Therese Davis

Australian cinema after Mabo

Part I. Australian Cinema and the History Wars: 1. Backtracking after Mabo 2. Home and abroad in Moulin Rouge, The Dish and Lantana 3. Elites and battlers in Australian Rules and Walking on Water 4. Mediating memory in Mabo - life of an Island Man Part II. Landscape and belonging after Mabo: 5. Aftershock and the desert landscape in Heavens Burning, The Last Days of Chez Nous, Holy Smoke, Serenades, Yolngu Boy, The Missing 6. Coming from the country in Heartland, Cunnamulla and Message from Moree 7. Coming from the the city in The Castle, Vacant Possession, Strange Planet and Radiance Part III. Grief, Trauma and Coming of Age: 8. Lost, stolen and found in Rabbit-Proof Fence 9. Escaping history and shame in Looking for Alibrandi, Head On and Beneath Clouds 10. Sustaining grief in Japanese Story and Dreaming in Motion.

Remembering our ancestors: cross-cultural collaboration and the mediation of Aboriginal culture and history in Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer, 2006)

Abstract In 2000, maverick Australian director Rolf de Heer began a collaboration with Australian Aboriginal screen legend David Gulpilil to make a film set in Gulpilils traditional lands in North Eastern Arnhem Land. The result of the collaboration is the new feature Ten Canoes (2006). For Gulpilil the project represented an opportunity to launch careers in film for members of his community, including his son Jamie Gulpilil (who plays the lead role). He has also stated that ‘the film will allow people from the community and around the world to know how our ancestors lived and to understand them’. In order to try to achieve this, de Heer took on the challenging task he describes as ‘fusing two very different storytelling traditions’. Drawing on the documentary Balanda and the Bark Canoes (2006) (also known as Making Ten Canoes) and other sources, this article goes behind the scenes to examine processes of cross-cultural collaboration and intercultural fusion. It argues the film shows that while stories have different forms and functions in different societies, one story can be made to serve two different cultural requirements and, further, in doing so can expand possibilities for both cross-cultural recognition and cinema.

Disputing history, remembering country in The Tracker and Rabbit‐Proof Fence

This essay takes issue with newspaper pundits, academic film critics and historians who seek in their respective professional ways to bar ‘history’ films from counting as ‘good cinema’ or who decry cinemas capacity for doing ‘real history’. Paying particular attention to the reappearance of the figures of the lost child and the black tracker in recent Australian cinema, we propose that history films be understood in terms of spectatorship rather than historical representation. Drawing on concepts of shock, recognition and nachtraglichkeit, we approach lost child and black tracker films as deferred revisions that invite the viewer to perform a cinematic kind of backtracking—that is, going over old ground in ways that may lead one to retract or reverse ones opinion.

Offshore processes: international perspectives on Australian film and television

The focus of this special issue of Continuum is on the international or ‘offshore’ life of Australian film and television, shifting attention away from questions of national selfimage to the international reception of Australian screen media and the intercultural interactions of its production, both past and present. The volume responds to a gap in critical responses to what Ben Goldsmith has dubbed ‘the international turn’ in Australian film and television. Much of the work to date on the current wave of internationalization of Australian screen production has tended to focus on policy, industry practices and economics rather than on cultural circulations across borders. It also tends to overlook the long history of international exchange in Australian cultural production and reception. The articles in this special issue redress these omissions by developing new historical, aesthetic and cultural critical frameworks for analysing ‘offshore processing’ in the creation of Australian screen content and the intercultural interactions of its reception in Australia and internationally. The essays have a strong dialogic connection, having been developed from papers presented by leading scholars across the fields of screen studies, cultural history, communications and cultural studies at the interdisciplinary symposium ‘Offshore Processes: International Perspectives on Australian Film and Television’, auspiced by Monash University in Prato, Italy, in 2012. Inspired by the symposium’s distinguished guest speakers, Professor Meaghan Morris and Professor Graeme Turner, who, in their different ways, have and continue to internationalize Australian cultural studies, this event was integrated with a mini film festival highlighting transnational and cosmopolitan aspects of Australian film and television. Opening with an outdoor screening of Baz Lurhmann’s Australia in the ruins of a medieval castle, dubbed in Italian to operatic effect, and illuminated in a keynote address by Professor Meaghan Morris, the festival featured work that is often sidelined in studies of Australian cinema such as genre and ozploitation film, Indigenous filmmaking, children’s television, diasporic shorts, women’s filmmaking and experimental film, some of which are discussed in this special issue. Contributors have been encouraged to engage with theories of post-nationalism, transnational cinema, post-colonialism and concepts from other fields to develop new frames for understanding Australian film and television. In preference to national roots, there is an interest in transnational routes of Australian screen culture and production, such as representation of the Australian–Asian relationship, work emerging from diasporic communities, themes and stories that inherently cross national borders, such as travel, immigration and war, indigenous filmmakers’ engagement with popular genres in crossover cinema, the relationship of revisionist transnational historical scholarship on historical documentary and the different offshore readings of Australian films. The articles in this volume cover a wide range of related areas, raising new issues in transnational film and television production and its viewing contexts both contemporary and historically.

Beyond good/should/bad: Teaching Australian Indigenous film and television

In this article I want to consider the procedure whereby a film or television series is constructed as socially ‘good’, thus becoming something ‘worthy’, and how worthiness in turn leads to something ‘bad’ for spectators and viewers, in the sense that these films become something we feel we should see rather than something we want to see. I am interested in exploring how this procedure has shaped recent popular reception of Indigenous film and television in Australia. I also want to consider in what ways this ‘should’ factor contributes to non-Indigenous student pre-conceptions of Indigenous film. Following on from Belinda Smaill’s article (in this issue), I want to reflect on the problem of why many students in my courses think of Indigenous film as a ‘bad learning experience’: a boring and uninteresting topic. By Indigenous film I mean both the many films that have been produced by nonIndigenous filmmakers about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their culture as well as a large body of films, videos and television programs produced since the late 1970s by Australian Indigenous filmmakers and communities. These productions, which range from videos produced by Indigenous media organizations in Indigenous languages for very localized consumption, to mainstream television documentaries and feature films, as well as experimental film and multimedia works exhibited in galleries, are a distinctive and vital component of the Australian national cinema. Unfortunately this body of work has suffered from some of the general perceptions applied to Australian film that Jodi Brooks mentions in her introduction (to this forum). Australian films are perceived by many (including Film Studies students) as a form of bad cinema – ‘bad copies’ of international styles. In the case of Indigenous-authored film and television this perception is complicated by a double manoeuvre whereby they are seen not only as bad copies of international styles but also as ‘too white’, that is as culturally inauthentic or bad cultural objects, particularly works produced by urban Indigenous filmmakers (Peters-Little 2001). Less noted is the more recent trend of framing Indigenous film and television in the discourses Brooks refers to as a peculiarly Australian form of white liberal guilt. In these instances Indigenous film and television is characterized as ‘worthy’ – films and series that should be seen by non-Indigenous filmgoers and viewers as an act of civic duty or political solidarity or even, perhaps, as a way of assuaging white guilt about our colonial

Australian Indigenous Screen in the 2000s: Crossing into the Mainstream

This chapter examines two key strategies pursued by Australian Indigenous screen producers in pursuit of mainstream reception: cross-cultural ‘cross-over’ features, and Indigenous-produced and themed primetime television drama and reality television formats. This chapter also argues that whilst there is much to celebrate about the new wave of Indigenous screen production, there is also a critical imperative to closely analyse the different textual strategies employed by Indigenous screen creatives’ use of the mainstream as a space of cross-cultural exchange.

Australian Cinema After Mabo : Trauma, Grief and Coming of Age

Part I. Australian Cinema and the History Wars: 1. Backtracking after Mabo 2. Home and abroad in Moulin Rouge, The Dish and Lantana 3. Elites and battlers in Australian Rules and Walking on Water 4. Mediating memory in Mabo - life of an Island Man Part II. Landscape and belonging after Mabo: 5. Aftershock and the desert landscape in Heavens Burning, The Last Days of Chez Nous, Holy Smoke, Serenades, Yolngu Boy, The Missing 6. Coming from the country in Heartland, Cunnamulla and Message from Moree 7. Coming from the the city in The Castle, Vacant Possession, Strange Planet and Radiance Part III. Grief, Trauma and Coming of Age: 8. Lost, stolen and found in Rabbit-Proof Fence 9. Escaping history and shame in Looking for Alibrandi, Head On and Beneath Clouds 10. Sustaining grief in Japanese Story and Dreaming in Motion.

Australian Cinema After Mabo : Acknowledgments

Part I. Australian Cinema and the History Wars: 1. Backtracking after Mabo 2. Home and abroad in Moulin Rouge, The Dish and Lantana 3. Elites and battlers in Australian Rules and Walking on Water 4. Mediating memory in Mabo - life of an Island Man Part II. Landscape and belonging after Mabo: 5. Aftershock and the desert landscape in Heavens Burning, The Last Days of Chez Nous, Holy Smoke, Serenades, Yolngu Boy, The Missing 6. Coming from the country in Heartland, Cunnamulla and Message from Moree 7. Coming from the the city in The Castle, Vacant Possession, Strange Planet and Radiance Part III. Grief, Trauma and Coming of Age: 8. Lost, stolen and found in Rabbit-Proof Fence 9. Escaping history and shame in Looking for Alibrandi, Head On and Beneath Clouds 10. Sustaining grief in Japanese Story and Dreaming in Motion.

Australian Cinema After Mabo : Frontmatter

Part I. Australian Cinema and the History Wars: 1. Backtracking after Mabo 2. Home and abroad in Moulin Rouge, The Dish and Lantana 3. Elites and battlers in Australian Rules and Walking on Water 4. Mediating memory in Mabo - life of an Island Man Part II. Landscape and belonging after Mabo: 5. Aftershock and the desert landscape in Heavens Burning, The Last Days of Chez Nous, Holy Smoke, Serenades, Yolngu Boy, The Missing 6. Coming from the country in Heartland, Cunnamulla and Message from Moree 7. Coming from the the city in The Castle, Vacant Possession, Strange Planet and Radiance Part III. Grief, Trauma and Coming of Age: 8. Lost, stolen and found in Rabbit-Proof Fence 9. Escaping history and shame in Looking for Alibrandi, Head On and Beneath Clouds 10. Sustaining grief in Japanese Story and Dreaming in Motion.

Australian Cinema After Mabo : Landscape and Belonging after Mabo

Part I. Australian Cinema and the History Wars: 1. Backtracking after Mabo 2. Home and abroad in Moulin Rouge, The Dish and Lantana 3. Elites and battlers in Australian Rules and Walking on Water 4. Mediating memory in Mabo - life of an Island Man Part II. Landscape and belonging after Mabo: 5. Aftershock and the desert landscape in Heavens Burning, The Last Days of Chez Nous, Holy Smoke, Serenades, Yolngu Boy, The Missing 6. Coming from the country in Heartland, Cunnamulla and Message from Moree 7. Coming from the the city in The Castle, Vacant Possession, Strange Planet and Radiance Part III. Grief, Trauma and Coming of Age: 8. Lost, stolen and found in Rabbit-Proof Fence 9. Escaping history and shame in Looking for Alibrandi, Head On and Beneath Clouds 10. Sustaining grief in Japanese Story and Dreaming in Motion.