I know I get a little mean when it comes to my alma mater The Australian Film Television and Radio School. But this piece in ScreenHub today just got my goat.
I have proposed that we should resurrect the debate about our purpose and offered a challenge to our implied assumptions about genre, emotion and entertainment. I’ve also argued that we should not tell our own stories, we should make our myths, and that the difference between our own stories and our myths are scale, dynamics and ownership. I have sketched out some ideas about scale and dynamics, but I have not yet made a case about ownership, because this is where all of the ideas come together.
The notion of ownership is deeply embedded in the phrase ‘tell our own stories’ but the question of who the owner is needs to be confronted here. If the ‘owner’ of the ‘our own stories’ is the person or people with the money to make the movies or the filmmakers who raise the money, then we are ascribing ownership to a very small, and by our own admission, culturally proscribed group of people. Myth on the other hand is owned by everyone it speaks to, and it speaks to humans more broadly than within specific cultures or societies. In order to be a myth is has to be a story bigger than ‘our own’. This does not mean it has to be an American movie.
American movies are based in American myths, and these are not the same as Australian myths. I speak from personal experience here, American’s believe in manifest destiny and Australians do not. Americans are raised to behave as though they could become the president of the United States and Australians are not. American movies uphold the underlying myths of pursuing your destiny or dreams, and taking individual action in the world. So, dynamics and scale come easily to those myth makers, which is why it may seem as though to argue for scale and dynamics is to argue for Americanisms.
But I hope that this is not the case. As David Stratton writes in his review of Blessed in The Weekend Australian on September 12, 2009 “we don’t do Hollywood style movies very well.” However, he has also called 2009 an “annus mirabilis” for Australian film, using a mythically saturated word, miraculous, for a year that has seen some remarkable myth making by Australians. Robert Connolly has mythologised the Balibo five and awakened exactly the sort of energy to work towards ideals that myths are capable of doing. Warwick Thornton has create a mythically resonant tale of indigenous kids sniffing petrol - with an optimistic ending – are these heroes not ideals for all indigenous cultures and their colonisers to work with? Mao’s Last Dancer is classic myth making: the dynamics of a rags to riches/ repression to freedom/struggle to triumph story, with dancing on a spectacular scale. It not only has built in international ownership across the U.S., China and Australia, but it’s a story owned by anyone who strives.
I recently saw a short film called Jacob, made by Dena Curtis, an Indigenous Australian woman. This film was not expensive to make, it is a genre piece, a period film, and its story, which only involves four characters, is on a mythic scale. It tells of a black man who comes home from months of working on the far reaches of the property expecting to see his newborn son for the first time only to find his son has come out white.
This story is much bigger than its protagonist. It is global on the subject of racial injustice. It could have been told about slaves in America, about Korean women after WW2 and on and on. Its dramatic question implies an action – will he accept the baby? Forgive the wife? Kill the landowner? And it has stakes – life and death stakes for the baby, justice and pride stakes for the parents. Inexpensive. Australian. And, because this story could be owned by so many, at any time, in any country and in all of the cultures and ethnicities that make up this country, it is mythic.
Myth making does not mean movies have to be happy or sad, smart or dumb, expensive or cheap, real or surreal. They must have scale, dynamics, and ownership by more than just their makers. Don’t tell our own stories, make our myths.
...And I thought, "Oh come on!" The games we can play with semantics are never-ending but the facts are, we don't make enough films to know what our myths are. All this theorising and conjecture and is just that. We can begin to talk about Australian myths when we have 1000 films and 10,000 novels worth watching and reading. We're not there yet. Anything short of that is just speculation.
But I guess if you're the head of Screen Studies at AFTRS you have to write *something*. So that's why you have this claptrap parading as theory. This is the same school that when I was there, dared to say "'Science Fiction' is an American Genre" and proceeded to block my science fiction project. It's good to see nothing much has changed. What a colossal waste of government money.
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