Adrian Danks

Australian International Pictures

This issue of Studies in Australasian Cinema is devoted to what might loosely be termed ‘Australian International Pictures’. It re-examines the concept and definition of Australian film in relation to a range of local, international and global practices and trends that blur neat categorizations of national cinema. Although this shift or ‘turn’ to international production or influence is particularly acute in relation to such developments as the opening of Fox Studios in Sydney in May 1998, it is in fact a key element of many stages in Australian film history. It incorporates overseas financed and conceived films shot in Australia, films that ‘imagine’ Australia from a significant distance, films that rely heavily on international models of production and genre, truly independent or transnational films that emerge from particular developments in international relations, international or even ‘foreign’ films that feature significant Australian personnel, and films shot within large studio complexes that just happen to be situated on Australia’s Eastern Seaboard. Such an approach even suggests a rethinking of what might be included within ‘Australian cinema’ to embrace or incorporate the dominant consumption patterns of local audiences (who mostly do not watch traditional ‘Australian’ films).

Rudimentary modernism: Ken G. Hall, Rear-Projection and 1930s Hollywood

In 1935, Australian filmmaker Ken G. Hall visited Hollywood to examine modern studio techniques. His main purchase on this trip was a rear-projection system, which he quickly put to rudimentary use on his 1936 feature, Thoroughbred. Primitive and modern, Hall’s often-maligned contribution to Australian film history needs to be re-examined. This chapter explores the ways this technology was utilized to modernize both production methods and transform the audience’s sense of space, time and place. It will compare the use of such devices as rear-projection and other techniques of studio production in Hall’s cinema of the 1930s and 1940s with that occurring in Hollywood at the same time to examine the forces impacting the Americanization of Australian popular culture during this period.

Where I’m Calling From: An American–Australian Cinema?

Australian cinema’s relationship with the United States has remained intricate, multifaceted and complicated. While film production and policy have expanded and become more complex, Australian cinema has remained an important exhibition and production network for the United States for over a hundred years. In the Introduction, we trace some of the material and expansive histories of this relationship by exploring the dynamic and shifting interactions between the two cinemas over time. As we argue, Australian cinema, largely through the practices of feature film 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. This Introduction is informed by the notion that Australian cinema has a deep, rich and complicated set of historical, economic and cultural relationships with the US that requires further acknowledgement and more detailed interrogation and discussion.

Picking Up the Pieces: Contemporary Australian Cinema and the Representation of Australian Film History

Australian cinema is generally under-populated by feature films and documentaries exploring its film history. A small number of works were produced between the 1960s and 1990s—including Forgotten Cinema (1967), Newsfront (1978) and The Celluloid Heroes (1995)—that acted to recognise a forgotten, if broadly conceptualised, history of Australian cinema and make claims for the resurgence and continuity of its ‘revival’. This chapter looks at a range of contemporary feature-length documentaries and feature films, including John Hughes’ The Archive Project (2006) and Mark Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood (2008), that question, revise and fragment this representation of Australian film history and its national cinema through the documentation of marginalised filmmakers and areas of film practice; specific case studies; and the direct or indirect citation of canonical examples of television, documentary and feature filmmaking.

South of Ealing: recasting a British studio's antipodean escapade

ABSTRACT The five films made in Australia by Ealing Studios in the 1940s and 1950s have largely been analysed and ‘reclaimed’ (by figures like Bruce Molloy) as key works of Australian National Cinema, movies that occupy and populate a period of meagre feature film production while reworking popular genres such as the Western and the crime film. Although these films can be read symptomatically in terms of their ‘localised’ renderings of landscape, character and narrative situation, they have seldom been discussed in relation to the broader patterns of Ealing film production, the studio’s preoccupation with interiorised communities, work, Britishness and small-scale settlements on the geographic fringes of Britain and the Empire (such as Whisky Galore!), and the various other films (such as the Kenya shot and set Where No Vultures Fly and West of Zanzibar) that light upon far-flung or peripheral locations and settlements. This essay re-examines the Ealing ‘adventure’ through a transnational lens that focuses attention on the largely unacknowledged parallels and production symmetries between films such as Eureka Stockade and those that sit within the ‘mainstream’ of the studio’s output (e.g. Passport to Pimlico). It also places these five films (The Overlanders, Eureka Stockade, Bitter Springs, The Shiralee and The Siege of Pinchgut) in relation to the broader commercial fate of the studio throughout the late 1940s and 1950s.

Living cinema: The demy films of Agnes Varda

ABSTRACT The string of four remarkable and often playful films that French/Belgian film-maker and visual artist Agnès Varda has made about her husband, Jacques Demy, since his death in October 1990—Jacquot de Nantes/Jacquot (1991); Les Demoiselles ont eu 25 ans/The Young Girls Turn 25 (1993); LUnivers de Jacques Demy/The World of Jacques Demy (1995) and Les Plages dAgnes/The Beaches of Agnès (2008)—represent one of the most extraordinary and intimate ‘tributes’ by one film-maker to another. Taken together these four often hybrid films revel in the shared aesthetic and domestic space of the two film-makers, beautifully and sometimes hauntingly capturing the corresponding and intertwined worlds of their professional and everyday lives. Combining and blurring conventional distinctions between documentary and fiction, these films explore film-making as a vital daily activity. They can also be considered as acts of mourning, attempts by Varda, over the space of almost twenty years, to come to terms with her husbands death as well as the realities of his existence. This article examines the ways in which each one of these films, alongside other works by Varda and Demy, returns to a corpus of specific ideas and preoccupations that revolve around the significance of place, personal biography, memory, everyday life and artistic inspiration within both film-makers cinemas.

‘I knew I should've taken that left turn at Albuquerque’: The Warner Bros. Cartoon down under

ABSTRACT There are many feature films made outside of Australia during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s that attempt to represent or ‘imagine’ specific histories or features of the Australian continent, particularly as a ‘landscape’. This article examines an under-analyzed series of films (containing similar characteristics) produced by the animation departments of major Hollywood studios during this same period. Its particular focus is upon two series of animated short subjects produced by the Warner Bros. studio in the period between the late 1940s and the early 1960s featuring the iconic ‘Australian’ characters Hippety Hopper and the Tasmanian Devil. It examines the ways in which these cartoons reinforce and in some respects depart from conventional representations of Australia in ‘international’ cinema (and also scrutinizes how they rarely move past a ‘partial’ representation of place). It also explores the ways in which the animated film allows for a freer expression of what might be called the ‘imagination’ of Australia, and how this relates to the often wilful, bizarre and non-realistic characterizations and stereotyping that appear within the frame and on the soundtrack. This article further interrogates how such textual practices relate to the broader characteristics of the animated film, the ‘imagination’ and representation of ‘other’ foreign places in Hollywood cinema more generally, and the ‘painterly’ image of Australia.

Hell's Highway, The Elusive Pimpernel, and Brewster McCloud

Manuela asks Ilse what von Bernburg said about her performance in a school play, Ilse tells Manuela that their teacher said nothing, but watched Manuela so closely, so intensely, that she seemed entirely entranced by her. This undeclared passion erupts at the party after the play, when Manuela becomes drunk on punch and declares her unending devotion (and desire) for Fräulein von Bernburg to the entire school of girls, and is soon isolated for her “insolence” by the Headmistress. Manuela becomes sickly and severely depressed when she discovers that her beloved teacher has also been forbidden to speak with her as well. This forced separation eventually leads to (among other things) von Bernburg’s resignation from her position at the school, which is intercut with the children’s dramatic search for a missing (and heartbroken) Manuela. This montage is made all the more dramatic by its effective use of sound: girls first whispering, then shouting Manuela’s name as they search the shadowy hallways and stairwells for her; the repeated clanging of the emergency bell once they’ve realized she’s truly missing; their running footsteps echoing through the cold and imposing corridors. In the film’s climactic moment, Manuela is saved, pulled from her precarious perch by her friends, and it is the Headmistress who, in the film’s last moments, walks the long staircase under the judging eyes of her pupils, and of the camera itself, as she retreats into her gloomy, forbidding office. Happily, the film refuses to neatly “explain” the relationship between Manuela and von Bernburg, because, really, what ending would be satisfactory? Their relationship, while intense, romantic, and just shy of specifically sexual, also treads in “messy” areas in terms of their age differences and the “pedagogical eros” at play in their attraction. This attraction, while upheld within the film as powerful and mutually beneficial, is nonetheless “morally” messy, and thus entirely captivating on the screen, even these eighty years later. Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform deserves the full “package” DVD treatment, with a documentary about the making of the film, featuring images of the cast and crew, a history of the film’s censorship, and a short biographical film devoted to Sagan, as well as digital re-mastering of the film’s sound and picture. In the best of all possible worlds, this new edition would also include the restoration of footage thought to be long lost to the censors. The film certainly deserves it, and one can dream, right?