Australian (post) national cinema

Introduction

In 2020, I again taught the subject Australian Film and Television utilising Tom O’Regan’s Australian National Cinema as a required reading. After requisite weeks on landscape cinema, the Ocker film, the Blak wave, suburbia and ordinariness, Australian film genre, documentary, short and experimental film, in week 10, I had scheduled a week with the topic of post-national cinema. The rationale here was to ‘update’ the syllabus in order to continue to engage students who are ever-wary of historical topics and, at times, need careful guidance through the importance of being historically responsible at every move, but also to keep an eye on the expansive ways in which film and television studies evolves, drawing on the host of adjacent disciplines; media studies (particularly in a School of Media, Film and Journalism), cultural studies, and Australian history. As the post-national cinema week approached, it became clear to me, and many students, that we had made our task difficult, I would like to think more sophisticated, by using O’Regan’s book as the mainstay of the subject. From the very first introductory week lecture, I had signalled the complications we would face:

This unit enables students to critically evaluate notions of nationalism in Australian Film and Television. Initially, the unit will explore traditional theoretical constructions of nationalism before considering the contemporary reconfiguring of nationalism. This reconfiguring will be performed in relation to discourses such as policy arrangements in relation to political machinations, auteur constructions, traditions of landscape cinema, race relations, multiculturalism, beach culture, the social, globalism, marketing, distribution, gender and criticism.

This unit synopsis sounds like a description of O’Regan’s book, encompassing, as it does, a host of discourses that abound in the formation Australian National Cinema, as a matter of course. In this way, O’Regan’s book is distinctive among the national cinema canon that has a long history but that intensified in the moment of Australian National Cinema’s appearance and which it is useful to have some context for.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, the concept of national cinemas had re-emerged as probably the preeminent discourse in film studies internationally. As Kristin Thompson (1996) points out in her introduction to the second special issue of Film History in 1996 devoted to national cinemas, as a film studies concern, ‘national cinemas emerged during the decade after approximately 1915 and it quickly became one of the main categories for writers dealing with film history’ (p. 259). Writing generally, and largely with reference to US and European scholarship, Thompson (1996) argues that the initial conceptions understood national cinema to be ‘fairly straightforward . . . isolable and self-contained . . . with little reference to parallel international developments outside its borders’ (p. 259). Thompson (1996: 259) characterises the, then, current 1990s wave of interest in national cinemas as ‘breaking down’ this delimited viewpoint, positing ‘the rise of auterism within the academy’ and an interest in ‘émigré directors and their influence in Hollywood’, as one factor that led to a reconsideration of national cinema. While Thompson is only concerned with Hollywood here (and it should be remembered that the United States, let alone Hollywood, have not loomed large in national cinema discussions), her introduction signals this intensification (exemplified in twin issues of Film History dedicated to the field) and shifting terrain of film studies in this period. The articles Thompson introduces, by David Desser, Eric Rentschler, Marc Silberman, Yuri Tsivian and Vance Kepley, following articles by Michael Walsh, Patricia Zimmerman, Mark Langer, Peter Geller and Manuela von Papen in the previous issue, were presented at the ‘Nation, National Identity and the International Cinema’, conference held at the Chateau de la Bretesche in Missilac, France, organised by Silberman in the previous year. In 1988, the University of Western Ontario hosted the National Cinemas Conference. At the same time, there was an increased interest in scholarly publishing in this field. Andrew Higson’s ‘The Concept of National Cinema’, from 1989 commenced this interest which was followed by Stephen Crofts’ ‘Reconceptualising National Cinema/s’ from 1993, Paul Willemen’s ‘The National’ from 1994. Andrew Higson’s Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain was published in 1995 while Susan Hayward’s French National Cinema from 1993 commenced Routledge’s National Cinemas book series, the strongest evidence of this interest, the third volume of which was Tom O’Regan’s Australian National Cinema in 1996. O’Regan’s volume was published in the same year as Pierre Sorlin’s (1996) Italian National Cinema and was followed in the following year by Sarah Street’s (1997) British National Cinema, Gunnar Iverson et al.’s (1998) edited collection Nordic National Cinema and eight further volumes. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie’s edited collection Cinema and Nation from 2000 signalled a shift in this trajectory, explicitly articulating a transnational approach to the study of a range of cinemas.

In Australia, the putative film renaissance or revival of the 1970s and 1980s was met with a subsequent mid-to-late 1970s and 1980s flourishing of research and publications concerned with Australian cinema and it is no coincidence that O’Regan was at the centre of this fervour. While the Australian Journal of Screen Theory and Cinema Papers emerged in the mid 1970s, it was in the mid 1980s, with a boost given to nationally focused publishing provided by the Bicentennial celebrations, that the emergence of the then Perth-based journal Continuum, begun by O’Regan and Brian Shoesmith, of An Australian Film Reader and The Australian Screen both edited by Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan from 1989, as well as a vast, largely unaccounted for landscape of ephemeral, ‘small journals’ that proliferated in this period, that it is possible to situate the emergence of Australian National Cinema. While it is possible to understand these local initiatives in relation to the international context of interest in national cinemas, the Australian film studies landscape had its particularities, as suggested by King, Verevis and Williams. Here, film studies, from the outset was ‘part of a largely interdisciplinary formation’ that included cultural and media studies in a number of institutional settings including Griffith and Murdoch Universities that were home to O’Regan (King et al., 2013: 8).

O’Regan’s Australian National Cinema can be seen emerging from this local context but, more specifically, it was developed over a long period of time, commencing with four of his earliest publications. ‘On Screen’ (O’Regan, 1981), ‘Australian Filmmaking: Its Public Circulation’, ‘Two Discourses of Australian Cinema’ (O’Regan, 1983) and ‘Ride the High Country: The Man from Snowy River and Australian Popular Culture’ (O’Regan, 1982). These articles were all written while he pursued a PhD at Griffith University in Brisbane with, variously, Dugald Williamson, Ian Hunter, Albert Moran, Sylvia Lawson and Mick Counihan as supervisors. In ‘On Screen’, it is possible to see the emergence of O’Regan’s approach to criticism, extended in the ‘Australian Filmmaking . . .’ article, but also of a film studies inflected by Foucauldian discourse analysis. In this regard, and without dismissing the gamut of and virility of the debates coursing through film studies in this period, O’Regan drew on the vital work emanating from the British journal Screen, in particular that of Paul Willemen, Claire Johnson and Lesley Stern in relation to the questions of critical practice that had been an abiding interest of O’Regan’s. Stern is of particular importance to O’Regan’s work here and is indicative of these discussions.

In her ‘Feminism and Cinema-Exchanges’, Stern (1979–1980) works to consider the ‘rigorous reworking not only of the question of the relation between feminism and cinema, but of the terms of that relation’ (p. 89) that was emerging in film studies at the moment and was a focus of the discussions between Christine Gledhill, Claire Johnston and Ruby Rich at the 1979 Edinburgh Film Festival Special Event. It is the conclusions to Stern’s review of this event that rhymes well with O’Regan’s own interests at the time. Stern (1979–1980) recalls how Gledhill ‘called for a reworking of the notion of “lived experience” . . . for a return to some kind of realist epistemology and attention to the extra-textual’ and Johnston, stressing ‘the need to assess the power and role of recognition and identification for political effectivity in feminist practice and the need to move beyond the text as autonomous object to the social conditions of production and reception’ (p. 104). For O’Regan, Stern’s review indicated a measure of the shifts in the theory-practice debates that were occurring in film studies, as they circulated around the journal Screen. In ‘On Screen’, O’Regan (1981) describes the emerging debates, in what sounds like a description of Australian National Cinema:

It was now over how the discourses, institutions, production, and exhibition apparatuses and alternative film practices in the cinema/media complex should be accounted for, and, how the critical project of Screen could be articulated within them to be in alignment with them and to modify them. (p. 52)

For O’Regan, it was Paul Willemen’s (1982) criticism of Screen, in ‘Remarks on Screen: Introductory Notes for a History of Screen’, from his position as editor of Framework, that aligned with Stern, Johnston and Gledhill’s considerations of the theory-practice debate, that further extended these discussions out onto the broader realm of film history and cultural materialism. For O’Regan, it is Willemen’s concern with theoreticism, away from cultural materialism, which is a crucial factor in the post-Second World War academy, a concern that I examined in ‘Shifts and Interventions: Cultural materialism and Australian Film History’ (Williams, 2009a), and is pivotal to O’Regan’s trajectory towards Australian National Cinema. O’Regan’s thinking at the time is ‘on the money’ considering his own concern with the local Australian conditions, his concern or a crucial practice, in relation to, the broader international movements in film criticism. This concern emerges in his next two articles ‘Ride the High Country: The Man from Snowy River and Australian Popular Culture’ and ‘Two Discourses of Australian Cinema’.

Described by O’Regan himself in the interview as a ‘breakthrough piece for me which, in the contemporary terms of research quality frameworks and ERAs was just a work of occasional criticism in a unrefereed publication’, ‘Ride the High Country’ from 1982 sees the emergence of O’Regan’s particular discursive film criticism. At once localised and materialist, it draws on discourses of feminism, ecocriticism, animal liberation, tourism, genre studies, policy shifts, film criticism, industrial production, film history, cultural studies, audience studies, and advertising and more, to address the success of George T Miller’s The Man from Snowy River (O’Regan, 1982) in the face of the Australian film revival. The film’s commercial nature, understood by O’Regan (1982) in relation to mainly the Crawford’s television production of the director and producer Geoff Burrowes, includes the prescient comment that ‘the integration of feature production with television will accelerate’ (p. 9), and that the divide between Australian film and television criticism has existed since the early 1970s. O’Regan’s (1982) approach to the film, in particular, the issues of popular culture (which is also strong in the work of Adrian Martin and Bill Routt from this period) in the face of the now familiar ‘valorisation of the feature film as an art form, rather than television serial drama’ (p. 8), stemming from the nationalism of the Whitlam years, is to work against these tendencies, in favour of appreciating the film, on its own terms, as popular entertainment that is instructive for Australian film criticism, industry, policy and culture. One of the most amusing, because it is characteristic of ‘O’Regan’s particular “voice” as well as his concern for the quotidian and social aspects of film-going, is the article’s use of tales of “two girls at the Perth premiere . . . so proud to be Australian”’ (O’Regan, 1982: 8) garnered from an account by the film’s producer and the two ‘stories of the films popularity’, one of a policeman who drove from Rockhampton to Gladstone to take his girlfriend to see The Man at the drive-in and of a radio station warning listeners to book for the film due to its popularity. These tales are precisely about O’Regan’s (1982: 8) concern with material, social accounts of the ways that popular culture works, another discourse of film criticism that he pursued for the rest of his life.

It is in this kernel of an idea of ‘what the Australian feature should be’ (O’Regan, 1982: 8) that it is possible to see the germination of Albert Moran and O’Regan’s (1983) crucial ‘Two Discourses of Australian Cinema’ from the following year. As O’Regan tells us in the interview, ‘Albert, basically said it’d be interesting if we put together the stuff he was collecting on the discourse on Australian documentary [that culminated in the book Projecting Australia (Moran, 1991)] together with what I’d put together’ ( ‘The Circulation of Ideas’). The article sets out by responding to the then recent Australian film history books such as Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper’s Australian Films 1900–1977: Guide to Feature Film Production and Ina Bertrand and Diane Collins’ Government and Film in Australia (Moran and O’Regan, 1983: 163), understanding the predominance of the feature film in Australian National Cinema, Moran and O’Regan (1983: 163) are interested in understanding the Australian cinema through a discursive shift from ‘Australian film as documentary’ in the period 1940–1960 to ‘Australian film as feature narrative’ in the period after 1960 rather than as ‘an account of linear growth and development’. Their project is to provide a means of thinking themselves out of the paradigm of a unified national industry and to propose some reasons for the various factors that occasion the discursive shift from documentary film to feature narrative which has diminished the attention given to documentary film in scholarly writing in this country (Moran and O’Regan, 1983: 163). They write,

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 the 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. (Moran and O’Regan, 1983: 163)

In both the ‘Ride the High Country’ and ‘Two Discourses’ articles, it is possible to see the prefiguring of the manner and tenor of Australian National Cinema where O’Regan (1996) writes,

Australian film is an unprincipled assemblage, in that there is no general principal that coheres its component parts, or allows for a unitary explanatory principal productively to combine its many facets. It is an imperfectly integrated assemblage because it is a hybrid of people, texts elements and social practices, discourses and technologies with all manner of relations between them. (p. 40)

In a continuation of this concern for ‘Australian film [as] . . . a series of different objects’, O’Regan, with Albert Moran, put together two of the most important film studies collections in film studies in this country; An Australian Film Reader (Moran and O’Regan, 1985), including a reprint of ‘Ride the High Country’ and The Australian Screen (Moran and O’Regan, 1989). Both books are considered accounts of the breadth of Australian film and television productions, as well as a snapshot of the kinds of film criticism. In this way, rather than simply a collection of available writings cobbled together for an anthology, both books bear the imprint of the editor’s engagement with and knowledge of Australian film and its scholarship, purposefully commissioning contributions and including historical documents for An Australian Film Reader. Recalling O’Regan’s characterisation of ‘Ride the High Country’ in the face of contemporary concerns such as research quality frameworks and Excellence in Research for Australia (ERAs), these collections contain an importance particular to their historical moment and it is possible to see these collections reiterating the concerns raised in the earlier articles as the Introduction tells us,

Just what is an Australian film? Is it equivalent to ‘Australian cinema’ or are they separate entities? Is Australian film merely the accumulated sum of films made in this country? Is it something more than that – or less? Should the local film distribution and exhibition sectors be included, or excluded on the basis that a good proportion of the films they circulate have not been made locally? And what – to grasp the thorniest nettle of all – is Australian about Australian film? Wherein does the Australian-ness reside? (Moran and O’Regan, 1985: 13)

An Australian Film Reader is described by the editors as ‘a series of voices about Australian film, without seeming (so far as we can tell) to have a definitive authorial voice of its own’ (Moran and O’Regan, 1985: 14), subscribing to the multifarious nature of Australian film from the 1920s to the, then, present. The Australian Screen continues the concern with ‘Australianness’ in the introduction and extends its purview to television, in the form of Albert Moran’s chapter ‘Crime, Romance, History: Television Drama’, (to be further realised in O’Regan et al.’s (1993) Australian Television Culture), and in the shadow of the resurgent nationalism occasioned by the bicentennial celebrations that swamped the country in 1988. But it is also possible to see an updating of the concerns of An Australian Film Reader to include issues of gender, class and ‘ethnicity’ in the form of Sean Maynard’s chapter on ‘Black (and White) Images: Aborigines and Film’. The Introduction also addresses the contemporary moment of the book’s appearance, particularly attempts to draw on past mythologies of nation and identity and to works that counter prevailing popular mythologising, exemplified by the Bicentennial, with more discursive and incisive accounts emerging from the cultural studies realm. The Editors write (Moran and O’Regan)

Recent critics such as [Tim] Rowse (Australian Liberalism and National Character) (Rowse, 1978), [Richard] White (Inventing Australia) (White, 1981), [Ross] Gibson (The Diminishing Paradise) (Gibson, 1984) and [Graeme] Turner (National Fictions) (Turner, 1983) have stepped back from the issue, arguing that the search for an essence or core is the search for an illusory object, a modern form of myth-making. The notion of Australia is not a fixed, transcendent one. Rather different people at different times have written and spoken about Australian in different ways. (Moran and O’Regan, 1989: xi)

This embracing of both ‘different ways that others have talked about Australia; tracing various histories of continuities and transformations in various national rhetorical figures’ could be transposed to O’Regan’s work in the early articles, these collections and on to Australian National Cinema.

The post-Bicentennial culture which gave rise to Australian National Cinema, at the same time as it draws through O’Regan’s earliest work, saw the emergence of the Prime Minister Paul Keating-inspired invocation of the discourses of multiculturalism and post-nationalism, particularly ‘Australia in Asia’, that became mainstays of O’Regan’s Australian (post) National Cinema book. Important to this formulation are Jon Stratton and Ien Ang’s ‘Multicultural Imagined Communities: Cultural Difference and National Identity in Australia and the USA’, from the Critical Multiculturalism Special Issue of Continuum that O’Regan edited in his last role as General Editor, and Anne Curthoys and Stephen Muecke’s ‘Australia, For Example’.

Like Rowse, White, Gibson and Turner, as mentioned earlier, Stratton and Ang (1994) address the discourse of multiculturalism in this country compared to the United States, proposing a notion following Benedict Anderson, of ‘a multicultural imagined community . . . located . . . away from an imagining of the national community in terms of a homogenous “way of life”’ (p. 148), as it functions in official policy discourse. Most of the concluding arguments here are to do with ‘the mainstreaming of multiculturalism in Australia’ (Stratton and Ang, 1994: 151), a notion that is of obvious appeal to film and television scholars, and is one of the motivations of Australian National Cinema’s discussions of Strictly Ballroom (1992), a key film here, alongside Moving Out (1983), They’re a Weird Mob (1966), Gino (1994), Traps (1994), Nirvana Street Murder (1991) and others.

Curthoys and Muecke’s (1993) ‘Australia, For Example’ in the anthology The Republicanism Debate attempts to distinguish the notion of post-nationalism from multiculturalism, seen in Stratton and Ang’s conception, that ‘as a term does not yet describe anything readily apparent in terms of policy or popular activity’ but mainly ‘to indicate a renewed sense of Australian national identity . . . in a context where philosophically and politically Australia is conceived as a multiplicity composed of changing cultural, governmental industrial and economic strands’ (pp. 177–178). This appeal, for Curthoys and Muecke (1993: 178), are understood as new developments among the intelligentsia and the mass media which signal a newer post-nationalism which rhymes well with O’Regan’s theorising of national cinema formation in terms of ‘an unprincipled assemblage’ and a discursive multiplicity.

In the Interview I did with O’Regan (Williams, 2009b), he agrees that Australian National Cinema can be seen as an accumulation of all his previous work, as a magnum opus, but is careful to understand it as something larger than that ‘to the many preoccupations of the Murdoch [University] agenda of the 1980s and 90s’:

There’s bits and pieces in there that have echoes of having been an interlocutor with the likes of Ien Ang and John Hartley; of Rita Felski and Horst Ruthrof, of Alec McHoul and Krishna Sen, of John Frow and Vijay Mishra, of Dona Kolar-Panov and Steve Mickler, of John Darling and Jeff Malpas over a sustained period. They each gave me a part of the picture and contributed to the shape of the book and the kinds of questions it asks. (‘The Circulation of Ideas’)

In a post-national, post-neo-liberal university multiplicity Tom’s deferral to authorship as ‘an unprincipled assemblage’, of his role as editor, an interlocutor, a convenor of occasions for ideas, as a curator diminishes his significant role in fashioning a unique model for what is, at once, Australian (Post) National Cinema.