Australia

Australia

In Australia, Film Studies became firmly established as an institutionally recognized discipline in the decade from 1975 to 1985. Although this history in many ways reflected international trends, there are two aspects of the story that may be unique to the Australian case. One was the coincidence between the rise of Film Studies and the strategic revival of the Australian feature film industry in the early seventies with significant government funding and institutional support. 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 (1989), David Bordwell provides a history of the ‘academicization’ of film theory and criticism. Having noted various critical schools that developed after the Second World War in the US and Europe, mostly outside the universities, Bordwell identifies the appearance in the 1970s of professional associations and journals of film educators that contributed to this academicization at the same time as Film Studies was being introduced into university departments of drama, literature and art history that were already committed to the study of canonical cultural texts. Inspired by Bordwell, Barrett Hodsdon's Straight Roads and Crossed Lines attempts an equivalent history for Australia, ‘charting and explicating a range of film culture activities’ (2001: 59) from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that anticipate, intersect and occasionally conflict with the burgeoning realm of screen education. Hodsdon contrasts three spheres of ‘unofficial’ film culture – university-based film societies, the Sydney filmmakers co-operative and the Super-8 scene – against what he sees as examples of ‘official’ film cultural and educational institutions: the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), Swinburne Film School, the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA), and the growing number of higher education programmes in Film Studies.

Hodsdon identifies two defining characteristics of the 1950s university film societies, most prominently the Melbourne University Film Society and Sydney University Film Group, and the film festivals associated with them. First, they pursued the kind of left-wing political agenda advanced by the Realist [Page 113]Film Group (2001: 62–3). Second, they developed, through the introduction of regular bulletins, a film appreciation framework that promoted the cultural status of the medium (2001: 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 – moved from the provision of programme notes, short reviews and commentaries to more substantial critical and theoretical reflection. Hodsdon contrasts these ‘authentic publications’ to the ‘academic overkill’ and ‘French intellectual fashion that overtook the academic scene of screen studies (as it “evolved” in the 1970s)’ (2001: 68, 86). He suggests that academicized Film Studies, along with other factors such as weekly screenings from the National Film Theatre of Australia and double-features at inner city repertory cinemas, ultimately contributed to the demise of university film societies (2001: 82–3).

The second of Hodsdon's unofficial institutions, the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op (1970–85), arose out of Ubu Films, a distribution and exhibition operation headed by activists Albie Thoms and Aggy Read that focused on avant-garde and alternative films, mostly 16mm shorts, low budget features and documentaries. Thoms and Read envisaged the Co-op as a participatory organization that would encourage upcoming and marginal filmmakers to disseminate their work to local audiences at a time when Australian feature film production was at a nascent stage (Thoms, 1978; Hodsdon, 2001: 89). In 1972 the Co-op launched a monthly newsletter that ran until 1975 and then transformed in 1976 into the tabloid-format Filmnews. (Continuing publication until 1995, Filmnews ultimately outlasted the Co-op by a decade.) During the 1980s, under the editorship of Tina Kaufman, the journal became not just a house journal for the independent film community but also a forum for critical commentary on cultural policy and broader industry issues and an important cross-over vehicle into academic Film Studies (Collins, 1983; 1984). Local academics such as Meaghan Morris, Tom O'Regan, Stuart Cunningham, Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka published on aspects of Australian cinema, and UK-style screen theory was mediated through interviews with Paul Willemen and others.

...