Noel King, Constantine Verevis, Deane Williams. Handbook of Film Studies. Editor: James Donald & Michael Renov. Sage Publications. 2008.
In Australia, Film Studies became firmly established as an institutionally recognized discipline in the decade from 1975 to 1985. Although this history in many ways reflected international trends, there are two aspects of the story that may be unique to the Australian case. One was the coincidence between the rise of Film Studies and the strategic revival of the Australian feature film industry in the early seventies with significant government funding and institutional support. The other was the coincidental emergence of a new style of film reviewing and criticism that acted as both a counterpoint and a complement to the new academic discipline.
In his book Making Meaning (1989), David Bordwell provides a history of the ‘academicization’ of film theory and criticism. Having noted various critical schools that developed after the Second World War in the US and Europe, mostly outside the universities, Bordwell identifies the appearance in the 1970s of professional associations and journals of film educators that contributed to this academicization at the same time as Film Studies was being introduced into university departments of drama, literature and art history that were already committed to the study of canonical cultural texts. Inspired by Bordwell, Barrett Hodsdon’s Straight Roads and Crossed Lines attempts an equivalent history for Australia, ‘charting and explicating a range of film culture activities’ (2001: 59) from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that anticipate, intersect and occasionally conflict with the burgeoning realm of screen education. Hodsdon contrasts three spheres of ‘unofficial’ film culture—university-based film societies, the Sydney filmmakers co-operative and the Super-8 scene—against what he sees as examples of ‘official’ film cultural and educational institutions: the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), Swinburne Film School, the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA), and the growing number of higher education programmes in Film Studies.
Hodsdon identifies two defining characteristics of the 1950s university film societies, most prominently the Melbourne University Film Society and Sydney University Film Group, and the film festivals associated with them. First, they pursued the kind of left- wing political agenda advanced by the Realist Film Group (2001: 62-3). Second, they developed, through the introduction ofregular bulletins, a film appreciation framework that promoted the cultural status of the medium (2001: 64). These bulletins—Melbourne University Film Society Annotations (later, Annotations on Film), The University Film Group Bulletin (later Melbourne Film Group Bulletin), Sydney University Film Group Bulletin and others—moved from the provision of programme notes, short reviews and commentaries to more substantial critical and theoretical reflection. Hodsdon contrasts these ‘authentic publications’to the ‘academic overkill’ and ‘French intellectual fashion that overtook the academic scene of screen studies (as it “evolved” in the 1970s)’ (2001: 68, 86). He suggests that academicized Film Studies, along with other factors such as weekly screenings from the National Film Theatre of Australia and double-features at inner city repertory cinemas, ultimately contributed to the demise of university film societies (2001: 82-3).
The second of Hodsdon’s unofficial institutions, the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op (1970-85), arose out of Ubu Films, a distribution and exhibition operation headed by activists Albie Thoms and Aggy Read that focused on avant-garde and alternative films, mostly 16mm shorts, low budget features and documentaries. Thoms and Read envisaged the Co-op as a participatory organization that would encourage upcoming and marginal filmmakers to disseminate their work to local audiences at a time when Australian feature film production was at a nascent stage (Thoms, 1978; Hodsdon, 2001: 89). In 1972 the Co-op launched a monthly newsletter that ran until 1975 and then transformed in 1976 into the tabloid-format Filmnews. (Continuing publication until 1995, Filmnews ultimately outlasted the Co-op by a decade.) During the 1980s, under the editorship of Tina Kaufman, the journal became not just a house journal for the independent film community but also a forum for critical commentary on cultural policy and broader industry issues and an important cross-over vehicle into academic Film Studies (Collins, 1983; 1984).
Local academics such as Meaghan Morris, Tom O’Regan, Stuart Cunningham, Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka published on aspects of Australian cinema, and UK-style screen theory was mediated through interviews with Paul Willemen and others.
The third institutional space described by Hodsdon is the Super-8 scene in Sydney and Melbourne in the 1980s and 1990s. The Sydney Super-8 Film Group started as a cell of activists and ended up, after several transformations, as the Sydney Intermedia Network. The Melbourne group, formed in 1985, had antecedents in the TCH! TCH! TCH! Super-8 and video collective of the late 1970s and early 1980s, headed by Philip Brophy in association with Jayne Stevenson, Adrian Martin, Rolando Caputo and others. These Super-8 groups received extensive coverage in such publications as Filmnews, On the Beach (1983-87) and Filmviews (1986-88), including writings by some of the key participants—Martin, Mark Titmarsh and Michael Hutak, for example. The Super- 8 filmmakers were sometimes also cinephile critics, and their intimate knowledge of film and television culture enabled them to recycle and rework movie images encountered on television. Putting these fragments into new contexts, they were able to open up original and unpredictable possibilities for critical reflection.
One lesson from these ‘unofficial’ Australian film movements, which Hodsdon addresses in the final section of Straight Roads and Crossed Lines, is the importance of reviewing and criticism in producing a local film culture. In the mid-1980s critics such as Morris (1983; 1985) and Martin (with Caputo) had questioned the practice of film reviewing and the rigid conformism imposed by film theory paradigms (Hodsdon, 2001:155). In his book on Australian National Cinema (1996), Tom O’Regan took up the question of how film theory and criticism help to disseminate a particular understanding of what constitutes that cinema. Again drawing on Bordwell’s Making Meaning, O’Regan distinguishes between explicatory and symptomatic criticism—between comprehension and interpretation—in order to explain how critics typically engage in a process of de-mythologizing and re-mythologizing film texts (1996: 333-41). To show how this process has worked in the Australian setting, O’Regan postulates three personae that represent three interconnected critical paradigms: the cinephile, the critical intellectual and the film historian. In order to give these ideal types historical substance, O’Regan notes the need to contextualise them in the appropriate institutional spaces and public arenas (1996: 341-6). His brief account of the three positions provides a point of departure for our attempt to map the institutional spaces, local personnel and critical positions of film theory and criticism that have shaped the particularity of Australian Film Studies.
Institutions
The arrival of Film Studies in the Australian academy in the 1970s and 1980s was marked by the official opening of the AFTRS in 1975 (it had been in operation since 1973) and the proliferation of Film Studies courses in Australian upper-level secondary schools, in colleges of advanced education (CAES), in institutes of technology (WAIT, NSWIT, RMIT), in newer universities like Murdoch, Griffith and Deakin, and in critical disciplines (such as English and comparative literature, art history and communication studies) in some of the older universities. Although in places like Melbourne’s La Trobe University and Sydney’s University of New South Wales Film Studies was established as a discrete aesthetic field and discipline of inquiry, the emergence of cultural studies during the 1980s meant that it more often became part of a larger interdisciplinary formation.
Of special importance during these formative years were a number of conferences, organizations and journals that helped to consolidate the position of Australian Film Studies by encouraging the local and international exchange of critical ideas and perspectives. Among them were theAustralian Screen Studies Association (ASSA) conferences and its antecedents (1978-84), the biennial conference of the Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand and its precursors (1981-present), and the annual conferences of the Cultural Studies Association of Australia (1991-present).
The ASSA developed out of the Australian Journal of Screen Theory, a mid-1970s publication edited by Philip Bell, Colin Crisp, Stephen Crofts, Peter R. Gerdes, Neil McDonald, John Tulloch and others. Its manifesto, announced on the inside cover of its first issue, was to provide ‘regular interdisciplinary reflection on the increasingly complex body of film theory at a level suited to the many film courses springing up at tertiary and senior secondary level’. Launched in 1981 at the second Australian Film Conference, held at Nedlands College of Advanced Education in Perth, Western Australia, the ASSA operated during its brief lifespan as an informal and perennially under-funded network across a number of universities and colleges. The first official Australian Screen Studies Conference was held at La Trobe University in December 1982. By the time of the second ASSA Conference at Griffith University in Brisbane in 1984, both the association and the journal were being wound up, citing declining interest in mid-1970s ‘screen theory’ in the face of increasingly well-established media and communications studies courses.
Despite their premature demise, the ASSA conferences and the Australian Journal of Screen Theory remain testament to a vibrant exchange of ideas at the borders of the new academy. The journal published not just conference papers, but also explications of new critical approaches such as semiotics and linguistic models, local scholars engaging with international debates around such topics as feminism and melodrama, critical approaches to Australian cinema and new work on television studies as well as new articles by overseas writers. Conferences like the ASSA, as well as university departments and the Melbourne and Sydney film festivals, further enhanced the influence of international—and especially British—screen culture on the development of Australian Film Studies by sponsoring visits by overseas academics and filmmakers such as Isaac Julien, Annette Kuhn, Laura Mulvey, Mark Nash, Dana Polan, Pierre Sorlin, Paul Willemen and Peter Wollen.
Much editorial space in the Australian Journal of Screen Theory was devoted to a perceived need to create dialogue between screen theorists and a community of unfashionably ‘atheoretical’ film practitioners, historians and archivists alienated by the former group’s ‘esoteric-elitist thinking and use of almost unintelligible language’ (Gerdes, 1978: 3). That a significant gap really did exist between the screen theory and film history positions was confirmed when the historians and archivists decided to set up a series of History and Film conferences to alternate with the ASSAconferences, the first of which was held at the National Library of Australia in 1981. History and Film had soon outlasted its rival and, having survived a hiatus in 1991, it was revived in 1993 at La Trobe University and renamed the Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand (FHAANZ) conference at Australian National University in Canberra in 1995. With the shift in the 1990s to a more inclusive brand of Film Studies, the FHAANZ has gone to become ‘by default the regular Australian conference for film academics of all persuasions’ (Bertrand, 2005: 11).
Apart from the Australian Journal of Screen Theory and Filmnews, significant journals since the 1960s have included the long- running Metro, the journal of the Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) (1974-present) and the Melbourne-based Cinema Papers. Cinema Papers had several incarnations: first as a short-lived film society publication started by La Trobe University students Peter Beilby and Philippe Mora in 1967; then as a limited circulation tabloid (196970) which was resurrected by the then London-based filmmaker Mora during a visit to the 1973 Melbourne International Film Festival; then, with funding from the Film and Television Board, as a large-format page quarterly (1973-79) and an 80-page bi-monthly (1979-89) before it merged with Filmnews in 1989 and eventually ceased publication in 2001 (see Murray, 1984). The editorial board of Mora, Beilby and Scott Murray wanted the magazine not only to document the growth of a local film culture, but also to provide a ‘forum to stimulate the interchange between filmmakers, critics and educators’ and so to act as ‘an agent for investigation, criticism and innovation’ (Murray, 1984: 41).
Significant journals not solely dedicated to film include Media Information Australia (from 1998, Media International Australia) and Continuum, a media and cultural studies journal originating in Perth (1987) under the general editorship of O’Regan (Murdoch), Brian Shoesmith (WA College of Advanced Education), Noel King (Curtin University) and Toby Miller (Murdoch). Continuum ‘updated’ the Australian Journal of Screen Theory and was later adopted as the official publication of the Cultural Studies Association of Australia. Other journals contributing to the intellectual culture that has supported the expansion of Australian Film Studies have included Antithesis, Art & Text, Filmviews, Flesh, Intervention, Meanjin, On the Beach, Southern Review and Tension. More recently a number of lively online journals have made an appearance: Screening the Past (founding editor: Ina Bertrand, 1997-present), Senses of Cinema (founding editor: Bill Mousoulis, 1999-present), and Rouge (editors: Helen Bandis, Adrian Martin and Grant McDonald, 2003-present).
Personnel
All the activity around Film Studies and film culture in the 1970s was paralleled by an upsurge of interest in the cinephile institutions of review journalism. This was embodied most notably in Colin Bennett’s long tenure as film critic at Melbourne’s the Age newspaper. He was later followed by Meaghan Morris at the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review, Adrian Martin at the Age, Helen Garner at the Australian’s Review of Books, Paul Byrne at the Sydney Morning Herald and Sandra Hall at the Australian.
As it took root within the academy from 1975 to 1985, however, Film Studies was dominated less by the figure of the cinephile than by the persona of the critical intellectual. International developments in film theory, in particular the politically progressive reflection on film language and practice developed in the pages of the UK journal Screen, were given an Australian inflection in the writings of David Boyd, Brophy, Creed, Crisp, Cunningham, Ross Gibson, Helen Grace, Ian Hunter, Laleen Jayamanne, King, Martin, Morris, O’Regan, Noel Purdon, Rohdie, Bill Routt, Stern, Graeme Turner and Dugald Williamson. Although a number of these writers became internationally recognized for a particular brand of cultural studies, it was arguably Film Studies that gave the Australian style its unique inflection. In the introduction to Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader, a 1993 anthology which includes essays by Cunningham, Gibson, Grace, Martin, Morris, O’Regan, Stern and Turner, the editors John Frow and Meaghan Morris make the point that,
first encounters with a culture and society approach in the late 1960s came not from reading Raymond Williams but from attending WEA [Workers Education Association] summer schools on film run at Newport Beach in Sydney by John Flaus [who] (like Lawson) helped create a constituency for the project of cultural studies as well as to train a generation of film and media critics. (1993: xxv-xxvi)
At the same time, encouraged by the 1970s feature film revival and interest in Australian film histories, another discourse distinct from that of either the cinephile or the critical intellectual was becoming increasingly evident. This was the voice of the film historian, to be heard in the writings of people like Ina Bertrand, Diane Collins, Crisp, Lawson, Moran, Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper (1980), Graham Shirley and Brian Adams (1989) and Tulloch (1981; 1982). Although the mid- 1980s may have been the high noon of high theory internationally, in Australia, at least, publications about film history were on the rise. One reason may have been a shift in the focus of research provoked by the impact of cultural studies. Another was certainly a resurgence in nationalist sentiment that not only garnered government assistance for the film industry but also, as a spin-off, predisposed Australian publishers to favour any new writing about Australian history, including work in the area of film history. Both nationally and internationally, it is also possible to discern around 1985 a theoretical shift in Film Studies marked by post-structuralist currents, and in particular the influence of Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972). A 1980s ‘crisis’ in film theory and the proclaimed ‘end of grand theory’ were signalled by Bordwell’s Making Meaning. This provoked a re-appraisal of concepts such as mise en scene and realism, a return to empirical investigation, and an attempt to negotiate the tension between theory and history via a non-totalizing concept of difference that could respect the heterogeneity of historical material.
In the late 1980s such contextual factors as government endorsement of democratic multi-culturalism and shifts in communication technologies and broadcasting regulations contributed to the breakdown of the imaginary ‘identity’ of Australian screen studies that had been dominant in 1975-85 and the emergence of a more inclusive brand of Film Studies. These changes prompted diversification into distinct specializations often associated with particular writers. Thus, with the publication of Perspectives on Chinese Cinema (1985), A Bit on the Side: East-West Topographies of Desire (1994) and The Filmmaker and The Prostitute: Dennis O’Rourke’s The Good Woman of Bangkok (Berry et al., 1996), Chris Berry (initially) was seen to be responsible for Asian cinema studies in Australia. Jon Stratton and Ien Ang made the running on multicultural media studies, while in the 1990s Jennings, Michael Meadows, Felicity Collins and Therese Davis (2004) forged names for themselves in the study of Indigenous film and television.
In the mid to late 1980s, the arrival of UK television scholars John Fiske and John Hartley in Perth and cultural/media academics such as Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer and Gillian Swanson at Griffith University in Brisbane paved the way for a shift of emphasis towards television research. Local scholars like Cunningham and Miller, Jacka, Moran, O’Regan, David Rowe, Tulloch and Turner (1989) were especially active in the new field, many of them—most notably perhaps Cunningham and O’Regan—also taking a growing interest in media policy. More recently, the increase of investment in, and production at, international film studios on Australian shores has provoked research into ‘Australian inter-national pictures’ with O’Regan (again), Ben Goldsmith and Nick Herd making major contributions (Goldsmith and O’Regan, 2005; Herd, 2004). The professionalization of Film Studies has meanwhile continued to see Australian film researchers publishing internationally on film authors and genres.
Critical Positions
Even if the first decade of Film Studies in Australia was dominated by the emblematic figure of the critical intellectual, and more specifically by that of a high theorist importing intellectual frameworks from Europe, we have attempted to show that this migration of ideas involved local adaptation and not just assimilation. It was this process of translation that shaped the ‘particularity’ of Australian Film Studies. The new discipline took on local inflections as the result of its location in specific educational institutions, its engagement with the parallel growth of historical research, and its responses to developments in the Australian film and television industries. These specifically Australian developments generated new positions that were soon being re-exported through the international exposure of scholars and critics like Creed, Cunningham, Gibson, Martin, Morris, O’Regan, Stern and Turner.
The period since 1985 has seen an increasing degree of intersection and cross-pollination between the traditions of the critical intellectual, the film historian and the cinephile. An early engagement between critical intellectuals and film historians was initiated by the intervention of Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan in their 1983 essay ‘Two Discourses of Australian Film’ in the Australian Journal of Screen Theory. Their declared aim was ‘to challenge the various histories of Australian film that already exist’ and to ‘call for a different account of Australian film’. For Moran and O’Regan, the problem with books like Eric Reade’s The Australian Screen (1975), Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper’s Australian Films 1900-1977 (1980) or Ina Bertrand and Diane Collins’s Government and Film in Australia (1981) was that they presented Australian film as ‘a homogenous object’ and offered merely ‘an account of linear growth and development’. As critical intellectuals Moran and O’Regan proposed a Foucauldian alternative:
Australian film is not a single unified object but a series of different objects, differently realised. Australian film can be thought of as a series of different discursive constructions, the discourses occupying a series of different institutional sites that variously allow or impede the issue of that discourse as a set of filmic texts______ There is no evolution or development across time. There is instead a series of different distinct constructions of Australian film having little or nothing in common with each other. (1983: 163)
Two years later, in 1985, Moran and O’Regan showed what this alternative would look like when they published An Australian Film Reader. Eschewing a ‘definitive authorial voice’, the book assembled ‘a series of voices about Australian film’ and juxtaposed documentary material with historical commentary in order ‘to emphasise that issues around the film work of each period were never settled’ (1985: 14).
Ina Bertrand is the doyenne of Australian film historians. She has been an advocate for the historiography of Australian film since the 1970s (see for example Bertrand, 1978), and she has the distinction of having presented a paper on Charles Tait’s 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang at the second Film Studies conference in 1981 and then returning to it twenty-five years later at the FHAANZ conference in 2006. Her 1981 book with Diane Collins, Government and Film in Australia, was one of those criticized by Moran and O’Regan. What is striking is Bertrand’s response. Her monumental 1989 edited collection, Cinema in Australia: A Documentary History, avoids their charge of homogenization and teleology by republishing a host of written documents from different periods ofAustralian film history, giving voice to particular discourses as they arose at any given moment. In the book, discourses such as those around avant-garde cinema, censorship, women’s film and exhibition practices form a mosaic of Australian cinema.
In the same year as Bertrand’s collection appeared, Moran and O’Regan published a second edited volume, The Australian Screen (1989). This presented specialist essays on such topics as early cinema, Aborigines and film, women’s film, film in the 1980s, television drama, institutional documentary and independent film and video. What emerges from the interchange between them and Bertrand thus appears to be less a consensus than a degree of convergence and at least a conversation between ‘critical intellectual’ and ‘film historian’ perspectives.
At around this time two ‘critical intellectuals’ rose to prominence who have in different but symptomatic ways engaged with the concerns and personae of both the film historian and the cinephile critics. In 1983, Ross Gibson’s ‘Camera Natura: Landscape in Australian Feature Films’ appeared in On the Beach, a journal he had co-founded and edited. Meaghan Morris’s ‘Tooth and Claw: Tales of Survival, and Crocodile Dundee’ was first published in Art & Text in 1987 and then included in The Pirate’s Fiancee the following year.
Gibson’s essay, revised and republished several times over subsequent years, is a reaction against the so-called ‘AFC genre’ of the 1970s feature-film Renaissance. Divining a shift in Australian film culture marked by the contrast between the colossal failure of The Lighthorsemen (Simon Wincer, 1987) to connect with audiences and the popular success of George Miller’s Mad Max films, in 1988 Gibson traced the Australian settler culture’s fascination with the landscape back to the masculinist-nationalist impulse that was invoked when whites invaded the Great Southern Land. Drawing on his first book The Diminishing Paradise (1984), Gibson understands the landscape cinema of the 1970s and 1980s in relation to the larger history of imaging in writing, painting and photography performed by whites in Australia (see also Gibson, 1992).
In her equally influential essay on the Paul Hogan vehicle Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman, 1987), Morris invokes Deleuze in order to refute the binary two-industries ‘commerce and culture’ model of Australian film put forward by Dermody and Jacka (1987; 1988a; see also 1988b). In its place, Morris proposes ‘positive unoriginality’ as a strategy that sustains the survival of cultural specificity through ‘the revision of American cultural codes by Australian [film] texts’. The cultural logic of positive unoriginality is scarcely concealed in a film such as Crocodile Dundee, declares Morris: the film’s ‘borrowings are as clearly displayed as Dundee’s outback costume, with its comic mishmash of cowboy/western, bushman/jungle shreds—originating and imitating nothing but a late rural effort at vintage Bow-wow-wow’ (1987: 43). In this essay, and in others from the period such as Cunningham’s ‘Hollywood Genres, Australian Movies’ (1985) and O’Regan’s ‘The Man from Snowy River and Australian Popular Culture’ (1985), positive unoriginality—‘the art of combining economic pragmatism with cultural assertion’—somewhat unexpectedly ‘acquires a nationalist aura’ (1987: 46).
Although both Gibson and Morris were to some degree co-opted by the new cultural studies moment, and their writings on film picked up in academic Film Studies under that rubric, in style their essays tend more towards that of the cinephile criticism being published in some of the more ephemeral film magazines and reviews of the time. Their work thus brings us back to those ‘largely ephemeral sites with little or no institutional “standing”’, which Adrian Martin described as keeping alive ‘a collective dream of marginal criticism’ outside the academy (1992b: 7). Across countless review articles and essays and, more recently, in several books, Martin has railed against those 1970s and 1980s accounts that reduce Australian film to purely national social and cultural agendas—a politics of representation—and ignore its international flows (initially, American and avant-garde film, but more recently World cinema) and the very form and style that animate both the film object and ‘the act of criticism’. Imbuing Australian (inter-national) Film Studies with the vitality and originality of a cinephile- mentor such as Manny Farber, Martin’s work demonstrates what is important in thinking and writing seriously about film. It is not so much one’s critical agenda, whether that be theoretical or historical, depending on your position. Rather, it is ‘the action of critical writing, what it can conjure, perform, circulate, transform’. Martin’s conclusion can stand as a manifesto for Australian Film Studies: ‘In writing as much as in film, we must come to close terms with what is “at once mysterious and materialistic” in matters of style’ (1992a: 131).