Australian Film Festival

This is the first book to offer an in-depth examination of the history, operation, and growth of film festivals as a cultural phenomenon within Australia. Tracing the birth of film festivals in Australia in the 1950s through to their present abundance, it asks why film festivals have prospered as audience-driven spectacles throughout Australia, while never developing the same industry and market foci of their international fellows. Drawing on over sixty-years of archival records, festival commentary, interviews with festival insiders and ephemera, this book opens up a largely uncharted history of film culture activity in Australia.

This book presents an unprecedented analysis of the dynamics of cultural representation and interpretation in film criticism. It examines how French critical reception of Australian cinema since the revival period of the 1970s has evolved as a narrative of perpetual discovery, and how a clear parallel can be drawn between French critics' reading of Australian film and their interpretation of an exotic Australian national identity. In French critical writing on Australian cinema, Australian identity is frequently defined in terms of extremes of cultural specificity and cultural anonymity. On the one hand, French critics construct a Euro-centric orientalist fantasy of Australia as not only a European Antipodes, but the antithesis of Europe. At the same time, French critics have tended to subordinate Australian cultural identity within the framework of a resented Anglo-American filmic and cultural hegemony. The book further explores this marginalisation by examining the influence of the French auteur paradigm, particularly in reference to the work of Jane Campion, as well as by discussing the increasingly problematic notion of national identity, and indeed national cinemas, within the universal framework of international film culture.

Contains entries, many with descriptive annotations, on books, book chapters, periodical articles, government reports, academic theses, films, videos, and audio recordings published in Australia and elsewhere from 1988 to the early and mid 1990s. Works cited embrace all aspects of Australian film considered as art, industry, and sociological phenomenon, except extremely technical aspects of filmmaking. Categories include film archives and libraries, production, super-8mm film, government and film, history and criticism, ethnographic film, biographies, and film criticism and reviews. Includes author, book title, and film title indices. Distributed by Books International. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Australian Film Revival: 70s, 80s, and Beyond explores the matrix of forces – artistic, cultural, economic, political, governmental, and ideological – that gave rise to, shaped, and sustained this remarkable film movement. This engaging new study brings fresh perspectives, insights, and innovative approaches to a variety of films from a diversity of filmmakers. Areas of focus include the complex and contentious subjects of masculinity, femininity and feminism, the maternal, as well as the Indigenous road film and the protean Australian gothic. During the formative years of the revival, Australian films seemed to emerge from out of the blue in terms of global film history, with many features including Picnic at Hanging Rock (l975), Caddie (l976), The Last Wave (l977), The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (l978), and My Brilliant Career (l979) receiving international distribution and enthusiastic critical acclaim with strong box office results. By the time the film revival was in full swing, not only did Australian audiences flock to theaters to see “homegrown” films, but the quantity of Australian films on overseas screens was so high that ardent critics declared this outpouring an Australian “New Wave.” The eyes of the world had turned to a compelling and largely unknown culture.