‘An idleness bordering on the wacky’: Paul Cox and the contradictions of an Australian art cinema

Abstract

This study of the Australian filmmaker Paul Cox aims to tease out a number of contradictions in the institution of Australian art cinema from the 1970s to the present day. It looks at the cultural, social and historical factors which position Cox as a supposedly ‘maligned’ artist; the interpretive work of film criticism and analysis that helps construct the reception of his career; and recent changes in the arthouse sector that have ushered in first a critique and then a rehabilitation of his oeuvre. Beyond this socially defined circle of art, artist and art cinema, the publicly ‘repressed’ aspects of Cox's cinema that tend more to resemble the excluded arena of avant-garde production are explored.