Film

It is no easy task for an outsider to anatomise a national cinema, and the Austrian academic Adi Wimmer suggests in this series of essays that Australian cinema has always been more national than most. In other words, our filmmakers have been unusually dedicated to the project of defining a collective identity through a set of instantly recognisable myths: the ultimate Australian film would be one that showed a group of sun-bronzed, laconic, Anglo-Saxon blokes battling droughts and big business in a wide brown land seen equally as a symbol of brooding masculinity and as a hostile mother.

Bruce Beresford has left a greater imprint on the national sensibility than most people might think. From The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) through The Getting of Wisdom (1977) and Breaker Morant (1980), he has demonstrated a virtuoso ability to dramatise Australianness, classic and modern. His films Don’s Party (1976) and The Club (1980) mean that we are never likely to forget the idiom in which David Williamson first represented us, because Beresford has made it part of the cinematic argot of the country; a new production of a play is automatically measured by how much the actors stand up to the classic performances of Graeme Kennedy or Ray Barrett or John Hargreaves in Beresford’s vision of the plays.

The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand is the thirteenth of Wallflower Press’s ‘24 frames’ series, but there is no need for the editors to feel superstitious on that account. This is a series which presents certain problems. It requires the editor(s) of each volume to choose twenty-four films that are, in some degree, representative of the titular country, or, as the case sometimes even more dauntingly is, of two titular countries – and I know whereof I speak. Having edited Wallflower’s The Cinema of Britain and Ireland (2005), I can sympathise with the difficulties involved in trying to achieve any sort of representativeness across not one but two film-making countries. And I might add resentfully that Canada gets a whole volume to itself. Canada!

Tony Harrison is a man with a passion. The evidence is the Australian Film & TV Companion. Meticulously researched and compiled, Harrison has listed every sound feature film made in this country since 1930 and every nationally broadcast television drama series, mini-series, television movie, documentary series, comedy series and current affairs show since 1956.

What is a monster? Why are we so recurringly fascinated by graphic representations of the monstrous? And, in particular, what do cinematic images of male monstrosity tell us about the ways in which Western culture produces and views the categories of masculine and feminine?  Barbara Creed’s new book is a direct extension of much of the lively work she did in The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993). In Phallic Panic, she moves from her earlier consideration of how we might interpret visions of female monstrosity as evidence of profound anxiety about the role of the woman in phallocentric society, particularly in her vagina dentata manifestations, to an examination of the cultural and psychological implications of male monsters.

Writing of cinematographer Damien Parer’s untimely death in 1944, war correspondent Chester Wilmot paid tribute to him as ‘a fine man as well as a brilliant photographer. He made the camera speak as no other man I’ve ever known.’ Neil McDonald’s book, Damien Parer’s War, does eloquent justice to this legendary figure in Australian history and Australian film. Many may know that Parer was the first Australian to win an Oscar, but, unless they have read the 1994 edition of this admirable book, they may not know much else.

In the movie The Producers (now a musical), Gene Wilder accuses Zero Mostel of treating actors like animals. ‘Have you ever seen an actor eat?’ is Mostel’s pithy reply. There is a truth buried in this joke: eating can be important to actors in a profession where much time can be spent between jobs, ‘resting’, as it is euphemistically called.

Like many students of Australian film, I became aware of Cecil Holmes’s work through the viewing of a scratched print of Three in One in a lecture hall in one of our tertiary institutions, many years after it had failed to gain general release within Australia and killed off the dream of an indigenous film industry, yet again. A brave and naïve film, it was clearly well-made, stylish, and addressed a local audience without condescension or parochialism. Three in One was an early hint of what an Australian cinema might look like, and is now held to be one of the landmarks in the history of Australian film. To those who see the film now, though, its maker must seem to have suffered the same fate as its optimistically named production company, New Dawn Films. There is some satisfaction, then, in reading One Man’s Way to see what did happen to a substantial talent squandered by an insecure and conservative Australian film industry.