented and terrifying protagonist. Citing Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1982), Gaunson draws attention to the ambiguity of the border between monster and protagonist and the  eruption of ‘“otherness” from within’. In this framework, Kent references the  ­hallucinatory magic of the cinema of attractions and the special effects of Georges Méliès to connect the protagonist’s Adelaide living room with an expansive cinephile tradition.

18

Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye

While Stadler and Gaunson focus on narratives of dislocation, Diana Sandars considers a collection of films that are structured around narrative journeys that hold out the possibility of transformation and self‐discovery. Sandars connects Barbara Creed’s (2007) conception of ‘the heroine’s journey’ with the landscape tradition in Australian cinema to argue for a ‘next generation of daughters, remapping the journeys of the daughters that have punctuated the Australian screen from its earliest period’. Taking 2015 as an exemplary year for films focusing on female characters in Australian landscape cinema, Sandars argues that The Dressmaker ( Jocelyn Moorhouse 2015) and Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller 2015) represent female experience as mythic, transformative and decolonising. In contrast, the adolescent female protagonists of The Daughter (Simon Stone 2015) and Looking for Grace (Sue Brooks 2015) are caught ‘between the rural landscape as  a space of freedom, and the family home as a place of entrapment and disempowerment’. The exploration of landscape cinema is reoriented in the opening chapter by Susan Bye which focuses on Robert Connolly as auteur, innovator and advocate for the ‘local’ Australian screen industry. Connolly’s filmmaking practice combines innovation, a focus on audience and a strong sense of social responsibility. Inflected by Connolly’s distinctive mapping of the terrain of Australian film production, the discussion provides a fresh perspective on the constitution and significance of the producer‐as‐auteur in a changing screen ecology. This multiplatform ecology – as an entrepreneurial space that refigures the producer–genre–landscape nexus – is taken up in Part VI.

­Proposition 5: Australian Cinema is a Televisual Industry The chapters in Part V present the interconnection between cinema and television in Australia as definitive and influential, not a recent result of media convergence but, rather, an enduring industrial, cultural and aesthetic exchange. In 1994 film critic, Adrian Martin, described Australian and British cinemas as ‘televisual cinema’ (1994, 15). O’Regan (1996, 126) picks up Martin’s point, describing the ways in which Australian cinema is ‘a post‐television national cinema’ emerging as it did in the 1970s on the back of television’s ‘technological and employment infrastructures’ and bearing its traces as a consequence. When television broadcasting began in Australia in 1956, the film industry of the silent and pre‐war sound era was a distant memory. While some notable feature films and documentaries were released in the 1950s, including Bitter Springs (Ralph Smart 1950), Mike and Stefani (Ron Maslyn Williams 1952), The Back of Beyond ( John Heyer 1954) and Jedda (Charles Chauvel 1955), television rapidly became the mainstay of the production industry until the renaissance of feature filmmaking in Australia during the 1970s. As Moran (1989) has pointed out, television drama, comedy and advertising



Introduction: Australian Cinema Now

19

provided something of a training ground for producers and audiences unfamiliar with Australian content on screen. However, it was the arrival of the mini-series on television in full colour after 1975 that forged a bridge between ‘quality’ television and prestige filmmaking – with 16 mini-series produced in the 1970s, peaking with 86 in the 1980s including four highly‐acclaimed historical mini-series from the Kennedy‐Miller production house: The Dismissal (1983), The Cowra Breakout (1984), Bodyline (1984) and Vietnam (1987). Stuart Cunningham (1989, 40) has described the mini-series as ‘an expansion of the “horizons of possibility” of televisual form,’ and argues that by organising the narrative around multiple perspectives and an extended timeframe, Kennedy‐ Miller productions achieved a complexity that positioned the viewer as ‘knowledgeable citizen, rather than distracted consumer.’ For George Miller, the historical mini-series was a form of ‘ticking off ’ a repertoire of significant stories. ‘We went through all the major cultural events, those sort of, that stand out as it were in our culture’ (in Byrnes, n.d.). Yet, the gendered nature of the 1980s historical miniseries continues the focus on masculinity in Australian film culture. As Dermody and Jacka noted, national history was presented from a male perspective and via ‘an all‐male diorama approach to the re‐staging of great sporting and military defeats from the hall of memory’ (in McKee 2001, 223). With Brides of Christ (Australian Broadcsting Corporation, 1991), a mini-series about the social revolution of the 1960s and its impact on the Catholic church, producer Penny Chapman reconfigured the relationship between the mini-series and history to focus on women’s history and experience. Chapman’s commitment to ‘quality’ TV drama is longstanding and has informed her contribution to Matchbox Pictures, the production company she co‐founded with four others in 2008 and which forms the subject of Helen Goritsas and Ana Tiwary’s chapter in Part V. Of her passion for television and her work in the 1990s, Chapman recollects that The Damnation of Harvey McHugh (ABC, 1994) was watched by far more people than Jane Campion’s award‐winning film The Piano (1993). I kept saying our connection with Australians who watch what we are doing is more intense in a way. I always felt back then that people under‐estimated the power of good storytelling on TV to have an impact on our culture and who we are. (Chapman quoted in Kalina 2015)

The contemporary shift to long‐form drama series and video‐on‐demand streaming services has produced a new kind of viewing experience. Filmmaker Robert Connolly suggests that the process of redefinition that is taking place in the realm of television drama and online viewing requires a concomitant recalibration of the nature of filmmaking with, for instance, the adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas’s novel, Barracuda (2013) by Matchbox Pictures as a longform drama for ABC‐TV, rather than a feature film for a much smaller cinema audience (in Bizzaca 2016). According to Connolly, the drama series is attuned to current viewing modes, offering the

20

Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye

flexibility of either ‘one‐hour television bites’ or a longer engagement but ‘even if they binge ten hours in a row, there’s something about TV really finding its form in that one‐hour format’ (in Bizzaca 2016). The context and place of viewing has also changed the meaning of television, with online platforms and mobile devices transforming what was once a domestic medium into something quite different. As Turner and Tay (2009, 2) argue, ‘once the prime time medium of mass communication, [television] can now also be discussed … as a highly personal medium of individualized, privatized consumption’. Moreover, whether through formal or informal channels, online access to global series such as Game of Thrones (HBO Series 1–8, 2011–2019) has reoriented the relationship between Australian viewers and the rest of the world (Turnbull 2014, 61). Across the globe, the topography of the contemporary screen production landscape is undergoing a dramatic process of transformation. Along with the increasing influence of multinational media corporations and the impact of global communications networks, new media platforms and technologies are eroding the distinctions between television and cinema. This reorientation of screen culture and entertainment is encapsulated by the stand‐off in 2018 between the organisers of the Cannes Film Festival, determined to ‘define cinema as a theatrical experience’, and Netflix, which uses its original, quality (and cinematic) films to market its home‐streaming service (Sims 2018). In the Australian context, the borders between film and television production have always been porous, but new ecologies of production, distribution and consumption have brought the two industries even closer together, as they produce ‘content’ to be consumed. ‘Screen content’ as a formulation demands new taxonomies of value. In the case of the Australian screen industry, with its reliance on the support of public funding bodies, these changes can be mapped through, for example, the broadening of Screen Australia’s support to take in film, television and online content. A sticking point, however, has been Screen Australia’s continuing insistence that a cinema release is required for producers of feature films to claim a 40% offset tax concession (George 2017). In the opening chapter of Part V, Amanda Malel Trevisanut maps the factors involved in the convergence of film and television as a global phenomenon, before focusing on the specific context of Australian screen production. She highlights the significant role played by Screen Australia and the Australian public broadcasters, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), in supporting independent content producers to take risks on innovative projects. The investment offered by these bodies allows for independent producers to develop product for the expanding niche markets afforded by media convergence and new and intersecting delivery platforms. Malel Trevisanut makes a powerful case for the cultural, creative and economic value of public support for screen production, highlighting the significance of the public broadcasters’ remit to foster new ideas and approaches. Within this context, the emergence of Screen Australia and the evolution of the Enterprise program are represented as pivotal to



Introduction: Australian Cinema Now

21

‘the development of innovative projects and distribution pathways’, a reorientation of purpose that foregrounds value over ‘quality’ and breaks away from a privileging of feature film as having a particular connection to cultural identity and the national project. Sue Turnbull and Marion McCutcheon, in chapter 19, scrutinise the discourse around the idea of ‘quality television’ to challenge judgments based on taste and prestige. They argue that a focus on value rather than quality offers a more balanced and comprehensive measure of the contribution made by particular screen productions ‘in today’s kaleidoscopic screen landscape’. With The Kettering Incident (Porchlight Films/Sweet Potato Films 2016) as their case study, they map out a model for calculating both the economic and cultural value of a television drama series, by taking into account the production process (development, production and distribution), consumption/reception and wider social value. In the case of The Kettering Incident, social value emerges through an exploration of environmental issues and concerns around law and order. In tracking the accrued value of The Kettering Incident, Turnbull and McCutcheon demonstrate the layers of value  –  and creativity  –  related to an independent Australian production ‘produced for an international audience on a global digital network’. Helen Goritsas and Ana Tiwary’s discussion of Matchbox Pictures similarly takes on the dynamic role played by Australia in the global screen production context. In the case of Matchbox, the trajectory is from an independent Australian production company, characterised by its diverse slate of film and television ­projects, to a branch of NBCUniversal, a global media company with a huge international distribution network and market. Goritsas and Tiwary describe Matchbox’s inception as a strategic alliance of like‐minded creatives meeting the challenges imposed by the relatively small Australian market, an alliance that was sealed by Screen Australia Enterprise funding. The Matchbox trajectory is a definitive example of the reorientation of public financial support through Screen Australia to emphasise participation and sustainability within a convergent and globalised screen industry. Part V closes with a chapter from Anthony Lambert, shifting the focus from the production of ‘quality television’ to a consideration of the ‘social power’ of television to mediate and shape the nation’s understanding of ‘important cultural events.’ Taking up the exemplary case of Schapelle Corby, Lambert scrutinises media spectacles generated in response to Australians arrested on drug‐related offences in Asia to account for the way that the ‘figures and tropes of screen culture are continuously generating and informing discourses of national memory, geography, space and identity’. Lambert’s analysis of the dialogic interrelationship ­between screen and culture highlights the influence of the cinematic texts of the 1980s and 1990s (films and mini‐series), however, this ‘influence’ is situated within a concept of ‘generative intertextuality’ that breaks down formal and industrial distinctions between film, television and online representations.

22

Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye

­Proposition 6: Australian Cinema is a Multiplatform Ecology Wiley Blackwell commissioned this Companion to Australian Cinema as part of its national cinema series at a time when ‘cinema’ and ‘film’ had already been replaced by ‘screen’. In 2008, the Federal government merged the Australian Film Commission, the Australian Film Finance Corporation and Film Australia into a single body, Screen Australia. Of the seven state and territory funding bodies, only South Australia and Victoria have retained ‘film’ in their names. In 2017 Screen NSW went a step further and merged with Arts NSW to become Create NSW. Yet a glance at the websites for each of these funding bodies reveals a continuing focus on feature film and television drama and documentary production, with the addition of online or digital media, web series or games. In 1989, Adrian Martin contributed a chapter called ‘Indefinite Objects: Independent Film and Video’ to Moran and O’Regan’s anthology. Martin’s definition of ‘independent’ film and video would be unrecognisable to the screen production industry today. In Deloitte’s 2018 report for Screen Producers Australia, ‘the independent screen sector’ was comprised of production companies who are commissioned or subsidised to produce scripted drama, reality TV formats and light entertainment, mostly for television networks. In sharp contrast, for Martin in 1989 independent film and video was a social scene generating a shape‐shifting body of experimental and avant‐garde filmmaking  –  with Michael Lee’s The Mystical Rose (1977) as an exemplar that falls between the purist‐fine arts and the radical‐agitational avant‐gardes promoted by film critics and historians (Martin 1989, 173–4). Rejecting ‘grand theoretical schemas’, Martin explores five ‘traditions open to experimental filmmakers, and how they have been used, crossbred and constantly redefined in practice’ (175). Thirty years later, the Melbourne and Sydney experimental film scenes of the 1960s–80s, evoked so vividly by Martin, no longer exist. Or do they? If we turn to Ross Gibson’s Changescapes (2015) we might find Martin’s ‘indefinite objects’ have morphed into Gibson’s exemplars of ‘complexity, changefulness and aesthetic force’ (vii). These include ‘artworks or designed experiences … that help us understand, accept and inhabit complexity’ and they can be found ‘everywhere in contemporary culture … because a heightened sensitivity to environmental dynamics and complexity is now everywhere’ (vii). If, as Gibson proposes, changescapes ‘can be poems, databases, buildings, paintings, films, songs, designed environments, music or artistic and scholarly careers interpreted as heuristic processes of proposition‐and‐response’ (vii), then it is our final proposition for this Companion that, in the twenty‐first century, Australian cinema is a multiplatform ecology. It is fitting then that Ross Gibson opens Part VI with a compelling treatise on churn – or cinema made sometime last night. Setting aside the commodity‐forms of feature films, drama series and documentaries that preoccupy ‘the industry’, Gibson champions ‘the churn’ of audio‐visual sequences – circulating as ‘pulses’ of



Introduction: Australian Cinema Now

23

affect between friends – as a ‘disruption to the old movie business’. It is not only the commodity form that is dispensed with here: cinema’s window‐on‐the‐world, its meaning‐making, its ‘inhabitable worlds’ disappear too. As do audiences, spectators and viewers. In the digital space, traders in sentiments (or moving‐image sequences) are bonded into ‘convivial’ and ‘excited cohorts’. For Gibson, churn began with 1970s music – London punk and Jamaican dub – and its 1980s industrial form, the music video. He finds a contemporary manifestation of ‘churn’ in Australian hiphop culture, exemplified by ‘Rapper Tag’, a four‐year ‘communal’ and ‘homey’ project that has garnered 4.5 million views. Stuart Cunningham and Adam Swift take up the challenge of the new screen ecology from a creative industries perspective, charting the explosion of YouTube channels and Screen Australia’s Skip Ahead initiative with Google. The disparity between local screen initiatives and global screen ecology is evident in the metrics carefully assembled in their chapter. Cunningham and Swift begin with Google’s expansion into Australia, and they offer an incisive account of what an Australian content creator looks like in the YouTube space. Their interviews with content creators and their analysis of the Skip Ahead program support their claim that this globalised screen ecology is a paradigm shift in Australian screen culture that requires us to adjust our focus, and our mindsets. In his chapter on transmedia documentary, Deane Williams begins with two quotes that mark a significant shift in documentary’s aspirations since the 1980s: from an international conversation among nations on the problems they each face, to a rootless, mobile and ‘fast’ network of documentary makers without a national cinema base to ground them. His analysis of transmedia documentary activism, exemplified by Freedom Stories (Steve Thomas and Lisa Horler 2015), is preceded by a thorough account of ‘critical transnationalism’ and Australian documentary history. Rather than abandon ‘the national’ in favour of the transnational, Williams advocates a non‐linear form of transmedia networking that works against transnational dislocation. Like Williams, Belinda Smaill has no wish to relinquish the national in her chapter on watching wildlife on screen. Taking landscape cinema as her point of departure, Smaill brings the objective optic of the wildlife webcam, or naturecam, into conversation with Australia’s classic landscape documentary, The Back of Beyond ( John Heyer 1954). This conversation is ‘a double‐edged intervention’ that privileges ‘environment’ over ‘landscape’ and a nonhuman optic over humanist documentary. Seeking an optic that ‘might decentre the human’ in favour of ‘ecological relations’ Smaill focuses on ‘a digital menagerie’ enabled by GoPro cameras and streaming technology. But unlike Gibson’s ‘excited cohort’ trading in moving images, the solitary FalconCam viewer enjoys desktop access to Australia’s endangered raptors streamed live via two cameras set up for a scientific study at Charles Sturt University. For Smaill, this viewing experience can take two forms: a ‘drop‐in’ moment of human ‘proximity’ to the falcons, or a sustained slow‐viewing, attuned to incremental change and an ethic of ‘mutuality.’

24

Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye

This volume opens in Chapter 1 with the declaration, You Are Here, and closes, most fortuitously in Chapter  26 with the question, ‘Where Am I?’ Writing in response to Soda_Jerk’s TERROR NULLIUS, exhibited at ACMI in Melbourne in 2018, Norie Neumark finds herself emerging from the launch of this remix‐film‐ event ‘riven by affect and laid bare to the questions of where we are, where I am, in the Australia that the film avenges.’ Terror Nullius borrows audio‐visual sequences from Australia’s film and television archives and ‘de‐composes, co‐composes, and re‐composes’ them into a revenge fable. But rather than bonding over these remixed sequences into an ‘excited cohort’ with the crowd gathered for the launch of Terror Nullius, Neumark emerges from the premiere screening, ‘unhinged’. In this ‘undone’ state, memory and affect intermingle with familiar audio‐visual sequences that are not quite right. The terror of white Australia’s cultural mythology, cut‐up and spliced – from Skippy the bush kangaroo to Mad Max and One Nation’s Pauline Hanson – leaves nowhere to hide. What better place to end and renew our foray into the question of Australian cinema now?

References Ang, Ien and Gay Hawkins. 2008. The SBS Story: The Challenge of Cultural Diversity. Sydney: UNSW Press. Barclay, Barry. 2003. ‘Celebrating Fourth Cinema.’ Illusions 35: 7–11. Bertrand, Ina, and Diane Collins. 1981. Government and Film in Australia. Sydney: Currency Press. Bertrand, Ina, and William D. Routt. 1989. ‘The Big Bad Combine: Some Aspects of National Aspirations and International Constraints in the Australian Cinema, 1896– 1929.’ In The Australian Screen, edited by Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan, 2–27. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin Books. Bizzaca, Caris. 2016. ‘Risk vs Reward vs Robert Connolly.’ Screen Australia July 27, 2016. https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/sa/screen‐news/2016/07‐27‐risk‐vs‐reward‐vs‐ robert‐connolly Broinowski, Anna. 2018. ‘“The Industry will be Gutted”: Why Australian Film and TV is Fighting for its Life.’ The Guardian April 30, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/ culture/2018/apr/29/the‐whole‐industry‐will‐be‐gutted‐why‐australias‐film‐and‐tv‐ industry‐is‐fighting‐for‐its‐life Byrnes, Paul. n.d. Interview with George Miller. Australian Screen Online. https://aso.gov. au/people/George_Miller_1/interview/ Coffell, Chris. 2018. ‘Go Down Under with 20 Must‐See Ozploitation Films!’ Film School Rejects, February 5, 2018. https://filmschoolrejects.com/20‐must‐see‐ozploitation‐ movies/ Collins, Felicity. 1999. ‘Bringing the Ancestors Home: Dislocating White Masculinity in Floating Life, Radiance and Vacant Possession.’ In Twin Peeks: Australian and New Zealand Feature Films, edited by Deb Verhoeven, 107–116. Melbourne: Damned Press. Collins, Felicity and Therese Davis. 2004. Australian Cinema after Mabo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



Introduction: Australian Cinema Now

25

Columpar, Corinn. 2010. Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World on Film. Carbondale and Edwardsville, USA: Southern Illinois University Press Connolly, Bob. 2005. Making ’Black Harvest’: Warfare, Film‐making and Living Dangerously in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Sydney: ABC Books. Cooper, Elise and Johnny Lieu. 2016, ‘8 Indigenous Australian Films and TV Series Everyone Should Watch Right Now.’ Mashable, July 5, 2016. https://mashable. com/2016/07/05/indigenous‐australian‐film‐tv/#5ImC9s4wLsqP Creed, Barbara. 2007. ‘The Neomyth in Film: The Woman Warrior from Joan Of Arc to Ellen Ripley.’ In Women Willing to Fight, edited by Silke Andris and Ursula Frederick, 15–37. Newcastle UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Cunningham, Stuart. 1991. Featuring Australia: The Cinema of Charles Chauvel. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Cunningham, Stuart. 1989a. ‘The Decades of Survival: Australian Film 1930–70.’ In The Australian Screen, edited by Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan, 53–74. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin Books. Cunningham, Stuart. 1989b. ‘Textual Innovation in the Australian Historical Mini‐Series.’ In Australian Television: Programs, Pleasures and Politics, edited by John Tulloch and Graeme Turner, 39–51. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Delamoir, Jeanette and Stephen Gaunson. 2015. ‘Introduction to Re‐evaluating the Royal Commission into the Australian Moving Picture Industry.’ Studies in Australasian Cinema 9 (3): 225–229. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1986. Kaf ka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deloitte Access Economics. 2018. Screen Production in Australia: Independent Production Screen Production Industry Census. PDF download. https://www2.deloitte.com/au/ en/pages/economics/articles/screen‐production‐australia.html Dermody, Susan, and Elizabeth Jacka. 1987. The Screening of Australia, Vol. 1: Anatomy of a Film Industry. Sydney: Currency Press. Dermody, Susan, and Elizabeth Jacka. 1988a. The Screening of Australia, Vol. 2: Anatomy of a National Cinema. Sydney: Currency Press. Dermody, Susan, and Elizabeth Jacka, eds. 1988b. The Imaginary Industry: Australian Film in the Late ’80s. Sydney: Australian Film, Television and Radio School. French, Lisa, ed. 2003. Womenvision: Women and the Moving Image in Australia. Melbourne: Damned Publishing. George, Sandy. 2017. ‘Local Content: Policy, Pressure Points, Options, Impacts.’ Screen Australia, September 8, 2017. https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/sa/screen‐news/ 2017/09‐08‐local‐content‐policy‐pressure‐points‐options/part‐1‐the‐producer‐ location‐and‐pdv‐offsets Gibson, Ross. 1988. ‘Formative Landscapes.’ In Back of Beyond: Discovering Australian Film and Television, edited by Scott Murray, 45–59. North Sydney: Australian Film Commission. Gibson, Ross. 2015. Changescapes: Complexity, Mutability, Aesthetics. Crawley, Western Australia: UWA Publishing. Goldsmith, Ben, 2010. ‘Outward‐looking Australian Cinema’, Studies in Australasian Cinema, 4 (3): 199–214. Goldsmith, Ben, and Tom O’Regan. 2005. The Film Studio: Film Production in the Global Economy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

26

Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye

Goldsmith, Ben, Susan Ward and Tom O’Regan. 2010. Local Hollywood: Global Film Production and the Gold Coast. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Herd, Nick. 2004. Chasing the Runaways: Foreign Film Production and Studio Development in Australia 1988–2002. Sydney: Currency House. Jacka, Elizabeth. 1988. ‘Australian Cinema: An Anachronism in the 1980s.’ In Nation, Culture, Text: Australian Cultural and Media Studies, edited by Graeme Turner, 106–122. London: Routledge. Jacka, Elizabeth. 1991. The ABC of Drama, 1975–1990. North Ryde, NSW: Australian Film, Television and Radio School. Jennings, Karen. 1993. Sites of Difference: Cinematic Representations of Aboriginality and Gender. The Moving Image series. South Melbourne, Vic: Australian Film Institute. Kalina, Paul. 2015. ‘TV Producer Penny Chapman on Housewives, Gallipoli, and Why Writers are “the Witches of the Industry”.’ Sydney Morning Herald, April 10, 2015 https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv‐and‐radio/tv‐producer‐penny‐chapman‐on‐ housewives‐gallipoli‐and‐why‐writers‐are‐the‐witches‐of‐the‐industry‐20150407‐ 1mfcx7.html Khoo, Olivia, Belinda Smaill and Audrey Yue. 2013. Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Landman, Jane. 2006. The Tread of a White Man’s Foot: Australian Pacific Colonialism and the Cinema. Canberra: Pandanus Books. Landman, Jane. 2009. ‘“Not in Kanzas Anymore”: Transnational Collaboration in Television Science Fiction’. In Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, edited by Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks and John Caldwell, 140–154. New York and London: Routledge. Langton, Marcia. 1993. ‘Well, I Heard it on the Radio and I saw it on the Television…’: An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by and about Aboriginal People and Things. North Sydney: Australian Film Commission. Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu‐mei Shih. 2005. Minor Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press. MacDougall, David. 1998. Transcultural Cinema. Princetown, New Jersey: Princetown University Press. Martin, Adrian. 1989. ‘Indefinite Objects: Independent Film and Video.’ In The Australian Screen, edited by Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan, 172–190. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin Books. Martin, Adrian. 1994. ‘Ghosts … of a National Cinema.’ Cinema Papers April: 15. Martin, Adrian. 2003. The Mad Max Movies. Strawberry Hills, NSW: Currency Press. Mayer, Geoff, and Keith Beattie, eds. 2007. The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand. London: Wallflower Press. Maynard, Sean. 1989. ‘Black (and White) Images: Aborigines and Film.’ In The Australian Screen, edited by Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan, 216–235. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin Books. McFarlane, Brian, and Geoff Mayer. 1992. New Australian Cinema: Sources and Parallels in American and British Film. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. McFarlane, Brian, Geoff Mayer and Ina Bertrand, eds. 1999. The Oxford Companion to Australian Film. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. McKee, Alan. 2001. Australian Television: A Genealogy of Great Moments. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.



Introduction: Australian Cinema Now

27

Michaels, Eric. 1986. Aboriginal Invention of Television in Central Australia 1982–86. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Miller, Toby, Nitin Govil, John McMurria and Richard Maxwell. 2001. Global Hollywood. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mills, Jane. 2009. Loving and Hating Hollywood: Reframing Local and Global Cinema. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Moran, Albert. 1989. ‘Crime, Romance, History: Television Drama.’ In The Australian Screen, edited by Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan, 236–255. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin. Moran, Albert, and Tom O’Regan, eds. 1985. An Australian Film Reader. Sydney: Currency Press. Moran, Albert and Tom ORegan, eds. 1989. The Australian Screen. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin Books. Moran, Albert, and Errol Veith. 2006. Film in Australia: An Introduction. Port Melbourne, Vic: Cambridge University Press. Morris, Meaghan. 1989. ‘Tooth and Claw: Tales of Survival and Crocodile Dundee.’ Social Text 21: 105–127. O’Regan, Tom. 1989a. ‘Cinema Oz: The Ocker Films.’ In The Australian Screen, edited by Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan, 75–98. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin. O’Regan, Tom. 1989b. ‘The Enchantment with Cinema: Film in the 1980s.’ In The Australian Screen, edited by Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan, 118–145. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin. O’Regan, Tom. 1993. Australian Television Culture. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. O’Regan, Tom. 1996. Australian National Cinema. London and New York: Routledge. O’Regan, Tom, and Anna Potter. 2013. ‘”Globalisation From Within?” The De‐ nationalising of Australian Film and Television Production.’ Media International Australia 149 (1): 5–14. Pertierra, Anna Christina, and Graeme Turner. 2013. Locating Television: Zones of Consumption. London: Routledge. Pike, Andrew and Ross Cooper. 1980. Australian Film 1900–1977: A Guide to Feature Film Production. Melbourne: Oxford University Press & AFI. Quinn, Karl. 2014. ‘Why Won’t We Watch Australian Films?’ Sydney Morning Herald, October 26, 2014. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/why‐wont‐we‐ watch‐australian‐films‐20141024‐11bhia.html Routt, William D. 1989. ‘The Fairest Child of the Mother Land: Colonialism and Family in Australian Films of the 1920s and 1930s.’ In The Australian Screen, edited by Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan, 28–52. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin. Rutherford, Anne. 2011. What Makes a Film Tick? Cinematic Affect, Materiality and Mimetic Innervation. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. Screen Australia. 2014. The Black List. PDF download. https://www.screenaustralia.gov. au/getmedia/a321de20‐911c‐448b‐8afa‐f29bc82f16e6/Black‐list.pdf Screen Producers Australia. 2018. Screen Production in Australia Key Findings, PDF download. https://www2.deloitte.com/au/en/pages/economics/articles/screen‐production‐ australia.html Shirley, Graham and Brian Adams. 1983. Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, Currency Press. Simpson, Catherine, Renata Murawska and Anthony Lambert, eds. 2009. Diasporas of Australian Cinema. Bristol, UK: Intellect Books.

28

Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye

Sims, David. 2018. ‘What’s at Stake in Cannes’s Battle with Netflix. The Atlantic April 16, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/04/cannes‐netflix‐ battle/558026/ Stadler, Jane, Peta Mitchell and Stephen Carleton. 2015. Imagined Landscapes: Geovisualizing Australian Spatial Narratives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tan, Monica. 2014. ‘The Babadook’s Monster UK Box Office Success Highlights Problems at Home.’ The Guardian October 29, 2014. Teo, Stephen. 2001. ‘Floating Life: The Heaviness of Moving’ Senses of Cinema 12. Tulloch, John. 1981. Legends on the Screen: The Australian Narrative Cinema 1919–1929. Sydney: Currency Press & AFI. Tulloch, John. 1982. Australian Cinema: Industry, Narrative and Meaning. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Turnbull, Sue. 2014. ‘Imagining the Audience.’ In The Media & Communications in Australia, 4th Edition, edited by Stuart Cunningham and Sue Turnbull, 59–72. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Turner, Graeme. 1986. Literature, Film and the Construction of Australian Narrative. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Turner, Graeme. 1989. ‘Art Directing History: The Period Film.’ In The Australian Screen, edited by Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan, 99–117. Ringwood, VIC: Penguin. Turner, Graeme. 1994. ‘Whatever Happened to National Identity? Film and Nation in the 1990s.’ Metro Magazine 100: 32–35. Turner, Graeme, and Jinna Tay. 2009. ‘Introduction.’ In Television Studies after TV: Understanding Television in the Post‐Broadcast Era, edited by Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay, 1–6. London and New York: Routledge. Turner, Graeme, and Stuart Cunningham, eds. 2000. The Australian TV Book. Sydney: Allen & Unwin Academic. Verhoeven, Deb, ed. 1999. Twin Peeks: Australian and New Zealand Feature Films. Melbourne: Damned Press. Wark, Mckenzie. 1995. ‘Cinema II: The Next Hundred Years.’ A Century of Australian Cinema, edited by James Sabine, 198–212. Port Melbourne: Australian Film Institute.

Part I

An Indigenous Screen Culture

1

You Are Here Living Maps of Deep Time, Clock Time Felicity Collins

Let me begin with an aside, with a scene from Warwick Thornton’s frontier ­western, Sweet Country (released in Australia in January 2018). Early in the film there is a startling moment – a scene, a performance, a sequence of gestures – where a skinny Aboriginal boy is given a hiding. In a short, sharp sequence, the boy is held tight in the grip of a grey‐bearded Aboriginal man (an overseer, a station hand) while the white station boss uses a thick leather belt to punish him. After a single preview screening, the boy’s misdemeanour is hard to recall. Perhaps it was for stealing a watermelon from the station’s desert garden patch, or maybe the boss just felt like giving the boy ‘a good hiding’. A scene or two later, the boy is handcuffed and chained to a rock for prying into a saddlebag. These punishments are presented as ordinary, inviting no sympathy from the white boss or the Aboriginal overseer. They occur early in the film as part of an iconography of frontier violence that looks more like slavery in the American south than conquest of the west. The slave iconography persists as the boy unbolts the chain and makes his escape across the sandy desert to the next station, still handcuffed with the chain trailing behind him. Arriving at the neighbouring station, the boy lurks in an outhouse from where he witnesses a shootout. This scene of violence draws on the American western’s classic iconography of ‘innocent’ homesteaders defending themselves from an attack by ‘crazed’ Indians. But in Sweet Country’s twenty‐first century, Australian iteration of the western, it is the innocent ‘natives’ who are trapped inside the timber homestead, desperately dodging the bullets fired by the crazed ‘homesteader’ outside. Based on true events that occurred in Central Australia in the 1920s, Sweet Country’s main storyline appears to hang on the fate, not of the boy, Philomac, but of a mild‐mannered blackfella, Sam Hamilton, who goes on the run with his young A Companion to Australian Cinema, First Edition. Edited by Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

32

Felicity Collins

wife after he shoots the ‘homesteader’. They elude the law by crossing the frontier into hostile country, but eventually Sam and his wife turn themselves in, and Sam is charged with murder. Found not guilty, frontier justice nevertheless seals Sam’s fate. Sam’s storyline, however, is only one thread in a film that looks a bit like an American western and a lot like a southern slave film. What makes Sweet Country something other than both those American genres is its location in landscapes, or more specifically in ‘country’, that Australians are beginning to recognise as a ‘living map’ created by the ancestors (Tilley qtd in Stadler et. al. 2015, 182). The question of how Blak Wave filmmakers and their culturally diverse audiences are making sense of and encountering themselves in this ‘living map’ is at the heart of the television event, You Are Here (NITV and SBS‐TV, 2017). The event consisted of four documentaries – We Don’t Need a Map (Warwick Thornton, Barefoot Communications), In My Own Words (Erica Glynn, Blackfella Films), Connection to Country (Tyson Mowarin, Weerianna Street Media) and Occupation: Native (Trisha Morton‐Thomas, Brindle Films) – along with panel discussions and interviews with the directors (The Point: You Are Here Interviews, Eps. 1–4, 2017). Marketed as ‘films for Australians to find their bearings’ (Screen Australia 2017b), three of the documentaries were launched at the 2017 Sydney Film Festival as part of its First Nations focus (Screen Australia 2017a), and all four were screened on SBS and NITV in July–August 2017. You Are Here, then, is a simultaneous cinematic and televisual event in Australian screen culture.

Deep Time, Clock Time While You Are Here is the main focus of this chapter, I am not yet quite done with Philomac. Sweet Country, in its very title, seems like a good place to start my account of the central task faced by the filmmakers of the Blak Wave, and in particular those involved in You Are Here – the task of orienting Australian audiences to where we are as a settler‐colonial nation, to what has gone on here in the colonial era, and to what persists here from upwards of 65 000 years of continuous occupation by the world’s oldest living culture. Set in central Australia, Sweet Country was filmed within a 50 kilometre radius of Alice Springs. It features the ‘visual splendour’ of landscapes such as the MacDonnell Ranges and Simpson’s Gap that have become part of the nation’s cultural imaginary, not only via popular reproductions of famous watercolours by Albert Namatjira, but via the paintings, outback films, television travel series and tourist brochures that, during the course of the twentieth century, transformed the ‘dead centre’ of Australia into something akin to the nation’s spiritual heartland. While recent Australian outback films such as John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (2005), Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008) and Ivan Sen’s Mystery Road (2013) and Goldstone (2016) have rendered their landscapes as barren, flyblown, dilapidated,



You Are Here: Living Maps of Deep Time, Clock Time

33

sparsely‐populated, drought‐stricken and treacherous, Sweet Country renders the desert landscapes of central Australia as richly photogenic and teeming with life – and with stories waiting to be told. Framed in wide‐shot, these geological formations are widely recognised by Australians not only as photogenic landscapes, but as ‘country’ in the Indigenous sense: These landscapes are defined and bound by custom and hereditary rights, shaped by a priori spiritual forces and imbued with spiritual power. ‘Country’ may include landscapes, seascapes and riverscapes, and may have one or more focal sacred sites. […] Customary management of ‘country’ involves special knowledge and practices that traditional owners bring to the task. (Davis and Langton 2016, 1–2)

In Sweet Country, wide‐shots convey the vast scale and spiritual power of rock ­formations that stretch horizontally across the screen, towering over human actions set up for the camera in the middle ground. Human actions arising from outside the frame unfold on a diagonal into the foreground. But whether located in the middle or foreground, the narrow plane of human action is diminished by, estranged from, and subject to the spiritual forces of ‘country’ in which the film’s actions are performed. If the classic John Ford western claimed as its territory the imagined frontier between nature and culture, wilderness and garden, the outlaw and the law, then Sweet Country is a western insofar as it borrows some of Ford’s tropes, such as the raising of the gallows and the raising of the church steeple. But the forms of violence in which Sweet Country trades resonate with history rather than myth, and the Australian audiences addressed by the film are deeply implicated in that violence rather than safely distanced from it. Of the many acts of violence performed and presented in Sweet Country – including a determined rape committed in furtive silence under the cover of darkness – the one that lingers is the hiding meted out to the boy, Philomac, who is then chained up like a dog. This act of violence lingers because it is shockingly familiar. Unlike public floggings and hangings, or frontier spearings, shootouts and beheadings, ‘a good hiding’ was an ordinary part of childhood in nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century Australia, witnessed and suffered in schools and homes across the country, as well as on outback stations using Aboriginal workers as slave labour. Witnessing Philomac’s casual hiding in Sweet Country involves both a shock of recognition and a moment of reorientation. It implicates us1 and aligns us ethically and affectively with three figures in the scene: the boss who delivers the hiding, the station hand who holds the boy and enables the hiding, and the boy who suffers the hiding. As an allegory of colonialism, this scene goes to the heart of the settler‐colonial imaginary, at the very moment when the politics of recognition in Australia enters a new, highly contested phase. At the same time, the scene offers something other than the chance to witness an allegory of race relations. Under cover of the hiding, Philomac sneaks a small object into his pocket, an object that

34

Felicity Collins

will come in handy when he needs to unshackle his chains. After witnessing the shootout at the neighbouring station, Philomac takes two more objects from a saddlebag – a tobacco pouch and a gold pocket watch. The tobacco is quickly dispensed with, but Philomac holds onto the precious watch until the very end of the film. As it turns out, Philomac is the unacknowledged son of the white boss who gave him the hiding. There is a moment of affiliation between them, however, as the story of frontier ‘justice’ unfolds, deep time wins over clock time. Philomac’s final, pensive gesture in the film is to contemplate and then relinquish the beautifully crafted watch by casting it into a waterhole. In this gesture of relinquishment, the film suggests that colonial clock time is but a drop in the waterhole of Indigenous deep time.2 The boy, Philomac, is a minor character in Sweet Country, but one who speaks to me in two ways. Firstly, he asks for mutual recognition of ‘a good hiding’ as a temporality or event endured by children (and adults) on both sides of the colonial story. Secondly, Philomac serves as a spatial marker who says I am here, you are part of this living map, we are standing at the junction between clock time and deep time. This junction, this meeting place between the brief history of colonial dispossession and the long duration of Indigenous presence, provides an entry point into the documentary films shown on television under the rubric of You Are Here. Arising from the ‘Moments in History’ initiative by Screen Australia, NITV and SBS‐TV, You Are Here is part of the Blak Wave of film and television production that, since the turn of the century, has been redefining Australian national cinema and its place‐based imaginary – one film at a time, one interview at a time, one television series at a time, one international award at a time.

Recognition Politics On 16 November 2015, Screen Australia, in partnership with Indigenous public broadcaster NITV, put out a call for ‘a slate of compelling and powerful documentaries’ to help Australians ‘find their bearings’ in the lead up to the proposed 2017 referendum – anticipated since 2012 – on the Constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples (Screen Australia 2015). In June 2017, three of the documentaries were screened at the Sydney Film Festival, and in July– August 2017, all four documentary films were screened and discussed nationwide on NITV and SBS‐TV (the Indigenous and multicultural network) under the rubric of You Are Here. In the time lapse between the commissioning of the four documentaries in 2015 and their broadcast in 2017, a confluence of events in the public sphere changed the context for the promotion and reception of You Are Here. These de‐railing events included not only a radical challenge to the proposed Constitutional referendum – embodied in the May 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart – but also the displacement of recognition politics from Australia’s First Nations to the



You Are Here: Living Maps of Deep Time, Clock Time

35

LGBTQI community. Instead of the anticipated recognition of First Nations in the Australian Constitution, 2017 ended with a triumphant ‘Yes’ vote in the marriage equality postal survey. The reform of the Australian Constitution was replaced, in a sense, by the reform of the Marriage Act. You Are Here started as an orderly, collaborative project between national, publicly funded screen institutions, to commemorate two milestones in the politics of recognition. Screen Australia’s 2015 call for submissions noted that 2017 ‘marks the 50th anniversary of the 1967 “Yes Vote” referendum and the 25th anniversary of the Mabo Native Title High Court decision’ (Screen Australia 2015). While anniversary documentaries and mini‐series constitute a genre in national television, in this case the foreshadowed referendum failed to occur. After several years of work by an expert panel and a select committee to draft an amendment to the Constitution that would hopefully win a majority of voters in a majority of states, the Recognise campaign (which was widely expected to succeed) had shifted ground.3 On 26 May 2017, twelve regional dialogues with First Nations representatives culminated in the 2017 National Constitutional Convention at Uluru in Central Australia. In the Uluru Statement from the Heart the Convention’s delegates issued a resounding rejection of a minimalist, symbolic statement of inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the nation’s Constitution (Referendum Council 2017). Asserting the unceded sovereignty of Australia’s First Nations, and the outstanding necessity for agreements or treaties between Indigenous nations and settler Australia, delegates at the Uluru Convention rejected the proposed amendments to the Australian Constitution and challenged the conceit that 60,000 years (or more) of continuous occupation could be removed from world history by a mere two hundred years of colonial settlement. The Uluru Statement declared: Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from ‘time immemorial’, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago. This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co‐exists with the sovereignty of the Crown. (emphasis in original, Referendum Council 2017)

Drawing attention to the ‘dimensions of our crisis’ – including the world’s highest rates of incarceration, alienation of children from families, and ‘obscene numbers’ of youth in detention – the Uluru Statement called for ‘constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country.’ Specifically, the Uluru Statement calls for ‘a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution’, and

36

Felicity Collins

a Makaratta (the coming together after a struggle) Commission ‘to supervise a process of agreement‐making between Governments and First Nations and truth‐telling about our history’. The Uluru Statement concludes with a declaration, and an invitation: In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard. We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future. (Referendum Council 2017)

On 30 June 2017, the Referendum Council delivered its final report, including and supporting the key features of the Uluru Statement. By the time Prime Minister Turnbull responded to the Referendum Council’s Report on 26 October 2017, rejecting its recommendations out of hand, public attention had moved to the postal survey on marriage equality. Prime Minister Turnbull’s year may have ended with an almost unanimous Parliamentary vote to support legal recognition of marriage as a ‘union of two people’, but recognition of First Nations sovereignty was a step too far for an increasingly conservative government, further entrenching Turnbull’s status as a disappointment to an electorate that had invested in him as a progressive liberal. In the absence of a referendum on Constitutional recognition in 2017, new contexts emerged for the presentation of the You Are Here documentaries, followed by interviews and panel discussions on NITV. These contexts included: a media kerfuffle over the defacement of public statues of early colonisers such as Captain Cook and Governor Macquarie, coinciding with a political stoush over the decision by some local councils to support the campaign to Change the Date on which the nation celebrates Australia Day (Watson 2017, 13–17); the online publication of an interactive map of Colonial Frontier Massacres in Eastern Australia (University of Newcastle 2017) as further evidence of the nation’s origins in genocidal violence; and the 2017 discovery by archaeologists of tools and artefacts in the Madjedbebe rock shelter in Arnhem Land that demonstrate over 65,000 years of continuous occupation (Griffiths 2018, 271– 6). In the wake of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, these events created a rich public context for the launch of You Are Here, a screen culture event that participates in the disorderly process of ‘Australians finding their bearings’. The marketing of the series featured the ubiquitous symbol for ‘You Are Here’ that tells us which direction we are facing, where we need to go, and how we got so lost. This trope, of disoriented newcomers trying to find their bearings with inadequate maps and a poor sense of direction, has been a staple of Australian literary and visual culture. Over the course of the twentieth century, Australian cinema relied heavily on the image of a photogenic landscape swallowing up intrepid figures – runaway convicts, shipwrecked sailors, colonial explorers, cattle drovers, lost children, disoriented tourists and intrepid backpackers – who ignore or misread the signs separating navigable space from the sublime void that lingers



You Are Here: Living Maps of Deep Time, Clock Time

37

on in the imagined landscapes of the twenty‐first century. This ‘navigable‐void’ has attracted the attention of writers, painters, photographers and filmmakers over two centuries. It occupies a special place in the scholarship of cultural nationalism, most evocatively in Ross Gibson’s Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002). Of the rich scholarship on the Australian landscape, Badland is the slim volume that resonates with and anticipates the poetic intelligence, shifting perspectives and immersive approach taken by You Are Here’s four directors. Together, their films propose that the sublime, menacing void of terra nullius has always been a navigable place, a ‘living landscape’ to which we belong, rather than ‘sweet country’ there for the taking. My discussion, below, focuses on how each film in You Are Here engages the imagined spectator–viewer. In three of the films, the director appears on screen and addresses the spectator–viewer directly. I am indebted here to a century of critical thinking on the cinema–spectator relationship, elucidated so elegantly by Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener in Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (2010). In what follows, I draw lightly on Elsaesser and Hagener’s formulations of cinema as door, window, skin and mirror to explore how each film in You Are Here locates and dislocates the spectator–viewer. I count myself as one such spectator–viewer who has taken up the invitation to cross a threshold, to peer through a window, to touch and be touched by a living landscape, and to look into a mirror and come face to face with an ignominious history. Some readers may object to my indefinite use, throughout this chapter, of ‘you’, ‘our’, ‘we’, and ‘us’. Finding our bearings in Australia today depends on recognising just how mutable pronouns can be. The series begins with a greeting from director Warwick Thornton, ‘G’day Australia’, and it ends with a question from director Trisha Morton‐Thomas, ‘we all want to be friends, eh?’ In You Are Here spectator–viewers will ricochet from ‘we’ to ‘you’ to ‘they’; from ‘here’ to ‘there’ and back again. This rebounding is part of the exhilaration of getting lost as we find our way into the living maps that unfold ‘from the heart’ in You Are Here.

You Are Here: We Don’t Need a Map ‘They threw a rock at me. I threw a grenade back at them.’ (Warwick Thornton, The Point 2017)

What’s most striking about the experience of sitting down to watch Warwick Thornton’s We Don’t Need a Map, is that, in a documentary about taking our bearings from the night sky – in particular, from a constellation of five stars in the Milky Way – there is no stable position from which to view the film’s explosive montage of flags, journeys, interviews, stories, tattoos, songs, paintings, sky maps, history lessons and bush puppet‐shows. The pre‐credit montage makes the formal

38

Felicity Collins

intention of the film clear. A mash‐up of images flash‐dance on screen to the sounds of the 1976 Australian punk rock classic, ‘(I’m) Stranded’ by The Saints. This pumping anthem marks Thornton’s emergence from ‘the cupboard’ where he’s been hiding since his casual remark – that the Southern Cross is becoming the new Swastika – ignited a social media storm in 2010, following his nomination for Australian of the Year. After the frenetic opening sequences, a ‘short history lesson by Warwick Thornton’ draws us into an irreverent alignment with a filmmaker tuned into the Australian vernacular. By the end of the ‘history lesson’ there is little chance of settling back into our armchairs for a sober treatise on the Southern Cross as an emblem of race relations in Australia. Instead, we embark on a series of journeys with Thornton. Together, we will criss‐cross south‐eastern, northern, and central Australia. We will find ourselves speeding down highways, hovering around campfires, landing on faraway beaches, gazing up at the Milky Way and watching a miniaturized Captain Cook come ashore. As spectator–viewers we will find ourselves stepping through dark portals into living maps, a step or two behind Thornton and his camera (see Figure 1.1). The cinema spectator’s uncanny experience of crossing a threshold, of stepping through doorways into other worlds – in the company of a doppelganger or ­double – has been described by Elsaesser and Hagener as both projection and identification:

Figure  1.1  Crossing the threshold into Yolngu country with Thornton and his guide. Source: We Don’t Need a Map (2017). Directed by Warwick Thornton. Produced by Cutting Edge/Barefoot Communications. Frame grab captured by Felicity Collins from NITV broadcast 23 July 2017, available on Informit EduTV.



You Are Here: Living Maps of Deep Time, Clock Time

39

projection allows the spectator to plunge into the film, to temporarily dissolve part of his/her bodily boundaries and give up his/her individual subject status, in favour of a communal experience and a self‐alienating objectification; […] identification means the spectator can absorb the film, make it his or her own, i.e., incorporate the world and thereby constitute him‐/herself as an “imaginary” subject. (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010, 37)

Thornton presents himself as a doppelganger seconds into the film. It opens before the title sequence with a black screen and the first line of the Australian national anthem. Lights burst out of the darkness to form the Southern Cross, and we hear a greeting from the director himself: ‘G’day Australia, how’re ya going?’ Appearing on camera with the clapper board for Scene 1, Take 1, Thornton introduces himself as the maker of films with daggy titles we would never want to watch. Disarmed, we can relax while Thornton does the hard work of interviewing urban experts on Australian racism and the Southern Cross as a symbol of equality and exclusion. Heading south, Thornton interviews an astronomer who lets us in on a ‘beautiful’ idea about where we are in time and space. With Thornton, we learn that the light we see in the sky from the five stars we call the Southern Cross, was the light that began its journey across space almost 250 years ago, around the same time that Captain Cook ‘took off to come and find us’ – not, Thornton adds, that anyone was lost, or waiting to be discovered. Thornton’s colloquial history lesson – together with a puppet‐show performed by tiny bush toys and a miniature sailing boat – demonstrates that Captain Cook’s encounter with this continent and its peoples in 1770 constitutes a small moment in the great expanse of deep time. The brevity of settler‐colonial history is summed up in a montage of flags that supplanted the Union Jack (left behind by Cook to claim Australia for the British crown). We barely have time to ask ourselves why it’s the lead singer from The Drones, Gareth Liddiard, who is chosen to point out the motif of St George’s cross on successive versions of the Australian flag before Thornton whips us off to the Eureka Stockade in Ballarat – to see the original Southern Cross flag and to slide down the blue slippery dip in the children’s playground. Just as we are beginning to think the Eureka flag might stand for something worthwhile, like the fight for democracy, we are confronted with evidence of how this flag, with its five stars arranged in a cross, was used to drive Chinese miners from the goldfields. Burdened by the knowledge of a mob of patriots laying into Australia’s newborn egalitarianism, we follow Thornton on another kind of journey, crossing new thresholds into the presence of Indigenous elders for whom identity (as Romaine Moreton says towards the end of the film) is a verb not a noun, ‘a doing word’. The Yolngu elders who have agreed to be part of Thornton’s film are responsible for passing on and keeping sacred the stories to which they belong. Arriving by boat in Yirrkala with Thornton, we cross the threshold from clock time to deep time (see Figure 1.1 above). With Thornton as our double, we are introduced to Djulpan, the Yolngu story of the Southern Cross. As the story of

40

Felicity Collins

Djulpan unfolds, we see footage of young men cutting into a tree with an axe to make a bark canoe. A young child is placed in the canoe on a white sandbank, while the custodian of the story tells us that the spirits of the ancestors are travelling in that canoe, across the sky. Interspersed with further scenes of storytelling, connecting earth and the night sky in Warlpiri country, we are presented with comic scenes of colonial figures, reduced to bush toys, attempting to sail their boat across desert sandhills. In a series of bush puppet‐shows, Thornton appears as a giant puppeteer making a pantomime of British attempts to invade and colonise the interior – an invasion of ‘sweet country’ featuring cowboys with guns, warriors with spears, and windmills that drain the desert of water. In between journeys that take us from clock time into deep time and back again, Thornton ventures into conversation with urban scholars, writers, comedians and rappers who have stuck their necks out, challenging the ‘dickhead’ use of the Southern Cross by the ‘Aussie Swazi’ brigade. Near the end of the film, we cross another threshold with Thornton, into the danger zone of tattoo parlours where zealous nationalists have embraced the Southern Cross tattoo. In one of these parlours, we catch up with a young teacher having his tattoo removed by painful laser because the Southern Cross no longer honours his forebears who died under the flag at Gallipoli in 1915. How, then, might we orient ourselves at the end of this riotous film? Alighting from the back of a bush‐toy motorbike, with the earth spinning under our feet, we might look up at the night sky and see Djulpan shining through the Southern Cross. Then again, we might look to the earth and recall Thornton’s final, slow motion shots – gestural movements of sweeping up, of clearing the ground, of sending the ceremonial map of Djulpan ‘back to a warm place, back up there’. In this closing shot of Djulpan becoming a cloud of dust, mingling with the smoke of the campfire, We Don’t Need a Map leaves us standing at a threshold. This liminal space, reserved for future custodians of Djulpan, is not ours to cross. It is the limit point of our journey.

You Are Here: In My Own Words ‘I want to get people’s hearts, their conscience. It’s not just about educating them, we have to get beyond, and get to their hearts.’ (Erica Glynn, The Point 2017)

In My Own Words, Erica Glynn’s observational documentary shot in an isolated rural town, provides a complete change of pace for the spectator–viewer. The film invites us to sit quietly, outside the frame, and attend to the small moments that will take place inside a classroom, and inside a town called Brewarrina (see Figure 1.2). The filmmaker holds dear the lives of a small group of adults who consented to be observed and recorded by a film crew for 14 weeks as they learned



You Are Here: Living Maps of Deep Time, Clock Time

41

Figure 1.2  Waiting for the Aboriginal Adult Literacy Program to begin in Brewarrina. Source: In My Own Words (2017). Directed by Erica Glynn. Produced by Blackfella Films. Frame grab captured by Felicity Collins from NITV broadcast 30 July 2017, available on Informit EduTV.

to read and write. The condensation of 14 weeks of filming into a documentary of 52 minutes would, on the face of it, speed things up. But the film is shot and edited in such a way that time slows down. In My Own Words seats us outside the classroom, allowing us to take a long look inside. Indeed, it takes a second viewing to realise there are no long takes in this film, and our sense of action unfolding on different planes within the shot is at odds with the film’s montage of many shots covering each scene from different angles and distances. Similarly, the separation of voices we hear from persons we see, adds another layer, that of listening while looking. From outside the room, we observe a slowly unfolding relationship between the teachers and the participants who reveal something of themselves for the camera, and something else for the audio‐track. The feeling, of looking through a window into a world that knows we are there, owes more to montage techniques than to the immersive experience of the long take. Yet the immersive experience of this film, the feeling of observing a world, brings to mind Bazin’s commitment to neorealism as ‘a description of reality conceived as a whole by a consciousness disposed to see things as a whole’ (Bazin in Elsaesser and Hagener 2010, 29–30). Neorealism, then, ‘is not so much concerned with a choice of subject as with a particular way of regarding things. [… It] rejects analysis … of the characters and their actions. It looks on reality as a whole’ (Bazin in Elsaesser and Hagener 2010, 30). In films that conceive of reality as a whole, the question of the long take versus montage is not the issue. For Bazin, ‘the neorealist film has a meaning, but it is a posteriori, to the extent that it permits our awareness to move from one fact to another, from one fragment of reality to the next’ (Bazin in Elsaesser and Hagener 2010, 31). This account of a cinematic experience – of moving ‘from one fact … one fragment of reality to the next’ without imposing a meaning – seems a good fit for the experience offered by In My Own Words.

42

Felicity Collins

It would be easy to pigeon‐hole In My Own Words as advocating the Literacy for Life program from Cuba as a solution to high rates of illiteracy among adult Indigenous Australians. This would categorise the film as an intervention into social ‘disadvantage’ rather than an engagement with the intergenerational impact of colonial ‘dispossession’. In the interview (The Point 2017) that followed the screening of In My Own Words on NITV, the film’s director, Erica Glynn, insisted that her intention was not to ‘educate’ the audience. Rather, she wanted the audience’s experience of Aboriginal adult illiteracy to be ‘heartfelt’. Initially, Glynn considered fiction and other forms, before deciding to make an embedded, observational documentary. Building a relationship with Literacy for Life, and with those delivering the program in Brewarrina was ‘the right way’ to make this particular film. What worked for the filmmakers during 14 weeks of shooting on location in the classroom and in the town of Brewarrina, is what works for the viewer during 52 minutes of screen time. The film is a slow revelation. It unfolds shot by shot, moving us from one scene to the next. As these scenes accumulate, they invite us ‘to look on reality as a whole’. This occurs in three ways. Firstly, we witness students in the ‘Yes I Can’ program take one step, and then another, towards literacy, starting with the letter A, then copying words, combining words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs, understanding exclamation marks and writing a letter (and receiving one in return). Secondly, we learn more about ‘reality as a whole’ when we listen to backstories from participants. Delivered in snippets, each reticent voice‐over brings us into closer proximity with the teller. From these voice‐overs, and from classroom exchanges, we learn what is at stake for the teachers and adult learners who were treated as outcasts in the school system. Two words arise: ‘shame’ and ‘rubbish’. The ‘shame’ of not being able to do what others do without effort or help – withdraw money, go shopping, vote, read the electricity bill. The ‘rubbish’ of family feuds and community conflicts – as well as unemployment, domestic violence, drugs and alcohol – that make life in Brewarrina precarious. ‘Shame’ and ‘rubbish’ are the words we hear, but in the classroom the sound we hear around those words is laughter, and what we see in the faces, pondering letters and words with intent, is a form of resilience and renewal, described by Jonathan Lear as ‘radical hope’ (Lear 2002; see also Pearson 2009; Collins 2016). Finally, the film makes spaces for us to pause in the here‐and‐now of time itself. At regular intervals, there is a lull in the storytelling, a breathing space to contemplate shots of earth and sky, river and trees, passing trucks, perching birds, derelict cotton sheds and a patient moon. To borrow from Bazin again, the film ‘rejects analysis … of the characters and their actions. It looks on reality as a whole.’ If We Don’t Need a Map takes the viewer on an exhilarating ride through many portals, In My Own Words ‘gets to’ the viewer by unfolding a world, that for a decade or more we have understood through media coverage as ‘remote’, ‘dysfunctional’ and ­‘disadvantaged’. Glynn reframes this world as close and real.



You Are Here: Living Maps of Deep Time, Clock Time

43

You Are Here: Connection to Country ‘The country is always a character in my films …’ (Tyson Mowarin, The Point 2017)

In 1992 the High Court of Australia, in its famous Mabo decision, threw out the nation’s founding doctrine of terra nullius. The native title legislation arising from the decision required Indigenous Australians to prove an unbroken ‘connection to country’ in order to gain native title over their land. Tyson Mowarin’s documentary offers a bird’s eye view of what ‘connection to country’ means in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The view is so wide and high, so deep and piercing that the Mabo decision, and the deeply flawed native title legislation that followed, are reduced from landmark decisions to errant judgments. At one level, the film’s probing camera‐eye takes us into Indigenous communities as they seek our support to protect heritage sites from the mining and resource sector in the Pilbara – as a matter of urgency. At another level, Connection to Country reaches out to spectator– viewers with an all‐embracing message, an enveloping touch, from the spirit of country herself (see Figure 1.3). The film opens with a sweeping, panoptic shot of a landscape of unsurpassed splendour, capturing our look and drawing us into the scene to reveal, standing on the headland, not a man with a movie camera but a man with a drone. At some point he will say, ‘I want to share this way of thinking with you, why the

Figure 1.3  In the opening drone shot of Muruga, we hear the spirit of the land say in Ngarluma language, ‘This is my story, but it’s your story too.’ Source: Connection to Country (2017). Directed by Tyson Mowarin. Produced by Weerianna Street Media. Frame grab captured by Felicity Collins from NITV broadcast 6 August 2017, available on Informit EduTV.

44

Felicity Collins

country means so much to blackfellas, and why it should mean something to you too.’ After the opening sweep of the moving image, Mowarin’s words draw us slowly back to earth. Captured and complicit, our look cuts to an overhead shot of a flat dusty road and a lone vehicle coming into view. At the wheel, the driver introduces himself as Tyson Mowarin, a Ngarluma man and the director of the film. He takes us home to the town of Roebourne in time to see his young daughter, Sharliya, receive an award at school. We look on as Mowarin tells us that Sharliya was ‘born with a responsibility to look after country. And I’m making sure she’s strong on that.’ In Mowarin’s safe hands, we make another smooth transition to a river where a Ngarluma woman calls out, in language, to the spirit of the land. Turning to the camera she explains, ‘meeting and greeting … is very important for us. The kids can go fishing now.’ Listening while taking in the scene, we hear Mowarin on the soundtrack, adding: ‘the spirit of the land is still alive, she’s still out there, the country’s living and breathing spirit.’ Our knowledge of this living landscape begins to deepen as the film turns our attention to the rock art of Murujuga, twice as old as the oldest cave paintings in the world, and more than equal to the pyramids of Egypt in terms of world heritage. But then, in a tenth of a second, our growing sense of awe is shattered. At the moment of our recognition of Murujuga as unique, the ancient stones are blasted to pieces – then shovelled aside to make way for a gas plant, and later, a corrosive fertiliser plant. The beauty and civility of the opening sequence give way to shock. Still reeling, we are presented with a montage of memory‐images that bring to light the enslavement, massacres and assimilation policies that enabled settler– colonial exploitation in the Pilbara. To drive home the point, Mowarin shows us footage of iron ore magnate, Lang Hancock, saying of Aboriginal people in the Pilbara: ‘the ones that are no good to themselves and can’t accept things, the half caste … I would dope the water up so that they were sterile and would breed themselves out in the future, and that would solve the problem.’ As we absorb these words, and acknowledge their continuity with the 1868 massacres, we can only concur with the spirit of the land when she tells us (in the language of the Ngarluma people): ‘I feel this pain. I can be angry too.’ Here, the body of the film, the voice of the land, and the embodied viewer converge in a haptic experience involving all the senses. This is a somatic form of spectatorship best described by Vivian Sobchack who insists: ‘[W]e do not experience any movie only through our eyes. We see and comprehend and feel films with our entire bodily being, informed by the full history and carnal knowledge of our accultured sensorium’ (qtd in Elsaesser and Hagener, 116). The remainder of Connection to Country puts our ‘carnal knowledge and accultured sensorium’ to the test as we are drawn into the hard graft of political activism in the Pilbara. A film that began by sweeping the viewer into its welcoming orbit, ‘to share this way of thinking with you’, brings us back to the here‐and‐now. Our wondrous view from above is replaced by what’s happening at ground level. Here, we are sidelined while elders and children – and the politics of mining and heritage sites in the



You Are Here: Living Maps of Deep Time, Clock Time

45

Pilbara – come first. Heading off in two directions, the film leaves us to tag along as best we can. We hover out‐of‐frame at profilmic events staged by the Pilbara community with Mowarin’s camera and microphone as their witness. We follow behind, as he records bush meetings to fight the ‘erosion by stealth’ of Western Australia’s Aboriginal Heritage Act. We stand well back, as he talks with a generation of men who maintained their connection to country by working as station hands on land taken from them. Back in his studio in Roebourne we share Mowarin’s interest in using VR technology to ‘render’ country anew for Sharliya’s generation. Later, we attend a roadside meeting between elders and a young pastoralist couple to protect a thalu site from passing vehicles. We share the tensions of the meeting and the relief that this small but powerful site will be recognised and respected. At ground level, the camera aligns us with Mowarin as an embedded activist. Multiple violations of Australia’s Aboriginal heritage sites in the Pilbara are brought to light in interviews and bush meetings, and a petition is presented to the Western Australian parliament. Traversing town and bush, cattle stations and homelands, the film’s drive to make this story ‘our story too’ draws on ‘cinema as a specific kind of contact’ – postcolonial, intercultural – involving both skin and touch in ‘a haptic experience’ of bodies brushing up against each other (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010, 110). Coming into close contact with Mowarin’s activist filmmaking, the spectator–viewer is drawn into a visceral sense of urgency, of time running out – made all the stronger by Mowarin’s purposeful and patient exposition of what is happening to country and why it matters to all of us. In the closing scenes, the haptic body of the spectator, the voice and spirit of the land, and the profilmic presence of Mowarin begin to permeate each other. We find ourselves back in the car, driving somewhere not‐yet‐known with Mowarin. On arrival, we observe a brief exchange that indicates we are here for a special event. In the next scene, we find ourselves looking at a kangaroo tail being scraped and cooked over a campfire while the last rays of the sun linger on the kids running free. On the soundtrack Mowarin is speaking to us. He wants us to understand the inclusivity of Aboriginal culture as a heritage that Australians should ‘be proud of ’ and ‘embrace’, ‘help fight for’, and see ‘as part of their identity as well.’ In this moment we feel here‐ now with Mowarin, while ‘Australians’ are not‐here‐yet. With this to ponder, we arrive at the penultimate scene of the film. Young boys, painted up and lit only by the campfire, dance in a curving line, out of the darkness towards the camera. The voice of the spirit of the land speaks to them – and our ears are touched, one last time, by the beauty of her language and her tender words, translated for us: I heard you today, calling out to me. I’m happy for you. I love it when you sing and dance for me. I feel the rhythm in my sands. I hear it on the wind. Make me feel so good!

46

Felicity Collins

The screen fades to black and we pause in the afterglow, waiting for the credits. Instead, the screen lights up and we find ourselves swept up by the camera in a series of high, wide shots that reveal Mowarin and Sharliya in a pristine seascape, close at first, and then almost swallowed up by the vast, shallow sea merging with the sky. Mowarin’s voice calls for our attention, speaking to us directly: ‘I hope you understand now why I wanted to bring you to the Pilbara in ­northwestern Australia, and listen to the land the way we do, and understand our connection to country.’ A song, Ngarniui Ngurra WAM’s Sounds of the Pilbara, fills the space as Mowarin and Sharliya reappear in the foreground. Mowarin’s voice urges us ‘to work together’ to save ‘our heritage’ for ‘our kids future’. We remain inside this thought, this expansive space, as Mowarin exits the frame and Sharliya takes his place, front and centre with the sea stretching out behind her. Our vision dims and the credits roll, leaving us in a haptic, sensory state – touched, captured and held by this bounteous film.

You Are Here: Occupation: Native ‘I was coming across stuff that was really heart‐breaking and gut‐wrenching and horrific. […] Generations and generations before me had been treated so horrifically in a country that I actually love. And that really hurts. And then, to turn around … to make it funny was really hard.’ (Trisha Morton‐Thomas, NITV interview) In the final film of the You Are Here series, we come face to face with writer, actor and director, Trisha Morton‐Thomas, an Anmatyerr woman from central Australia who has a thing or two to show us about our history, from the other side. This is a history lesson like no other – one made possible by the archival documentary series, First Australians (Perkins and Cole, 2008), a labour of love that brought Aboriginal voices and stories out of the archives and turned them into Australia’s top‐selling educational DVD (Collins 2016). Occupation: Native picks up on these characters and stories from the archives and gives them a satirical makeover, turning a horror story into a comedy of errors. The film begins with a classic landscape shot of the sun setting over a red desert. On the soundtrack we hear a familiar voice, one we’ve heard in cinema, on television and on stage. History tells us the original people of Australia were hunter–gatherers who lived in isolation for tens of thousands of years – blah, blah, blah.

A gum tree replaces the setting sun, and a kookaburra responds to history’s egregious claim with peals of laughter. The frame shifts to reveal Trisha Morton‐ Thomas under the tree. On the soundtrack she exclaims: ‘That’s me! Reading my birth certificate. They got my mum’s name wrong.’ On screen we see a



You Are Here: Living Maps of Deep Time, Clock Time

47

superimposition of the certificate and the words Pansy Pidgigal crossed out in favour of Patsy Morton. ‘But that’s not the part that does my head in’, says Morton‐ Thomas, ‘my mum’s occupation is listed as a native. Occupation: Native.’ Lifting her head from the document and looking to camera, her voice‐over continues: ‘I wonder how you get into that kind of work.’ An iris shot transports us to an office where Black Comedy (ABC‐TV) star, Steven Oliver, is seated at a desk, wearing a shirt and tie and looking at a computer screen. He turns to Morton‐Thomas, perks up, and tells her just why occupation ‘native’ is perfect for her: Well, you get to be on country, sleep under the stars, hang out with the mob, plus you get to go hunting and gathering and maintain a healthy lifestyle and, the best perk of all, you get a lot of dreaming time. [The downside:] it’s a 24‐hour kind of deal, you can’t just switch off. Plus, you’ve got to deal with 229 years of negative stereotypes.

Oliver ‘speaks native’ for a moment: they look at each other and burst out laughing. But we are not let off the hook. The screen fills with a barrage of hate‐filled social media posts, riddled with racist stereotypes. The sequence ends with Morton‐ Thomas back in the desert, under the gum tree, gesticulating at the camera operator (now in the frame) then storming off into the distance, leaving us with the song lyrics: ‘when you see us in a car, you don’t know who we are – black ‘n’ deadly.’ In the far distance, Morton‐Thomas turns once more to the camera, remonstrating furiously. On the soundtrack we hear her declare, ‘I’m not an expert in Australian history, but this film is the way I see it.’ The task for the spectator– viewer is not to see history through Morton‐Thomas’s eyes, but to come face‐to‐ face with ‘our’ history, reflected back to us from the other side. As Elsaesser and Hagener put it in their summary of cinema as mirror and face: […] entering into the diegetic world through window and door was a matter of keeping one’s distance, however “close” one was, or of crossing thresholds and traversing liminal spaces. Now the metaphor of cinema as mirror blocks this passage […] A look into the mirror necessitates a confrontation with one’s own face as the window to one’s interior self. Yet this look at oneself in the mirror is also a look from outside, a look that no longer belongs to me, that judges or forgives me, criticizes or flatters me, but at any rate has become, the look of another, or “the Other”. (56–7)

There is, however, a great deal more to this film than an encounter with the look of ‘another’ or ‘the Other’ who has every reason to judge and criticise. Morton‐ Thomas not only holds up a mirror, she performs the role of the impresario (see Figure 1.4), the one who rivets our attention as she presents, with great fanfare, the sorry story of a loutish ‘Aussie tribe’– the one tribe, among many visiting tribes, to plant a flag and take possession of the land, in rude violation of all the rules of hospitality. We are here, then, to look at our unvarnished history and learn a lesson in good manners.

48

Felicity Collins

This show‐and‐tell unfolds in two parts. The first debunks the myths of peaceful settlement and stern nation‐building. The second documents the story of Aboriginal activism, from the protests and petitions in the 1930s to the contemporary struggle for recognition, expressed most recently in the Uluru Statement. While archival footage, re‐enactments and expert interviews help us understand the impact of colonisation, and the courageous resistance to it, the affective force that keeps us glued to the screen, despite the ground being pulled from under us, comes from the combination of mimetic performance and vernacular narration. Together, they turn Australian history on its head. This comic reversal leaves us defenceless as we come face to face with the cruelty, injustice and mendacity presented to us in a series of theatrical cameos. When Morton‐Thomas steps out of a colourful row of bathing huts, dressed in a colonial costume, complete with top hat and walking stick, we cannot help but laugh (see Figure  1.4). When Steven Oliver appears beside her, dressed as Captain Cook, we can only marvel at their audacity as they tumble national icons from their pedestals – and take their place. As the history lesson unfolds, portraits of eminent invaders, explorers and other colonists are brought to life by actors who step out of picture frames, and quote

Figure  1.4  Trisha Morton‐Thomas mirrors our history back to us. Source: Screen Australia. Occupation: Native (2017). Directed by Trisha Morton‐Thomas. Produced by Brindle Films/Screen Territory. Broadcast on NITV 13 August 2017, available on Informit EduTV.



You Are Here: Living Maps of Deep Time, Clock Time

49

from letters, diaries and reports. While the cameos are ironic, the words hit home. These segments reveal that the early colonisers recognised and, in many cases, admired the ways in which Aboriginal people inhabited and cultivated the land, extended hospitality to strangers, and fought to protect themselves from the worst of the British invasion and the frontier wars that continued into the twentieth century. As Morton‐Thomas and Oliver reduce us to laughter at our own expense, we cannot help but recognise that our colonising forebears have much to answer for. They admired Aboriginal people and recognised the injustices heaped upon them, but remained deaf to the self‐serving ‘blah, blah, blah’ of colonial discourse. The nation’s first two prime ministers, Barton and Deakin, give us further cause for shame: their repudiation of Aboriginal Australia retains not a trace of the mutuality, affection and regard that arose through face to face contact during the colonial era. We might wallow in or turn away from this short history of infamy, but the film closes with another option. Having stepped into the pages of history, paddled her canoe across Sydney Harbour, travelled to London to walk in the footsteps of Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne, Morton‐Thomas is transported back to the red desert of central Australia. The camera finds her dressed in black, standing barefoot on a sandy track, holding a wooden stick. This will be our final lesson, and we need a big stick to learn it. For the next seventy‐seven seconds, Morton‐Thomas will walk along a desert track, drawing a line in the sand – one second for every thousand years of Aboriginal occupation of Australia. This line in the sand gives us a new perspective on deep time and clock time. They are part of one continuous line, with ‘our history’ lasting about 0.25 of one second. From this perspective, it is only a small step to accept the invitation to align our story with deep time. Released from the mirror of our sorrowful–laughable history, we (the ill‐mannered Aussie tribe) are given the chance to soar with the camera to find Morton‐Thomas sitting on a ridge overlooking Alice Springs. Contemplating a new relationship based on truth‐ telling, she turns to face us and says, ‘… we all want to be friends, eh?’

Which Way From Here? The four films in You Are Here not only speak to us ‘from the heart’, they take us where we haven’t been before, show us things we need to see more clearly, and tell us stuff we really ought to know by now. They teach us lessons in hospitality and good manners, and they have a good laugh with us at our sheep, our flags, our statues and our tattoos. They invite us to get on board, learn to be friends, and become part of something bigger and more inclusive than the short history of the ‘Aussie tribe’. Between them, the four filmmakers translate the key tenets of the Uluru Statement into language we can all understand: the need for an Indigenous voice to keep the government on track when it comes to looking after culture and country; the need for truth‐telling about the past if we want to be friends in the

50

Felicity Collins

future; and the need for treaties with Australia’s first peoples and their descendants, recognising they never gave up their land or their sovereignty. But everywhere I turn, in the discussion of where we might go from here, an anxiety arises – that the best efforts, over two centuries, of Australia’s first peoples to attune us to where we are, seem to fall by the wayside. Time and again we tune into Indigenous knowledge of where we are, but somehow it fails to ‘stick’ or to ‘seep’ through into ‘broader public consciousness’ (McKenna 2018, 30). We listen, but with ‘tin ears’ that fail to hear (Davis and Langton 2016, 6); and we look, with ‘a kind of sightlessness’ at ‘what it is to be a blackfellow in the here‐and‐now of Australian life’ (Stanner 1959, quoted in Pearson 2009, 8). For spectator–viewers who have sought out the films of the Blak Wave over the past two decades in order to find out who and where we are in relation to Indigenous Australia, how often have ‘attempts at somatic, affective and haptic understanding shatter[ed] on the soft … impenetrable surface of … [our culturally and semantically charged] skin’? (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010, 109) Recognising our problem – our thick skins, tin ears and sightless eyes – You Are Here takes a big stick to the carapace that protects our soft underbelly. Towards the end of We Don’t Need a Map, for instance, our intrepid doppelganger, Warwick Thornton greets Captain Cook coming ashore in the form of a tiny bush toy strapped to a motor boat: ‘I’ve had a word with the mob’ he says. ‘You can stay, but none of that raping and pillaging, ok?’ Contemplating this invitation to come ashore on new terms, our thoughts might drift to Philomac, sitting by the waterhole, its surface rippling as the little clock descends to its resting place below. Looking into that waterhole, glimpsing the dissolution of clock time into deep time, we might find ourselves turning towards the much‐expanded ‘here‐and‐now of Australian life’ on offer in both You Are Here and the Uluru Statement from the Heart. How might we stay attuned to the expansive ‘here‐and‐now’ presented to us by You Are Here’s interlocutors? Bruce Pascoe, a writer and Yuin /Bunurong man, sitting around a campfire with Trisha Morton‐Thomas at the end of Occupation: Native, has this to say: Sensible Australians will decide … they want to belong to this culture … because it makes so much sense … That’s why I want the eight-year-olds, the nine-yearolds – whatever the colour of their skin – to learn the law and the culture of this land. Because it will stand them in good stead.

On the sensible shift to belonging and learning, the last word goes to Romaine Moreton, a poet, filmmaker and Goepul Jagara/Bundjalung woman. In We Don’t Need a Map, she has a thought that turns out to be a good answer to the question, ‘which way from here?’ Our identities need to be doing words … not who you are, but what you are responsible for.



You Are Here: Living Maps of Deep Time, Clock Time

51

Acknowledgement I would like pay my respects to the traditional custodians and elders, past, present and future of the Yuin nation on whose country I was born and where I spent my early years, the Bundjalung nation whose country I came to love in my growing up years, and the Kulin nation on whose country I have lived and worked for three decades.

Notes 1 By ‘us’ I mean a discursive public of strangers who form an indefinite audience for films and other texts that address Indigenous and settler relations in Australia. See Collins 2016a, “A Hungry Public”. 2 See McGrath and Jebb (eds) 2015. This interdisciplinary anthology investigates the conceptual and methodological gains and pitfalls of expanding the reach of ‘history’ to ‘deep time’ in the Australian context. I am mindful throughout this essay that ‘deep time’ is an invention of ‘clock time’  –  a concept arising in the present moment of rethinking ‘where we are’ in temporal and spatial terms. 3 On the shifts in public debate that gave rise to the 2017 Uluru Statement From the Heart  see Q&A: Live from GARMA Festival, 2014; Davis and Langton 2016, McKenna 2018.

References Collins, Felicity. 2016a. ‘A Hungry Public: Stranger Relationality and the Blak Wave.’ In Contemporary Publics: Shifting Boundaries in New Media Technology and Culture, edited by P. David Marshall, Glenn D’Cruz, Sharyn McDonald, and Katja Lee, 27–42. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Collins, Felicity. 2016b. ‘After Dispossession: Blackfella Films and the Politics of Radical Hope.’ In The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics, edited by Yannis Tzioumakis and Claire Molloy, 231–241. London and New York: Routledge. Davis, Megan, and Marcia Langton (eds). 2016. It’s Our Country: Indigenous Arguments for Meaningful Constitutional Recognition and Reform. Carlton VIC: Melbourne University Press. Elsaesser, Thomas, and Malte Hagener. 2010. Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses. New York: Routledge. Gibson, Ross. 2002. Seven Versions of an Australian Badland. St Lucia QLD: University of Queensland Press. Griffiths, Billy. 2018. Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia. Carlton VIC: Black Inc. Lear, Jonathan. 2002. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge MA/London: Harvard University Press.

52

Felicity Collins

McGrath, Ann, and Mary Anne Jebb (eds). 2015. Long History, Deep Time: Deepening Histories of Place. Acton ACT: Australian National University Press and Aboriginal History Inc. McKenna, Mark. 2018. ‘Moment of Truth: History and Australia’s Future.’ Quarterly Essay, 69. Melbourne: Black Inc. NITV. 2017. ‘You Are Here: 4 Documentary Films for Australians to Find their Bearings.’ July 3. Accessed September 2017. (http://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2017/07/03/ you‐are‐here‐4‐documentary‐films‐australians‐find‐their‐bearings Pearson, Noel. 2009. ‘Radical Hope: Education and Equality in Australia.’ Quarterly Essay, 36. Melbourne: Black Inc. Q&A: Live From Garma Festival, Arnhem Land. 2014. ABC iview, August 4. Accessed April 2018. http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s4040700.htm Referendum Council. 2017. Uluru Statement from the Heart. Final Report of the Referendum Council, June 30. Accessed September 2017. https://www. referendumcouncil.org.au/ Screen Australia. 2015. ‘Expressions of Interest for Moment in History.’ November 16. Accessed September 2017. https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/sa/screen‐news/ 2015/11‐16‐expressions‐of‐interest‐moment‐in‐history Screen Australia, Media Release. 2017a. ‘Sydney Film Festival to Feature First Nation Filmmakers From Around the World.’ May 10. Accessed August 2017. https://www. screenaustralia.gov.au/sa/media‐centre/news/2017/05‐10‐sff‐first‐nation Screen Australia, Media Release. 2017b. ‘NITV’s You Are Here: Four Compelling Documentary Films.’ July 3. Accessed August 2017. https://www.screenaustralia. gov.au/sa/media‐centre/news/2017/07‐03‐nitv‐you‐are‐here Stadler, Jane, Peta Mitchell and Stephen Carleton. 2015. Imagined Landscapes: Geovisualizing Australian Spatial Narratives. Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press. Stephens, Kim. 2017. ‘The Southern Cross is becoming the new Swastika’: New Documentary Examines ‘Hijacking’ of National Icon.’ June 9. Accessed December 2017. http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/movies/new‐movies/the‐southern‐ cross‐is‐becoming‐the‐new‐swastika‐new‐documentary‐examines‐hijacking‐of‐ national‐icon/news‐story/6df437be01344c301ad02221e17d893a Taylor, Andrew. 2016. ‘Artists shed light on Governor Macquarie’s massacres of Indigenous Australians.’ The Sydney Morning Herald. April 7. Accessed September 2017. https:// www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art‐and‐design/artists‐shed‐light‐on‐governor‐ macquaries‐massacres‐of‐indigenous‐australians‐20160406‐gnzq9m.html The Point: You Are Here Interviews: Warwick Thornton Is Here – Ep 1. NITV July 23, 2017. Accessed March 2018. https://edutv‐informit‐com‐au.ez.library.latrobe.edu.au/ watch‐screen.php?videoID=1964952 The Point: You Are Here Interviews: Erica Glynn Is Here – Ep 2. NITV, July 30, 2017. Accessed March 2018. https://edutv‐informit‐com‐au.ez.library.latrobe.edu.au/watch‐screen. php?videoID=1972647 The Point: You Are Here Interviews: Tyson Mowarin Is Here  –  Ep 3. NITV, August 6, 2017. Accessed March 2018. https://edutv‐informit‐com‐au.ez.library.latrobe.edu.au/ watch‐screen.php?videoID=1987651 The Point: You Are Here Interviews: Trisha Morton‐Thomas Is Here – Ep 4. NITV, August 13, 2017. Accessed March 2018. https://edutv‐informit‐com‐au.ez.library.latrobe.edu. au/watch‐screen.php?videoID=1994858



You Are Here: Living Maps of Deep Time, Clock Time

53

University of Newcastle. 2017. Colonial Frontier Massacres in Eastern Australia 1788–1872. The Centre for 21st Century Humanities. Accessed September 2017. https://c21ch. newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/ Watson, Don. 2017. ‘What should we do with Captain Cook?’ The Monthly, October 2017: 13–17. With Secrecy and Despatch. 2016. Exhibition curated by Tess Allas and David Garneau. Campbelltown Arts Centre, April 9 ‐ June 12. Accessed September 2017. http://c‐a‐c. com.au/with‐secrecy‐despatch/

2

Charlie’s Country, Gulpilil’s Body Corinn Columpar

In their foundational text Australian Cinema After Mabo, Felicity Collins and Therese Davis sum up the career trajectory of iconic Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil by noting that he has typically ‘played to and undercut the Eurocentric fantasy of an exotic or mystical figure,’ often in works by white, settler filmmakers, and thereby exists ‘somewhere between the canny black tracker and the noble savage’ (Collins and Davis 2004, 23). In fleshing out this claim, they pay particular attention to Dutch Australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker (2002), the last feature film featuring Gulpilil prior to their book’s publication in 2004. For their purposes, it is a telling professional bookend, one that sheds light on the contemporary moment in which they were writing: by making its Aboriginal lead more at home in Australia than his settler counterparts and reframing questions of land ownership in terms of ‘custodial obligation and belonging’ (16), the film, like the Mabo decision before it, exposes the fallacy of terra nullius and acknowledges the validity of Aboriginal land claims. Moreover, it brings the screen persona of Gulpilil into the twenty‐first century by ‘reviv[ing] the exoticism of Walkabout and combin[ing] it with the post‐colonial moral authority invested in an Aboriginal elder’ (23). Since that time Gulpilil has engaged in two other cinematic collaborations with de Heer, Ten Canoes (2006) and Charlie’s Country (2013), and the results have again been noteworthy for three related reasons. First, both involved Gulpilil and other Aboriginal participants at multiple stages in their development and thus constitute something truly exceptional: as Anne Rutherford writes of Ten Canoes, ‘hybrid, inter‐cultural work that reinvents the space between Indigenous and non‐ Indigenous cultures’ (Rutherford 2013, 139). Second, in part because of the ongoing and considerable involvement mentioned above, they communicate with A Companion to Australian Cinema, First Edition. Edited by Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



Charlie’s Country, Gulpilil’s Body

55

exceptional incision the perspectives and interests of Aboriginal Australians, thereby contributing to a counter‐cinematic alternative to a dominant cinema that tends to perpetuate historically entrenched representational tropes and the colonial logic informing them. Third, they continue the work of The Tracker before them by recasting the figure of Gulpilil for contemporary audiences. In the case of the later work with de Heer, however, the exoticism that Collins and Davis mention is not supplemented so much as undercut by various representational strategies that make Gulpilil familiar, or at least normative, within a narrative context that nonetheless respects the specificity of his experience and the historical conditions that have contributed to its production. The result is two films that showcase what Jo Smith and Stephen Turner refer to as Indigenous ‘insistence’ or ‘presencing,’ which involves making visible a way of life that both long pre‐dated colonisation and continues into the present as an alternative to colonial (or ‘postcolonial’) norms. Working in tandem with acts of pointed resistance, which have the capacity to thwart the operations of colonial power, acts of insistence offer up ‘alternative political ontologies [that] challenge the orthodoxies of the colonial present, and open up possibilities of living other than those mandated by the state and settler status quo’ (Smith and Turner 2013, 286). As has been recounted by many scholars and critics, Ten Canoes (2006) represents Gulpilil’s community, the people of Ramingining, on its own terms in a story that takes place prior to any contact with white, settler culture and with a style that departs from the conventions of both classical and ethnographic cinema. While the extent to which Gulpilil can be credited as a kind of co‐author of Ten Canoes, and thus responsible for its final form, is a matter for debate (Hamby 2007; Hiatt 2007; Davis 2007), the significance of his textual presence is indisputable. Serving as the film’s storyteller, he uses his voice – and his voice alone – to school the presumably Anglophone and non‐Aboriginal spectator in the codes and practices of his people. In the most celebrated moment of his voice‐over narration, he introduces the film to come by issuing a playful warning that signals an epistemological shift: ‘I am going to tell you a story. It’s not your story. It’s my story, a story like you’ve never seen before.’ In comparison, Charlie’s Country features Gulpilil as a credited co‐author who worked alongside de Heer on every aspect of the story’s development, and insistently foregrounds that which remains out of frame in Ten Canoes, Gulpilil’s body; the result is a fully fleshed‐out alternative to the stock characters (again, the canny tracker and noble savage) that Collins and Davis identify with the actor. Set in the so‐called ‘postcolonial’ present, rather than the colonial or pre‐colonial past, the film narrates the myriad constraints placed on Aboriginal people in a contemporary Australia where those traditional ways of life that have not been destroyed are highly regulated and few viable alternatives seem to exist. Within this context Gulpilil, as protagonist Charlie, verbally articulates a sense of injustice and indignity in the face of the constraints he faces, but it is his embodied presence – his bearing, his gestures, his movements – that prove even more expressive, and thereby significant, than his words.

56

Corinn Columpar

Almost immediately after the release of Ten Canoes, multiple scholarly articles on it began to appear, and now, almost ten years later, there is a wealth of literature dedicated to it. Charlie’s Country, in contrast, has not ignited the same kind of discussion. Granted, far fewer years have passed since its release, and it may be that Charlie’s Country is catching critical fire more slowly, but the contrast is still striking. One explanation for this relatively subdued reception is the fact that, by the time Charlie’s Country appeared, the collaborative nature of de Heer and Gulpilil’s working relationship was not as novel as it had been. An even more compelling explanation, however, is that Charlie’s Country is far less experimental formally and thus does not beg for the same kind of analysis. Unlike Ten Canoes, which plays with an elaborate flashback structure that involves three different time frames and a wide variety of cinematographic techniques, Charlie’s Country is relatively straightforward: a chronological account of a single protagonist’s experience, which unfolds with little stylistic embellishment. Yet despite its seeming simplicity, its arguably classical form, Charlie’s Country actually unsettles multiple ­representational conventions, and in the process positions the spectator as an engaged ­witness to the ongoing effects of colonialism and the ‘insidious trauma,’ as Maria Root (1992) terms it, that those effects produce. Given the extent to which these achievements are dependent on Gulpilil’s embodied presence, they come into sharpest focus when certain insights, emphases, and methods from performance studies are brought to bear on cinema studies.

­Performance As Process Contributing to the recent ‘affective turn’ in cinema studies, an approach to film informed by performance studies facilitates engagement with many of the issues that phenomenologically inclined, as well as Deleuzian, film scholars bring to the table too: not only affect but also corporeality, pleasure, and excess. Yet while many such scholars, especially Vivian Sobchack and those writing in her influential wake, foreground film spectatorship, particularly its experiential dimensions, studies of cinema inflected by performance studies have the potential to illuminate issues related to production as well. One way they do so is by reconceptualising the work done by actors, defining the preferred term ‘performance’ against ‘acting’ as it is typically understood. While ‘acting’ tends to connote an act of simulation, a role that an actor can take on and then off, and a mandate to realise faithfully a vision already created elsewhere (in a screenplay, a story board, or a director’s mind, for example), ‘performance’ implicitly acknowledges the shared embodiment of actor and character and thus connotes a far less contained process, one that is continuously evolving and thus capable of unscripted transformation. In short, the latter troubles the very boundaries upon which the former depends: those between diegetic and nondiegetic, textual and extratextual, art and life. When evaluated as a ‘performance,’ Gulpilil’s turn as Charlie accrues tremendous dimension.



Charlie’s Country, Gulpilil’s Body

57

Having been in the public eye for over forty years, Gulpilil – and particularly his career highs and personal lows – are well‐known, especially in Australia, but also among certain circles of international filmgoers. For such viewers, what cannot escape notice are the ways Charlie’s Country draws on Gulpilil’s life. To be sure, there are multiple counts on which actor and character differ: as de Heer notes in interviews, Charlie lives in Ramingining during the controversial ‘Intervention,’ which has seen the provision of emergency governmental resources to Northern Territorial Aboriginal communities since 2007, and he spends a period of time living alone in the bush, two experiences Gulpilil cannot claim as his own (Bunbury 2014). At the same time, however, Gulpilil and Charlie share a very particular social location, one produced by a history of settler colonialism, which has led to not only political disenfranchisement but also economic, social, and cultural impoverishment for many Aboriginal communities. Moreover, certain details of their biographies are the same. First, both find themselves, at some point in their lives, relying on alcohol and then engaging in drunken behaviour that lands them in jail, a fate that cannot be understood without reference to the aforementioned structural inequality. Second, they are both dancers who can boast of having performed for the Queen at the grand opening of the Sydney Opera House in 1973, an accomplishment that provides a measure of comfort and pride, even in the face of circumstantial hardship. As readily apparent as these multiple similarities are for some viewers, for other viewers Gulpilil’s history is unknown. Yet, at least at the time of the film’s release, various materials served to fill in any gaps in extratextual knowledge. For example, film festival catalogue copy frequently made note of the film’s ‘semi‐autobiographical’ nature and ‘authenticity’ (‘Charlie’s Country’ 2014; Schoettle 2014) and interviews with de Heer inevitably included mention of the fact that the film was conceived and drafted during the visits he made to Gupilil in prison (Bunbury 2014; Eeles 2014; Risker 2015). Were one to approach Gulpilil’s performance through the lens of star studies, a subfield in cinema studies with a relatively long history, one might summarise the significance of the similarities between actor and character by noting that Charlie’s Country strategically employs Gulpilil’s star persona in order to build on audience expectations and construct the character of Charlie as expeditiously as possible. In other words, one would likely start analysis with the sense of an actor as defined by a list of stable attributes and known experiences and then identify the way those things contribute to a character’s construction. Approaching the performance through the lens of performance studies, however, shifts focus from a persona to a process, one that is necessarily dynamic and multi‐faceted. More specifically, in the case of Charlie’s Country, it allows for an understanding of Gulpilil’s work on screen as an exercise in actualisation as well as acting, the production of a self as well as another. That Gulpilil treated the film’s production as incentive to make dramatic changes in his life and enter into a period of sustained sobriety only provides further incentive to view the work in this way. If one does, the body on screen, from the moment of Charlie’s introduction, exceeds the boundaries of the fiction about to be told and evokes a life that is rich in both resonance and possibility.

58

Corinn Columpar

With its first shot of a sign posted on the side of a dirt road, Charlie’s Country identifies the film’s setting, an Aboriginal community in Arnhem Land, as a ‘restricted area’ in accordance with the Liquor Act of 1979. With its second shot, it features Charlie, an inhabitant of that setting, and thereby settles into the representational strategy that characterises most of the film by sticking close to its ­protagonist in order to offer up an image of him that is at once intimate and respectful, quotidian and engrossing, wordless and expressive. As the film’s credits appear on the right side of the frame, Charlie sits to their left, cross‐legged on a bed while engaging in a sequence of movements: he removes from a nearby suitcase an old photograph, looks at it intently, searches for his glasses, resumes his inspection of the photograph after finding them, puts everything away, and then sits and stares into space while lost in thought. More than two full minutes in duration and featuring action that is relatively inconsequential, this shot serves to begin establishing the texture of a life rather than to jumpstart a plot. In so doing, it conditions a mode of spectatorship that prioritises corporeal co‐presence and affective engagement, thereby producing a viewer who is highly attuned to the micro‐ expressions and restrained gestures that film theorist Béla Balász associated with the close‐up, but that in this film feature in shots of every scale (Balázs 2011, 104). To affirm the importance of texture over plot is not to suggest that Charlie’s Country has no story arc or narrative momentum. On the contrary, the film follows Charlie as he negotiates his survival in a succession of places – his community, the bush, the city of Darwin, and, finally, his community again – and these various episodes in his life are linked causally: the confiscation of his gun and spear by the community police lead him to try living off the land, and when he becomes gravely ill due to exposure, he is flown to Darwin, where a series of events lead him from a hospital to a courtroom to a prison, before he eventually returns home. At the same time, however, within the context of this succession of events, which features a number of dramatic moments, more mundane moments – not only Charlie studying a photograph, but also Charlie fashioning a spear, cooking a fish, doing laundry, or interacting with friends – are given equal emphasis. Moreover, in all those moments, both large and small, Charlie takes shape through his comportment more than his words. Indeed, there are many long stretches of the film when he is silent, registering his reaction to a situation through something as subtle as a glance, a movement, or a sigh. As much as these actions serve to construct Charlie’s character, they also capture a way of life informed by histories of experience that are both personal and social in dimension and both past and present in tense. In other words, by virtue of its sustained focus on Charlie, Charlie’s Country regularly enables the work that Diana Taylor ascribes to performances in general, functioning as a ‘vital [act] of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated or what Richard Schechner has called “twice‐behaved behavior”’ (Taylor 2003, 2–3). For Taylor, this work is of essential importance, especially in cultural contexts characterised by a history of colonialism, insofar as it depends upon and sustains



Charlie’s Country, Gulpilil’s Body

59

forms of embodied knowledge that are integral to indigenous cultures and that have often been repressed, invalidated, and even prohibited. Reversing the norms that have prevailed historically, Taylor explores and affirms the value of embodied knowledge, as well as its performative iteration, in her book The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003). In the process she ascribes an enduring potency to even the most ephemeral of practices.

­Performance As Contingency Taylor’s work takes as its starting point what she calls a ‘rift’ between the two entities in her book’s title. On the one hand, the archive is characterised by ­permanence and fixity and contains ‘documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological remains, bones, videos, films, CDs, all those items supposedly ­resistant to change’ (19). The repertoire, on the other, ‘enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dances, singing  –  in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge’ (20). Despite their differences, the archive and the repertoire, according to Taylor, continually interact with each other and no account of a culture could be complete without reference to both. Moreover, neither is uniquely or innately equipped to uphold the political and social status quo or, alternately, to challenge its authority. At the same time, however, colonial ideology has not only reduced native populations to their bodies, and native culture to the various embodied practices Taylor locates in the repertoire, but it has also predicated colonial authority on, among other things, attributes associated with the archive, especially empiricism and objectivity. Thus, to take the repertoire seriously is both to imbue all embodied practices with an epistemological power they are normally denied and to acknowledge that many embodied practices, not inevitably but due to historical circumstances, contribute to a critique of colonial culture insofar as they allow for modes of expression that operate outside of the logic of the archive, or history as written by the victor. To suggest that Charlie’s Country functions as a performance and is thus aligned with the repertoire may seem counter‐intuitive given the way Taylor catalogues the archive: films are among the items she describes as resistant to change. Moreover, in the case of those films that most typically represent Aboriginal people, ethnographic films, her characterisation make perfect sense. As Fatimah Tobing Rony notes, ethnographic cinema is animated by a taxidermic impulse, a desire to arrest historical change in an effort ‘to make that which is dead look as if it were still living’ (Rony 1996, 101). Consequently, many ethnographic films produce a constructed image of a ‘traditional’ way of life that disavows changes wrought by the ethnographer’s presence and, more broadly, the history of colonialism that gave rise to the discipline of anthropology and its attendant methods of data collection, including filmmaking. That they do this in relation to people

60

Corinn Columpar

whose ways of life – indeed, whose very lives – are assumed to be on the verge of extinction only makes the imperative to produce taxidermic representations that much more pressing. Despite the distinctly archival project of ethnographic cinema, however, there is cause to complicate Taylor’s schema and to acknowledge the ways in which film straddles the boundary between archive and repertoire. Doing so creates the conditions of possibility for a mode of spectatorship that recognises the potential for historical and cultural change, even in those films that are most invested in resisting it. An understanding of film in archival terms exclusively depends upon the recognition of certain qualities of the medium at the expense of others. Specifically, it depends upon a privileging of the means by which the profilmic event is preserved over the profilmic event itself. Alternately, to invoke Mary Ann Doane, it depends upon a privileging of cinema’s capacity to structure events defined by their contingency over that upon which contingency depends: ‘a nonteleological time in which each moment can produce the unexpected, the unpredicted’ (Doane 2002, 22). In her book The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive Doane suggests that the tendency on the part of film scholars and cultural critics to downplay contingency in the face of its control by the cinematic medium is a result of two chief factors. First is the sense of inevitability that recording an event lends that event, no matter how unexpected or unpredicted it may have originally been; as Doane puts it, cinema produces for its spectator ‘a present haunted by historicity’ (23) rather than the present pure and simple. Second, the conventions of classical form tend to press all events, no matter how spontaneous, in the service of a story, thereby imposing on them legibility, significance, and a sense of being, in some way or another, planned. While these claims constitute the jumping off point for Doane’s discussion of film’s role in the rationalisation of society at the end of the nineteenth century, they are also generative insofar as they lay the groundwork for work on cinematic performance or, even more to the point, cinema as performance. In other words, they contribute to an account of cinema that recognises it, or at least certain components of it, as aligned with Taylor’s repertoire. To wit, when George Kouvaros discusses performance on screen, he implicitly acknowledges the same tension that Doane posits, one between contingency and its control, and then describes the power of performance to unsettle the controlling tendencies she describes: ‘the activity of performance has a corrosive effect on the film, eating away at its structures’ (Kouvaros 2004, 34). Elaborating on this claim, he identifies a certain instability that prevails when performance is foregrounded: [A]t the same time it opens up the film to a range of different readings, sensations, and temporal configurations. There is something paradoxical here: the outbursts and gestures that move across the scene and destabilise our reading suggest a one‐ time‐only status. Yet in the cinema, provoked into being and caught by the camera, they are there to be viewed over and over again. (34)



Charlie’s Country, Gulpilil’s Body

61

Informing this quotation are two interrelated assumptions that undergird the work of multiple contemporary film scholars interested in performance. First, in as much as a film features embodied performances, it constitutes a performance. Granted, the medium may capture those performances through technological means and contain them through narrative ones, but the performances nonetheless persist, as does their potential to produce a spectatorial response that is both immediate and affective. Approaching the study of cinema with a focus on performance initiates a shift in perspective that opens up multiple analytical possibilities. It allows film spectators, and scholars, to take seriously the idea that every film is a documentary of its own making and thus to think about films as not only products defined by their fixity, stability, and capacity to be both commodified and consumed but also as records of a process involving, among other things, chance and change, activity and interactivity, flux and fluidity. Second, foregrounding performance has the potential to multiply, or even confound, meaning. Take, for instance, gestures, which Kouvaros invokes in the above quotation. Some gestures can, by social convention, denote something specific: for example, a head nod signifies ‘yes.’ In these cases, the performance of the gesture by a particular body thickens that gesture’s meaning, but rarely undercuts its commonly understood significance. Far more often, however, gestures, much like extra‐linguistic sounds, do not signify anything specific and are more open to interpretation. More evocative than denotative, they tend to leave the spectator affected rather than informed. Insofar as they feature volatile and provocative bodies, certain films, or kinds of films, lend themselves to a discussion of performance more readily than others. To name just a few scholars whose work is sited at the intersection of cinema studies and performance studies and is thus informed by the above assumptions, Kouvaros makes his claims about the power of performance within the context of a book on the films of John Cassavetes, who is frequently labelled an ‘actor’s director’; Elena del Rio routes her interest in performance through a discussion of filmmakers who strategically use actors (among other things) to create a cinema of formal excess and affective charge, such as Douglas Sirk, Claire Denis, and David Lynch; and both Douglas Rosenberg and Erin Brannigan have written books on what Rosenberg (2012) calls ‘screendance,’ a hybrid of film and dance that depends upon the choreography of both bodies and film technology. As different as Charlie’s Country may be from these objects of analysis on certain counts, it shares with them one common, and key, attribute: as already mentioned, it too relies centrally on an embodied presence, that of Gulpilil, who appears in every scene. Yet, in keeping with Taylor’s discussion of the repertoire, the fact that Gulpilil is Aboriginal makes the stakes of his performance different, and arguably higher, than they are for other actors upon whose shoulders entire movies rest. His body provides access to a history of experience that is not only under‐represented in popular culture but also in danger of complete erasure. For this reason the end of the film, which is hopeful despite the increasingly dire circumstances narrated, is quite noteworthy: when released from jail, Charlie returns to his community and begins instructing

62

Corinn Columpar

youth in the art of traditional dance, thereby passing on knowledge of an embodied practice that might otherwise be forgotten. What Charlie does in the world of the film, Gulpilil does in the world at large; he engages in, to invoke Taylor’s turn of phrase again, ‘vital acts of transfer.’ A far cry from the taxidermic display of ethnographic cinema, these acts are vital in both senses of the word. Not only are they important but they are also in service of a culture that is decidedly alive, characterised by both continuity and ongoing transformation.

­Performance As Encounter Charlie’s Country ensures the transferral of embodied knowledge by pressing its form in the service of a sustained and affectively charged intersubjective encounter, one that involves both Gulpilil as Charlie and the viewer. In the context of this encounter, the viewer is ideally positioned to bear witness to Gulpilil’s/Charlie’s experience, an act that, in the words of Dori Laub, involves knowing that experience ‘from within’ while simultaneously ‘preserv[ing one’s] own separate place, position and perspective’ (Felman and Laub 1992, 58). As noted above, the film offers up an image of Charlie in its second shot, and the camera never leaves his presence from that point on, focusing on him and his experiences until the final shot, a close‐up of his face as he looks offscreen and the credits roll. While this kind of sustained focus on a single character is already unusual, what distinguishes Charlie’s Country even further is the fact that Charlie features in almost every shot of the film. To be sure, there are exceptions to this general tendency. Most importantly, the film contains multiple shot‐reverse shot sequences that depict Charlie as he engages in exchanges with other people. Additionally, there are a limited number of, first, establishing shots that are unmoored from Charlie’s exact location in order to give a more general sense of a scene’s setting and, second, point of view shots that are followed, as per the conventions of suture, by a shot of Charlie looking. Far more frequently, however, the film presents a shot, usually of a space, that initially seems to be either an establishing or point of view shot, only to have Charlie then enter the frame, assuming the position of the camera’s subject. In this way, Charlie’s Country is a telling title: repeatedly over the course of the film’s duration, the space on screen gets reorganised around Charlie’s presence, existing as an environment to be interacted with rather than a landscape to be contemplated at a distance. These shots, in conjunction with the many that feature Charlie throughout their duration, ensure that the spectator maintains a position of proximity and access as events unfold. Of the unusual shot varieties mentioned above, the one that best crystallises the general representational strategy of Charlie’s Country is that which seems to be a point of view shot, but then turns out to be a(nother) shot of Charlie. The film’s sixth shot is a case in point. After the sequence of actions that Charlie is engaged



Charlie’s Country, Gulpilil’s Body

63

Figure 2.1  The camera’s tracking movement coordinates with Charlie’s mobile perspective. Source: Charlie’s Country (2013). Directed by Rolf de Heer. Produced by Bula’bula Arts Aboriginal/Vertigo Productions. Frame grab by Helen Krionas.

in when first introduced, he leaves his sleeping quarters in order to take a walk through his community. Accordingly, shots three, four, and five all feature him, at varying scales, in motion; additionally, shot five shows him looking at something as he walks. Shot six, in turn, begins as a long shot of a police station that seems to be a view from Charlie’s mobile perspective (Figure 2.1). Not only does the syntax of shots suggest as much – shot five is a perfect set‐up for an eyeline match – but the camera’s tracking movement is perfectly coordinated in both pace and direction with Charlie’s movement in previous shots. Before the shot ends, however, Charlie’s hair and shoulder appear on the left side of the frame and remain there until shot seven is introduced one second later. As piecemeal and short‐lived as the imagery of Charlie’s body is in this shot, it is nonetheless salient since it jars viewers schooled in classical conventions, forcing them suddenly to reorient themselves and reread the image. What shot six, and the many subsequent variations on it, achieve on a micro level, the film as a whole does on a macro one: it ensures that the spectator experience the film’s events with Charlie rather than as him. In other words, it foregoes the means of producing a textually determined act of spectatorial identification and instead locates the spectator nearby. At first glance, this might seem like a lost opportunity for a film invested in realising the same kind of epistemological shift that Ten Canoes announces at its start, one that supplants a familiar story with one ‘like you’ve never,’ or at least rarely, ‘seen before.’ After all, in many of the foundational works of apparatus theory, most notably Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ identification with a figure on screen is a means of ensuring that figure’s narrative authority while its alternative, objectification, is associated with lack of agency, power, and subjectivity. Charlie’s Country, however, operates outside of such binaristic logic and embraces a third possibility, as if acutely aware that identification poses risks as well as rewards, the most significant of which is a

64

Corinn Columpar

displacement of the figure of identification in all of his/her specificity. In other words, insofar as cinematic identification inevitably involves projection  – ­projection of the spectating self onto the on‐screen other – it has the potential to overwrite the subject whose experience is being narrated. Being located nearby, in contrast, accords the spectator the position of someone who has first‐hand knowledge of Charlie’s experiences but never at his expense. Not only does the film ensure that the viewer is consistently in Charlie’s presence as he engages in daily activities, thereby making his world readily accessible, but it also inscribes the viewer’s presence in the film with the way it renders that world. In particular, the camerawork in the film is almost exclusively handheld. Thus even static shots, of which there are many, are only relatively static; as their framing shifts slightly, they produce the sense of an embodied look at the same time that they take another body, that of Charlie, as their subject. In bringing these two bodies together, the film produces an intersubjective encounter that is strikingly similar to those that Taylor describes in a chapter of The Archive and the Repertoire dedicated to Yuyachkani, the leading theatre collective in Peru. On one side of Taylor’s encounters is the collective itself, which consistently pays heed to Peru’s history of conflict, injustice, and violence in an effort to make it legible; as Taylor writes of one production in particular, ‘trauma becomes transmittable, understandable through performance – through the reexperienced shudder, the retelling, the repeat’ (208). On the other side is the audience, which comes through the act of viewing to constitute a community of witnesses, a wide and varied group of observers who occupy the liminal position that Laub identifies. As a result of that position, they are, Taylor argues, at enough of a remove to escape trauma’s immediate effects, but sufficiently close to recognise ‘their role in the ongoing history of oppression which, directly or indirectly, implicates them’ (211). In the case of Charlie’s Country a similar dynamic takes shape. While Gulipilil’s performance as Charlie involves the (re)staging of fleeting embodied experiences that bespeak a history of victimisation and survival in the face of colonial trauma, the film’s single‐minded focus and handheld cinematography make the act of spectatorship one of witnessing as well. While the role of witness might seem to be a passive one insofar as it involves acts of reception (watching and listening) rather than those of production (that is, acting in some fashion), both Laub and Taylor suggest that it is actually one endowed with considerable power. For Laub, the witness is integral to the very structure of testimony. As she writes in a landmark study of the genre, which she co‐authored with Shoshana Felman, it is the witness’s presence that allows the speaker’s speech to ‘assume the form of testimony’ (Felman and Laub 1992, 58). In other words, as Roseanne Kennedy writes, testimony foregrounds the act of reception, being ‘understood, rhetorically, as an address to an audience, which optimistically hopes for a response’ (Kennedy 2011, 263). For Taylor, the witness not only  participates in, and thereby enables, the production of an account of an experience, but also ensures that experience’s ongoing acknowledgement. ­



Charlie’s Country, Gulpilil’s Body

65

More specifically, and more surprisingly in light of her association of performance with the repertoire, she ascribes to the audience of the Yuyachkani troupe an archival function: able to testify to the fact of trauma long after its performance concludes, that audience ensures the active memory of that which would otherwise be forgotten. Granted, Charlie’s Country does not qualify as testimony per se due to the emphasis that scholars of it tend to place on acts of verbal narration: as Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland write, image‐based modes of representation ‘require the supplement of language to do the work of testimony’ (Kilby and Rowland 2014, 2); nor does it allow for the kind of encounter that theatre facilitates, one that brings performers and audience together in a particular space at a particular time. Yet insofar as the film’s form simulates a defining attribute of both testimony and theatre – that is, the capacity for two bodies (be they individual or collective) to be present to each other in an act of communication – the claims made by Laub and Taylor can be extended to it as well. Indeed, Gulpilil’s performance and its presentation condition an act of sustained intimacy and exchange, and the result is a record of something elusive: one man’s way of being in a world built upon his marginalisation that lives on in both the material artifact of the film and the memory of the film’s viewers. What makes this encounter even more powerful is the fact that this way of being both grounds and exceeds the text, and context, of its presentation: the country at issue is not only Charlie’s but Gulpilil’s as well. On this count, Charlie’s arrival at prison in the last quarter of the film is particularly noteworthy since it precipitates an act that is not only dehumanising but also incapable of being simulated: the shaving of Charlie’s, and Gulpilil’s, head (Figure 2.2). Underscoring the authenticity of this act with its form, the film captures the majority of the shaving process in one long take and positions Charlie in such a way – against a black background and facing the camera  –  that the scene’s diegetic trappings

Figure 2.2  The dehumanising act of shaving Charlie/Gulpilil’s head. Source: Charlie’s Country (2013). Directed by Rolf de Heer. Produced by Bula’bula Arts Aboriginal/Vertigo Productions. Frame grab by Helen Krionas.

66

Corinn Columpar

recede from view. What remains is the performance laid bare, ‘the reexperienced shudder, the retelling, the repeat,’ as it affects and transforms character, actor, and audience alike. While this moment may be exceptional in its starkness, it is nonetheless representative of the film as a whole. By virtue of the performer that lends it coherence from start to finish, Charlie’s Country issues an embodied appeal to the viewer, speaking volumes on its own resistant and insistent terms.

­References Balázs, Béla. 2011. ‘The Spirit of Film.’ Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory: ‘Visible Man’ and ‘The Spirit of Film.’ Edited by Béla Balázs and Erica Carter. Berghahn Books: New York. Brannigan, Erin. 2011. Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image. New York: Oxford University Press. Bunbury, Stephanie. 2014. ‘From Jail to Cannes: Film director Rolf de Heer talks about the movie that helped save David Gulpilil. The Sydney Morning Herald, May 24. Accessed June 1, 2016. ‘Charlie’s Country.’ 2014. Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2014 Catalogue. Accessed June 1, 2016. http://www.kviff.com/en/programme/film/318578‐charlies‐country/ Collins, Felicity and Therese Davis. 2004. Australian Cinema After Mabo. New York: Cambridge University Press. Davis, Therese. 2007. ‘Remembering our Ancestors: Cross‐cultural Collaboration and the Mediation of Aboriginal Culture and History in Ten Canoes.’ Studies in Australasian Cinema, 1, no. 1: 5–14. del Rio, Elena. 2008. Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Doane, Mary Ann. 2002. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Eeles, Matthew, ‘Interview: Rolf de Heer.’ 2014. Cinema Australia, July 20. Accessed June 1, 2016. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. 1992. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge. Hamby, Louise. 2007. ‘A Question of Time: Ten Canoes.’ The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 18, no. 1: 123–126 Hiatt, L. R. 2007. ‘Who Wrote Ten Canoes?’ Quadrant, November: 70–75. Kennedy, Rosanne. 2011. ‘An Australian Archive of Feelings: The Sorry Books Campaign and the Pedagogy of Compassion.’ Australian Feminist Studies, 26, no. 69: 257–279. Kilby, Jane and Antony Rowland. 2014. The Future of Testimony: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Witnessing. New York: Routledge. Kouvaros, George. 2004. Where Does It Happen? John Cassavetes and Cinema at the Breaking Point. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’ Screen, 16, no. 3: 6–18. Risker, Paul. 2015. ‘A Veteran’s Next Step: Rolf de Heer on Charlie’s Country.’ Film International, 13, no. 1: 134–139.



Charlie’s Country, Gulpilil’s Body

67

Rony, Fatimah Tobing. 1996. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Root, Maria P. P. 1992. ‘Reconstructing the Impact of Trauma on Personality.’ In Personality and Psychopathology: Feminist Reappraisals, edited by Laura S. Brown and Mary Ballou. New York: Guilford. Rosenberg, Douglas. 2012. Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image. New York: Oxford University Press. Rutherford, Anne. 2013. ‘Ten Canoes as “Inter‐Cultural Membrane.”’ Studies in Australasian Cinema, 7: no. 2–3: 137–151. Schoettle, Jane. 2014. ‘Charlie’s Country.’ Toronto International Film Festival 2014 Catalogue. Accessed June 1, 2016. Smith, Jo and Stephen Turner. 2013. ‘Indigenous Inhabitations and the Colonial Present.’ The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, edited by Graham Huggan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

3

Ivan Sen’s Cinematic Imaginary Restraint, Complexity, and a Politics of Place Anne Rutherford

Ivan Sen is an important contemporary Australian filmmaker, whose work offers many challenges for the reinvention of Australian cinema and for future directions in international cinema. He is an important figure in what has been called the Blak Wave in Australian cinema – the rise over the last few decades of a growing number of talented Indigenous filmmakers who are redefining long‐held conceptions about what Australian cinema is and can be, and challenging hegemonic definitions of Australia at their core. The premise underpinning this chapter is that we cannot understand the significance of how Sen’s films take up cultural and political issues until we understand the cinematic strategies they use to do so. The chapter aims to think and write these levels together, to prise open a different kind of space that is not defined by long‐standing dichotomies between cultural and aesthetic analysis, but to read the two together. Sen is a profoundly political filmmaker, but he has developed a very specific cinematic aesthetics to achieve his political ends. As a cineaste, Sen is thinking with light, camera framing and movement, performance, scripting, timing, and musical pacing. He says, ‘ultimately I have love of cinema’, and it is through an exploration of his love affair with film that we can come closer to more fully understanding the richness and the subtlety of what his films are doing, and their political and cultural resonance (Maddox 2013). Just as Sen is thinking cinematically, this chapter cleaves as closely as possible to a method of ‘thinking with a film’, rather than ‘thinking about a film’. An analysis of the aesthetic strategies of Sen’s films forms the bedrock of a kind of cinematic analysis that acknowledges the multi‐layered, polyvocal medium that is cinema and the registers of feeling it can produce, and recognises that the qualities of experience a film can generate are key to its cultural and political resonance. A Companion to Australian Cinema, First Edition. Edited by Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



Ivan Sen’s Cinematic Imaginary

69

Sen has developed a working practice that gives him an extraordinary level of control to stamp his way of seeing on his films, both literally and metaphorically. He is renowned for multitasking on his films – on his recent films, Mystery Road (Sen 2013) and Goldstone (Sen 2016), he wrote and directed the film, composed the score and was the director of photography and editor. He has previously single‐handedly made two feature films, Toomelah (2011) and Dreamland (2010). Sen’s role since 2009 as co‐principal, with David Jowsey, in their production company, Bunya Productions, ensures this creative control. Sen’s outstanding talents as a filmmaker have contributed to his ability to navigate an extremely difficult financial environment for Australian film, to keep making very personal, successful, innovative and challenging films for nearly two decades. This chapter explores the political/aesthetic strategies he has developed across his features and one pivotal short film, since 2000, and the trajectories he is exploring in the ongoing transformation of his work.

­Cutting to the Bone: a Narrative Aesthetics of Sparseness and Precision As a core principle for editing, sound designer and picture editor Walter Murch advises: ‘[a]lways try to do the most with the least … suggestion is always more effective than exposition. Past a certain point, the more effort you put into wealth of detail the more you encourage the audience to become spectators rather than participants’ (Murch 2001, 15). Murch applies this principle to all aspects of filmmaking. The evolution of Ivan Sen’s narrative films appears to be a constant reworking and refinement of this understanding, in all aspects of his film craft – paring down all excess, working with the principle that less is more, cutting to the bone to fine‐ tune the moments that will resonate across the gaps to draw viewers in as participants. Reading the successive drafts of the screenplay for Sen’s first feature, Beneath Clouds (Sen 2002), is like watching a very particular cinematic intelligence take shape, as a proliferation of plot lines is whittled down into a single taut thread, backstory is distilled into energetic traces, dialogue is pared back into cryptic, condensed knots, locations crystallise as sites loaded with history, memory and feeling and, as narrative structure evolves from busy to sparse, the horizontal arc of narrative blends into the long road that cuts a swathe across the wide, flat plains of regional NSW. Through each iteration key motifs remain – billowing clouds, cotton chipping, prison, memory of massacre, fractured family relationships, ever‐ present police surveillance – a suite of motifs that will recur across Sen’s films in an ongoing rolling invention of how to articulate the cinematic poetics of place with the ever‐present legacy of a very specific history of conflict over land and presence.

70

Anne Rutherford

This economy of means that characterises all of Sen’s features emerges in his early short films. Sen says that his shorts were ‘playing’ but what is evident in these films is an intensive experimentation with energetic dynamics: how to translate an early training in music and photography into the language of narrative cinema; how to meld an acute sensitivity to pace, visual tonality and composition with a mastery of structure and audiovisual montage in cinematic storytelling. Sen’s short film, Dust (Sen 2000), brings the viewer face to face with a massacre. In a scenario that could easily have become sensationalised or sentimental, the film works instead with very few elements, tightly controlled, to create and hold maximum emotional resonance with no excess. Set in the cotton fields around Wee Waa in northwestern NSW, this is indeed a film about dust – the thin cloak of dust that barely covers the skeletons laid out in a mass grave just beneath the surface – but it is only in the final two minutes of the film that a dust storm exposes what lies underneath the cotton. Until that point, the film plays out in the relationships within an Aboriginal family, a white couple and between the two as they are thrown together, by economic necessity and lack of alternatives, to work the cotton. Like all of Sen’s films to date, Dust opens out a context strongly grounded in a close, inside knowledge of Indigenous lives in regional NSW, rarely seen on the Australian screen, that challenges one‐dimensional images of ‘Aboriginality’ so prevalent in mainstream media. Typical of Sen’s astute selection of details that have the capacity to bring the maximum resonance in their associations, the location in the cotton fields is a powerful mnemonic trigger. The image of workers chipping cotton, spread out in the baking sun along the parched, cracked furrows of the cotton rows, is an image absent from Australian cinema but very familiar from the slave archives of Georgia and Tennessee (America’s Black Holocaust Museum). The Mississippi flows somewhere in the undercurrents of this film but with one major difference: this cotton is planted on the ancestral lands of the workers who swing their hoes over the bones of their ancestors.1 What would it be like to face the mass grave of one’s own massacred family members? To work like a slave in one’s own country? Sen’s films are replete with moments that can suddenly ricochet non–Indigenous viewers into places of unknowing, of the unthought, and can lead to flashes of understanding or insight for those who may never have considered these questions. In Toomelah (Sen 2011), it is the question of a child to her old aunty, ‘why did they take you away’? How could a child process this possibility of sudden, catastrophic alienation from family? How could she reconcile this possibility with a sense of self, of identity and belonging? Or the image of the young boy Daniel looking at photos of ceremony and the traditional life of his ancestors pinned to the wall of the school library. Curious, confused, longing, bewildered? This moment is set adrift in the currents of the film, the question thrown out like a buoy for viewers to catch hold of if they will. All of Sen’s Australian films work to position the viewer with Aboriginal characters, to see the world through their eyes to some extent, but he never spells these questions out, works always with suggestion rather than exposition, opens a door to let viewers in.



Ivan Sen’s Cinematic Imaginary

71

This positioning of viewers is not purely through formal cinematic techniques, such as point‐of‐view, and nor is it a kind of generalist identification with a putative ‘Indigenous perspective’. These are stories after all – stories crafted to explore specific characters in specific contexts. Speaking of Toomelah, for example, Sen says that the ‘world of the film […] is the world of those young people’, not the world of the community of Toomelah as a whole (Sen 2015). As much as the images in Dust may reverberate on an international canvas, this positioning is profoundly local. There is a level of realism that gives the stories a social depth and specificity that comes from Sen’s close knowledge of these communities and informs his eye and how he writes character. Sen’s experience as a documentary maker clearly contributes to this precision of detail. He constructs very finely‐drawn concrete worlds, through the framing of space, the scripting of dialogue, the choice of location, the exploration of scenarios and the crafting of narratives rooted in a profoundly embodied sense of place  –  of character, accent, attitude, geography, community and social circumstance. These details, however, do not fill up the narrative – the key here is in the precision of aural and visual detail, distilled into kernels, potent nodes. The sparseness makes each detail more significant, makes it resonate like a tuning fork. In Beneath Clouds, this resonance is in the iconography: a world of wide open skies and rolling clouds but impossibly narrow horizons, bounded on one side by wheat silos looming over the town, on another by the constantly patrolling police, on another palpably constricted by teenage pregnancy and family conflict, and the road the only way out (see Figure 3.1). In Mystery Road

Figure  3.1  A world of wide open skies and rolling clouds but impossibly narrow ­horizons. Source: Beneath Clouds (2002). Directed by Ivan Sen. Produced by Australian Film Finance Corporation/Autumn Films Pty. Ltd./Axiom Films. Frame grab captured by Anne Rutherford from the 2002 DVD version.

72

Anne Rutherford

(Sen 2013), it is grounded in the barren layout of the housing estate on the edge of town, the twang of the Moree girls, their shuttered, defiant faces, the malignant savagery of the roo shooters, the lingering menace of marauding wild dogs, the currency of drugs pumping the economy, the highway as the conveyor belt that keeps the whole system circulating, and the pervasive signs, fences and barely‐ contained violence that enforce the legal realities of land tenure. Sen’s eye isolates these details with surgical precision, a scalpel that dissects the muscle, ligaments and circulatory system that hold this body politic in place.

­Poetics and Politics, Time And History: a Musical Sensibility of Tempest and Restraint It is productive to think about Dust as setting out to solve a cinematic problem – how to acknowledge the significance of massacre in the present – both the emotional cicatrices and its concrete legacy: the fracturing of lineage and identity and systems of land title and ‘conceptions of land‐relatedness’ (von Sturmer 2015b) that disenfranchise traditional owners. How to do this in a way that addresses a dual audience: that can speak to Indigenous viewers, and also draw non‐Indigenous viewers into connection with the Indigenous characters, so that they also feel the shock and the full gravitas of a land with ‘stains of blood all over it’, as Aaron Pedersen says (‘The Aussie Box: Aaron Pedersen Forum: Video Insert’)? How to do it in a way that is not maudlin, and also not didactic: to avoid an approach that could spark disavowal among non–Indigenous viewers, to lead them to identify with and step into, to some extent, the perspective of the Indigenous characters? The key to how Sen achieves this balance is his ability to manage energetic dynamics. It would be easy to approach Sen’s films through the visual, particularly his work with space and landscape. This dimension is very strong, but a closer study of Dust’s structure reveals a musical sensibility at the core of his cinema that gives the filmmaker a model to mould minimal elements into stylised patterns of repetition and variation articulated along a musical line, and a rigorous control of timing and pacing that also carries over into a strategic use of dialogue. Dust is structured into three parts: after initial wide shots of the location, the first part positions the viewer inside a car with an Aboriginal family as they travel cross‐country to the cotton fields. The camera cuts repeatedly between a montage of extreme close‐ups – mouth, eyes, hands – and an extreme long shot, as a convoy of cars etches a line across the land with its huge open skies: proximity and distance, tight control and release – a pattern that builds through the entire film. The montage is held together by the music that propels the image forward, giving the sequence a linear horizontal momentum in what Michel Chion calls ‘temporal vectorisation’, but these vectors are subtly held in check by the music’s cyclical,



Ivan Sen’s Cinematic Imaginary

73

repetitive nature (Chion 1994, 13 ff.). The image is cut to the music in a slow, rhythmic structure of beats and pauses: eyes mouth eyes mouth eyes mouth eyes mouth … road with sky: beat beat beat beat beat beat beat beat … pause.2 Like an overture, in this first part of the film the music sets the frame within the world of the Aboriginal characters, a musical signature that is then disrupted by dissonant accents as the camera goes into the car of the two white characters arriving at the cotton farm. Sound sets up a sense of menace lurking both from the white characters and between them. This use of sonic dissonance to signal discord, an inside and an outside, echoes Chion’s understanding of the way sound constructs and positions character: the two sets of characters are ‘divided by the way they inhabit the soundscape’ (Chion 2009, 256). The first part of Dust has the shape of a moving horizontal line articulated against the vertical axis of the fragmentary close‐ups. The spaciousness of the low horizon filmed in the glow of the dawn light is constantly curtailed by the confined space of the car, its expansiveness pinned down and anchored by signs that remind us of the disciplinary regime that constrains it: No Trespassing; Private Property; Slaughter Creek. The second part of the film opens this frame out into the broad expanse of the fields, but here too the land is constrained, stitched down by the horizontal rows of cotton extending into the distance as far as the eye can see, framed by cinematographer Allan Collins like ribs on a corset. This second part pits the two groups together in a structure that builds on the sense of two disparate worlds. As the workers spread out, chipping weeds along the cotton rows, the simmering undercurrent of violence between the black and white men and the menace of the police alternate with a spaciousness and a rich vein of deadpan black humour in the dialogue between Leroy and Vance, the two Aboriginal men – the same oscillation of intense tightening then release, marked by the music that builds and diminishes, swelling into the foreground and receding intermittently. Sen sets up the scene through tension then rests it, shots of the clouds marking the rest: a build‐up of beats and pauses in an escalating atmosphere of hostility, until the conflict finally erupts into violence, the agitated swaying of the handheld camera dislodging the rigorous control and restraint set up in the preceding sequences. A fierce dust storm blows away the violence in the third part of the film, forcing the characters back into the confined space of a car, together. In the aftermath of the dust storm, in the final moments of the film, as the characters are released from the claustrophobia of the car, the camera pulls back to reveal what lies underneath: the silent testimony of the bones that casts everything that has gone before into perspective. The final crescendo – the swirling tempest of dust – breaks out of the disciplined restraint of the first two parts of the film in a tumultuous, random, chaotic energy that shakes up the status quo – both the regime of denial and the limited possibilities of what can be spelt out in the language of linear narrative. This is figured in the wildly swinging camera, the howling wind and the dust that erases any ­distance, brings everything close into the ambit of swirling particles.

74

Anne Rutherford

Description, however, cannot fully capture the way Sen deploys energetic dynamics to build layers of complexity into a deceptively simple structure; if it could, the film could just as well be words on a page. This is about openness and constraint, tension and release, the orchestration of energies. This idea of structuring energy is more familiar from music, but Sen transposes these feelings and energies into rhythm and phrasing, in the performative dimensions of sound and image. To understand this we need to explore the ‘rhythm, dynamism, materialities and temporalities at work’ in the film (Chamarette 2012, 69). Perhaps the closest we can come to conceptualising this in film is to adopt Daniel Stern’s ­concept of ‘vitality affects’. Stern uses this term to describe ‘forms of feeling’ that are outside more familiar understandings of categorical affect (clearly defined emotions, such as sadness or anger) (Stern 1985, 54). Seeking to understand this energetic dimension, in the experience of infants, he writes of ‘qualities of feeling that […] do not fit into our existing lexical taxonomy of affect. These elusive qualities are better captured by dynamic, kinetic terms, such as “surging”, “fading away”, “fleeting”, “explosive”, “bursting”, “drawn out”, and so on’ (Stern 1985, 54). Stern proposes the centrality of these ‘activation contours’ (Stern 1985, 58) in dance, music and art. He calls them ‘time‐intensity contours’ (Stern 1985, 157), which are ‘experienced as dynamic shifts or patterned changes within ourselves’ (Stern 1985, 57). Music gives us a language to map out shifts in tempo: accelerando/ ritardando; dynamics – diminuendo/ crescendo; and the registers of mood – con brio/ leggero – but even this vocabulary so finely attuned to spatial and temporal progressions cannot encapsulate the constantly mutating kinetic registers of intensity that Stern describes.

­Rhythm, Tempo and Complexity In her elegant discussion of cinematic turbulence and flow, Yvette Bíro applies understandings of time derived from contemporary physics to principles of narrative representation, arguing that ‘[e]very change in rhythm and tempo has to be questioned, for these characteristics form the basis of further complexities’ (Bíro 2008, 14). Bíro writes of events that catalyse turbulence, ‘hijack[ing] action from its […] regular orbit’, of the ‘fire sparked by clashes [that] get things moving’ (Bíro 2008, 27), of ‘strange attractors [that] induce systems to wander’ (Bíro 2008, 23). She says that ‘even the simplest linear dimension contains numerous layers of time’ (Bíro 2008, 13). Central to this understanding of the energetic processes of turbulence and flow is the demand that we develop much more complex and comprehensive understandings of time. Integral of course to all cinema, these principles of complexity are commonly straitjacketed by conventional linear cause–effect understandings of three‐act narrative structure. While Sen clearly deploys these



Ivan Sen’s Cinematic Imaginary

75

structures to articulate the overall shape of his films, the unfolding of the films scene by scene and moment by moment evidences a sensitivity to the energetic dynamics of time that is much more akin to the complex temporal ‘architectonics’ of music. In Dust, the orchestration of these ‘time‐intensity’ vitality affects sets up a choreography of feeling that makes it possible to draw viewers energetically into the feeling dynamics of the film and to hold them into the shock of the final revelation. This dynamic of restraint and release, the mastery of rhythm and pace and a musical sensitivity to the ebb and flow of intensity make it possible for the filmmaker to embed the political dimensions of the film cinematically. In part, the politics of Dust are embedded in its approach to history. The commonly understood concept of history assumes the linear layering of the present over the top of multiple pasts, implying the model of the palimpsest. Throughout his films, Sen challenges this ‘pastness’, bringing events that could be placed chronologically – as occurring in the past – well and truly into the experiential present. In Dust it is the orchestration of the rhythmic contours of ‘turbulence and flow’ that enables him to hijack the linear logic and bring to bear a more complex understanding of temporality, ‘history’ and multidimensionality in the present. In response to Dust, John von Sturmer gives the silent testimony of the bones a voice: ‘Bones, are they there always beneath the surface – and how do they reveal themselves, if at all; and at the same time how do they keep themselves under wraps? Shall we say that it is this “concealment” that keeps that history alive and active – and “throttling”?’ (von Sturmer 2015b).

­Subtle Registers of Music and Knowing The emphasis given to sound in Dust allows Sen to build another, much more subtle dimension in the film. The use of music as a structuring, integrating device, and to position characters, is the more overt work with sound in the film: the music is emphasised around the moments of aggression between the men but pulled down around the old lady, Ruby. A subtle musical vibration gives a hint of a knowing, a connection with what happened here that is only partly through memory, partly intuition, partly through story, more through the senses – embodied in the dizziness that overtakes her – that is not spoken, only hinted at in more oblique references, in cryptic, restrained dialogue: ‘[b]ad things happened here. They rounded up your people, women and kids too. Bad things happened here, my mummy told me, now I tell you. They were your people’ (see Figure  3.2). This knowledge is the subtext of the film: forms of feeling and a connection and belonging to land and ancestors that cut through

76

Anne Rutherford

Figure  3.2  There is a hint of knowing around the old lady, Ruby. Source: Dust (1999). Directed by Ivan Sen. Produced by SBS Independent/NSW FTO. Frame grab captured by Anne Rutherford from the 2011 DVD version available on Picnic at Hanging Rock (French Edition). Dust is available for viewing through the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Canberra.

the ordered, regular, horizontal surface of narrative.3 The reminder that this is occupied land is never far from the surface of Sen’s films, the evidence just a willy willy away. In an obituary for an old Wulaki artist, a woman from Arnhem Land, curator Djon Mundine describes the land as ‘a social place, a set of social sites’. He writes that: [i]n this northern society people know and experience the land and its interactive players to a great but calm intensity and a ‘lived’ harmonious relationship. They automatically see the land differently. Adults, especially women, carried this ‘knowing’ of a wide range and depth, a profundity difficult to describe. (Mundine 2011)

Set in the southeast, Dust also carries the traces of this knowing. Von Sturmer asks: what shall we call those things that remind, that stir, that draw or take us in, that seize us with invisible claws or talons, that prick or nettle us? That clutch us to them? Incitements? The ant that climbs on the skin of the arm, what is that? The salty drop of sweat that drips in the eye? The crank of a slow‐turning Southern Cross? The call of a bird that insists on its own voice? From western Arnhem Land: ‘That nakangila, he call ‘imself ’. In western Cape York that plover calls himself too: tal tal … Or brolga: korr’ korr’ korr’. Or crow: waak waak waak … How are we to be taken into that sensory world, to be reminded as it were? To be reminded to be aware? To be made alive  –  sensitive  –  to sensation  –  in which every appearance of the world becomes a display of meaning? (von Sturmer 2015a)



Ivan Sen’s Cinematic Imaginary

77

­Space, Place and Performance: the Emotional Registers of Sound and Silence At the turning point of Mystery Road (Sen 2013), detective Jay Swan, played by Aaron Pedersen, discovers a drug haul secreted in a trashed and deserted house. Sen says, ‘I love the way Aaron moves in this scene – it’s a real black thing, real Indigenous thing, the movement  –  something you can’t really teach’ (Mystery Road Films 2013). After hearing this, I watch this scene again, repeatedly. What I see is an actor/character who steps into the room slowly, cautiously, all his senses attuned to what the space might offer. He takes the measure of the room, looking left, right, scoping the space, feeling, sensing (see Figure  3.3). Is this what Sen means – this quiet attentiveness, this particular quality of presence, alert, waiting for the place to reveal itself ? Quietness figures strongly in Sen’s films. He says that, in Mystery Road, he ‘love[s] the quiet moments … the powerful moments are the quiet moments’, and he builds this principle of letting the quietness play out into the way he writes, directs and edits his films (Mystery Road Films 2013). Sen says that, in his screenplays, he writes blow‐by‐blow dialogues, as this is an industry requirement, but he ‘writes lines knowing that he will strip them away’; as he told Susan Thwaites, on set he will often tell an actor not to say the line, just to think it (Sen 2015) – some lines of dialogue become ‘verbal lines’, others ‘non‐verbal lines’ – so that we watch the character thinking (Sen 2015). Dialogue is not necessarily full and transparent. This principle of not filling up the space gives Sen’s films a quality of openness, bringing the viewer into presence with the gaps in the dialogue, rendering them alive and significant, full of innuendo. There is not a flicker of redundancy here: in

Figure 3.3  Pedersen takes the measure of the room, scoping the space, feeling, sensing. Source: Mystery Road (2013). Directed by Ivan Sen. Produced by Bunya Productions/ Mystery Road Films/Screen Australia. Frame grab captured by Anne Rutherford from the 2014 DVD version.

78

Anne Rutherford

the gaps is the ‘lack’ that Chion suggests is essential for the full functioning of the sound film – even though many films ignore this principle of non‐redundancy – and the minimalist use of suggestion that Murch sees as essential to draw viewers in as active participants in the film (Chion 1999).4 This flexible, strategic approach to dialogue features across Sen’s films, amplifying the relationship between the verbal and non‐verbal. In Toomelah, there is a slight temporal stagger effect, as Sen feeds the dialogue line by line to the young actor, Daniel Connors (Bunya Productions 2011). A strategy born of the exigencies of working with a non‐professional child actor, this momentary delay produces a subtle effect of ambiguity and hesitation in the character, as viewers engage with the pauses between thought and speech, the moments in which we participate in his thought processes before we have a verbal lead to decipher them. These can be saturated silences. In Mystery Road, a quiet, sensing presence reverberates throughout Pedersen’s performance: a constant thread that often deflects away from the centrality of dialogue and grounds his character, Jay Swan, in physical presence. Sen’s strategy of paring back the dialogue – of not committing everything to verbal language  –  leaves more space for Pedersen to perform with his body, face and eyes. As von Sturmer puts it, this ‘jay [bird] is far from a chatterer, more a laconic Spartan with a fox hid within his jacket’ (von Sturmer 2015a). At times the viewer needs to look beneath the surface into the gaps, to what is not being said. At times, dialogue can be strategic rather than realistic: it may appear transparent on the surface but be a ruse to stage the unsaid (Rutherford 2015). In Sen’s 2016 feature, Goldstone, Pedersen has only about twenty lines of dialogue in the entire film, giving the actor ‘a platform to play differently’ (Sen 2015). Indeed, Sen’s account of how he works on set confirms his astute attunement to what can emerge in the energetic crucible of performance and cinematography: he says that, in Mystery Road, he aimed to fully storyboard the shoot but in the end ‘did not want to lock it off ’, wanting to be open to what happened in the moment (Sen 2015).5 There is a sense of the director watching, gleaning, caught up in the act of seeing and the moment of performance, just as viewers are. This openness is also intimately tied to a sensitivity to the resonance of place. Sen speaks of the importance for Indigenous people of a sense that ‘the land has a connection to […] people, a sense of respect, sensitivity to where and who you are and how it informs and connects to who you are’ (Sen 2015). All of Sen’s films to date work to ‘re‐inhabit’ the land – to challenge the widespread assumption that ‘everything [all land] is unmediated, open slather’ (von Sturmer 2015b). Sen puts back the Aboriginal people often airbrushed out of the picture in the Australian cinematic imaginary. Toomelah (2011), for example, plays out in the old Toomelah mission community, barely ten kilometres off the Newell highway where, as Sen says, tourists stream across the country completely unaware that just a stone’s throw away is a large Aboriginal community (Sen 2015). In Toomelah, this location is very specific to regional NSW, but for Sen the sense of place is as much a principle as it is a commitment to particular Australian locations. The director



Ivan Sen’s Cinematic Imaginary

79

has – in planning – a futuristic Asian sci‐fi film, Loveland, which will create a ‘mega Chinese city’ in the South China Sea. Some of the film will be shot in Shanghai and some in a studio on the Gold Coast. He says that ‘Loveland will also be an Indigenous film for [him]: Indigenous because of a sense of place and sacredness’ (Sen 2015).

­Genre and Art: Influence and Transformation Sen has nominated No Country For Old Men (Coen Brothers, 2007) as a significant influence on Mystery Road, citing the Coen brothers’ film as a rare achievement that combines genre and arthouse in a box‐office success (Sen 2015). To be sure, Cormac McCarthy, author of the source novel that the Coen brothers’ film adapts, has an exquisite sense of place – in his writing the palpable look and feel of the harsh arid zones of Texas backcountry wrench the gut of the reader in terse, corrosive prose – and No Country’s stunning cinematography captures some of the quality of this fierce landscape. Sen has said that the western elements in Mystery Road were inspired by the spectacular shooting locations around Winton in south‐ west Queensland – landscapes he describes as ‘just as awe‐inspiring as anything in Monument Valley’ – but it is not hard to see the influence of the Coen brothers’ western in the look of Mystery Road, particularly in the way his camera frames the grassland with the broad open horizon, often filmed in the magic hour (Sen 2015).6 No Country For Old Men, like many of the Coens’ generic hybrids, is marked by its subversion of genre conventions, combining the western elements with aspects of chase, horror, crime, noir, comedy thriller and road movie (Coen Bros 2007). Mystery Road, too, is a genre hybrid – drawing on thriller, western and detective genres – but the analogy between the two films is anything but straightforward. Sen reconfigures the generic roots he draws on. He has said that he thinks any genre film with a lead Indigenous character will, by definition, transform the genre: You could probably make ten genre films in this country and if at least one of the lead roles is an Indigenous role, it’s going to be unique. That Indigenous character is going to bring a unique perspective, which the genre hasn’t had before. So there’s real currency in chasing genre with Indigenous perspective. (cited in O’Cuana 2013)

To approach Mystery Road through questions of genre demands that we jettison simplistic taxonomic understandings of genre and recognise the productivity of genre as a toolbox for drawing on elements of the familiar and putting them in play to engage new contexts. Sen’s aim is to be able to work with genre to achieve box‐office success but to ‘keep the same resonance as Mystery Road’ (Sen 2015). He speaks of his desire to ‘do a big commercial film but actually have something

80

Anne Rutherford

to say’ (SBS). In this commitment to work with genre on his own terms, Sen shares a productive approach to the enabling potential of genre explored previously by Indigenous filmmakers in films such as Smoke Signals (Eyre 1998), which, as Corinn Columpar writes, goes beyond generic formulae and deploys elements of the western genre to produce a ‘largely self‐determined vision of American Indian life’ (126). Pressed further to clarify the influence of No Country For Old Men, Sen’s response is unexpected: he says it is a great film to study to learn about film sound (Sen 2015). Watching the Coen Brothers’ film in the light of this comment is revealing – the most striking impression is its extreme sonic economy. Music in the film is either completely absent or minimal. As Anthony Lane writes, ‘[Carter] Burwell’s score is little more than a fitful murmur’ (Lane 2007).7 Burwell says that, in No Country For Old Men, they worked with the principle that ‘if there’s music, it should somehow emanate from the landscape.’ In an interview with the film’s sound designer, Craig Berkey, the interviewer observes that the lack of music and the ‘aural subtleties […] encouraged the audience to listen intently and as a result, pulled us further into the film’ (Riehle 2007). According to Philip Brophy, this ‘disquieting silence’ is a key feature in creating the complexity of genre in No Country For Old Men (Brophy (2008). Brophy argues that the brief musical moments in the film ‘freeze time and transfigure momentum’. Working with what he calls a ‘sonic orchestra’ of sound effects, the film becomes a ‘precise meditation on how the dramaturgical becomes cinesonic.’8 Music in Mystery Road is also minimal: five music cues, barely over six minutes in total until the end credits roll in. The music is drone‐like, non‐melodic – one long sustained note building over another, the focus on shifts in timbre and texture. In contrast, in Beneath Clouds Sen consistently used music to fill in the ­emotional layers of character and pre‐empt dramatic moments. In Mystery Road its use is structural and strategic: music never accompanies any of the interactions between characters, is always over one of the bird’s eye travelling shots that punctuate the film. (Only in the last music cue does the camera gradually open out from this bird’s eye view.) These are temporal transitions that both rest the drama and carry the action over into a new dramatic beat. The absence of music gives the film a spare, crisp quality and a level of uncertainty that adds to the suspense and the realism. The soundscape builds layers of ambient sound that ground the film strongly in a very concrete, embodied experience of place: a musique concrète built up from bird calls, bush sounds, crickets, dogs growling, wind, rustling grass, police radios, muffled crowd sounds, train sounds, car engines, trucks changing gear, the sound of tyres on bitumen and often a barely discernible low wind‐like rumble that adds to the tension. This ‘sonic orchestra’ throws viewers into experiencing the aural world more closely. The density of environmental sound consolidates the realist effect of location, adding complexity to the generic elements in the film and p­ ulling them into a strongly realist base.



Ivan Sen’s Cinematic Imaginary

81

John von Sturmer questions the nature of dramaturgy in Mystery Road: until the final shootout there is little one could call dramatic or dramaturgical. Swan is not the lightning conductor for the tensions that exist. They waft around him, they dog his footsteps, his every awkward movement and moment. Yet he is by no means the centre of their circulation  –  despite the cinematic convention. (von Sturmer 2015a)

The film is a slow burner, to be sure, but what is it that ‘wafts around’ Pedersen’s character in the film; how are these tensions figured? In Mystery Road, it is, at least partly, through the cinesonic: the given body in this world of sound pressing close, pulling away, building visceral layers of tension around the character. Just as the narrative has become progressively more sparse in Sen’s films, so too the way he works with the emotional registers of sound has become increasingly more restrained and sophisticated. In Dust, the score works in three ways: structurally – to articulate the energetic dynamics of the film; emotionally – to tinge the emotional qualities of character; and also, symbolically – to signal the other less overt dimension of knowledge/spirit/presence/connection to land. Despite the minimal musical score in Mystery Road, music is no less central to the film. Its explicit use is transposed into an overarching principle of musicality: the articulation of time, punctuation, structure, rhythm and phrasing. Sen’s ongoing commitment to exploring the complex emotional registers of sound is evident in his comments about the soundtrack for Goldstone (Sen 2016), just released at the time of final editing of this article. He says, ‘music is in my blood’ and he has invested in new equipment and new audio software that ‘produces emotions [he has] never felt before’: the software enables him to ‘[build] up depth in the music – complex and layered sounds to [… change the sound] in gorgeous restrained ways […] to create a kind of music people have never heard’ (Sen 2015). Goldstone extends the principle of musicality into every dimension of action, pace and story. Sen says he has worked at: not rushing the dramatic moments […] everything – all the action, the dialogues, the camera and the sounds – has to be tuned in the one key like music […] the action has to work on many levels […] not pressing notes that are not in that key [… action has to be] restrained […] relevant to the characters […] not punching out of the fabric of the story. (Sen 2015)

­Genre as a Pivot As Sen’s first film to work extensively with genre, Mystery Road figures as a turning‐ point in Sen’s evolving cinematic aesthetics – a ‘stepping stone’, as he describes it. Sen has declared his intention to move into commercial cinema, using genre as a

82

Anne Rutherford

Figure 3.4  There is ‘something stunningly beautiful and profound in the [drama‐driven] action and landscape’. Source: Goldstone (2016). Directed by Ivan Sen. Produced by Bunya Productions/Dark Matter. Frame grab captured by Anne Rutherford from the 2016 DVD version.

pivot in the transition from arthouse to mainstream. He acknowledges that it is much easier to do an art/drama film; to make a big commercial genre film and keep the artistic quality is much more challenging. Comments made by the director in recent interviews about this emerging project are by nature provisional and sketchy, but they give a sense of this transformation and the new directions in the ongoing reinvention of his cinematic aesthetics. Goldstone (Sen 2016), described as a ‘spin‐off ’ from Mystery Road, has more genre elements than the earlier film. Sen describes Goldstone as an action film and says the pace is much quicker, but he says that the main objective of the action in Goldstone is to produce the ‘most artistic drama‐driven action you’ve ever seen’ (see Figure 3.4). On the shoot, there was ‘something stunningly beautiful and profound in the action and landscape’ and the action scenes ‘felt the same as the deep dialogue scenes’ (Rutherford 2016; Sen 2015). He describes Goldstone as a ‘stepping stone’ to Loveland, and he aims to carry this approach to action into Loveland, which he plans as a much bigger film, a genre film that he can ‘get on screens in Tokyo and everywhere’ (Sen 2015).

­Photography, Cinematography and Place: the Vitality of the Image According to Sen, Loveland started not with words but with light (Sen 2015). The filmmaker’s early training was not only as a musician but also as a photographer and his initial aim in his film training was to become a director of photography. Nowhere is Sen’s virtuosity as a cinematographer more striking than in Dreamland



Ivan Sen’s Cinematic Imaginary

83

(Sen 2010): the mysterious, mystical black‐and‐white film shot by Sen in the Nevada desert with actor Daniel Roberts, just the two of them out there for weeks on end stalking fictional extra‐terrestrials. Sen says that it was on this film that he really learned how to make a film and his credits on the film are for writer, director, original score, photography, sound production, mix and editor. Dreamland has screened at a few festivals but has never been released for distribution. Not a single word of dialogue is spoken by the actor throughout the film. There is one scene in which Tasma Walton appears and speaks and a monologue at the beginning and end of the film, and the only other voices come from occasional radio messages, often distorted and indecipherable. Sen’s cinematography in Dreamland has an extraordinarily tactile quality. In this monochrome world, outbreaks of black stubble on white skin on the actor’s unshaven face have the same quality as spiky clumps of grass stretched as far as the eye can see on the pockmarked earth. Every erosion on the actor’s face mirrors the crevices weathered into the rocky outcrops of the land over millennia. Sharp focus from each blade of grass in the foreground stretched back across the desert expanse of knobbly cactus to the distant mountain contours – sculptural forms all, in high relief brought into striking presence by the high contrast cinematography, from extreme close‐up of a beetle navigating a terrain of pebble boulders to the furthest abyss of the night sky. Dials, screens, electronic signals and footage of astronauts are all integrated through this aesthetic of haptic surfaces into a sensual immersion in which landscape, actor and traces of an extraterrestrial ‘dreamland’ become one. This is not a narrative of alien hauntings mapped onto the land – rather, it emanates from it, brought into sensory focus by the exquisite cinematography. A masterful soundscape melded together from electronic beeps, metallic sounds, animal howls, buzzing, radio static, a synthesiser music score, a deeply melancholy cello and radio voices beaming in from military aircraft controllers give this place an otherworldly dimension, locating the quest to penetrate this mysterious world of military installations and discover the veracity of classified information on UFO sightings and alien encounters in a densely sensual experience of place. As a photographer, Sen specialised in environmental portraiture, and he says that photojournalism had ‘more influence than any filmmaker’ on his film work (Sen 2015). He cites Ansel Adams as an early favourite, saying Adams’ ‘tonal reproduction is out of this world’ (Sen 2015). Adams’ photographic oeuvre is characterised by a profound reverence for place and a quest to translate this reverence into a language of composition, tonality and light. Looking at Adams’ photographs, even in reproduced print form, the tonal range and complexity and the emotional quality of the images can be staggering. Adams’ account of the process of producing his photographs is an elegy to the act of seeing, the experience of following the light and the mysterious presence of place: writing of his 1927 photograph, Monolith: The Face of Half Dome, he writes, ‘I saw the photograph as a brooding form, deep shadows and a distant sharp white peak against the dark sky’ (Adams 1983, 4): a perfect synthesis of form and feeling.

84

Anne Rutherford

Many of Adams’ images feature exquisite photographic renderings of billowing clouds. It is not hard to imagine that, as the young Ivan studied Adams’ complete immersion in lenses, filters, composition, and the qualities of tone, contrast, texture, grain, and light that bring vitality to the image, Adams’ photographer’s eye fused in Sen’s aesthetic sensibility with his experience of the dramatic vistas of western New South Wales. He reinvents Adams’ eye in his own recurrent moving images of clouds rippling, swirling, looming, glowering, or freighted with dust. In Sen, however, this acute visual attunement is charged with an understanding of place as a site of the concrete, quotidian, specific ever‐present legacy of both culture and history.

­A Counter‐Hegemonic Australian Cinema: Audience and Heterogeneity Writing of the concept of a national cinema, Andrew Higson has argued that, ‘to identify a national cinema is first of all to specify a coherence and a unity; it is to proclaim a unique identity and a stable set of meaning […it] is thus invariably a hegemonising, mythologising process’ (Higson 1989, 37). The question of hegemony – how it is produced and reproduced and how to counter it – runs as a core thread through the growing literature on indigenous cinemas, focusing particularly on analyses of the politics of representation. In her recent discussion of the poetics of indigenous cinemas, framed as ‘Fourth Cinema’, Corinn Columpar’s evaluation of this politics privileges a narratological approach. She focuses on ‘an exploration of the relationship between Aboriginal identity and acts of cinematic narration’ (Columpar 2010, 155), developed as a critique of normative, hegemonic dimensions of conventional narrative structures. However, following a method of ‘thinking with a film’, rather than simply ‘thinking about a film’, reveals a rather different picture. This method acknowledges the multi‐layered complexity of cinema as a medium and eschews the orthodoxy of a film analysis based on the assumed primacy of narrative over a film’s work with sound and image, time and space. A richer, ‘thicker’, more textured understanding of the experiential worlds produced by a film becomes possible – one that opens out a more nuanced reading of a film’s political dimensions and acknowledges the central role of spectatorship and the variability of reception among diverse audiences. The hegemonic construction of an ‘imagined community’ of nation is re‐ enacted across many branches of the Australian film industry and culture, not just in the narratives that are produced but also in the conception of the audience for whom a film or programme is made. The working principle that has historically dictated the shaping, editing and targeting of much of film production is that of a ‘mainstream audience’. Speaking in 2002 with author Faye Ginsburg, filmmaker



Ivan Sen’s Cinematic Imaginary

85

Rachel Perkins commented that, in her production of the SBS series Blood Brothers (1993), she ‘had to make compromises with SBS editors because of what they felt would draw non‐Aboriginal audiences’ (Ginsburg 2002, 48). Darlene Johnson confirmed a similar assumption in discussion of the production, a decade later, of her documentary Gulpilil: One Red Blood (2002): ‘it was made for the ABC and has to work for an ABC audience [… assumed to be] definitely a non‐Aboriginal audience’ (Rutherford 2003, 5). Writing in 2002, Ginsburg identified the importance of the wave of black filmmaking in Australia to create new ‘screen memories […that] establish and enlarge a counterpublic sphere […] new narrations’ in which Indigenous people are ‘central and emergent’ (50). This counter‐hegemonic project, she argued, is an essential part of creating ‘a sense of national identity that is decentred, flexible, and inclusive of indigenous cultures’ (50). Sen’s films not only stem from an understanding of the plurality of cultures that is so often missing from Australian cinema; they also work with a pluralist conception of the audience. Opening up this awareness is a critical dimension of the counter‐hegemonic project. For Mystery Road, Pedersen says, ‘first and foremost we wanted to make something that our people could connect to and be proud of ’, but they also wanted to appeal to a broader Australian and international audience (as cited in O’Cuana 2013). The premiere of the film in Winton signalled the success of this address to very diverse audiences: Sen says that ‘the screening brought together all the Indigenous and non‐Indigenous people, the traditional owners of the land and the current landowners. As far as we could gather, it was the first time that this had actually happened in the long history of this town’ (Carew 2013). Part of this success must come from Sen’s ability to write scripts that resonate on many different levels – some layers and references that Indigenous viewers will pick up on and others may not; other layers that harvest the broad appeal of globally familiar generic traits and narrative scenarios that heterogeneous audiences can interpret in their own way. Humour and the specificity of place and community figure strongly in this strategy. Toomelah, perhaps Sen’s most challenging film for ‘mainstream’ audiences, is for many viewers grim and desolate. Sen says that the kids in Toomelah would ‘laugh their heads off ’ watching the film  –  partly because of the unique experience of seeing themselves on screen, but partly because their lives are very different to the mainstream and they have a radically different sense of humour (Sen 2015). In Mystery Road, when Aaron Pedersen’s character trains the scope of his Winchester rifle on Johnny, played by Hugo Weaving, the sudden cry of a plover ricochets off the rocky perch where Johnny has just been shot dead. Punctuation, yes, a dramatic sound effect also, but the association of ‘messenger birds’, often associated with death in Aboriginal cultures, suggests another layer here – a seed scattered specifically for Indigenous viewers to pick up, like another text in invisible ink, just as Ruby’s sudden dizziness, resonating in a musical

86

Anne Rutherford

vibration in Dust, hints at another form of feeling and knowing.9 Suggestion, not exposition: Sen’s aesthetics of sparseness and restraint – his mastery of energetic dynamics – allows him to build this layer in the interstices of the overt text – under, beside, behind. How many more such seeds and layers of complexity are scattered in these films? Says von Sturmer: ‘for blackfellas that other text is always there, everywhere’ (von Sturmer 2015b). A lack of knowledge is one thing; to not even know that one doesn’t know is a different matter entirely.

­Acknowledgements A number of colleagues have given invaluable critical advice and practical support for this article. Numerous conversations with John von Sturmer have been a great source of engagement, encouragement and critical insight. I am grateful to Sally Macarthur for advice on musical concepts, to David Jowsey for organising access to a copy of Dreamland, to Katie Haynes and Susan Thwaites for providing a recording of the Ivan Sen symposium, and to Ivan Sen for permission to quote the symposium conversation.

Notes 1 John von Sturmer points out that the Marxist concept of ‘alienated labour’ is very apt in this context, particularly given that Aboriginal people have been historically alienated from the possibility of investing their labour in their own land for their own benefit, not the benefit of others (von Sturmer 2015b). 2 Dust is available for viewing through the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Canberra. 3 The old woman in Beneath Clouds also carries this knowing, unmasking the ‘passing for white’ of the girl, Lena, asking: ‘where your people from, girl?’ 4 Chion says that early sound film ‘lacked lack’ – the lack necessary for the sound film’s full functioning (Chion 1999, 10). 5 Sen says he often plays music to an actor before they act out a scene, embedding a musical approach to feeling in the performance; and he often talked to Pedersen during a shot for Mystery Road. 6 The magic hour refers to the special quality of light at sunrise and sunset. Many commentators have focused on the look of the film, enumerating lists of supposed iconographic borrowings, such as cowboy hats, in a typically reductionist approach to genre. This is typical of the Aaron Pedersen fan sites. 7 According to Lane, there are sixteen minutes of music in total including three minutes over the credits. 8 Brophy says this sound ‘[evokes] a distinct presence which refuses to be anchored by scenography or even dramaturgy, countering a long tradition in the use of film music.’



Ivan Sen’s Cinematic Imaginary

87

9 Mundine writes that ‘the people of the south‐east see the appearance of the small agile Willy Wagtail bird as a messenger bird of someone’s death’ (Mundine 2011). Von Sturmer adds to this: ‘Birds can be messenger birds – and certain species are conventionally assigned this role. In Mystery Road when Johnno is shot the bird – a plover – calls at that point. This might be interpreted as the departure of the spirit of the newly dead’ (von Sturmer 2015b).

­References Adams, A. 1983. Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, 1st ed. Boston: Brown. America’s Black Holocaust Museum.