33 results
4 - On the Beach (1959)
- Adrian Danks, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Victoria
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- Australian International Pictures (1946-75)
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- 18 October 2023
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- 31 March 2023, pp 48-63
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GROUND ZERO: AUSTRALIA AT THE END OF THE WORLD
The short spike in international film production in Australia at the very end of the 1950s saw a partial shift of focus to urban settings. Three of the four major British and US productions made during this relatively brief moment in time – Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (Season of Passion, Leslie Norman, 1959), The Siege of Pinchgut (Harry Watt, 1959) and On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959) – eschew the ‘outback’ for contemporary or marginally futuristic stories set within the expanding metropolises of Sydney and Melbourne. Yet only one of these films, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, provides a vibrant, energetic vision of the close living characteristic of the inner city. Both The Siege of Pinchgut and On the Beach use their respective cities as staging grounds for dramas that progressively depopulate their urban environments. The Siege of Pinchgut was made on a smaller scale and on a more mundane theme than On the Beach, yet its generic crime drama largely staged at Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour shares some interesting commonalities with its more famous and prestigious cousin. It must have been striking indeed to view these two films on first release in Australia and compare their stark representation of two ‘rival’ cities that had, to this point, only very occasionally appeared in international or transnational productions.
In fact, aside from brief appearances in movies like The Road to Bali (Hal Walker, 1952), Melbourne had never been the focus of such a fiction feature before. Nevertheless, it is the city's palpable and actual sense of isolation, as well as its capacity to be rendered as both a specific place and a generic ‘anywhere’, as a modern metropolis and a colonial backwater, as both familiar (English-speaking but also an important base for US soldiers in World War II) and slightly exotic, that made it an appropriate geographic location for this widely publicised and discussed end-of- the- world drama. This was, of course, also justified by the pointed setting of the film's source novel as well as the ongoing if peripatetic practice of filming US and international productions in Australia throughout the 1950s.
6 - The Drifting Avenger (1968)
- Adrian Danks, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Victoria
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- Australian International Pictures (1946-75)
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 31 March 2023, pp 80-94
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TOEI, NIKKATSU AND TOHO DOWN UNDER
Despite vociferous calls for increased support to the Australian film industry by practitioners, cultural commentators and some politicians, 1968 and 1969 were still largely fallow years for local feature-film production (see, for example, Thornhill 1985: 166–70). Of the eight features made across these two years, none made a significant impact at the Australian box office, though You Can't See ‘Round Corners (David Cahill, 1969), Age of Consent (Michael Powell, 1969) and The Intruders (Lee Robinson, 1969), a quickly made attempt to exploit the phenomenal recent international success of the television series Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, featuring almost all of the same personnel in front of and behind the camera, did well in specific locations. Aside from, arguably, Age of Consent, which was also the biggest commercial success of this ragtag group, none of these ‘local’ productions left a lasting impression on Australian audiences or its national cinema.
The most intriguing and surprising ‘Australian’ films made across these two years were stand-alone productions completed by three different major Japanese studios (in the order of their completion: Toei Company, Nikkatsu Corporation and Toho Co.) and exploiting their host country's natural resources, locations and filmmaking facilities. News of this surprising spate of regionally specific international production emerged in early 1968 when the Sydney press announced that ‘A MAJOR Japanese film company plans to shoot a $200,000 colour movie in Australia this autumn’, exploiting the backdrop of ‘the search for Bass Strait oil’ (‘Bass Strait Oil Hunt Inspires a Japanese Film’ 1968: 6). It would feature ‘an Australian female lead’ and was plainly aimed at highlighting Australia's mineral wealth, a core platform of the emerging cultural, geopolitical and economic relationship between the two countries (‘Bass Strait Oil Hunt Inspires a Japanese Film’ 1968: 6). It was to be made by Nikkatsu, Japan's oldest major film studio. The finished movie ultimately shifted its focus to a young advertising illustrator who comes to Sydney, Newcastle, the area around Tamworth in northern New South Wales and, as originally planned, Fiji, seeking inspiration for the tourism campaign he is contracted to work upon.
2 - The Overlanders (1946) and Ealing Down Under
- Adrian Danks, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Victoria
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- Australian International Pictures (1946-75)
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- 31 March 2023, pp 14-31
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TOUCHING AND GOING
[They] should be primarily outdoor stories. They should … be on a large enough canvas to appeal to world-wide audiences. And they should compensate with action what they will lose through lack of polish in the actors. (Kemp 1999: 151)
In 1955, Ealing made its last films at its studios in West London prior to commencing short allegiances with production facilities owned by larger, often monopolistic corporations Rank Organisation and British MGM, before ceasing operations in 1959. The final two films made by Ealing at its famed, boutique studios, the generally forgotten Touch and Go (Michael Truman) and the widely celebrated The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick), bear striking similarities in their rendering of highly restrictive and patently artificial physical environments. This sense of artifice and of an antiquated, patently unreal world plays into the insularity of the former film and the heightened, disarmingly murderous fantasy of the latter. Each is largely isolated to a single London street or neighbourhood and relies extensively on the control afforded by such contained and highly regulated studio production.
The first of these, Touch and Go, is an oddly desiccated and largely uneventful film focusing on the failure of an upper-middle-class English family to emigrate to Australia. As Charles Barr has ironically argued, one of the most striking things about this film is its disinterest in presenting Australia as anything other than a ‘card played’ or an ‘abstraction’ (1977: 175), a vision that helps stage these characters’ frustration and dissatisfaction with their place in a bland, conservative and cosy postwar Britain: ‘It has never been revived, which is not surprising … [It is] an example of late, mainstream Ealing at its most suffocating’ (1977: 174). In Touch and Go, the momentous decision to emigrate to Australia is taken by the father alone (played by a stalwart but blustery and constantly irritated Jack Hawkins), and is little more than a tantrum aimed at the staidness of the design company he works for which won't embrace his plans for Scandinavian ‘innovation’. Revealingly, his firm continues to favour the comfiness and ugliness of overstuffed, chunky British furniture, a style that perhaps resonates with Hawkins’ stiff-upper-lip star image and common accounts of the personal predilections of Ealing's production head, Michael Balcon.
References
- Adrian Danks, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Victoria
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- Australian International Pictures (1946-75)
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Contents
- Adrian Danks, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Victoria
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- Australian International Pictures (1946-75)
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7 - Age of Consent (1969)
- Adrian Danks, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Victoria
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- Australian International Pictures (1946-75)
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ESCAPING ENGLAND: MICHAEL POWELL IN AUSTRALIA
Celebrated English filmmaker Michael Powell's career in Australia is a tale of considerable tenacity, pragmatism and, ultimately, missed opportunities. Amongst his mooted projects were films based on Arthur Upfield's popular Bony novels, Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock and Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding (Powell 1992: 508–509). The two films that he did make in 1960s Australia – They’re a Weird Mob (1966) and Age of Consent (1969); also adaptations – are amongst a small number of features produced in Australia during that leanest of decades. For example, They’re a Weird Mob, a significant box-office success in Australia and New Zealand but nowhere else, was the single Australian-made or -filmed feature to be commercially released in 1966. Powell's two features are also amongst the highest profile and budgeted ‘Australian international’ co-productions of their era.
Though they are, in some ways, studies in contrast – They’re a Weird Mob working to embrace and reflect upon the Australian idiom and character while signalling significant demographic changes in its population; Age of Consent labouring to escape the pressures, increased cosmopolitanism and transformations of modern Australia on the tropical idyll of Dunk Island in North Queensland – both films feature outsiders or exiles learning or relearning the rhythms and nuances of daily, Australian life. Although shot many thousands of kilometres from Britain, these films are as responsive to place as the filmmaker's more celebrated works, and reflect Powell's genuine commitment to working in Australia during this period. While various writers have claimed that Powell's subsequent ‘exile’ to the Antipodes marked a significant downturn in his work's quality and level of engagement, and represents a kind of purgatory to be endured after the scandal of Peeping Tom (1960), his efforts in the largely moribund Australian feature-film industry of the 1960s still draw upon his maverick personality, as well as his truly adaptive and responsive filmmaking practice. This is reflected in Powell's accounts of his time in Australia in the second volume of his autobiography, Million-Dollar Movie (see Powell 1992: 436–55, 472–88, 509–15).
5 - The Sundowners (1960)
- Adrian Danks, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Victoria
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- Australian International Pictures (1946-75)
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‘PEAK’ PRODUCTION
Between 1958 and 1959 four significant international feature films were shot in Australia: On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959), Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (Season of Passion, Leslie Norman, 1959), The Siege of Pinchgut (Harry Watt, 1959) and The Sundowners (Fred Zinnemann, 1960). In many respects, this represents a period of peak production ‘down under’ prior to the near cessation of feature filmmaking in the early to mid-1960s. The final of these films, Fred Zinnemann's episodic pastoral, The Sundowners, released in the US in early December 1960, is the last large-scale feature made in Australia prior to Michael Powell's They’re a Weird Mob in 1965–6 and represents the final completed attempt to make a high-budget, mainstream and multi-star-driven popular success in Australia – other than the very differently appointed Ned Kelly (Tony Richardson) in 1970 – until the tax concession driven push of the early 1980s.
Three of the four films mentioned above are based on significant and highly successful Australian literary properties. They reflect a maturing of ‘locationist’ and transnational film production practices as well as the broader trend of independent production companies, with the support of major Hollywood or British studios, optioning bestselling novels and widely performed plays. For example, the decision to relocate Ray Lawler's ground-breaking and distinctively Carlton-set play, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, to the more cosmetically attractive hot-house climes around Sydney Harbour, drawing on an array of performance styles and starring a startling mix of American and British actors – Anne Baxter, Ernest Borgnine, John Mills and Angela Lansbury – was predicated on the international exposure of the source material and its apparent correspondences with thematically and stylistically equivalent US models such as Marty (directed by Delbert Mann in 1955, and also starring the Oscar-winning Borgnine) and the work of Tennessee Williams, then a highly popular source for screen adaptations including A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951), Baby Doll (Elia Kazan, 1956) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958). This small ‘boom’ is also symptomatic of the increased desire of Hollywood-based actors, writers, directors, producers and other significant filmmaking personnel to seek control of development and production and make films largely outside of immediate studio jurisdiction.
8 - Color Me Dead (1970)
- Adrian Danks, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Victoria
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- Australian International Pictures (1946-75)
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FILM NOIR IN THE ANTIPODES
In the late 1960s, producer-entrepreneur Reginald Goldsworthy (of Goldsworthy Productions) brought American television director Eddie Davis to Australia to make three feature films: It Takes All Kinds (1969), Color Me Dead (1970) and That Lady from Peking (1970). Generically similar crime-thrillers, each film was made in collaboration with senior American partner, Commonwealth United Corporation, on a modest budget and with American actors mainly known for their work in television and B-movies in the lead roles (O’Brien 1970b: 35).1 The second film, Color Me Dead, stands apart from the others for being a direct remake of the film noir classic, D.O.A. (Rudolph Maté, 1949). Discarding the flashback structure of the original, Color Me Dead begins with an atmospheric night sequence, but soon settles into a routine (if convoluted) thriller in which the poisoned protagonist attempts to track down his own killer. While the Davis version closely follows the dialogue and plot of Maté's film, the form and style of the Australian remake owes less to its precursor than it does to post-classical noirs (such as Harper, Jack Smight, 1966; The Detective, Gordon Douglas, 1968; Lady in Cement, Gordon Douglas, 1968) and television noir (Dragnet, 1951–9; Naked City, 1958–63; The Fugitive, 1963–7). In this chapter we look at the Antipodean, cultural remaking of D.O.A., historically situated midway between its classic original (1949) and its second, neo-noir remaking, D.O.A. (Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, 1988). The Australian remake's television aesthetic – and US cable release – adds weight to the suggestion that, through the 1960s, the noir of the classic sensibility was kept alive mainly through television series and movies, some of which embraced an increased transnationalism. The Australian remake also demonstrates something of the way in which the development and expansion of ‘international’ film noir – as an ‘artistic impulse to represent global modernity and its psycho-sexual anxieties’ (Petty 2016: – extends well beyond France and the US.
In More Than Night, James Naremore describes the category of film noir not as a set of narrative or stylistic features, but as a discursive formation: ‘film noir belongs to the history of ideas as much as to the history of cinema … [I]t has less to do with a group of artifacts than with a discourse’ (Naremore 1998: 11).
10 - Walkabout (1971)
- Adrian Danks, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Victoria
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- Australian International Pictures (1946-75)
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OUTBACK RELATIONS: WALKABOUT AND WAKE IN FRIGHT
‘To think of this film purely as Australian would be a mistake’, Grahame Jennings [Walkabout's production manager] said later in Sydney. ‘Nick [Roeg] meant the city to be any city; the desert is meant to be a desert anywhere. The characters of the three children could be any family unit group in the world. I don't think he meant the film to have a message, although perhaps it has one.’ (Jennings interviewed in Strange 1971: 12)
1971 was a key year in the emergence of modern Australia cinema. Two seminal films, Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout and Ted Kotcheff's Wake in Fright, were screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May and went on to become significant touchstones for the 1970s film ‘revival’, as well as the broader and ongoing iconography and thematic preoccupations of Australian cinema. These two films arose from the marginally more productive feature-film ecology that took root in the late 1960s and represented a way forward for the ‘national’ cinema in terms of style, theme, characterisation, filmmaking process and form, while also looking backwards, at times critically, to the largely international or ‘locationist’ productions of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. In Walkabout's emphasis on the transcendental strangeness and mysticism of the Australian landscape, as well as its troubled but ground-breaking incorporation and representation of Aboriginal characters, their culture and agency, and Wake in Fright's often grotesque, dark, dirty Gothic and deeply unsettling skewering of the foundational myths of Australian mateship and masculinity, it is also possible to see even deeper connections to key trends, forms and films of Australian cinema throughout the rest of the 1970s and into the 1980s.
Although both films are routinely listed as important works in various surveys of postwar Australian cinema – particularly after the rerelease of Walkabout in the late 1990s and Wake in Fright's rediscovery in the late 2000s – they also present a stout challenge to commentators proselytising for a national cinema that privileges, and even insists upon, key creative roles being filled by Australian practitioners and financing largely being sourced locally (see Lawson 1985: 175–83).
Traditions in World Cinema
- Adrian Danks, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Victoria
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Acknowledgements
- Adrian Danks, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Victoria
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Australian International Pictures (1946-75)
- Adrian Danks, Constantine Verevis
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Australian International Pictures examines the concept and definition of Australian film in relation to a range of local, international and global practices and trends that blur neat categorisations of national cinema. Although international co-production is particularly acute in the present day, this book examines the porous nature of Australian International filmmaking, and the intriguing transnational and cross-cultural formations created by globally targeted but locally focused films made in Australia in the period 1946-75. Case Studies: The Overlanders (1946) and Ealing Down Under; Kangaroo (1952); On the Beach (1959); The Sundowners (1960); The Drifting Avenger (1968); Age of Consent (1969); Color Me Dead (1970); Ned Kelly (1970); Walkabout (1971); Wake in Fright (1971); The Man from Hong Kong (1975).
11 - Wake in Fright (1971)
- Adrian Danks, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Victoria
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DREAMING OF THE DEVIL
Based on Kenneth Cook's 1961 novel, Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971) takes its title from ‘an old curse’: ‘May you dream of the Devil and wake in fright’ (Cook 1971 [1961]: 3). These words appear as an epigraph on the book's title page, but the book could just as readily have drawn its inspiration from the first words of Hunter S. Thompson's contemporaneous Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: ‘He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man’ (2005 [1971]: n.p.). Kotcheff's film tells the story of a city-educated schoolteacher, John Grant, who becomes stranded in the outback town of Bundanyabba (the ‘Yabba’) on his way home to Sydney for the Christmas holidays. What follows is a lost weekend of drinking, cruelty and violence during which time Grant is confronted with beastly aspects of his own character, hitherto concealed from him. Now recognised as a film that ‘prepared the way for [the] mix of hyperrealism, excessive masculinity, ambiguous sexuality, and misogyny [that is] so insistently present in subsequent Australian cinema’ (O’Regan 1996: 57), Wake in Fright achieved some critical recognition but little commercial success upon its original release. Writing in industry-centred Melbourne-based magazine Lumiere, Barry Lowe observed: ‘Wake in Fright [has] caused the biggest furore (if you discount the carry-on which surrounded Mick Jagger as the choice to play Ned Kelly) … by portraying Australians as an ugly, boozing lot’ (Lowe 1974: 4–5). As Scott Murray noted decades later (at the time of film's 2009 restoration and re-release), this type of response needs to be contextualised as part of the ‘cultural war’ that surrounded international companies and filmmakers who used Australia as an ‘exotic’ location but failed, in their often pastoral visions of the continent, to adequately engage with nationalist themes and the local industry: ‘in this atmosphere of resignation and despair, it was not surprising that Tony Richardson's Ned Kelly (1970) was eviscerated … Canadian Ted Kotcheff's Wake in Fright … was written off as a brutal and dishonest picture of outback Australia, while Brit Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout was cruelly undervalued and dismissed as an aimless travelogue’ (Murray 2009: A23).
12 - The Man from Hong Kong (1975)
- Adrian Danks, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Victoria
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KUNG FU ON ULURU: ASIAN-AUSTRALIAN CINEMA
From its outrageous, pre-credit sequence – an absurdly situated drug deal at Uluru (referred to in the film as Ayers Rock) that culminates in an extended kung fu fight and car chase (also involving a helicopter) on and around the ‘rock’ – through to its literally explosive finale atop a Sydney high-rise, Brian Trenchard-Smith's international co-production, The Man from Hong Kong (1975), is a ground-breaking work of transnational Asian-Australian cinema and a prime example of 1970s ‘Ozploitation’ (a term that connects a diverse group of Australian genre films to international and transnational exploitation movie-making). The Man from Hong Kong also provides a significant point of connection to the ‘Australian international pictures’ of the 1950s and 1960s, the 1970s feature-film ‘revival’ – it was released in the key year of 1975 – and the boom in exploitation and genre-based commercial filmmaking in Australia in the late 1970s and into the 1980s enabled by changing funding mechanisms and ideologies. Like many co-productions and internationally financed features made in Australia, The Man from Hong Kong is a vanguard work that has been largely written out of nationalist and even postcolonial accounts of Australian cinema. As we will demonstrate in this final chapter, along with films such as The Overlanders (Harry Watt, 1946), The Sundowners (Fred Zinnemann, 1960), Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971) and even Koya no toseinin (The Drifting Avenger, Shogoro Nishimura, 1968), The Man from Hong Kong needs to be included in any discussion of what constitutes Australian cinema under the transformations wrought by globalisation, postcolonialism, transnationalism and the fracturing of national identity. As the final film discussed in this book, it provides a bridge between the ‘Australian international pictures’ of the postwar era and the relative boom in transnational co-productions and globally-focused features that follow the ‘revival’. It is also an important, if contested, work within what Olivia Khoo, Belinda Smaill and Audrey Yue categorise as ‘Asian-Australian cinema’ (2013).
ENTER THE DRAGON: BRIAN-TRENCHARD SMITH, OZPLOITATION AND HONG KONG GENRE FILMMAKING
Writer-director Trenchard-Smith began his career in the UK before moving to Sydney, where he initially edited news footage and film trailers at Channel TEN-10 before moving to Channel 9 as promotions director.
1 - Australian International Pictures (1946–75)
- Adrian Danks, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Victoria
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- Australian International Pictures (1946-75)
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POPULATING THE VOID
The quarter of a century stretching from the end of World War II to the early 1970s is often characterised as a period of virtually no activity in the Australian film industry. This perception can be best understood as part of an argument considered necessary to help facilitate and evaluate the Australian film ‘revival’ or New Wave of the 1970s. However, such an understanding is only true if discussion is limited to wholly Australian-financed and ‘-created’ feature-film productions and avoids more dynamic and diverse areas such as screen culture, amateur or non-theatrical film, government-funded documentary production, and global trends in co-production and location-based filming. Additionally, it ignores the fact that some of the most enduring and formative images of Australian cinema were fashioned during this seemingly ‘fallow’ period, representing ‘Australia’ to the world on a level unmatched until the early to mid-1980s with the global phenomena of films such as Mad Max (George Miller, 1979), The Man from Snowy River (George T. Miller, 1982) and Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman, 1986). Of particular interest in these earlier, post-World War II films are the views of urban and outback landscapes and the Australian ‘character’ created by significant, sometimes visionary, overseas-based filmmakers such as Harry Watt (The Overlanders, 1946; Eureka Stockade, 1949; The Siege of Pinchgut, 1959), Lewis Milestone (Kangaroo, 1952), Stanley Kramer (On the Beach, 1959), Fred Zinnemann (The Sundowners, 1960), Michael Powell (They’re a Weird Mob, 1966; Age of Consent, 1969), Junya Sato (Koya no toseinin, The Drifting Avenger, 1968), Tony Richardson (Ned Kelly, 1970), Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, 1971) and Ted Kotcheff (Wake in Fright, 1971).
The ‘imagination’ of Australia – the work of identity formation – characterised by these films, and other international features made during this ‘interval’, is one of the key areas investigated in Australian International Pictures (1946–75). The value of this study resides not only in its production of new historical, textual and institutional knowledge, but also in the ways it illuminates and reframes the films and filmmakers of the ‘revival’ themselves, questions essentialist approaches to Australian cinema, and suggests important links between this earlier diverse grouping of films and many developments in the ‘national’ cinema since the mid-1970s, including the current era of local-global film production.
Frontmatter
- Adrian Danks, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Victoria
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Index
- Adrian Danks, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Victoria
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9 - Ned Kelly (1970)
- Adrian Danks, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Victoria
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NED KELLY: AUSTRALIA'S FIRST MULTIMEDIA STAR
Any representation of the figure of Ned Kelly (1855–80) – the ‘loud-mouthed, law-breaking, swaggering, son of an Irish convict’ (McIntyre 1982: 38) – is framed not only by the historical record but also by an intertextual relay that includes a vast array of novels, plays, operas, songs, comics, video games, and a long history of cinematic portrayals of the famed bushranger, beginning with The Story of the Kelly Gang (Charles Tait, 1906) and extending through to True History of the Kelly Gang (Justin Kurzel, 2019) (see Gaunson 2013). While the depiction of Kelly in each version varies, sometimes considerably, depending on its principal source and approach – from the close attention to specific historical accounts in the TV miniseries The Last Outlaw (George Miller and Kevin Dobson, 1980) to outright parody in Ned (Abe Forsythe, 2003) – each attests to the cultural resonance, continuing power and local and international recognition of the Kelly myth and its foundational place in popular conceptions of Australian identity and its audiovisual heritage. It is this continued fascination, and the ability to use Kelly's story to address key aspects of Australian history and character, which has led to the production of over a dozen Kelly-related feature films and numerous documentaries, TV movies and series, and short films. The story and character have also proven attractive to filmmakers – both from overseas and locally – seeking an Australian and international audience (though, perhaps surprisingly, few of these films have been significant financial or critical successes). The themes of youthful anti-authoritarianism, liberation and social injustice that run through many iterations of the Kelly saga, may also have been particularly attractive to filmmakers in the mid-to- late 1960s aiming to explore revisionist and politically progressive variations on established genres and forms. At this moment, almost 100 years after his death, Ned Kelly may have seemed like a figure whose ‘time’ had well and truly come.
British director Tony Richardson's interest in making a film about the Australian outlaw was piqued by Sidney Nolan's celebrated series of Ned Kelly paintings that were successfully exhibited in London in the early 1960s.
3 - Kangaroo (1952)
- Adrian Danks, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Victoria
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- Australian International Pictures (1946-75)
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Summary
‘THE AUSTRALIAN STORY’: HOLLYWOOD ARRIVES DOWN UNDER
Observing that ‘all national cinemas are implicated internationally’ (1996: 56), Tom O’Regan makes note of the ‘contribution’ that Australian-made and shot films – in particular bushranger and drover films – have made to the western genre over a long period of time, starting with The Story of the Kelly Gang (Charles Tait, 1906) (1996: 168), often claimed to be the first feature film made anywhere in the world. Focusing on the former, William D. Routt attends specifically to the similarities between early US westerns and Australian bushranger films – the historical frontier settings, use of landscape and early twentieth-century period of production – but resists the label ‘bush westerns’, preferring to characterise a group of early bushranger films – several Kelly Gang films and up to fifteen others such as Robbery Under Arms (Charles MacMahon, 1907), Thunderbolt (John Gavin, 1910) and Captain Starlight, or Gentleman of the Road (Alfred Rolfe, 1911) – as belonging to a ‘western-like genre’ that grew out of local conditions (Routt 2001). Making a related argument, Peter Limbrick refers to the western as ‘a settler colonial mode of cinema’, describing all but the last of five films made by Ealing Studios in Australia in the 1940s and 1950s – The Overlanders (Harry Watt, 1946), Eureka Stockade (Harry Watt, 1949), Bitter Springs (Ralph Smart, 1950), The Shiralee (Leslie Norman, 1957) and The Siege of Pinchgut (Harry Watt, 1959) – as works that use the iconography and narrative situations familiar from the genre (2007: 68–9). While seeking to acknowledge the western's significant place, production and popularity outside of America, Limbrick cautions against ignoring the wider record of US interests in Australia, pointing out that Ealing's plan to establish an ongoing presence in the country was disrupted by a more general national turn away from Britain to the US in the postwar era, as well as the making of large-scale American ‘runaway’ productions such as Kangaroo (Lewis Milestone, 1952), On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959) and The Sundowners (Fred Zinnemann, 1960) (Limbrick 2007: 83).
Chapter 4 - The W/hole David Lynch: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
- Edited by Marcel Hartwig, Universität Siegen, Germany, Andreas Rauscher, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany, Peter Niedermüller, Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, Germany
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- Book:
- Networked David Lynch
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 19 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 January 2023, pp 61-77
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Summary
In 2007, David Lynch created a short film – HollyShorts Greeting – for his acceptance of the fourth HollyShorts Film Festival Visionary Award (2008). There is much to admire in this four-minute film, from a variation on the backwards talking from Twin Peaks (1990–1) through an impromptu shuffling dance by Lynch, and on to – in anticipation of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) – a lineup of beguiling chorus cuties. Perhaps of most interest, though, is Lynch's instruction that we ‘keep [our] eye on [the] donut, not on [the] hole’. This is, of course, a delicious conceit because Lynch has always been interested in holes – that is, in portals or openings – that take you somewhere unexpected, somewhere dark and beautiful. Moreover, as Gilles Deleuze reminds us in Cinema 1: The Movement- Image, we should never confuse wholes with parts, or sets. Deleuze writes: ‘sets are closed, and everything which is closed is artificially closed. […] But a whole is not closed, it is open, and it has no parts’ (1986: 10).
This chapter appeals to the w/hole David Lynch – his open set of films and artworks – to argue that those who initially objected to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) thought that the part (the prequel film) would close out the set (the first and second seasons of the television series) when in actuality it worked only to extend the mystery. As Lynch would have it:
To me, a mystery is like a magnet. Whenever there is something that's unknown, it has a pull to it… . When you only see a part, it's even stronger than seeing the whole. The whole might have a logic, but out of its context, the fragment takes on a tremendous value of abstraction. (Rodley 2005: 231)
If Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me frustrated its initial audience – especially its Twin Peaks fan base – then this might be because the experience of (serial) repetition is displaced from a closed set or sequence of texts – the connection and continuation of a film prequel and television series – to an open w/hole.