AustLit

'In 2000, maverick Australian director Rolf de Heer began a collaboration with Australian Aboriginal screen legend David Gulpilil to make a film set in Gulpilil's traditional lands in North Eastern Arnhem Land. The result of the collaboration is the new feature Ten Canoes (2006). For Gulpilil the project represented an opportunity to launch careers in film for members of his community, including his son Jamie Gulpilil (who plays the lead role). He has also stated that "the film will allow people from the community and around the world to know how our ancestors lived and to understand them". In order to try to achieve this, de Heer took on the challenging task he describes as "fusing two very different storytelling traditions". Drawing on the documentary Balanda and the Bark Canoes (2006) (also known as Making Ten Canoes) and other sources, this article goes behind the scenes to examine processes of cross-cultural collaboration and intercultural fusion. It argues the film shows that while stories have different forms and functions in different societies, one story can be made to serve two different cultural requirements and, further, in doing so can expand possibilities for both cross-cultural recognition and cinema.' Source: Studies in Australasian Cinema 1.1 (2007): 5.

'This article maps a series of connections between the feature film Emerald City (1988) and a range of contexts seen as informing its generation, operation and reception. Emphasis is placed upon the synchronicity of the movie's appearance with key shifts in government film policy, and the emergence of new critical paradigms within the academy, which reorganized dominant understandings of Australian cinema, and questioned the cultural value assigned to particular works and genres. Through this 'conjunctural' analysis, Emerald City is reread as not only a symptomatic work, marking transitions between "new wave" film-making and the 'post-national' cinema of the 1990s, but is re-evaluated as a significant film, provocative of fresh approaches to both the historiography and practical management of Australian cinema, detectable within more recent archaeologies of screen 'content' and the rhetorics of film policy formulated in its wake. Source: Studies in Australasian Cinema 1.1 (2007): 29. (Sighted 01/09/2009).

'Suffused with a sense that earlier filmic imaginings of Australian identity were "beginning to look threadbare" (Turner 1994a: 68), 1990s Australian cinema provides a key site for the examination of Australian identity in multicultural terms. Drawing on the work of Ghassan Hage (1998, 2003), Stuart Hall (1990, 1993) and Daniel Nourry (2005), this article investigates how notions of Australian identity in a multicultural society are played out (and with) by Australian cinema of the 1990s. Particular attention is paid to Head On (Kokkinos, 1998) and Strictly Ballroom (Lurhmann, 1992), as examples of different approaches to this issue. Enlisting a Bakhtinian approach, whereby identity is conceived in terms of "thinking from the margins", I argue that whilst films such as Strictly Ballroom enlist a "good multiculturalism" to extend, through tolerance, the boundaries of Australian identity to the Other, Head On provides a way of thinking about Australian-ness that refuses to simply assimilate or incorporate its Greek-Australian protagonist. By co-opting the audience to a position on the margins of society, Head On opens up a notion of Australian identity that is not only or simply hybrid, but also never finally fixed (Hall 1990).

Source: Studies in Australasian Cinema 1.1 (2007): 61. (Sighted 01/09/2009).

'This article argues that Harry Watt's The Overlanders (1946), an Ealing Studios film shot in Australia, should be understood as an international film product, one with a foot in the post-war cultural histories of both Australia and Britain. In this sense the film requires different reading strategies to those used within a national cinema framework. The article resists 'settling' the account, or justifying the film's raison d'être with respect to only one of nationalist discourse, arguing that a reliable and truthful account of The Overlanders will always be a composite one.' Source: Studies in Australasian Cinema 1.1 (2007): 79. (Sighted 01/09/2009).

This article contextualizes Ken G. Hall's 1940 film Dad Rudd, M.P. with the history of Dad Rudd, a fictional character who pervaded Australian popular culture throughout the first half of the twentieth century. It argues that the fiction, theatre, film, cartoon and radio narratives in which he appeared have been instrumental in the creation of the idea of a popular Australian audience that can be defined in relation to a particular set of national symbols. Addressing Hall's film as well as the promotional material and public debate surrounding it, the article demonstrates that conceptualizations of an Australian national audience have been influenced by the genres and narratives of popular culture, historical circumstance and American cultural production. Source: Studies in Australasian Cinema 1.1 (2007): 91. (Sighted 01/09/2009).