The first comprehensive volume of original essays on Australian screen culture in the twenty-first century.
A Companion to Australian Cinema is an anthology of original essays by new and established authors on the contemporary state and future directions of a well-established national cinema. A timely intervention that challenges and expands the idea of cinema, this book brings into sharp focus those facets of Australian cinema that have endured, evolved and emerged in the twenty-first century.
The essays address six thematically-organized propositions - that Australian cinema is an Indigenous screen culture, an international cinema, a minor transnational imaginary, an enduring auteur-genre-landscape tradition, a televisual industry and a multiplatform ecology. Offering fresh critical perspectives and extending previous scholarship, case studies range from The Lego Movie, Mad Max, and Australian stars in Hollywood, to transnational co-productions, YouTube channels, transmedia and nature-cam documentaries. New research on trends - such as the convergence of television and film, digital transformations of screen production and the shifting roles of women on and off-screen - highlight how established precedents have been influenced by new realities beyond both cinema and the national.
- Written in an accessible style that does not require knowledge of cinema studies or Australian studies
- Presents original research on Australian actors, such as Cate Blanchett and Chris Hemsworth, their training, branding, and path from Australia to Hollywood
- Explores the films and filmmakers of the Blak Wave and their challenge to Australian settler-colonial history and white identity
- Expands the critical definition of cinema to include YouTube channels, transmedia documentaries, multiplatform changescapes and cinematic remix
- Introduces readers to founding texts in Australian screen studies
A Companion to Australian Cinema is an ideal introductory text for teachers and students in areas including film and media studies, cultural and gender studies, and Australian history and politics, as well as a valuable resource for educators and other professionals in the humanities and creative arts.
Table of Contents
About the Editors viii
Notes on Contributors x
Foreword xvi
Tom O’Regan
Acknowledgments xxiii
Introduction: Australian Cinema Now 1
Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye
Part I An Indigenous Screen Culture 29
1 You Are Here: Living Maps of Deep Time, Clock Time 31
Felicity Collins
2 Charlie’s Country, Gulpilil’s Body 54
Corinn Columpar
3 Ivan Sen’s Cinematic Imaginary: Restraint, Complexity, and a Politics of Place 68
Anne Rutherford
4 Shadowing and Disruptive Temporality in Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Spear 89
Felicity Ford
5 Beyond the Wonderland of Whiteness: The Blak Wave of Indigenous Women Shaping Race on Screen 107
Odette Kelada and Maddee Clark
Part II An International Cinema 131
6 Another Green World: The Mad Max Series 133
Constantine Verevis
7 Is Everything Awesome?: The LEGO Movie and the Australian Film Industry 149
Ben Goldsmith
8 Jane Campion: Girlshine and the International Auteur 165
Lisa French
9 Constructing Persona: Mediatisation, Performativity, Quality, and Branding in Australian Film Actors’ Migration to Hollywood 184
P. David Marshall
Part III A Minor Transnational Imaginary 205
10 Interpreting Anzac and Gallipoli through a Century of Anglophone Screen Representations 207
James Bennett
11 Unsettling the Suburban: Space, Sentiment, and Migration in National Cinematic Imaginaries 228
Helen Grace
12 The Rocket: Small, Foreign‐Language Cinema 248
Olivia Khoo
13 Serangoon Road: The Convergent Culture of Minor Transnationalism 262
Audrey Yue
Part IV An Auteur‐Genre‐Landscape Cinema 285
14 An Independent Spirit: Robert Connolly as Auteur‐Producer 287
Susan Bye
15 Disruptive Daughters: The Heroine’s Journey in Four Films 313
Diana Sandars
16 Atopian Landscapes: Gothic Tropes in Australian Cinema 336
Jane Stadler
17 Spirits Do Come Back: Bunyips and the European Gothic in The Babadook 355
Stephen Gaunson
Part V A Televisual Industry 371
18 Between Public and Private: How Screen Australia, the ABC and SBS have shaped Film and Television Convergence 373
Amanda Malel Trevisanut
19 Quality vs Value: The Case of The Kettering Incident 391
Sue Turnbull and Marion McCutcheon
20 The Evolution of Matchbox Pictures: A New Business Model 416
Helen Goritsas and Ana Tiwary
21 Schapellevision: Screen Aesthetics and Asian Drug Stories 442
Anthony Lambert
Part VI A Multiplatform Ecology 461
22 CHURN: Cinema Made Sometime Last Night 463
Ross Gibson
23 Over the Horizon: YouTube Culture Meets Australian Screen Culture 472
Stuart Cunningham and Adam Swift
24 Digital Transmedia Forms and Transnational Documentary Networks 493
Deane Williams
25 Ecological Relations: FalconCam in Conversation with The Back of Beyond 508
Belinda Smaill
26 Where Am I?: The Terror of Terra Nullius 525
Norie Neumark
Index 537
