East-West Film Journal, Volume 5, No. 2
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EAST-WEST FILM JOURNAL VOLUME 5· NUMBER 2 Shifting Paradigms in the Australian Historical Film 1 STEPHEN CROFTS Hollywood Images of the Pacific 16 GLENN K. S. MAN The Illusionary Island: Hollywood's Pacific Place RAYMOND F. BETTS Context and The Makioka Sisters MARKUS NORNES The Rhetoric of Mirror, Shadow, and Moon: Samsara and the Problem of Representation of Self in China YUEJIN WANG "Lynching" as Entertainment: Race and Gender in David Lynch's Wild at Heart 93 SHARON WILLIS Colonialism in the Hindu Caste System: Satyajit Ray's Sadgati (Deliverance) DARIUS COOPER A Talk with Shaji 128 D. WILLIAM DAVIS Book Reviews JULY 1991 The East- West Center is a public, nonprofit educational institution with an international board of governors. Some 2,000 research fellows, grad uate students, and professionals in business and government each year work with the Center's international staff in cooperative study, training, and research. They examine major issues related to population, resources and development, the environment, culture, and communication in Asia, the Pacific, and the United States. The Center was established in 1960 by the United States Congress, which provides principal funding. Support also comes from more than twenty Asian and Pacific governments, as well as private agencies and corporations. Shifting Paradigms in the Australian Historical Film STEPHEN CROFTS I T IS AXIOMATIC that national cinemas can playa crucial role in defin ing and redefining national identity. This is evident in countries with elab orate state control of product, such as most Chinese films since 1949 and Russia between the mid-1920s and glasnost, as it is in contexts of rela tively laissez-faire approaches such as New German Cinema of the 1970S or Hollywood. It was precisely on grounds of cultural nationalism that Australian activists campaigned through the 1960s for the revival of a feature-film industry. While there had been continuous documentary filmmaking since the Second World War, and while some filmmakers found work making TV advertisements and others after the mid-1960s made occasional TV series, cinema screens had since 1945 been dominated by Hollywood, and secondarily by British product. Of the forty-one features made in Austra lia between 1950 and I969, twenty were wholly or substantially financed and controlled by non-Australian interests (Pike and Cooper 1981). One of the earliest articles campaigning for the feature revival, written by Tom Weir in 1958, deserves quoting at length for its insights into Australia's acute cultural dependency: Films have been the distinctive art form of our generation. Perhaps they will continue to be. In countries like France, England and the USA films have also been the most important means of heightening a people's feeling of commu nal personality, bringing them the shock of self-recognition that Herman Melville was concerned to give when his own America was a dependent cul ture .... Anybody who has sat among a mass audience in a British or I 2 STEPHEN CROFTS American cinema, while a locally made film takes some story as the excuse for an observant romp over familiar streets and landmarks and for an imagi native statement of their national characteristics, knows the blend of stimu lation and assurance that comes from it. It plants one's feet on the ground. The workaday world is integrated with the world of one's imagination. It is disastrously not so in Australia. It is typical of the underdeveloped personality of our people that we have practically no indigenous films .... Like pre-Chaucerian England, tugged between Italy and France, we are also torn between two dominant cultures, those of America and Britain. No wonder our voices are thin and so weakly articulated as to be barely audible to visitors when they first step ashore. The daydreams we get from celluloid are not Australian daydreams. Our kingdom is not of this world. (Weir 1958,144) These remarks may have particular salience for other postcolonial cul tures such as the Canadian. They pinpoint a chronic cultural diffidence. Though this has been somewhat modified in the 1980s, Australia must be the only nation-state in the world that celebrates its defeats, whether it be on the battlefield, at Gallipoli in 1915, or in the sporting arena with a horse, Phar Lap, done over, in the local parlance, by the Yanks. Australia's cultural assertion has had to counter its blithe subservience to other countries' economic, political-strategic, and cultural interests. In a local film culture dominated by Hollywood assumptions about enter tainment, genre, stars, acceptable narrative modes, and so on - and sup ported by vigorous lobbying from the MPDAA, sometimes at the federal government level - Hollywood films have, throughout the feature-film revival, dominated local box office to a greater extent than in almost any other foreign market: between 70 and 80 percent, compared with, say, 50 percent in Germany in 1978 and 50 percent in France in 1989. In its own tiny reversal of the predominant cultural flow, Australia in the 1980s aimed to export more films to the United States. In this exercise, the world-renowned Australian film, Crocodile Dundee, was the tip of an inglorious iceberg. Scores of films, maybe as many as a hundred, were made which had no clear sense of audience address. Chary of tackling Australian-specific issues for fear of losing American audiences, and simultaneously mostly lacking the sound generic bases to make American films, they were aptly named "mid-Pacific" films, for the textual reasons just cited and for the exhibition reason that they ended up as theatrical SHIFTING PARADIGMS IN THE AUSTRALIAN HISTORICAL FILM 3 failures in Australia and cable fodder in the United States. Such a readi ness to second-guess what another country will expect of Australia is char acteristic of its cultural dependence. THE PERIOD FILM I wish to focus on one aspect, or symptom, of that dependency in the fea ture-film revival. It is the category of history, which is deployed exten sively in the revival's best-known genre, the period film of I975-I98I and beyond, and is taken up differently in a second group of historical films from the late I98os. The period film's canonic texts include Picnic at Hanging Rock (I975, Peter Weir), My Brilliant Career (I979, Gillian Arm strong), Breaker Morant (I980, Bruce Beresford), and Gallipoli (I98I, Peter Weir). The later historical films included The Year My Voice Broke (I987, John Duigan), Celia (I988, Ann Turner), and Flirting (I990, John Duigan). Further details and distinctions of this shifting paradigm will be elaborated later. But first, what does it mean, in so culturally dependent a country as Australia, to talk in the I970S of Australian history? It is not enough to say, as does a character in Kings of the Road, that "the Yanks have col onized our subconscious." Quite apart from psychoanalytic quibbles about theorizations of the nonconscious, one has to ask what "indige nous" culture there was originally and whether it is recoverable anyway (one might recall the I985 Screen debate between Teshome Gabriel and Julianne Burton). Aside from the Aboriginal culture, which white settlers have all but obliterated, white Australian cultural identity was until the Second World War inextricably bound up with the imperial ties of the Commonwealth. Thus, in a symptomatic reading, Bill Routt could note the structuring absence of the mother from melodrama and other genres of the I920S and I930S where such a figure might be expected to appear (Routt I989). She is, of course, the motherland, Britain. Only in the later I950S did a radical nationalist historiography construct an Australian identity defined against British dominance. Its key moment was the I890S, and its icons the man of the bush, his larrikin defiance of authority, his genuineness and mateship with his fellows. Though cogently and power fully criticized in the I970S for its romanticism and gender-blindness, it was this moment of Australianess which substantially filtered through, with varying gender inflections, to the period film of the later I97os. This 4 STEPHEN CROFTS is a distinctly different historical project from that which beset the politi cized filmmakers of the New German Cinema. Theirs was a project of coming to terms with a past (Vergegenheitsbewaltigung) that Nazism had left in a pall of unacknowledged shame. In Australia's case, it is less a mat ter of not disavowing the past, but rather of trying to discover some indig enous white Australian identity. If not chimerical, the task is very precari ously founded, because so disjoined from any historically rooted national conSCiOusness. Thus when a veteran cultural nationalist of the revival, Philip Adams, describes the period film as Australia's Western (quoted by Hamilton and Matthews 1986, 82), the comparison is frankly suspect. The Western as literature mythologized the American West almost as it happened, not sev enty years afterwards. And the westward settlement of the United States was fueled by a potent mix of historically coincident nationalism, reli gious fervor, migration, intensive industrialism, and vibrant capitalism. No such mix obtained in Australia; even many of the components were lacking. If the period film's historical roots were still searching cultural ground, its generic components were anything but Australian. This should not sur prise, for no genres could survive the twenty-five year virtual hiatus in fea ture production. The lack of generic tradition, and the consequently extreme hesitancy of generic definition, is abundantly evidenced in con temporary taxonomies (Burstall 1976). Preceding the period film, the ocker comedy stood as the first genre of the revival. Moreover, it was an indigenous genre. "Ocker" describes avowedly crass behaviors found in the Australian male, and the ocker comedy presented his exploits in pica resque narratives of soft-core and bibulous inspiration.