Lost Generation

Hello Oblivion!

You sort of get depressed when you see the phrase 'lost generation' to describe your generation of directors, but it's been anything but creative or productive if you've been a film director in Australia for that last 15 years. You make your own luck with most things, but there's been a wholesale destruction of context one wonders if there will ever be a thriving film industry in Australia ever again.

So, here's today's guff in The Australian.

Yet there is little doubt many of our directors have wasted years trying to crack the development or funding cycle for one film. Others have released US films that failed to make an imprint on a market that appears increasingly unwilling to embrace independent cinema. Which is part of the problem. A country such as ours that produces generally low-budget films is unlikely to throw up the next director of a Terminator or Batman film, even if our actors populate them and crew members support them.

I'm depressed just reading the rest of the fucking article so I'll keep it at this: it's not for wont of trying, but funding bodies are not serious about an industry. They're serious about paying their mortgages like the rest of the regular stiffs. There's never been *any* urgency to make the industry work as an industry. Its a little embarrassing that the funding bodies are now forced to consider the audience after decades of negligence. But I've ranted about that before. the next bit sort of worries me too:

"The kids who are coming up now are just as interested in directing for the multiplex as the guys who came up in the 80s and 90s wanted to direct specialty cinema," Ginnane says. "(They) have a better understanding of the international mainstream. In the 70s, people like (Stork and Eliza Fraser director) Tim Burstall, for instance, wanted to make mainstream films but they had no understanding of the international mainstream market."

Knowledge of that market is obviously far more attainable now than in the 70s when film magazines and journals tended to be a filmmakers' window to the world. Today, a flight to LA is commonplace and US trailers and box-office figures can be downloaded instantly. Which makes Hollywood seem so much closer.

Jeebus, where do you start? People have been trying for decades to be in the mainstream. It's hard to be in the mainstream because it's fickle and fast, but it's not like there have been a shortage of film makers who wanted to ply their trade and keep doing it in a commercial sense. It's ALWAYS been the case that the funding bodies have only supported the film makers who are decidedly against any kind of commercial commitment until last year. And even then, the noises we're hearing from Screen Australia don't seem to augur a new era of commercial film investment, but a continuation of supporting crappy films that not even Australians want to see.

In other words, the terms of reference in this whole discourse is so askew it's not yielding any kind of sense of how our industry got to be so small and insignificant in the span of 30years. But until the media actually readjusts its mypoic astygmatic gaze, theyre never going to understand how far from commercial our cinema actually is.