Adrian Danks - American–Australian Cinema: Transnational Connections

The Author(s) 2018

Adrian Danks 1, Stephen Gaunson 1 and Peter C. Kunze 2

In the opening pages of his seminal book, Australian National Cinema , Tom ORegan poses a series of pertinent questions to help foreground and reframe the study of Australian cinema: What are the uses of Australian cinema for those who consume, speak, write about and produce its films? What is Australian cinema in the situations it creates and finds itself located in? How do diverse actors make sense of Australian cinema? In this book, American-Australian Cinema: Transnational Connections , we test and expand ORegans overarching national cinema thesis by focusing on the notion of Australian cinema as an international industry profoundly influenced by and dependent on the United States. Some 20 years after the publication of ORegans book, in an increasingly convergent, globalized Hollywood, these questions remain of enduring importance for scholars of Australian cinema as a national film culture, cultural industry and key player in world cinema.

Such an approach is, of course, not unprecedented. For example, in 1968, writing upon the American influence on Australian cinema management, Ruth Megaw argued that the history of the local national industry was dominated and defined by US production, distribution and exhibition. This dependence is an outcome of Australias stunted boom and bust production history and shared language with Hollywood as well as the failure of an often closely aligned British cinema to achieve the levels of success and productivity of the USA in terms of film production and exhibition practices. The Australian cinema-going public mostly watches films from the US and about the US. Over the passage of the last 100 years, little has changed. The US has continued to be a key reference point and sphere of influence for many Australian institutions, cultural industries and works of popular entertainment. Even some of the countrys most distinctively Australian identities and products are American in origin. While both Nicole Kidman and Mel Gibson were born in the US, two New York brothers, William M. and Ralph R. Foster, also founded Fosters Lager, the iconic Australian beer brewing company, in the 1880s. One of Australias most famous institutions and brands of the nineteenth century, the transportation stagecoach company, Cobb & Co., was also of US origininitially trading under the name of the American Telegraph Line of Coaches. Nevertheless, close examination of the cultures ongoing connections, particularly in regards to film production and culture, remains limited.

Australian cinema has been little different in terms of the profound impact of these ongoing American cultural influences. Though Australia produced cinemas first feature filmCharles Taits The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906the industry that developed in its wake has continued to operate in the shadow of Hollywood-controlled production, distribution and exhibition. Since at least the 1920s, Australian cinema has been marked by an ongoing series of imperial, offshore, international and transnational productions that have sometimes dominated its international reputation, ranging from For the Term of His Natural Life (Norman Dawn, 1927), The Overlanders (Harry Watt, 1946) and On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959) to Babe (Chris Noonan, 1995), The Matrix (The Wachowski Brothers, 1999) and Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015). Nevertheless, as Deb Verhoeven argues, what Australian consumers want and seek out most often has almost no relationship to the national agenda or the general quest for a national cultural identity in the cinema. Regardless of these mercurial tastes and cultural and economic imperatives, there has been insufficient research conducted on the diversity of Australian audiences and filmmakers or that examines the USs culturally rewarding and significant influence upon the sustainability of the Australian film industry.

As this book explores, the Australian cinema, largely through the practices of production, distribution, exhibition and reception, has continued to be indebted and attached to US cinema as well as to a more broadly defined Hollywood style of filmmaking. Although Britain also cast a significant influence on the Australian film industry from the 1920s through the 1960s, the increased dominance of US modes of production, exhibition and distribution, as well as the tastes of local audiences, reflect a shift in core Australian values, economic imperatives and spheres of influence towards the US across the mid-twentieth century. This is a development melancholically critiqued, through the dramatization of the fate of rival Australian newsreel companies (based on the two major Australian outfits, Cinesound and Movietone News) in the 1940s and 1950s, in one of the most celebrated and emblematic works of the 1970s feature film revival, Phillip Noyces Newsfront (1978). The vision summoned by Noyces ultimately deflating narrative is of a marginalized Australian film industry struggling to maintain a local perspective while being squeezed out by the imperial dominance of British and American production, distribution and exhibition interests (with the US largely winning out). Newsfront highlights the perennial dilemma of trying to get Australian content onto screens dominated by increasingly globalized modes of film consumption.

Many films made in Australia also reflect the inspiration of other significant cinemas and filmmaking movements such as the nouvelle vague , Griersonian documentary, contemporary Asian cinemas, European art cinema and international variations on the western. However, Hollywood has long provided the key source of stylistic and narrative influence on Australian filmmaking as well as a significant point of reference and aspiration for various actors, directors and other production personnel including figures such as J. P. McGowan, Errol Flynn, John Farrow, Shirley Ann Richards, Hugh Jackman, Orry-Kelly, Mel Gibson, Dion Beebe, Gillian Armstrong, Bruce Beresford, James Wan, Toni Collette and Cate Blanchett. Because Australian films rarely achieve more than negligible penetration of the US market, Australian cinema commonly celebrates figures working successfully in America, such as in Gillian Armstrongs documentary championing Australian costume designer Orry-Kelly, Women Hes Undressed (2015), or embraces the influence of American genre movies through documentaries such as Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (Mark Hartley, 2008) and Into the Shadows (Andrew Scarano, 2009). As outlined above, over the last 100 years US cinema has also come to define the core expectations of most Australian audiences. This is still true despite the increased presence of a variety of other large-scale film industries in Australia such as Bollywood and its use of the country as a location for both post-production and to stage narratives about the burgeoning global Indian diaspora.

But relying on a deferential, even dependent relationship is not the most useful strategy for understanding the enduring industrial and cultural relationship between Australian and American cinemas. The preference for the more commonly used term Hollywood cinema over American or US cinema reflects a notion of US-produced cinema as a largely symbolic center; though much business is still conducted in Los Angeles, the funding, talent and inspirations for these films come from around the world, and many of the most successful Hollywood movies in recent years have been filmed or digitally produced outside of Hollywood and even the USA itself. Particularly significant Australia-filmed productions in this mode include The Matrix (The Wachowski Brothers, 1999 and 2003) series, the three Star Wars (George Lucas, 1999, 2002, 2005) prequels, Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001), Peter Pan (P. J. Hogan, 2003), Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze, 2009) and The Great Gatsby (Luhrmann, 2013). Over the last 30 years, the majority of these productions have utilized the state-of-the-art studios built in Sydney, Melbourne and on the Gold Coast: Fox Studios, Docklands Studios and Village Roadshow Studios, respectively. In response, we should now aim to pursue an examination of national cinema that simultaneously acknowledges this creative and economic interdependence as well as the tenuousness of a stubborn insistence on the firm boundaries and borders of national cinema. Following the lead of scholars such as Ben Goldsmith, it is more effective to think of Australian cinema through the parameters of a vibrant and ever-shifting international cinema rather than a stunted boom and bust national cinema.