Cross‐cultural reception studies: Culturally variant readings ofcrocodile dundee

Abstract

1. Cross-Cultural Reception Studies: Methodology As global image markets expand, so it becomes the more important to analyse the foreign receptions accorded to exported films. The cultural knowledges which a given film-viewing community brings to a given text will clearly affect both the readings made of it as well as its popularity. Eric Rentschler has valuably analysed the U.S. construction of New German Cinema in terms of the importer's ignoring the cultural specificities and production processes of the texts concerned, together with a corollary elevation of the author as prime source of meaning.1 Such dehistoricising moves encourage and reinforce the growing bland internationalism of much art cinema.2 Test screenings, audience surveys and market research specialists are amongst the divining rods used by producers and distributors to fathom films' likely market acceptabilities. Working post hoc, film historians would appear to be better placed to understand the reasons for success or failure than filmmakers are to predict successes, in their own or foreign markets. Yet surprisingly little work has been done in studies or, more particularly, in cross-cultural studies, beyond the sharing of anecdotes about culturally differential readings of given films, and impressionistic gestures about favourable overseas reception which usually serve jingoistic ends.3 Adequately large samples of reviews, however, offer the analyst the most reliable basis for systematic examination of readings of texts. For reviews are both opinion-leaders and responsible to the commonality of their readerships. No other source yields such detailed and condensed responses to texts, nor so readily allows the analyst to make symptomatic readings which sidestep the empiricist pitfalls of mass communications research methodology. A reliable sample needs to be considerably larger than the handful of reviews customarily cited as evidence of overseas success of, say, Australian product. Cross-cultural study can focus on different reading groups both within and between given nation-states. That I focus here on the latter is not to buy the nationalist fictions of any imagined political community4 or their homogenisations of class, gender, ethnic, regional and other differences. Theoretically, my international focus assumes the continued effectiveness of the nation as political unit,5 and refuses the miasmic transnational confusions of some of the further reaches of post-modernism. Methodologically, given the centrality of reviews as the major data source, analysis of different national readings yields a sufficiently large sample, whereas subcultural analyses could be supported only by small samples offering adequate bases for analytical comparison. Crocodile Dundee was selected for analysis as being internationally the most successful Australian film ever made, the tip of an inglorious iceberg of Australian films of the mid-1980s which sought to break into the lucrative U.S. market and mostly ended up as cable fodder.6 Three criteria obtained in the selection of the two samples of fourteen reviews representing respectively the U.S. and the U.K. receptions of Crocodile Dundee: the influence and size of readership of the papers and magazines concerned; their representativeness of the spread of publications in the country concerned, geographically and by assumed literacy/intelligence of readership; and the comparability of such spreads of publications across the two countries. Details are elaborated in Appendix One below. Newspapers and weekly magazines were selected as those publications both most likely to frame viewers1 opinions of texts and reaching a wider readership than specialist monthly or quarterly publications. This article works from the hypothesis that a properly constructed comparison of two countries' reviews of the same film may yield significant conclusions about national cultural differences, and in particular about foreign constructions of the film's country of origin. …