Contemporary Australian Film Theory and Criticism

Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams

ContemporAry AustrAliAn film theory AnD CritiCism Abstract The discipline of film studies has, since the late 1960s and early 1970s, been a burgeoning academic and intellectual field of inquiry. This article seeks to provide a map of the local and international flows of Australian film theory and criticism. By tracing some key critical positions, personnel and institutions, it provides an account of the state of contemporary Australian film studies. The article falls into three parts. The first reflects upon the establishment of academic film studies in Australia, beginning with the 1970s and 1980s importation of screen theory. The second attends to a late 1980s and early 1990s recognition of the historical and cultural specificity of film (and television), and the associated turn to historical film studies. The third part looks at the institutionalisation of the discipline, to attend to some of the intellectual and pragmatic considerations shaping Australian film studies through the 1990s and beyond.

The past year has seen two key events in Anglophone film (and media) studies: the 50th anniversary of the UK-based journal Screen, first published by the Society for Education in Film and Television (SEFT) in 1959; and the 50th anniversary of the US-based Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). Each institution used the occasion to devote space – in special issues of Screen and Cinema Journal (the latter published in cooperation with SCMS since 1969) – to reflect not only on the history of the associations and their affiliated publications, conferences and memberships but also, more broadly, to consider the state of film (and media) studies today (see Kuhn, 2009; Fischer, 2009). Such retrospection coincides with, and is complemented by, Terry Bolas’s (2009) recent book on the history of SEFT, Screen Education: From Film Appreciation to Media Studies. In Australia, while the absence of a comparable (ongoing) professional association to that of SEFT or SCMS (and their associated journals) diminishes the concentration of such reflection, some attention to the development of Australian film theory and criticism demonstrates the very particular condition of film studies in this country. This article attempts a reconstruction of the establishment of academic film studies in Australia, beginning with the (1970s–1980s) importation of Screen theory, and subsequent (1980s–1990s) turn to film history. The latter part of the article reflects upon the more recent (1990s–present) institutionalisation of the discipline to attend to some of the intellectual and pragmatic considerations that shape contemporary Australian film studies. No. 136 — August 2010 177

film theory in Australia In order to begin to understand the state of Australian film studies – theory and criticism – today (and look ahead to its future), it seems necessary to understand something of its past. By taking an interest in the sometimes idealistic (sometimes prescriptive) nature of the formative moments in Australian film studies – its practical and theoretical statements and achievements, its various intellectual and political engagements, and its personal, professional and institutional motivations – we can begin to assess the state of contemporary film studies in circumstances substantially different from those in which the discipline sought to establish itself, especially in the decade 1975–85. There is here, admittedly, a certain arbitrariness to the limits imposed on an inquiry into the beginnings of film studies, not only in situating the ‘original’ moment of Australian film studies in this period, but also in limiting the concept of ‘film studies’, which overlaps substantially with literary, communications and cultural studies, and its geographical demarcation (‘Australian’), which elides the connections and exchanges of ideas and personnel from other parts of the world, and also the way in which film studies develops differently in various locations across Australia (cf. Frow, 2005). The establishment of academic film studies in Australia can be located in the (international) Screen theory moment of the early to mid-1970s. These years marked the importation of positions displayed in the pages of Screen journal, notably a 1973 double issue, with two long essays by Christian Metz and newly translated articles by Tzevtan Todorov and Julia Kristeva, and in 1975 Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, the most widely cited and reprinted of Screen articles. In some of the best theoretical writing of the period – a series of essays subsequently translated in The Analysis of Film (2000) – Raymond Bellour developed theories of text and reading as critical practice for the close analysis of film, and addressed the larger issues of subjectivity, desire and identification that had dominated Western visual culture. The impact that these new theories of film, notably the semiological works, had in Australia was evident in the forum provided by the Tertiary Screen Education Association of Victoria (TSEA-V) conference, held in Melbourne in 1975. Reflecting on that event, Ian Hunter recalls: The event that [eventually] brought me to Griffith [University, 1976–2002] was a symposium on ‘screen theory’ that was held in the then-Melbourne Teachers College … Mick Counihan [then at La Trobe University] talked about cine-structuralism and was selling copies of a big double Christian Metz issue of Screen, and Meaghan [Morris] was either just going to Paris or had just come back from Paris, and anyway was the bearer-expositor of French semiotic work. (Hunter, 2008: 47) Brian Shoesmith, who in the late 1980s would go on (with Tom O’Regan, Noel King, Toby Miller, Alec McHoul, and others at Murdoch, Curtin and Edith Cowan Universities) to raise the journal Continuum from the ashes of the Australian Journal of Screen Theory, similarly remembers the event: The turning point for me was a 1975 conference at Melbourne University … This was the time that semiotics was introduced into Australian film discourse. Mick Counihan attempted to explain it to us [and] Meaghan Morris stepped in and clarified matters. In many respects it was a very Media International Australia 178

formative moment for many of us setting out to teach film and media in the Australian tertiary sector. Shortly after the conference John Tulloch and Peter Gerdes began the Australian Journal of Screen Theory. (Shoesmith, 2009: 139) In ‘No Flowers for the Cinéphile’, an account of the fate of Australian cinéphilia (and film culture) of the 1970s (and 1980s), Adrian Martin (1988) captures the moment in which the Australian Journal of Screen Theory (AJST) emerged: ‘[For] cinéphiles with a least one foot within the academy, 1976 was a bombshell. “Film Theory”, all evidence of which had hitherto been quelled or delayed, was beginning to emerge – either in the form of powerfully charismatic import personalities, or equally fervent local converts.’ (1988: 129) The inside cover of the first (1976) issue of AJST carries the journal’s mission statement, and further admits to Martin’s assessment of the intellectual environment in which the fledgling discipline sought to locate itself: [The Australian Journal of] Screen Theory is a new, interdisciplinary film journal which, while an Australian publication, is oriented towards an international English-speaking market. The journal has the principal objective of providing 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. The period 1975–85 – which Dudley Andrew (2000: 343) has called the ‘imperial age’ of film studies – is dominated by (Bellourian) ‘textual analysis’, by theories of the cinematic apparatus and the film spectator, and these are in turn underpinned by the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, the Marxism of Louis Althusser and the textual theory of Roland Barthes. In the mid-1980s, textual analysis came under fire, most notably from the ‘Wisconsin School’ led by David Bordwell. Bordwell disparagingly refers to the ‘Grand Theory’ of Saussure, Lacan, Althusser and Barthes (and the film theory derived from these positions) as monolithic ‘SLAB theory’, and sets a new agenda for a ‘historical poetics’ of film, one underpinned by a cognitive account of the spectator’s activity and narrative theory derived from neo-formalist aesthetics (‘Historical Poetics’). This crisis of Grand Theory took place alongside accounts of post-modernism, notably Jean-François Lyotard’s (1984) much-cited announcement that post-modernism was simply an ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’. In his provocative book, Making Meaning (1989), and subsequent anthology (with Noël Carroll), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (1996), Bordwell puts forward an argument for the displacement of (European) grand theory (both subject-position theories and culturalism), and installation of a deregulated ‘piecemeal theory’, one characterised by ‘mid-level’ research questions that are ‘conceptually powerful’ and ‘based in evidence’ without appeal to theoretical bricolage (Bordwell and Carroll, 1996: 6–30). The crisis in film theory and the move to post-theory (post-modernism, poststructuralism) occasions a return to the empirical investigation of film – that is, to film history. It coincides, too, with what Bordwell refers to as ‘culturalism’ in film studies (and associated movement of television into the syllabus), the shift from the analysis of texts to an interrogation of the uses made of texts, and the No. 136 — August 2010 179

specific practices that produce differences of race, ethnicity, class and gender. This enables a redefinition of the object of film analysis, and an institutional shift – in the guise of ‘historical reception studies’ – from text to intertext, from ideal spectator to actual audience, and to the ‘real’ history of a text’s activation. In the work of Janet Staiger (1992) and Barbara Klinger (1994), reception studies is contrasted with textual studies, placing the emphasis on the history of interactions between (real) readers and texts, actual spectators and films. In this shift, (the earlier brand of) textual analysis explains an object by investigating its internal strategies (generating an interpretation), but reception studies seeks to understand the various practices and institutions that determine a text’s reception (thereby understanding interpretations as historically and culturally situated events). In film studies, this move also occasions a shift (through the 1990s) to queer and cult studies, both of which involve the rereading of texts from earlier historical periods, with a view to providing a self-understanding for cultural production. Significantly, this empirical move coincides with Michel Foucault’s (1972) account of ‘effective’ history, and with the appearance (in English translation) of Gilles Deleuze’s two Cinema books (1983 and 1986). In particular, Deleuze’s books can be seen as an attempt to negotiate the tension that had arisen in film studies between theory and history. What Deleuze offers up is not another grand (or total) theory of film (a self-same model to be applied to texts), but rather a non-totalising concept of ‘difference’, one that can attend to the heterogeneity of historical material. Around the same time, film historians – notably Tom Gunning – began to question a history of film that saw early (or ‘primitive’) cinema as being significant only insofar as it contributed to the development of the ‘classical Hollywood narrative’ (in position by around 1917). In place of ahistorical, formal and narrative dominated accounts of cinema, Gunning (1989, 1990) proposed a ‘cinema of attractions’, one that developed out of a modern visual culture obsessed with creating and circulating a series of visual experiences. In Gunning’s writings of the late 1980s and early 1990s, early cinema is situated within the broader social and cultural experience of modernity, and cinema intersects with other types of attraction, such as the billboard, the world’s fair, the arcade and the amusement park. Contemporaneous works – anthologies such as Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz’s (1995) Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life and Patrice Petro’s (1995) Fugitive Images – suggest that a diversity of factors, including developments in transportation, architectures of transit (arcades) and aesthetic panoramic practices, contributed to the creation of a touristic consciousness that gave rise to cinema. Anne Friedberg’s (1993) Window Shopping and the writings of Giuliana Bruno (1993, 2002) place the ‘observer in modernity’ within a historical framework of pre-cinematic mobile and virtual gazes. In these works, cinema itself is understood as just one of several new technologies of mobility and of vision. The observer (the flaneur) becomes a prototype for the film spectator, and ‘window shopping’ and ‘streetwalking’ (for Friedberg and for Bruno, respectively) become a ‘passage’ out of the theory of the fixed gaze that had turned the 1970s cinema spectator into an immobile voyeur. In this shift, streetwalking comes to imply that, because of film’s spatio-corporeal kinetics, the spectator is a voyageur – a traveller – rather than simply a voyeur (a seer). In a more explicitly Deleuzian uptake, Laura Marks’ (2000) The Skin of the Film signals the shift to a more bodily (or haptic) engagement with film. Media International Australia 180

By grounding cinema (and proto-cinema) in traditions of image production in modernity, the work of Friedberg, Bruno, Petro and others provides a way of understanding and speculating a new age of digital filmmaking and (blockbuster) entertainment. The pluralism of the present period is also attended to under the rubric of intermediality, whereby the object of film studies shifts from (analogue) motion pictures to the way film combines with (or is replaced by) other arts and new (digital) technologies. A volume such as Linda Williams and Christine Gledhill’s (2000) anthology Reinventing Film Studies urges scholars to come to terms with the cinema as a mass art and recognise the alliance with communication and media studies, cultural studies and visual studies. More recently, David Rodowick has undertaken an ambitious two-volume project: The Virtual Life of Film (2007) and An Elegy for Theory (forthcoming) The first volume recognises that most so-called new media have been imagined from a cinematic metaphor: ‘an idea of cinema persists or subsists within the new media rather than supplanting the former as is typically the case in a phase of technological transition’ (2007: viii). The second volume proposes to survey the place and function of ‘theory’ in cinema studies since the 1970s in order to inquire why theory has became a contested object in competition with both history and philosophy.

film history in Australia A measure of the international shifts in scholarship and attitude – from the more prescriptive positions of the 1970s and 1980s to the (radical) pluralism of the 1990s and beyond – can be tracked across local publications and conferences. For instance, the Australian Journal of Screen Theory (established in 1976) put in place an early strategy – the publication of special conference issues – that became typical of the journal for the remainder of its tenure. A special double-issue (5/6, 1978) published papers from the First Australian Film Conference (June 1978, University of New South Wales) and the success of that event, together with the First History and Film conference (Canberra, 1981), led to an undertaking ‘[to] establish an association of people interested in the improvement of film teaching on a tertiary level’ (Gerdes, 1978: 3). The professional body, the Australian Screen Studies Association, was officially formed at the Second Australian Film Conference (Perth, 1980). The inside cover of issue 9/10 of AJST carried the Association’s founding resolution: ‘[to] assure the continuity of conferences, the publication of the journal, and a common front for securing further support for screen studies’. Issue 15/16 (1983) of AJST published papers from what became known as the First (official) Australian Screen Studies Conference, held at La Trobe University in December 1982. Among the published articles was Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan’s paper, ‘Two Discourses of Australian Film’, which – like Philip Brophy and Adrian Martin’s contemporaneous ‘The Archaeology of Culture’ – carried (in its title) a harbinger of Foucault, and a sense of what was to come. Within a few years, the issue of AJST that carried papers delivered at the Second Australian Screen Studies conference (1984) announced, under the title ‘Vale: Australian Journal of Screen Theory’, the end of the journal. The following year, Philip Bell (1987), writing in Continuum, the new ‘Australian journal of the media’, marked out new directions – in television and historical reception studies – that were to be taken up in the late 1980s (and beyond): No. 136 — August 2010 181

The most recent [third and final] biennial conference of the Australian (now Australasian) Screen Studies Association was held in Sydney in December 1986. The papers printed here represent many of the issues considered, and reflect on the theoretical perspectives which the conference was intended to interrogate. Although it has not been possible to represent all the strands of the conference, three principal foci might be discerned in the following papers: First, a reassessment of film theory, especially in the light of recent work (such as Bordwell and Thompson’s) on Hollywood narrative. Second, a questioning of the future directions of what has for a decade been a most productive conjunction of psychoanalytic and feminist theorising. Third, the debate concerning TV as a cultural form in the light of studies focussed on active, diverse audience sub-cultures, and the popular/populist controversy. Reflecting upon the decade-long period in which Screen theory substantially informed the establishment of Australian film studies, Bell concludes: Although old theoretical habits die hard, all of the [collected] papers show a determination not merely to reproduce the somewhat one-dimensional preoccupations of much 1970s–80s work which all too frequently sought to appropriate film or TV texts to illustrate the subtlety or fashionability of recently patented and imported ‘theory’. The historical and cultural specificity of film and TV was repeatedly emphasised during the conference, as were the limitations of totalising theory generally. Hence, the papers published here are eclectic, although they employ or develop theory in relation to concrete, sometimes quite ‘empirical’ questions. This is a confident and positive movement, indicating that the search for monolithic theories ‘of film’ or ‘of TV’ textual practices has been left behind. (our emphases) The departure from earlier positions – and eclecticism of local writing on film – from the end of the 1980s to the beginning of 1990s is captured in two special journal issues devoted to film: ‘Film’ (Art & Text, vol. 34, 1989) and ‘Film: Matters of Style’ (Continuum, vol. 5, no. 2, 1992). The first, edited by Allen S. Weiss, reveals both the impact of Deleuze’s work and an interest in cinema and modernity as a point of reflection and convergence. The publication – a special issue of Art & Text, edited from New York with contributions from Tom Gunning, Annette Michelson, Dana Polan and David Rodowick – demonstrates not only the internationalism of Australian film theory, but also the fact that much of the film theory debate in Australia was occurring in the small journals network – not only Art & Text, but also On the Beach, Flesh, Tension, and so on. In ‘Film: Matters of Style’, editor Adrian Martin draws attention to this very point, stating that some of the most ‘influential’ players (of the time) in Australian film studies – Jodi Brooks, Ted Colless, Ross Gibson and Lesley Stern – worked in the field for over a decade without contributing to the country’s major film-dedicated magazines, Filmnews and Cinema Papers. Martin takes exception to Bordwell’s account of the state (and crisis) of film studies, arguing that in Australia the development of film studies, its institutions and organisations differs substantially, that the particularity of Australian film studies is informed by the fact that it happens ‘across an incredibly dispersed network, and often in mangled, cryptic, necessarily compromised forms’ – ‘not entirely a bad thing’ he adds. (1992: 9). Media International Australia 182

The recognition of the historical and cultural specificity of film and television that occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s effectively profiles the work of Australian ‘film historians’ such as Ina Bertrand, Bill Routt and John Tulloch. Bertrand had been an advocate for historical approaches to Australian film since the 1970s and, despite various shifts in the agenda of academic film studies, she maintained a consistent research profile. Bertrand’s publications – Film Censorship in Australia (1978), Government and Film in Australia (with Diane Collins, 1981) and the monumental Cinema in Australia: A Documentary History (1989) – set benchmarks for historical research, always seeking to contextualise various cinemas alongside issues of censorship, government involvement in film production (inescapable in Australia) and contemporaneous documents that position film texts historically. Later, Bertrand teamed up (in a chapter for The Australian Screen) with Routt to investigate local and international industrial flows and the establishment of the vertically integrated Australasian films ahead of World War I and (more recently) for the book ‘The Picture That Will Live Forever’: The Story of the Kelly Gang. Tulloch’s twin books – Legends on the Screen (1981) and Australian Cinema (1982) – are landmark works, in that the former emphasises textual analysis of historical films (particularly silent cinema) while the latter is an early example of a policy approach to film history that precedes the enthusiasm for this field evident in the (later) work of Tom O’Regan and Stuart Cunningham. Like the so called ‘crisis’ in film theory that occasioned a reconsideration (now referred to as ‘historical reception studies’), there emerged in Australia a shift in historical studies, signalled by the work of Foucault and occasioned locally by Moran and O’Regan’s reassessment of historical (film) studies. In ‘Two Discourses of Australian Film’ (1983), Moran and O’Regan assert that they ‘seek to challenge the various histories of Australian film that already exist’ and ‘call for a different account of Australian film than that recently entered into by Eric Reade [The Australian Screen], Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper [Australian Films 1900–1977: Guide to Feature Film Production], and Ina Bertrand and Diane Collins [Government and Film in Australia]’ (1983: 163). For Moran and O’Regan, these books (and one could add Graham Shirley and Brian Adams’ Australian Cinema to the list) present Australian film as ‘a homogenous object’ and state that ‘the point of these histories is to offer a teleology of that object, an account of linear growth and development’ (1983: 163). Against this type of account, Moran and O’Regan argue that: Australian film is not a single unified object but a series of different objects, differently realised. Australian film can be thought of as a series of different discursive constructions, the discourses occupying a series of different institutional sites that variously allow or impede the issue of that discourse as a set of filmic texts … There is no evolution or development across time. There is instead a series of different distinct constructions of Australian film having little or nothing in common with each other. (1983: 163) In 1985, Moran and O’Regan followed up the preliminary investigation of ‘Two Discourses of Australian Film’ with An Australian Film Reader, an edited collection of essays that structurally addressed the problems they had identified in earlier ‘problematic’ projects. The Reader subsequently can be seen as the first in a series of collections on Australian cinema that are less teleological. An Australian No. 136 — August 2010 183

Film Reader has four parts – Early Cinema, Documentary Hopes, Renaissance of the Feature and Alternative Cinema – and collects writings from a range of contributors, both contemporary and historical. The Introduction explains: The collection departs from the usual form of documentary history. In the first two sections the material is drawn only in part from the periods in question. Comment from our own period, exploring the earlier film work historically, is juxtaposed with material from earlier sources. The intention is to emphasise that issues around the film work of each period were never settled; that the past of our film production, like other pasts, is never finished. Thus the book assembles a series of voices about Australian film, without seeming (so far as we can tell) to have a definitive authorial voice of its own. (1985: 14) In many ways, the two Moran and O’Regan collections set the agenda for much of the work on Australian film studies that followed – including O’Regan’s (1996) important Australian National Cinema book – and in turn led to the kind of historical/practice coincidence that emerged in overseas work such as Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery’s (1985) Film History: Theory and Practice. One way to see the continuation of this kind of discursive historical approach to Australian film studies is to consider three recent monographs, each of which takes a strong lead from the work of Bertrand and Routt. These are Jane Landman’s (2006) The Tread of a Whiteman’s Foot: Australian Pacific Colonialism and the Cinema 1925–62, Deb Verhoeven’s (2006) Sheep and the Australian Cinema and Deane Williams’ (2008) Australian Post-War Documentary Film: An Arc of Mirrors. These books nevertheless need to be considered amongst the variety of writings and further atomisation of the field of contemporary Australian film theory and criticism.

film institutions in Australia In the late 1980s, such contextual factors as the official embrace of a policy of democratic multiculturalism and shifts in communications technologies and broadcasting regulations contributed to the breakdown of the imaginary identity of Australian screen studies (especially dominant in the period 1975–85), and the introduction of a more inclusive brand of film studies. These shifts witness a diversification of film studies into distinct genres often aligned with specialist writers whose focus on particular topics was accompanied by a reputation for career lines and responsibilities. In this way, Chris Berry (initially) with Perspectives on Chinese Cinema (1985), A Bit on the Side: East-West Topographies of Desire (1994) and The Filmmaker and The Prostitute: Dennis O’Rourke’s The Good Woman of Bangkok (Berry et al., 1996) became responsible for Asian cinema studies. Jon Stratton and Ien Ang became responsible for multicultural media studies, while Karen Jennings, Michael Meadows, Felicity Collins and Therese Davis forged names for themselves in the study of Indigenous film and television. At this time, there was also a rise in television studies as an Australian research phenomenon, with Stuart Cunningham and Toby Miller, Elizabeth Jacka, Albert Moran, Tom O’Regan, David Rowe, John Tulloch and Graeme Turner all moving into the field (heralded by the arrival of cultural/media studies academics Tony Media International Australia 184

Bennett, Colin Mercer and Gillian Swanson at Griffith University in Brisbane, and television scholars John Fiske and John Hartley in Perth in the 1980s). Around this time, the focus on television studies was accompanied by an interest in media policy with, in particular, Cunningham and O’Regan straddling both television studies and media policy studies. More recently, the increase of investment in, and production at, international film studios on Australian shores has provoked an interest in the study of ‘Australian international pictures’, with O’Regan (again), Ben Goldsmith and Nick Herd – with his book Chasing the Runaways: Foreign Film Production and Film Studio Development in Australia 1988–2002 (2004) – making major contributions. Institutional initiatives also gave rise to the publication of several series of monographs. For instance, the Australian Film Institute and the Australian Teachers of Media, along with Deakin University (Melbourne), initiated the Moving Image series of monographs, including Jennings’ Sites of Difference (1993) and Collins’ The Films of Gillian Armstrong (1999), while the Australian Film Commission contracted Marcia Langton’s ‘Well I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television’ (1993) and facilitated Hodsdon’s (2001) Straight Roads and Crossed Lines. Commercial publishers founded similar initiatives – Currency Press, for instance, established its Australian Screen Classics series, the most notable element of which is Martin’s The Mad Max Movies (2003). Books such as these have been shining lights in a (sometimes) dull Australian film studies landscape. The professionalisation of film studies has continued to see a number of Australian film studies personnel contributing to internationally published and distributed film studies series on authors and genres. Adrian Martin wrote Once Upon a Time in America for the British Film Institute (BFI) Modern Classics series (1998), Raul Rúiz: Images of Passage for the Rotterdam Film Festival (with Helen Bandis and Grant McDonald, 2004) and Terrence Malick for the BFI Filmmakers series (forthcoming) and Brian De Palma for the Contemporary Film Directors series from University of Illinois Press (also forthcoming). George Kouvaros (2004) wrote Where Does It Happen? John Cassavetes and Cinema at the Breaking Point for University of Minnesota Press; Colin Crisp wrote The Classic French Cinema 1930–1960 (1997) and Genre, Myth, and Convention in the French Cinema 1929–1939 (2002), both for Indiana University Press; Brian McFarlane wrote An Autobiography of British Cinema (1997) and edited The Encyclopedia of British Film (2003) as well as Wallflower Press’s The Cinema of Britain and Ireland (2005); Gabrielle Murray (2004) wrote This Wounded Cinema, This Wounded Life: Violence and Utopia in the Films of Sam Peckinpah; Lorraine Mortimer wrote introductions for and translated re-publications of Edgar Morin’s The Stars (2005) and The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man (2005); and Meaghan Morris (with Sui Leung Li and Stephen Ching-Kui Chan, 2005) wrote Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema. More recently, Australian film studies has seen relatively junior academics forge international names with publications from international presses. These include Jane Park’s (forthcoming) Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, Claire Perkins’ (forthcoming) American ‘Smart’ Cinema, Olivia Khoo’s (with Sean Metzger, 2009) Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures and Belinda Smaill’s (2010) The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture. No. 136 — August 2010 185

In a 1997 report for Screen journal entitled, ‘On Dangerous Ground’, George Kouvaros worries about the ‘unstable’ state of film studies in Australia. Addressing Bordwell’s (1989) book Making Meaning, Kouvaros asks about ‘the relevance that Bordwell’s understanding of the operation of the institution of film studies has for the actual working conditions and everyday pressures faced by film writers and scholars working in Australia’ (1997: 77). Here, Kouvaros is concerned with the provincial and contingent character of Australian film studies, ‘the fundamentally unstable nature of the terrain on which it operates’ (1997: 77). Kouvaros is also concerned for the state of film studies as a discipline with a discrete ‘specialized academic discipline’ under pressure from cultural studies and the adoption of ‘film’ by more established disciplines such as history, fine arts and sociology (1997: 77). Since 1997, film studies in Australia has, of course, developed in a variety of ways. Film scholars, like it or not, are consistently reminded that they are participating in international film studies, partly due to factors such as the overwhelming increase in access to global cinema via cultural film festivals and DVD re-releases, but also due to the relative lack of book and journal publishing opportunities in Australia. These factors, alongside the emerging discourse of university metrics and competitions such as the recent Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) journal rankings exercise, have seen an unparalleled internationalism in ‘Australian’ film studies. Part of the ‘terrain’, as Kouvaros (1997) terms it, is addressed by Dudley Andrew (2000), who sees the present era of film studies marked not only by the legacy of the past, but also by a new ‘market economy’ of tangible outcomes and ranked publications. For Australians, these final actions to academicise film studies have brought with them the kinds of considered publishing imperatives that Kouvaros saw Australian film studies as being subjected to in 1997. Alongside these factors, it is possible to see the rise in estimation of Australian-based journals, especially the internet publications Screening the Past (founding editor Ina Bertrand, 1997–present), Senses of Cinema (founding editor Bill Mousoulis, 1999–present) and Rouge (editors Helen Bandis, Adrian Martin and Grant McDonald, 2003–present). These journals have provided new (often) vibrant forums for academic (and other) writing on film. And other opportunities emerge from the fervour that is Intellect Publishing’s (Bristol, UK) raft of journals, including Studies in Australasian Cinema (founding editor Ian Henderson, 2007–present). Rick Altman (2009), in the previously mentioned Cinema Journal ‘SCMS at Fifty’ forum (edited by Lucy Fischer), reflects on the situation specific to the United States, where film studies as a discipline has become firmly established within the Academy at the same time as the material of that study has been reconfigured in the digital domain. He writes: Where does this leave us today, and for the foreseeable future? Frankly, as I see it, our situation is precarious indeed. What brought us together as a field, and sustained us for several decades as we eventually succeeded in our mission, was the desire to have cinema recognized as a powerful form of artistic, cultural, and economic expression, with cinema studies consequently recognized as an important, independent academic discipline. (2009: 135) In Australia at present, it seems that the situation is quite different. Film theory and criticism are dispersed between cultural studies, English, communications and Media International Australia 186

media studies, and (occasionally) dedicated film and television studies. In this dispersal, the discipline of film studies relies so much on the federal Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research’s (DIISR’s) Fields of Research (FOR) codes, where the 1902 Film, Television and Digital Media code signifies a coherence that is becoming unclear to many film studies scholars. As the discipline is said to be established, the forces of digital divergence that impinge on the discipline are at odds with the required accounting for the research outputs, which in the end define the field. This is a curious situation indeed! References Allen, Robert C. and Gomery, Douglas 1985, Film History: Theory and Practice, McGraw-Hill, New York. Altman, Rick 2009, ‘Whither Film Studies (in a Post–Film Studies World)?’, Cinema Journal, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 131–35. Andrew, Dudley 2000, ‘The “Three Ages” of Cinema Studies and the Age to Come’, PMLA, vol. 115, no. 3, pp. 341–51. Art & Text 1989, no. 34, Film, editor Allen S. Weiss. Bandis, Helen, Martin, Adrian and McDonald, Grant 2004, Raul Rúiz: Images of Passage, Rouge Press/International Film Festival Rotterdam. Bell, Philip 1986, ‘Vale: Australian Journal of Screen Theory’, Australian Journal of Screen Theory, nos 17/18, n.p. —— 1987, ‘Introduction’, Continuum, vol. 1, no. 2, n.p. Bellour, Raymond, 1974–75, ‘The Obvious and the Code’, trans. Diana Matias, Screen, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 7–17. —— 1979, ‘Alternation, Segmentation, Hypnosis: Interview with Raymond Bellour’, by Janet Bergstrom, trans. Susan Suleiman, Camera Obscura, nos 3–4, pp. 70–103. —— 1979, ‘Cine-Repetitions’, trans. Kari Hanet, Screen, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 65–72. —— 2000, The Analysis of Film, ed. Constance Penley, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN. Berry, Chris (ed.) 1985, Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, China-Japan Program, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. —— 1994, A Bit on the Side: East–West Topographies of Desire, Empress Publishing, Sydney. Berry, Chris, Hamilton, Annette and Jayamanne, Laleen 1996, The Filmmaker and The Prostitute: Dennis O’Rourke’s The Good Woman of Bangkok, Power Publications, Sydney. Bertrand, Ina 1978, Film Censorship in Australia, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane. —— (ed.) 1989, Cinema in Australia: A Documentary History, UNSW Press, Sydney. —— 2004, ‘“Wot’s in a Name?” and How Did We Get Here from There?’, paper presented to the 12th Film and History Conference, Canberra, www.afiresearch.rmit.edu.au/fhc2006/about.html. Bertrand, Ina and Collins, Diane 1981, Government and Film in Australia, Currency Press, Sydney. Bertrand, Ina and Routt, William D. 2007, ‘The Picture That Will Live Forever’: The Story of the Kelly Gang, Australian Teachers of Media, Melbourne. Bolas, Terry 2009, Screen Education: From Film Appreciation to Media Studies, Intellect, Bristol. Bordwell, David 1989, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema, Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Bordwell, David 1989, ‘Historical Poetics of Cinema’, in R. Barton Palmer (ed.), The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches, AMS Press, New York. Bordwell, David and Carroll, Noël (eds) (1996) Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI. Brophy, Philip and Martin, Adrian 1982, ‘The Archaeology of Culture (or How to Say Everything at Once)’, Cantrills Filmnotes, nos 37/38, April, pp. 44–53. Bruno, Giuliana 1993, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. —— 2002, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, Verso, London. No. 136 — August 2010 187

Charney, Leo and Schwartz, Vanessa (eds) (1995), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Collins, Felicity 1999, The Films of Gillian Armstrong, Australian Teachers of Media, Melbourne. Collins, Felicity and Davis, Therese 2004, Australian Cinema After Mabo, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne. Continuum, 1992, vol. 5, no. 2, Film: Matters of Style, editor Adrian Martin. Crisp, Colin 1997, The Classic French Cinema 1930–1960, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN. —— 2002, Genre, Myth, and Convention in the French Cinema 1929–1939, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN. Deleuze, Gilles 1986, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. —— 1989, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Fischer, Lucy (ed.) 2009, ‘Out of the Past’, Cinema Journal, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 128–97. Foucault, Michel 1972, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, Pantheon, New York. Friedberg, Anne 1993, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Frow, John 2005, ‘Australian Cultural Studies: Theory Story, History’, Australian Humanities Review, no. 37, www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-December-2005/frow.html. Gerdes, Peter 1978, ‘A Note from the Publisher’, Australian Journal of Screen Theory, nos 5–6, p. 3. Grieveson, Lee and Wasson, Haidee (eds) 2008, Inventing Film Studies, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Gunning, Tom 1989, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’, Art and Text, no. 34, pp. 31–45. —— 1990, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in T. Elsaesser and A. Barker (eds), Early Film: Space, Frame, Narrative, British Film Institute, London. Hastee, Amelie, Joyrich, Lynne, White Patricia and Willis, Sharon 2008, ‘(Re)inventing Camera Obscura’, in Lee Greiveson and Haidee Wasson (eds), Inventing Film Studies, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Heath, Stephen 1973, ‘Film/Text/Cinetext’, Screen, vol. 14. nos 1–2, pp. 102–28. Herd, Nick 2004, Chasing the Runaways: Foreign Film Production and Film Studio Development in Australia 1988–2002, Currency House in association with the Australian Writers’ Foundation, Sydney. Hodsdon, Barrett 2001, Straight Roads and Crossed Lines: The Quest for Film Culture in Australia from the 1960s? Bernt Porridge Group, Shenton Park. Hunter, Ian 2008, ‘Another Way of Being an Intellectual’, interview by Noel King, Communication, Politics & Culture, vol. 41, no. 1, n.p. ‘Interpretation Inc.’ 1993, Special Issue of Film Criticism, vol. 17, nos 2–3. Jennings, Karen 1993, Sites of Difference: Cinematic Representations of Aboriginality, Australian Film Institute, Melbourne. Khoo, Olivia 2007, The Chinese Exotic: Modern Diasporic Femininity, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong. Khoo, Olivia and Metzger, Sean (eds) 2009, Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures, Intellect, London. Klinger, Barbara 1994, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN. Kouvaros, George 1997, ‘On Dangerous Ground: Film Studies in Australia’, Screen, vol. 38, no. 1, Spring, pp. 76–81. —— 2004, Where Does it Happen? John Cassavetes and Cinema at the Breaking Point, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Kristeva, Julia 1973, ‘The Semiotic Activity’, Screen, vol. 14, nos 1–2, pp. 25–39. Kuhn, Annette 2009, ‘Screen and Screen Theorizing Today’, Screen, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 1–12. Media International Australia 188

Landman, Jane 2006, The Tread of a White Man’s Foot: Australian Pacific Colonialism and the Cinema, 1925–62, Pandanus Books, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra. Langton, Marcia 1993, ‘Well, I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw it on the Television …’, Australian Film Commission, Sydney. Lyotard, Jean François 1984, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (trans), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Marks, Laura 2000, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Martin, Adrian 1988, ‘No Flowers for the Cinéphile: The Fates of Cultural Populism 1960–1988’, in Paul Foss (ed.), Island in the Stream: Myths of Place in Australian Culture, Pluto Press, Sydney. —— 1992, ‘S.O.S.’, Continuum, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 6–14. —— 1998, Once Upon a Time in America, BFI, London. —— 2003, The Mad Max Movies, Currency Press and Screen-Sound Australia, Sydney. —— forthcoming, Terrence Malick, Palgrave Macmillan/BFI, London. —— forthcoming, Brian De Palma, University of Illinois Press, Chicago. McFarlane, Brian 1997, An Autobiography of British Cinema as Told by the Filmmakers and Actors Who Made It, Methuen, London. —— (ed.) 2003, The Encyclopedia of British Film, Methuen, London. —— (ed.) 2005, The Cinema of Britain and Ireland, Wallflower, London. ‘Metz’s Semiology: A Short Glossary’, Screen, vol. 14, nos 1–2, pp. 214–26. Moran, Albert and O’Regan, Tom 1983, ‘Two Discourses of Australian Film’, Australian Journal of Screen Theory, nos 15/16, pp. 163–73. —— (eds) 1989, The Australian Screen, Penguin, Ringwood. Morin, Edgar 2005, The Stars, Lorraine Mortimer (trans), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Morin, Edgar 2005, The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, trans Lorraine Mortimer, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Morris, Meaghan, Sui Leung Li and Ching-Kui Chan, Stephen (eds) 2005, Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Mulvey, Laura 1975, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 6–18. Murray, Gabrielle 2004, This Wounded Cinema, This Wounded Life: Violence and Utopia in the Films of Sam Peckinpah, Praeger, London. O’Regan, Tom 1996, Australian National Cinema, Routledge, London. Park, Jane forthcoming, Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Perkins, Claire forthcoming, American ‘Smart’ Cinema, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Petro, Patrice 1995, Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN. Pike, Andrew and Cooper, Ross 1980, Australian Film 1900–1977: A Guide to Feature Film Production, Oxford University Press, Melbourne. Polan, Dana 2007, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the US Study of Film, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Rodowick, David 2007, The Virtual Life of Film, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. —— forthcoming, An Elegy for Theory. Screen, vol. 14, nos 1–2. Shirley, Graham and Adams, Brian 1989, Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, Currency/ Angus & Robertson, Sydney. Shoesmith, Brian 2006, ‘Recalling Things Past: An Introduction to Continuum’, Continuum, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 1–5. —— 2009, ‘Through the Lens: Interviews from the Australian Film Theory and Criticism Project’, interviewed by Noel King, Metro, no. 161, n.p. Smaill, Belinda 2010, The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Staiger, Janet 1992, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. No. 136 — August 2010 189

Tulloch, John 1981, Legends on the Screen: The Narrative Film in Australia 1919–1929, Currency Press, Sydney. —— 1982, Australian Cinema: Industry, Narrative and Meaning, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Tulloch, John and Turner, Graeme (eds) 1989, Australian Television: Programs, Pleasures and Politics, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Todorov, Tzvetan 1973, ‘Semiotics’, Screen, vol. 14, nos 1–2, pp. 15–24. Verhoeven, Deb 2006, Sheep and the Australian Cinema, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Willemen, Paul 1973, ‘Christian Metz: A Bibliography’, Screen, vol. 14, nos 1–2, Spring/Summer, pp. 243–44. Williams, Deane 2008, Australian Post-War Documentary Film: An Arc of Mirrors, Intellect, Bristol. Williams, Linda and Gledhill, Christine (eds) 2000, Reinventing Film Studies, Arnold, London. Constantine Verevis is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University, Melbourne. He is the author of Film Remakes (Edinburgh University Press, 2006) and co-editor of Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel (State University of New York Press, 2010). Deane Williams is Associate Professor, Film and Television Studies, Monash University. He is the Editor of Studies in Documentary Film and his books include Australian Post-War Documentary Films: An Arc of Mirrors (Intellect, 2008) and, Michael Winterbottom (with Brian McFarlane, Manchester University Press, 2009). His new book will be The Films of Sean Penn for Wallflower Press (UK).

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