...but Australian Cinema does not!
This article came to me from Pleiades.
After a brilliant rebirth in the 1970s, it has become steadily worse. Our individual performers conquer all in Hollywood and London, and even Bollywood, but Australian films are consistently and predictably bad.
Compare and contrast, as the essay topic-setter would put it, two recent films: the big-budget fiasco Australia, and the exquisite Slumdog Millionaire.
Australia cost at least $130 million, perhaps all up quite a lot more than that. It is one of the worst films I have seen for years. And it has been a commercial mediocrity and critical flop. It is not so much a failed epic as a ludicrous, camp pantomime. It features superb actors: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman and the gifted and charming young Aboriginal star, Brandon Walters. But they cannot save it from its ridiculous plot confusion, its constant air of contrived unreality, its pretentious and worthless nods to other films and the fact that at no point does the viewer believe in or care about the characters or the situations.
It grossly defames our nation. The treatment of Aborigines is the most morally troubling aspect of our history and we are rightly exercised about it. But no Australian government ever sent Aboriginal children to a mission island near Darwin so that the Japanese would bomb them. Nor did the Japanese land on and take control of such an island in the 1942 bombing of Darwin.
Some critics have excused this by saying that Australia partakes of no reality and therefore this anachronism, along with all the others, doesn't matter. Australia claims to be dealing with a huge historical issue, the forced removal of mixed race Aboriginal children. It can't expect people to take it seriously if it then depicts eventsthat not only didn't occur, but could not possibly have occurred in the universe we happen to inhabit.
The script is a dog's breakfast. At one point the rough Aussie drover (Jackman) is driving the refined English aristocrat (Kidman) to her new home. Jackman says he's always wanted to crossbreed a wild brumby with an English thoroughbred. Kidman thinks he's propositioning her and reacts with shock.
This banal, pathetic attempt at a joke is important because it illustrates the script's disdain for the audience. Kidman's character is meant to be obsessed with horses in England, and with breeding her champions. It is inconceivable that she could have misunderstood Jackman's remark, so the misunderstanding, which is meant to be comic, has no plausibility. In other words, the actors are not delivering the dialogue of a joke, they are delivering the dialogue of a parody of a joke. The audience is being asked to laugh not at a comic situation but at a director's sly and knowing wink about the banality of comic situations in films. In which case, why make films at all?
Australia exhibits two of the worst characteristics of Australian filmmaking: excessive artiness, which prevents effective story telling and a didactic, dogmatic, unsubtle, hectoring tone of political preaching. It is a tragic waste of a unique opportunity in Australian filmmaking.
Aaaargh. Where do you start?
I think it's pretty damned unfair. The point is, you would be consigning to the dustbin all kinds of films on the basis that:
- 'Australia' is an Australian Film
- 'Australia' sucks as a film
- Therefore all Australian films suck.
That can't be right any more than 'Slumdog Millionaire' would somehow prove the superiority of British Cinema or Bollywood or whoever was invovled with that production by 3 degrees of association.
If all Australian Cinema got judged and hung on the basis of 'Australia' by Baz Luhrman,we should start judging everything by the worst example. What if Wayne Carey and Ben Cousins defined all Australian sportsmanship? What if Vince Sorenti proved why comedy in Australia was crap? What if Tracy Grimshaw (just to pull a name out of a hat, nothing personal here!) proved once and for all why Australian Television journalism was completely and utterly fucked?
Besides which, 'Australia' was more exceptional than a typical example of an Australian film production, what with its enormous backing from 20th Century Fox with a $200million or so budget. I mean, were every Australian film blessed with such Rupert-Murdochian Largesse!
It strikes me that everybody is kicking the dog now that it s down, and maybe in some ways it does deserve the kicks. However a long term outlook of cinema would tell you that there might not be an Australian Cinema in the decades to come if current trends continue.
It's really not a matter of talent or ideas or script or skill any more. It's the reality of the scale of economies involved in film production, distribution and just how many paying eyeballs are out there to be targeted.
In the global market, it may not matter what we produce or how we go about doing it, given what the global audience is looking for, which goes to our general inability to supply that demand.
By the way, this bit brought me a smile:
Some folks believe Australian poets achieve much more than our novelists because the poet mediates nature directly to the reader, whereas the novelist needs a complex society to work with.
But that doesn't explain why our films are so poor today. It may be that the culture of government grants that dominates our arts has deprived them of the drive to connect with an audience. On the other hand, maybe we're just better at cricket. Come to think of it, the Indians are beating us there, too.
Again, the production cost and risks of poetry are much smaller than for film. The relative successes of our poets essentially comes from the freedom they have in their mode of production.
But it's nice to see our poets are doing well in our own cultural estimation.
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