Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand 2
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DIRECTORY OF | LEALAND GOLDSMITH | RYAN WORLD CINEMA AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND 2 2 EDITED BY BEN GOLDSMITH, MARK DAVID RYAN AND GEOFF LEALAND Building on and bringing up to date the material presented in the first installment of Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand, this volume continues the exploration of the cinema produced in Australia and New Zealand since the beginning of the twentieth century. Among the additions to this volume are in-depth treatments of the locations that feature prominently in the countries’ cinema. Essays by leading critics and film scholars consider the significance in films of the outback and the DIRECTORY OF DIRECTORY beach, which is evoked as a liminal space in Long Weekend and a symbol of death AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND 2 in Heaven’s Burning, among other films. Other contributions turn the spotlight on previously unexplored genres and key filmmakers, including Jane Campion, Rolf de Heer, Charles Chauvel, and Gillian Armstrong. Accompanying the critical essays in this volume are more than 60 new film reviews, complemented by full-colour film stills and significantly expanded references for further study. From The Piano to Red Dog, from Pictures to The Orator, Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand 2 completes this comprehensive treatment of two similar – but also different – and consistently fascinating national cinemas. WORLD CINEMA DIRECTORY OF WORLD CINEMA Directory of World Cinema ISSN 2040-7971 Directory of World Cinema eISSN 2040-798X Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand 2 ISBN 978-1-84150-634-0 Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand 2 eISBN 978-1-78320-481-6 EDITED BY www.worldcinemadirectory.org BEN GOLDSMITH intellect | www.intellectbooks.com MARK DAVID RYAN GEOFF LEALAND AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND Volume 19 DIRECTORY OF WORLD CINEMA AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND 2 Edited by Ben Goldsmith, Mark David Ryan and Geoff Lealand intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA S First published in the UK in 2015 by Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2015 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd 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, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Publisher: May Yao Publishing Managers: Jelena Stanovik and Heather Gibson Cover photograph: Samson and Delilah, 2009, Scarlett Pictures/The Kobal Collection Cover designer: Holly Rose Copy-editor: Emma Rhys Typesetter: John Teehan Directory of World Cinema ISSN 2040-7971 Directory of World Cinema eISSN 2040-798X Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand 2 ISBN 978-1-84150-634-0 Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand 2 eISBN 978-1-78320-481-6 Printed and bound by Short Run Press, UK. CONTENT DIRECTORY OF WORLD CINEMA S AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND 2 Acknowledgements 5 Thriller 173 Essay Introduction: Australia 6 Reviews Film of the Year 16 War 193 Red Dog Essay Reviews Festival Focus 20 Brisbane International Film Festival The Australian Western 209 Essay Australian Film Locations 23 Reviews Marketing Mix 26 Introduction: New Zealand 222 Finding International Audiences Crossing the Ditch 228 Star Study 30 Essay Errol Flynn Reviews Directors 34 Directors 247 Jane Campion Women Directors of Feature Arthur and Corrine Cantrill Films in New Zealand Ken G Hall Annie Goldson Brian Trenchard-Smith Gaylene Preston Action and Adventure 49 Director Studies 266 Essay Costa Botes Reviews Yvonne Mackay Merata Mita Australian Animated Feature Barry Barclay Films 67 Christine Jeffs Essay Reviews Experimental and Documentary Film 291 Comedian Comedy 79 Theatrical Documentary in New Essay Zealand 2012 Reviews Genres of New Zealand Experimental Film Crime 95 ‘Principled Patriotism’ Essay Reviews Emerging Asian New Zealand Film-makers in New Zealand Australian Gothic 111 Cinema 311 Essay Reviews Recommended Reading 320 Horror 127 Australia & New Zealand Essay Cinema Online 334 Reviews Test Your Knowledge 342 Road Movie 145 Essay Notes On Contributors 345 Reviews Filmography 350 Science Fiction 159 Essay Reviews CONTENT Directory of World Cinema ofWorld Directory ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Directory of World Cinema S ENT First and foremost, the editors would like to thank the contributors for all their hard work, their enthusiasm for Australian and New Zealand cinema, and their patience while waiting for the book’s publication. The editors would like to thank the Film, Screen and Animation Discipline EM in the School of Media, Entertainment, Creative Arts, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, for its financial contribution to the book to purchase licensed images and to print this volume in colour. We are extremely grateful for this generous support. The colour version is striking and makes a huge difference to the text’s visuals. Thanks must also go to Heather Gibson, Jelena Stanovnik and Melanie Marshall for all their editorial work behind the scenes to prepare the directory for print. Finally, Mark Ryan would like to thank Hal and Jim McElroy and Catherine Gillam from the AFI Research Collection for their permission to use the Razorback images. NOWLEDG K Acknowledgements 5 AC Directory of World Cinema INTRODUCTION: BY BEN GOLDSMITH and MARK DAVID RYAN The question of what exactly constitutes an ‘Australian film’ has long preoccupied those involved or interested in the films made either in this country, or those films made with Australian involvement elsewhere in the world. When Warwick Thornton’s first film Samson and Delilah (2009) won the Camera d’Or at Cannes, there was no doubt that it clearly qualified as an Australian film. This story about two young Indigenous Australians living in an isolated community in the middle of the country, was written, directed and shot by Thornton, himself a Kaytetye man from the Northern Territory. But when another film by an Australian director won the Camera d’Or the following year, there was division among commentators and critics over whether this could be claimed as Australian. The Melbourne Herald Sun and the Northern Territory News, among others, were in no doubt that Melbournian Michael Rowe’s Año Bisiesta/Leap Year (2010) – made in Spanish, in Mexico – is Australian, with the latter publication memorably headlining its story of Rowe’s win ‘Oz S&M Flick Cannes Pick’ (Johnson 2010; Anon 2010a). Even one of the national public broadcasters described the film as an ‘Oz-Mex sex thriller’ in its news coverage (Vincent 2010). Rowe himself was careful to emphasize the ‘Mexican resonance’ of the film in interviews following his win (Wilson 2010), but he would also tell Australian film magazine Encore that ‘I’m a son of Australia, of course [...] My artistic sensibility and narrative is incorruptibly Australian; that comes from the cradle and you can’t get rid of it even if you wanted to’ (Anon 2010b: 21). This is reminiscent of the view expressed by George (Mad Max) Miller in the early 1980s that: we are Australians, we are Australian film-makers. I think, without even trying, the Australianness comes through in the film, so you can’t suddenly export yourself, as it were, and make film without that Australian point of view. Even though our culture reproduces to some degree the American, British, European and, in a little way, Asian culture, I think that makes us even in a very subtle way peculiarly Australian and you can never get around that. (Quoted in White 1984: 96) The idea of a nation’s cinema as a bounded, discrete and identifiable space neatly separated from the cinema of other nations has never been a reality. National cinemas are porous and leaky, inevitably multivalent, multiply connected to, influenced by, and impacting on narratives and styles, practices of film production and patterns of consumption beyond the national territory. Tom O’Regan locates the specificity of Australian cinema ‘not in any particular set of attributes, so much as in its relational character’ (O’Regan 1996: 7). Over the last few decades, Australian cinema’s international relations in production and policy have expanded and become more complex. Deb Verhoeven’s useful expansion of Susan Dermody and Elizabeth 6 Australia & New Zealand 2 Directory of World Cinema Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton, 2009) Jacka’s influential ‘Industry 1–Industry 2’ model of Australian cinema elaborates these changes (Verhoeven 2010; Dermody and Jacka 1987). Verhoeven suggests a new model, ‘Industry 3’, which is characterized by the mixing of national and international elements, films and film-makers. Alongside the inward-looking Industry 1, which Dermody and Jacka classified as principally being concerned with Australian identity (albeit influenced by European-style art cinema and obsessed by local, social purpose), and the more outward-looking Industry 2, preoccupied with entertainment, internationalism, genre production and learning from Hollywood, Verhoeven argues that a third industry became evident by the end of the 1990s: [Industry 3] comprises films and film-makers happily embedded in both the local and global [and] typically [...] films initiated by Australians wanting to work with large budgets, international resources, high-profile actors and local content or personnel, and shooting either