Australian Cinema

Abstract

The cinema of Australia has been the subject of continual, complex, and interdisciplinary scrutiny since the revival of feature film production in that country in the 1970s. Although limited academic and populist writing on Australian cinema predated the film revival, a wealth of contemporary and retrospective studies have appeared since the reemergence of Australian filmmaking on the national and international stages. Frequently, such works have been inflected with film, cultural, and media studies agendas quite apart from or in addition to the discourses of national cinema, identity, and representation that energized the filmmaking in the first place. Equally frequently, the output of Australian cinema has been studied in parallel with television, as well as with the cinema of New Zealand. The initial crop of industry-based analyses, thematically unified readings of film production, and the monograph concentration on outstanding director figures (as the currency of auteurism and the gold standard of national cinemas) has been complemented (and complicated) more recently by focused studies on issues of gender, ethnicity, Aboriginality, sexuality, and diasporic representation. These works have redressed the critical concentration on history, nation, and identity by encompassing and acknowledging an appropriate plurality of histories, nations, and identities on show in Australia’s filmmaking. Since 2000, increasing emphasis in academic treatments has been placed on diversity of representations and practitioners, and on the contemporary transnational context in which Australian films strive to make a commercial and cultural impact. Expanding consciousness of Indigenous cultural representation, and the critical recognition of Indigenous filmmakers, has significantly and necessarily reoriented debates around national identity and representation in the film industry and its products.