Finding ourselves in Australian films

Why on earth should Australian filmmakers want to try replicating Hollywood? No one can do Hollywood as well as Hollywood can, and the attempts to emulate it have usually, perhaps inevitably, led to flavourless or otherwise misbegotten enterprises. I know that this is the era of international co-productions, and that where the money comes from is undoubtedly influential, but where the creative personnel come from is surely still more so. I want to argue for the cultural significance of the small-scale filmmaking that doesn’t depend on US funding and thereby isn’t subject to the sorts of compromise that such involvement may entail.

It is always going to be difficult for Anglophone cinema, whether Australian, New Zealand, British or Canadian, to establish a viable place for themselves in domestic – let alone global – markets in the face of the all-conquering Hollywood product. As someone once remarked, if Americans spoke Chinese it would be easier for, say, Australia to maintain a sturdy film industry. For Anglophone films to be commercially successful, they need to break into the American market. There’s nothing new in that sort of ‘wisdom’. But is this the only sort of cinema that can justify itself? Is an Australian film (I use ‘Australia’ as a metonym for those other English-speaking countries referred to above) only worthwhile if it attracts audiences from Seattle to Dallas to Boston?