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38 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW A Croc of Gold? Is Australia's film policy producing trash? Toby Miller. The US market beckons: Yahoo Serious in Young Einstein. t isn’t always easy to know what people are talking about when I they voice the words “the Australian film industry”. The term serves to bring together some very diverse filmmaking and funding practices that have very distinct sorts of politics. It is odd to unify under the one heading, for example, a polite pornographic western (Picnic at Hanging Rock), a fish-out-of-water Winfield farce ('Crocodile Dundee) and a complex- feminist documentary drama (Serious Undertakings). They are funded differently, made for different purposes, and shown in very different types of venue. But the topic of “the Australian film industry” has become a significant one in a variety of quarters. For Bob Hawke," apparently, it stands on a par with social inequality: just as he has guaranteed the eradication of child poverty by 1990, he has guaranteed the survival of the film industry. For Gary Punch, film is “Australia’s broadest-based element of culture”. The link between the tourism industry and film as an “international calling-card" makes a “magnificent contribution to the nation”. Film industry workers and bureaucrats, confused and concerned by the way that taxation rebates (the 10BA scheme) have acted to encourage large numbers of unpopular, expensive and politically barren films, have sought other AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW 39 options. Only the American and Indian industries survive without state support: that possibility was effectively ruled out from the beginning. But the decision to wind back I0BA was announced months before anybody decided on a replacement. The material effects on the workforce were staggering. As at October 1988, an estimated four thousand members of Actors Equity had been out of work for a year; the finance had simply ceased to flow as investment advisers discouraged doctors and lawyers from choosing an outdated means of minimising their contributions to Consolidated Revenue. The policy-makers in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne were busily debating the merits of various proposals for government involvement. These included a film bank, a new television station along the lines of Channel Four in Britain (which has specialised in funding such films as My Beautiful Laundrette), new forms of tax incentive, revised investment guidelines, and many others besides. An announcement was finally made in the middle of the year. A new body, the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) was established. It is an incorporated company with investment funds drawn from public revenue: $70 million in 1988-89, and executives. What are we to make of How do we know? We know with guaranteed continuity for four this? Coupled with membership because the corporation’s guidelines years. So far, so good; the details of the FFC Board of state that it will only look at scripts in corporation is set up to perform an Directors (a banker, an academic, a the absence of “substantial market important function in terms of jobs, lawyer, two bureaucrats, an actor commitment”. It will not, one local culture and active state and a director announced so far) and suspects, be employing experts in participation in the economy. But the small amount of other issues of representation; nor will it be no projects are proceeding as yet; the information available, it is attending to the internal employment 4.000 remain unemployed; and very emblematic of an approach which is dynamics of the industry. Rather, its few FFC staff have been appointed. euphemisticaly being referred to as purpose will be to spend taxpayers’ These might be seen as the teething “market-driven”. In practical terms, money on the basis of advice from problems, common to any ordinary this means that the corporation is financiers, thereby driving the business putting an infrastructure in primarily interested in putting up definition of “film industry” further place; but the decisions on budget government money to support in th e direction of deeply and basic direction have effectively projects that can already conventional narrative feature films. been taken. In the euphoria that demonstrate private sector Stand by for a lot more fish-out- followed an announcement of action, commitment. It is not interested in of-water Winfield farces. Times may little attention ahs been focused on the specifics of a desirable local become increasingly hard for how that infrastructure is likely to cultural presence (other than as progressive Australian cinema. operate. measured by origins of personnel, Corporation staff may be thin money and story). Questions of on the ground, but the Financial gender, ethnicity, class — questions Review's job columns are to the of Australia - are outside the brief TOBY MILLER teaches in Humanities rescue, calling all investment of the organisation. at Griffith University. 40 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW Lights, Camera, Glasnost The Iceberg of Soviet filmmaking is beginning to thaw, reports Karen Rosenberg. he main character in the Soviet the watchful eye of the Moscow collaborator who wants to return to film Repentance is a Georgian office of Goskino, the country’s his homeland. (Under Stalin, such Tmayor who resembles Stalin in central film agency, they were too men were considered traitors and his external calm, inner paranoia and often formulaic and predictable. often sent to the gulag, and only a few ,, ruthlessness toward those who As one result, film attendance Soviet intellectuals had questioned contradict him. His son symbolises fell drastically. In 1975 a Moscow that judgment publicly.) Another the Brezhnev-era tendency to justify Film Studio production drew some German film. My Friend Ivan repression and silence dissenters: a 18 million moviegoers; a decade later Lapshin, finished in the early 1980s woman who denounces the small­ the total was down by half. In the and released in 1985, is a portrait town dictator is found insane and same period, average attendance at a Stalin-era believer who is beginning hospitalised. “After showings in films made by the Leningrad Film to have doubts. “I wanted to every city, people got up and Studio dropped from 14 million to understand why people like my applauded the blank screen,” the 6.3 million; by the Ukrainian parents were applauding Stalin,” movie’s director, Tenghiz Abuladze, Dovzhenko Film Studio, from 11.2 German said. Although to many in told me in Moscow not long ago. “It million to 5.3 million. the West this film may seem a timid was the first swallow of perestroika. ” And yet, as Soviet cinema lost picture of the cruelty of Stalin’s much of its appeal as mass police, it nonetheless raised the Lenin called cinema “the most entertainment, a few Soviet directors hackles of Soviet conservatives important art”, and the administ­ such as Andrei Tarkovsky captured because it challenged their idealised ration of Mickhail Gorbachev has the imagination of the intelligentsia. image of the building of socialism in mobilised the power of the movies in In the Russian tradition, artists are the 1930s. its campaign to restructure Soviet supposed to be martyrs who sacrifice Other previously shelved films society. The decision to release themselves for truth, and those created a stir because they touch on Repentance in 1986, two years after filmmakers who suffered at the Jewish life, a theme with a troubled its completion, was reportedly made hands of the Goskino censors history in the Soviet Union. at the Politburo level. And in May enhanced their reputations According to some directors, 1986, some say with the sanction of accordingly. Now, in the GorbaH Goskino would sometimes approve a Alexander Yakovlev, then the era, many of these same <«//< r > are scenario at a liberal moment and Central Committee member expected to provide not merely block the completed picture during a responsible for culture, the Soviet entertainment but moral guidance freeze in political life. Alexander Filmmakers Union became the first about the meaning of glasnost. Askildov’s Commissar, finished in *■ artistic association to vote out its old Repentance was only the most 1967, is a romantic tale of a Red * leadership and pump in more liberal famous “unshelved” title that broke Army heroine that o ffers a blood. The filmmakers had been the taboos about the Stalin era. sympathetic portrait of a Jewish frustrated for a long time, as the 160 Alexei German’s Trial on the Road, family in the Ukraine, but it was or so feature-length movies released finished in 1971 and released in 1986, deemed unacceptable after the Six- each year by Soviet studios accords sympathetic treatment to a Day War. Last March Askoldov numbingly indicated. Made under former prisoner of war and Nazi recalled, “[Alexei] Romanov, the AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW 41 former head of Goskino, invited me usual, still leave a lot unsaid. Yet, in a simply be uninterested in the theme u ■ for a confidential chat and, patting country long dominated by cliches of Stalinism, but other moviegoers my knee, said, ‘I have two and rituals, every deviation from were probably scared away by suggestions for how you can save orthodoxy carries value. Abuladze’s demanding style, in your artistic career: one, cut the part So readers also took note when which anachronisms are used to where the Jews are chased into the gas long and laudatory obituaries of suggest that dictatorships are a chambers, and, two, let’s figure out emigre film director Tarkovsky were recurring blight. Years of censorship how to change the Jewish family into published in the Soviet press after his hadn’t allowed audiences much a family of some other nationality’.” death in 1986 and when practice in deciphering visually Askoldov refused, and the film retrospectives of his films were complex works.

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