Mark David Ryan

Whither Culture? Australian Horror Films and the Limitations of Cultural Policy:

Cultural policy that attempts to foster the Australian film industrys growth and development in an era of globalisation is coming under increasing pressure. Throughout the 2000s, there has been a substantial boom in Australian horror films led by ‘runaway’ horror film Saw (2004), Wolf Creek (2005) and Undead (2003), achieving varying levels of popularity and commercial success worldwide. However, emerging within a national cinema driven by public subsidy and valuing ‘quality’ and ‘cultural content’ over ‘entertainment’ and ‘commercialism’, horror films have generally been antithetical to these objectives. Consequently, the recent boom in horror films has occurred largely outside the purview and subvention of cultural policy. This paper argues that global forces and emerging production and distribution models are challenging the ‘narrowness’ of cultural policy — a narrowness that mandates a particular film culture, circumscribes certain notions of value and limits the variety of films produced domestically. Despite their low-culture status, horror films have been well suited to the Australian film industrys financial limitations; they are a growth strategy for producers and a training ground for emerging filmmakers.

From Multimedia to Digital Content and Applications: Remaking Policy for the Digital Content Industries

This article analyses the two policy moments of digital content industries policy development of the Keating (1992–96) and Howard (2001–04) governments. In bringing these two moments into dialogue, our aim is to illuminate and evaluate the broader policy frameworks, and the political and policy contexts, which gave rise to and subsequently shaped these different digital content strategies. The Keating government connected culture and services to harness multimedia as a vehicle for cultural expression and as a new economically viable growth industry suited to a convergent information age. The Howard governments innovation agenda has reconstructed industry development priorities for the digital content industries, influencing their conception as inputs and enablers for both the ICT and broader industries in an information economy framework. The article concludes with an evaluation of the assumptions and priorities, shortcomings and advantages of these two quite different approaches to developing digital content industries.

Rethinking genre studies through distribution analysis: issues in international horror movie circuits

The existence of any film genre depends on the effective operation of distribution networks. Contingencies of distribution play an important role in determining the content of individual texts and the characteristics of film genres; they enable new genres to emerge at the same time as they impose limits on generic change. This paper sets out an alternative way of doing genre studies, based on an analysis of distributive circuits rather than film texts or generic categories. Our objective is to provide a conceptual framework that can account for the multiple ways in which distribution networks leave their traces on film texts and audience expectations, with specific reference to international horror networks, and to offer some preliminary suggestions as to how distribution analysis can be integrated into existing genre studies methodologies.

Worlds apart?: finance and investment in creative industries in the People's Republic of China and Latin America

This paper examines financing and investment structures in the film, television, and music industries of the Peoples Republic of China and Latin America. In both regions governments aspire to nurture high-value export-orientated creative sectors. Likewise, creators, producers, and distributors are increasingly targeting lucrative international markets, particularly culturally and linguistically proximate communities. However, while government policies can assist in domestic growth and in facilitating exports, it is synergy between financial and creative inputs into production, distribution, and marketing that determines success or failure.

A silver bullet for Australian cinema? Genre movies and the audience debate

ABSTRACT There has been a renaissance in Australian genre cinema in recent years. Indeed, not since the 1980s have Australian genre movies across action, adventure, horror and science fiction among others, experienced such prominence within production, policy discourse and industry debate. Genre movies, typically associated with commercial film-making and entertainment, have been identified as a strategy to improve the box-office performance of Australian feature films and to attract larger audiences. Much of this conversation has revolved around the question of whether or not genre can deliver on these high expectations and transform the unpredictable local film industry into a popular and profitable commercial production sector. However, this debate for the most part has been disconnected from analysis of Australias genre movie heritage in terms of their position within Australian cinema and their reception with domestic audiences, and how this correlates to contemporary trends. As this article argues, genre production is not a silver bullet that will single-handedly improve the Australian feature film industrys commercial performance. Genre movies have occupied, and continue to occupy, a difficult position within Australian cinema and face numerous challenges in terms of reception with national audiences, limited production scale and enterprise structures, and ongoing tensions between culture and commerce.

Australian cinema's dark sun: the boom in Australian horror film production

ABSTRACT There has been a boom in Australian horror movie production in recent years. Daybreakers (2010), Wolf Creek (2005), Rogue (2007), Undead (2003), Black Water (2008), and Storm Warning (2006), among others, have all experienced varying degrees of popularity, mainstream visibility and cult success in worldwide horror markets. While Aussie horrors renaissance is widely acknowledged in industry literature, there is limited research into the extent of the boom and the dynamics of production. Consequently, there are few explanations for why and how this surge has occurred. This article argues that the recent growth in Australian horror films has been driven by intersecting international market forces, domestic financing factors and technological change. In so doing, it identifies two distinct tiers of Australian horror film production: ‘mainstream’ and ‘underground’ production, though overlap between these two tiers results in ‘high-end indie’ films capable of cinema release. Each tier represents the high and low ends of Australian horror film production, each with different financing, production and distribution models.

Towards an understanding of Australian genre cinema and entertainment: Beyond the limitations of ‘Ozploitation’ discourse

While Australian cinema has produced popular movie genres since the 1970s, including action/adventure, road movies, crime, and horror movies, genre cinema has occupied a precarious position within a subsidized national cinema and has been largely written out of film history. In recent years the documentary Not Quite Hollywood (2008) has brought Australias genre movie heritage from the 1970s and 1980s back to the attention of cinephiles, critics and cult audiences worldwide. Since its release, the term ‘Ozploitation’ has become synonymous with Australian genre movies. In the absence of discussion about genre cinema within film studies, Ozploitation (and ‘paracinema’ as a theoretical lens) has emerged as a critical framework to fill this void as a de facto approach to genre and a conceptual framework for understanding Australian genres movies. However, although the Ozploitation brand has been extremely successful in raising the awareness of local genre flicks, Ozploitation discourse poses problems for film studies, and its utility is limited for the study of Australian genre movies. This paper argues that Ozploitation limits analysis of genre movies to the narrow confines of exploitation or trash cinema and obscures more important discussion of how Australian cinema engages with popular movie genres, the idea of Australian filmmaking as entertainment, and the dynamics of commercial filmmaking practises more generally.

Defining entertainment: an approach

Entertainment is a key cultural category. Yet the definition of entertainment can differ depending upon whom one asks. This article maps out understandings of entertainment in three key areas. Within industrial discourses, entertainment is defined by a commercial business model. Within evaluative discourses used by consumers and critics, it is understood through an aesthetic system that privileges emotional engagement, story, speed and vulgarity. Within academia, entertainment has not been a key organizing concept within the humanities, despite the fact that it is one of the central categories used by producers and consumers of culture. It has been important within psychology, where entertainment is understood in a solipsistic sense as being anything that an individual finds entertaining. Synthesizing these approaches, the authors propose a cross-sectoral definition of entertainment as ‘audience-centred commercial culture’.

Film, Cinema, Screen

Screen industries around the globe are evolving. While technological change has been slower to take effect upon the Australian film industry than other creative sectors such as music and publishing, all indications suggest that local screen practices are in a process of fundamental change. Fragmenting audiences, the growth of digital video, distribution and exhibition, the potential for entirely new forms of cultural expression, the proliferation of multi-platforms, and the importance of social networking and viral marketing in promoting products are challenging traditional approaches to filmmaking’. Moreover, there has been a marked transition in government policy rationales and funding models in recent years, resulting in the most significant overhaul of public finance structures for the film industry in almost 20 years. Film, Cinema, Screen evaluates the Australian film industrys recent development – particularly in terms of Australian feature film and television series production; it also advocates new approaches to Australian film and addresses critical issues around how screen production globally is changing, with implications for local screen industries.

Essays from the inaugural Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand conference (2016)

The essays gathered in this issue of Studies in Australasian Cinema are selected from, and broadly representative of, the methods and topics brought together at the inaugural SSAAANZ conference. Collectively, the essays speak to a broad conception of screen studies and diverse critical concerns across film and television exhibition and reception, documentary film, pedagogy and screen culture. Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams’ article analyses the cultural history of Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). Tessa Dwyer offers a detailed examination of the acclaimed television series Top of the Lake and the role cultural specificity and the authentic voice play in the context of transnational television. Simon Sigley investigates cinematic shifts in how Western Samoa was represented in three feature-length documentary films. Produced by the National Film Unit (NFU) of New Zealand between 1947 and 1962, the films cover a period during which ‘Samoa was administered as a United Nations (UN) trust territory by the New Zealand government’. Derived from a primary survey, Toija Cinque and Jordan Vincent’s article investigates the use of smart TVs and broadband-enabled mobile media devices for the viewing of movies, television programs and documentaries among other forms of screen content, often concurrently with social media devices, to understand audience practices in an increasingly fragmented mediascape. Vejune Zemaityte, Deb Verhoeven and Bronwyn Coate draw on big data in relation to feature film screenings and box office figures to interrogate the ‘10 per cent rule’ – the often made, but untested, claim in industry discourses that the Australian market represents 10 percent of the theatrical market for Hollywood films. Focussing on both Australian and US screening data from 2013, the article compares the popularity of selected American films in both the Australian and US markets to ‘contrast the differences that emerge in terms of distribution and exhibition’. Finally, Mark Ryan examines the pedagogy of screen content in undergraduate Australian screen studies courses. Together, the essays collected here provide a sense of the vibrancy and diversity of the research from the inaugural conference of Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, and anticipate its second conference, The Uses of Cinema: Film, Television, Screen, Monash University, Melbourne, November 21–23, 2018.