Australian Film Theory and Criticism: Volume 1: Critical Positions

By Deane Williams, Constantine Verevis and Noel King

The first part of a three-volume work devoted to mapping the transnational history of Australian film studies, Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Volume 1 provides an overview of the period between 1975 and 1990, during which the discipline first became established in the academy. Tracing critical positions, personnel, and institutions across this formative period, Noel King, Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams examine a multitude of books and journal articles published in Australia and distributed internationally though such processes as publication in overseas journals, translation and reprinting. At the same time, they offer important insights about the origins of Australian film theory and its relationship to such related disciplines as English and cultural studies. Ultimately, Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Volume 1 delineates the historical implications – and reveals the future possibilities – of establishing new directions of inquiry for film studies in Australia and internationally. Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Volume 2 and 3  are also now available from Intellect.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jul 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781783203246

Book preview

First published in the UK in 2013 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2013 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover designer: Edwin Fox

Copy-editor: MPS Technologies

Production manager: Jelena Stanovnik

Typesetting: Planman Technologies

ISBN 978-1-84150-581-7

eISBN

Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK

For David Boyd, Jim Kitses and in memory of Manuel Alvarado

—NK

For Noel King, mentor and friend

—CV

For Paul Willemen (1944–2012), and his sizeable contribution to Australian Film Theory and Criticism

—DW

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Patrice Petro

Introduction

Chapter 1: Australian Film Theory and Criticism

Noel King, Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams

Part I: Institutions

Chapter 2: Film Theory Goes to Australia

Constantine Verevis

Chapter 3: Writing the Australian Film Revival

Constantine Verevis

Part II: Personnel

Chapter 4: Cultural Mobility and Film Studies in Australia 1975–1990

Noel King

Part III: Criticism

Chapter 5: Shifts and Interventions: Cultural Materialism and Australian Film History

Deane Williams

Chapter 6: Australian Film Theory and Criticism and Cultural Studies

Deane Williams

Conclusion

Chapter 7: Contemporary Australian Film Theory and Criticism

Noel King, Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams

Appendix 1: Australian Journal of Screen Theory (AJST), 1976–1985

Appendix 2: Australian Film Theory and Criticism: The Interviews

Works Consulted

About the Authors

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Australian Research Council for financial support provided by an ARC Discovery Grant for this project. At Intellect, we thank Jelena Stanovnik for her initial interest in, and ongoing support for, this and other volumes in the Australian Film Theory and Criticism series. Special thanks to Paul Coughlin and Lauren Bliss for their research assistance.

Material appearing in this book appeared in earlier versions in the following publications and is reprinted here with the permission of the editors:

1. Noel King, Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams. Australia. The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies. Ed. James Donald and Michael Renov. London: SAGE, 2008. 112–22.

2. Noel King, Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams. Mapping Film Studies in Australia: Institutions, Personnel, and Critical Positions. Creative Nation: Australian Cinema and Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Amit Sarwal and Reema Sarwal. New Delhi: SSS Publications, 2009. 1–12.

3. Constantine Verevis. Screen Theory Goes to Australia. Framework 51.2 (Fall 2010): 420–37.

4. Constantine Verevis. Writing the Revival. Metro 150 (2006): 168–69.

5. Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams. Contemporary Australian Film Theory and Criticism. Media International Australia 136 (2010): 177–90.

6. Deane Williams. Shifts and Interventions: Cultural Materialism and Australian Film History. Screening the Past 26 (2009). http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/26/cultural-materialism-australian-film-history.html.

Preface

Recent years have witnessed a surge of publications that explore the institutional and intellectual foundations of film studies as a discipline, spanning not just the academy, but also government, the museum and the publishing industry.¹ In his book, Scenes of Instruction: the Beginnings of the US Study of Film, for example, Dana Polan focuses on the history of film studies as an academic field, situating his research within other disciplines in the humanities, sciences and social sciences, which have likewise questioned and investigated the nature and boundaries of disciplinarity over the past two decades. Polan’s book is an invaluable work of historical research and recovery and yet, like other recent titles that explore the disciplinary history of our field, it focuses largely on developments in the United States. To be sure, Haidee Wasson’s excellent study of MoMA also elaborates the ties between the United States and Europe (especially the United Kingdom)² and Michael Zyrd has written extensively on experimental film and the development of film studies in the US and Canada.³ Nevertheless, the larger, more complex history of the disciplinary formation of film studies remains to be written if we are to ascertain how the study of film has been institutionalised elsewhere, how ideas have travelled among intellectuals interested in film and media cultures, and how this international exchange has shaped the field of film studies across frameworks that are at once national, regional and transnational.

This is precisely why Australian Film Theory and Criticism (in three volumes) is such a signal accomplishment and critical intervention into the growing literature on the foundation of film studies as an intellectual field of inquiry. As Noel King, Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams make clear, although the rapid growth of film studies in Australia in many ways reflects trends already explored by scholars elsewhere, there are at least two aspects that are unique to the Australian context. First, the growth of film studies in Australia coincided with the revival of the Australian feature film industry in the early 1970s, supported by state and federal government funds as well as other cultural activities. Second, and perhaps even more importantly, film studies in Australia emerged alongside a new style of film reviewing and criticism which, as the authors explain, acted both as a counterpoint and a complement to the new academic discipline of film studies in the Australian context.

Indeed, what is distinctive about the institutionalisation of film studies in Australia is the emergence of what Tom O’Regan has emphasised as the discursive nature of Australian film culture, its engagement with multiple components of cinema as an institution, including economic, political, cultural and historical discourses.⁴ Historians, cinephiles and critical intellectuals – often in tandem, more often in critical debate – have endeavoured to provide an understanding of the particularity of Australian film theory and criticism, at once informed by international currents but shaped in specific institutional and educational contexts.

In the tradition of the work surveyed in this volume, Australian Film Theory and Criticism successfully captures the unique array of voices and views that have shaped Australian film culture as well as the international flow of film theory and criticism which circulates well beyond Australia, demonstrating how local distinctiveness abounds in the global circulation of moving images. This local distinctiveness might be best described as offering a challenge to the polarisation of theory and practice and the gap between film enthusiasts and film theorists. Above all else, it reveals itself in a rejection of impersonal, academic discourse in favour of an impassioned, immersed, and thoroughly engaged approach to film culture that is at once deeply local and inherently global. Needless to say, the legacy of Australian film theory and criticism, which is the subject of this volume, has not only transformed film and media studies in Australia. It has also expanded, enlivened and challenged our view of the institutional and intellectual foundations of film studies as a discipline, allowing us to grasp the contours of a more complex, international and globalised tradition of film and media studies, both in the past and today.

Patrice Petro

Notes

1 These works include Dana Polan’s Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the US Study of Film (Berkeley: U of California P, 2007), Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson’s edited volume Inventing Film Studies (Durham: Duke UP, 2008), and Peter Decherney’s Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (New York: Columbia UP, 2005).

2 Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: U of California P, 2005).

3 See Michael Zyrd, Experimental Film and the Development of Film Study in America in Grieveson and Wasson, Inventing Film Studies 182–216.

4 Tom O’Regan, Australian National Cinema (London: Routledge, 1996).

Introduction

Chapter 1

Australian Film Theory and Criticism

Noel King, Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams

Since the 1970s, the discipline of film studies has been a rapidly expanding, international academic and intellectual field of inquiry. Around the globe, there are a host of university departments that offer courses in film (television, radio and media) studies, numerous journals devoted to the critical appreciation of the cinematic form, and countless newspaper columns, radio spots and television programmes devoted to film commentary and criticism. In Australia the rapid growth of film studies – especially in the decade-long period from 1975 to 1985 – in many ways reflected international trends, but there are at least two aspects of the story that may be unique to the Australian case. One was the coincidence that, in the early 1970s, the rise of film studies and the strategic revival of the Australian feature-film industry, which was accomplished with significant government funding and institutional support, occurred at the same time. The other was the coincidental emergence of a new style of film reviewing and criticism that acted as both a counterpoint and a complement to the new academic discipline.

In his book Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema, David Bordwell provides a history of various modes of film culture and criticism in the United States and Europe, including a brief description of the various schools of interpretation that developed, mostly outside the academy, after the Second World War. Bordwell identifies a number of material and institutional developments through the 1970s – for example, professional associations and journals of film educators – that contribute to what he terms the academicisation of film theory and criticism, and the way that university film studies develop in disciplines – departments of drama, literature and art history – already committed to the explication and commentary of cultural texts (plays, novels, paintings and so on). In a (some ways) related project – Straight Roads and Crossed Lines: The Quest for Film Culture in Australia from the 1960s? – Barrett Hodsdon (with direct reference to Bordwell’s Making Meaning) declares his interest in charting and explicating a range of [Australian] film culture activities from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that anticipate, intersect and (sometimes) conflict with the rapidly increasing realm of Australian screen education programmes (59). Hodsdon places a particular emphasis on three proactive public spheres of unofficial film culture – university-based film societies, the Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative and the Super-8 scene – which he contrasts to official film cultural and educational institutions such as the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), Swinburne Film School, the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) and the rapidly developing higher-education programmes in film studies.

Hodsdon describes the first of these – the 1950s university film society movements (and concurrent film festivals) – as groups that adopted a role of cultural differentiation by pursuing, for instance, the left-wing political agenda advanced by such bodies as the Realist Film Group (62–63). In addition, the film society movements (most prominently, the Melbourne University Film Society and Sydney University Film Group) developed – through the introduction of regular bulletins – a film appreciation framework in an endeavour to promote and elevate the cultural status of the film medium (64). These bulletins – Melbourne University Film Society Annotations (later, Annotations on Film), The University Film Group Bulletin (later Melbourne Film Group Bulletin), Sydney University Film Group Bulletin and others – initially provided programme notes, short reviews and commentary but later offered up more substantial critical and theoretical reflection. Hodsdon contrasts these authentic publications to the academic overkill (68) and French intellectual fashion that overtook the academic scene of screen studies (as it ‘evolved’ in the 1970s) (86). He suggests that academicised film studies, along with other factors, such as weekly screenings from the National Film Theatre of Australia (NFTA) and double features at inner city repertory cinemas, ultimately contributed to the demise of university film societies (82–83).

The second of Hodsdon’s unofficial institutions – the Sydney Filmmakers Co-Op (1970–1985) – arose out of Ubu Films, a distribution and exhibition operation focused on avant-garde and alternative films, and headed by activists Albie Thoms and Aggy Read. In the early 1970s, Thoms and Read built upon Ubu’s established distribution base to launch a filmmakers’ participation organisation with the express purpose of encouraging the involvement of upcoming and marginal filmmakers in the dissemination of their work to local audiences at a time when Australian feature-film production was at a nascent stage (89). While the Sydney Filmmakers Co-Op’s primary role was one of distribution and exhibition (screening 16mm shorts, low budget features and documentaries), in the early 1970s the Co-Op launched a monthly newsletter (1972–1975), the beginnings of the tabloid-format publication Filmnews (1976–1995) that ultimately outlasted the Co-Op. During the 1980s (and under the editorship of Tina Kaufman), Filmnews became a crucial point of focus, not only for the independent film community but also as a vehicle of critical commentary for cultural policy and broader industry issues (see Collins, Following the AFI and We Aim to Please). Filmnews also provided an important cross-over into academic film studies, inviting local academics – such as Stuart Cunningham, Susan Dermody, Elizabeth Jacka, Meaghan Morris and Tom O’Regan – to develop commentaries on aspects of Australian cinema and act as mediators for UK-style screen theory. It also included interviews with Paul Willemen and others.

The third institutional space described by Hodsdon is the Super-8 scene: specifically, the Sydney Super-8 Film Group, which started as a cell of activists before consolidating through the mid 1980s ahead of reformulating itself (with a wider media focus) as the Sydney Intermedia Network (1990); and the Melbourne group which formed in 1985, but had an antecedent in the Tch Tch Tch Super-8 and video collective of the late 1970s and early 1980s (headed by Philip Brophy in association with Rolando Caputo, Adrian Martin, Jayne Stevenson and others). These Super-8 groups received extensive coverage in such publications as Filmnews, On the Beach (1983–1987), and Filmviews (1986–1988), including in writings by people – Martin, Michael Hutak and Mark Titmarsh – who had direct involvement in the scene. Additionally, the Super-8 filmmakers – like the cinephile critic, steeped in film and television culture – actively recycled and reworked movie images encountered on television. By putting these fragments into new contexts, they were able to open up original and unpredictable possibilities for critical reflection.

Hodsdon’s comments on these three unofficial film spaces link up not only with the final section of Straight Roads and Crossed Lines – which deals with the relationship between reviewing and criticism, and mid-1980s attempts by local critics such as Morris (The Practice of Reviewing and Fetish Busters in the Temple of Doom) and Caputo and Martin (The State of Film Criticism in Australia) to question the practice of film reviewing and the rigid conformity of film theory paradigms (Hodsdon 155) – but also with Tom O’Regan’s account of how developments in film theory and criticism in Australia have contributed to the notion of a national cinema. Towards the end of his (later) book, Australian National Cinema, O’Regan adopts (also from Bordwell’s Making Meaning) a general distinction between explicatory and symptomatic criticism – between comprehension and interpretation – to describe the way that critics typically engage in an ongoing process of de-mythologising and re-mythologising film texts (333–41). To show how this process has worked in the Australian setting, O’Regan postulates three personae that represent three interconnected critical paradigms: the cinephile, the critical intellectual and the film historian. In order to give these ideal types historical substance, O’Regan notes the need to think of these three positions in relation to different institutional spaces and public arenas (341–46).¹ O’Regan’s brief account of these three positions provides a point of departure for a broad mapping of film theory and criticism, specifically the institutional spaces, local personnel and critical positions that have given rise to and shaped the particularity of Australian film studies.

Institutions

In the present decade, Australian film studies is an interdisciplinary field. Film studies emerged in the academy – alongside state and federal government support for film production and other cultural activities – in the mid- to late 1970s and early 1980s. The AFTRS was officially opened in 1975 (it had operated from 1973) and film studies rapidly grew in Australian upper-level secondary schools, colleges of advanced education (CAEs), institutes of technology (WAIT, Perth; NSWIT, Sydney; RMIT, Melbourne), newer universities (Murdoch, Perth; Griffith, Brisbane; Deakin, Melbourne), and within disciplines – such as English and comparative literature, art history and communication studies – already committed to explicatory criticism. In some locations (Melbourne’s La Trobe University and Sydney’s University of New South Wales, for instance) film studies established itself as a discrete aesthetic field and discipline of inquiry, but with the emergence of cultural studies through the 1980s, it was most often part (or became part) of a larger interdisciplinary formation. A full account of the appearance and development of Australian film studies would attend to the various educational contexts that have given film studies specific inflection as influenced by critical formations, regional locations and migrations of key personnel.

During its formative years, a crucial component in the consolidation of Australian film theory and criticism was the local and international exchange of critical formations facilitated by academic film studies (and associated) conferences and related organisations, including the Australian Screen Studies Association (ASSA) conferences (1978–1984), the biennial conference of the Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand (FHAANZ) (1981–present) and the Cultural Studies Association of Australia (CSAA) annual conferences (1991–present).

The first of these, the ASSA, developed out of the Australian Journal of Screen Theory (AJST), a mid-1970s publication initiated by John Tulloch. Its manifesto (announced on the inside cover of its first issue) was to provide regular interdisciplinary reflection on the increasingly complex body of film theory at a level suited to the many film courses springing up at tertiary and senior secondary level (Tulloch AJST 1). Early issues of the journal published papers from the 1977 Conference of the Tertiary Screen Education Association of Victoria (TSEA-V) (Tulloch AJST 4) and the First Australian Film Conference (University of New South Wales, 1978) (Gerdes AJST 5/6). Operating as an informal network across several Australian universities and colleges, the ASSA was officially launched at the second Australian Film Conference held at Nedlands College of Advanced Education in Perth (1981). Accordingly, the first (official) Australian Screen Studies Conference was held at La Trobe University in December 1982 (Creed et al. AJST 15/16), but by the time of the second ASSA Conference at Brisbane’s Griffith University in 1984 (Bell AJST 17/18) the association and the Australian Journal of Screen Theory wound up its short-lived existence, ostensibly because interest in mid-1970s screen theory had declined in the face of increasingly well-established media and communications-studies courses in the academy.

Despite their premature demise, the ASSA conferences and the organisation’s journal are testament to a vibrant exchange of ideas at the borders of the (new) academy, with early articles devoted to the explication of new critical approaches (Sylvia Lawson and Sam Rohdie on semiotics), uptake of international models by local and locally-based academics (Barbara Creed and Lesley Stern, each on feminism and melodrama), new work by overseas academics (articles by Raymond Bellour, Andrew Britton, Edward Buscombe, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Laura Mulvey and others), critical approaches to Australian cinema (Albert Moran and O’Regan, Two Discourses), and (in two special issues) new studies of television (Bell and Crofts, AJST 11/12,