Stephen Gaunson

Australian (Inter)national Cinema: The Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry in Australia, 1926–1928., Australasian Films Ltd. and the American monopoly

ABSTRACT Despite Australia being one of the most robust and progressive film industries during the early years of moving pictures, it experienced a significant decline in film production from 1915. Whether this decline was a direct result of poor government policy is something that the Royal Commission on the motion picture industry in Australia 1926–1928. investigated. Marking a significant, yet terribly neglected moment of Australian film history, the Commission surveyed a variety of issues which had stunted the development of the national Australian cinema. By surveying the early period of the Australian cinema, in this article I will discuss how the Royal Commissions recommendations pushed for the national industry to become more active within the Hollywood world cinema model.

American combine: Australasian Films Ltd., and block bookings

The 1927–1928 Commonwealth Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry in Australia followed a series of public inquiries into the Australian cinema. One agenda of the Commission was to examine the dominance of American movies in Australian film exhibition. By concentrating on how the Commission explored this issue, as it related to the exhibition and distribution of Hollywood movies in Australia, here I will consider the extent to which Australian exhibition has been guided by and dependent on American movies. With the Commission established, in part, to explore the accusation of an American combine ruling the exhibition industry, and stunting the local production sector, the real question was whether the Commissioners would be persuaded to make recommendations to wrest the powers from America, and consequently redirect the local exhibition industrys dependence on Hollywood movies.

American Cartel: Block Bookings and the Paramount Plan

This chapter investigates how the Australian film industry was historically shaped during its formative period by the block booking contract system, which flooded Australia cinema screens with popular American films. While the block booking strategy did not last, Australia’s obsession with American cinema did, to the point where exhibitors today are still dependent on filling their venues with the latest craze from America. By concentrating on the silent period of 1909–1927, this chapter discusses a number of significant shifts in film exhibition that transformed Australian cinema from an independent and self-sufficient industry into a local Hollywood.

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.

Cinema plus: Robert Connolly and event audience screenings

ABSTRACT This article discusses the problems that Australian films face in the big distribution model, and ways thatproducers have rethought how their films are funded and distributed. To do this it uses the case study of Robert ConnollysCinema Plus exhibition company. Although there is a historical precedence set for Connollys self-distribution venture, this shiftto rethink how Australian films are being distributed and exhibited is certainly representative of a changing reassessment of theporous relationship between production and exhibition, which for some time Screen Australia demarcated in by two separatepools. What Cinema Plus represents is a recognition that conventional big distribution is not always the most effective way toreach the widest possible audience.

White Male History: The Genre and Gender of The Proposition

John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (2005) is a critically acclaimed movie that has been widely lauded for its brutal and violent depictions of Australia’s colonial history. In film scholarship, questions regarding the film’s genre, representation and its treatment of colonial history are far from settled. A key issue is that The Proposition avoids historical verisimilitude in favour of baroque allegory. Because the film invents a fictional history, some scholars have reconsidered the text in terms of film genre. Yet, as this chapter argues, the film’s attempt to develop a subversive depiction of colonial Australian violence is limited by the film’s formulaic approach to genre and an orthodox representation of settler Australia.

Lost adaptations: piracy, ‘Rip Offs’, and the Australian Copyright Act 1905

By investigating the early Australian feature films, through the Australian Copyright Act 1905, begins a discussion on the emerging industrialisation of patent and copyright law, which did not recognise celluloid pictures as matter that could be copyrighted. With the Act formed to provide authors greater powers to stop the proliferation of degraded versions of their work, film-makers came to adaptation as a strategy to legally protect their moving pictures from copyright infringements. By concentrating on the Australian cinema’s early tradition of adaptation, during the nascent period of film production (1906–1911), in this article, I will discuss how film-makers at, and outside of, the cinema were encouraged to engage with feature films as adaptation – and what this culturally meant. In a time of uncontrolled piracy and plagiarism ‘rip offs’, adaptations of popular works became a means for producers to copyright their films. And it was through this Act that the tradition of Australian adaptation began. By investigating the industrial factors behind where, why and how this tradition was culturally and socially shaped will identify by what means adaptation was spawned from the industry of copyright in a time where film-makers were trying to distinguish their works in a crowded field of film production and exhibition.

Introduction to re-evaluating the Royal Commission into the Australian Moving Picture Industry, 1927–1928

Welcome to this special issue on ‘Re-evaluating the Royal Commission into the Australian Moving Picture Industry, 1927–1928’. Although nearly 90 years have passed since that Royal Commission, the concerns it addressed remain relevant today: how to protect the local film industry, and how to regulate the dominance of American movies. It is perhaps this reason as to why researchers, scholars, students and teachers keep returning to the Commission as away to make sense of the complexities that continue to define the Australian cinema industry. The Commission heard its first evidence on 2 June 1927, and delivered its final report in April 1928. During the 1920s, countries around the world held public inquiries into the film industry and calls for an Australian Royal Commission into the motion picture industry were made ‘as early as 1921’, writes current contributor Mike Walsh in a 2004 paper (‘Motion Picture Distributors Association’, 16). The 1925 Sydney and Melbourne hearings of the Commonwealth Tariff Board, one of many precursors, debated a proposed increase of duty levied on imported films. The hearings, and the articles about them in trade journals and daily newspapers, revealed that Australian film producers believed an ‘American combine’ was acting against the interests of Australian filmmakers and independent exhibitors. But, writes Walsh, beyond the concerns of film industry personnel, the debates had a broader political nature:

Watching films: new perspectives on movie-going, exhibition and reception

In this book of insightful chapters on new approaches to the study of the cinema (cinema studies), its paradox is indeed the title – Watching Films – for it offers marginal attention to the theory ...

Marvellous Melbourne: Lady filmgoers, Spencer’s Pictures and Cozens Spencer

This article addresses the dual topic of exhibition and production by exploring showman Cozens Spencer’s popular Australian documentary, Marvellous Melbourne: Queen City of the South (Spencer’s Pictures 1910). The story of this film is the role that women played – not just in the city, but in relation to the cinema: as filmgoers, workers and on-screen characters. And indeed, by focusing on Marvellous Melbourne, much can be drawn from the ways that Spencer’s on-screen moving pictures were speaking to his ‘movie mad’ filmgoers. Evidenced in a film such as this, I am suggesting that its modern narrative – which concentrates on the modern city, and modern women in motion within the city – is very much engaged with Spencer’s endeavour to provide his audience with a modern cinema experience, illuminating the fantasy and romance of a technocentric and cultured city. But before discussing how Marvellous Melbourne represented its target demographic on screen, it is equally important first to ask how it became central to the sort of city cinema programme that Spencer was attempting to create.