film
THE SWEEP OF
AUSTRALIAN CINEMA
Adrian Martin
Brian McFarlan, Geoff Mayer and Ina Bertrand
The Oxford Companion to Australian Cinema
OUP $79.95hb, 583pp, 0 19 553797
ONE EXPECTS CONSISTENCY, rigour and logic from something called The Oxford Companion to Australian Film. One needs to be assured, as a movie-loving reader, that just about every important movement, figure, genre, film, institution, historical marker, cultural trend or manifestation has been duly, concisely, but intensively and fairly covered. One expects, if not exhaustiveness, then (in the editors' words) 'a sense of the sweep of Australian cinema' that conveys what this cinema 'is and has been'.
To this end, nearly 600 pages are comprised of entries on people, films and institutions; short essays on 'themes' (from 'Aboriginality' to 'Narrative Paradigms'); and -- as a bonus for the general reader -- a number of interviews sprinkled throughout. However, one can become quite deranged trying to figure out the editorial logic of this book, and the implications of what it puts in and leaves out.
Take the coverage of directors -- particularly those connected to the sphere loosely known as `independent' film (including short, experimental, documentary and radical- political film). There are entries for Tracey Moffatt, Ross Gibson, Bert Deling, Solrun Hoass, Philip Brophy, Jackie McKimmie, the Cantrills, Nigel Buesst, Scott Murray, Ann Turner, John Hughes, Ana Kokkinos, Tom Cowan, James Ricketson, Albie Thoms, Rachel Perkins and Paul Winkler - but not for David Caesar, Margot Nash, Peter Duncan, Kathy Mueller, Daryl Dellora, Monica Pellizzari, Michael Rymer, James Clayden, Pauline Chan, Brian McKenzie, Susan Dermody, Dirk de Bruyn, Rivka Hartman, Tim Burns, Susan Lambert, Don McLennan, Sophie Turkiewicz, Lawrence Johnston, Sue Brooks, David Perry, Helen Grace, Aleksi Vellis, Samantha Lang, Roger Scholes, Clara Law and Rowan Woods. No imaginable criterion can account for the distinction between these two groups.
Or consider the wayward system of 'theme' entries. 'Jewish Representation' is the subject of an adroit survey; while Italian, Greek, Polish, Chinese and sundry other cultures are all shoved under the rubric of 'Ethnic Representation'. 'Masculinity' and 'Mateship' cover the depiction of men -- but where are the corresponding entries on women, apart from (dear me) 'Maternal Images'? 'Adaptations' gets two entries, and there's even one on 'Novelisations' -- but not, for example, anything on Australian cinema's prevailing images of art and artists, cars, youth culture, love, sex, money, ageing, work, leisure, tourism, family, or politics and politicians. And why a survey of 'Criticism and Theory' that discusses only two essays?
Don't even get me started on the Companion's arbitrary selection of individual films, or its highlighting of only a couple of popular genres to the detriment of all the rest.
It is easy for a critic of my ilk to propose a thoroughly paranoid interpretation of the ideology or mindset driving this Oxford Companion. Ultimately, however, I fear that its sins may be entirely casual, unthinking ones -- reflecting, more than anything, essentially mainstream, middlebrow cultural orientations and interests. Does this matter, in a reference volume intended (as the Preface declares) 'to appeal to a wide readership'? Of course it matters, if one is seriously interested in presenting the depth and breadth of Australian film to a general audience, and flagging its future possibilities.
Several crucial kinds of Australian filmmaking suffer severe under-exposure here. Experimental cinema (like documentary and indigenous film-making) receives a token entry, and its relevant presence elsewhere (in the early career of Paul Cox, or as a branch of animation) is downplayed or overlooked altogether.
Films by women -- as the above list of excluded directors will indicate -- are marginalised almost out of existence. There is an entry for the organisation Women in Film and Television, but no general reflection on the industrial issue of women working in film and television. The impact of feminist activism and theory upon the independent and mainstream scenes alike is scarcely canvassed. Brian McFarlane's entry on 'Melodrama, The Later Years' manages not to mention the work of Jane Campion -- a breathtaking oversight.
Short films receive more government attention in Australia, as well as more public and critical support, than in possibly any other country. So many outstanding shorts --including The Illustrated Auschwitz , My Life Without Steve , Tears and Serious Undertakings -- have come to mark some of the most vital and innovative work in our national cinema. But shorts are again recognised in only a token fashion by this book; even the noted early works of well-known feature directors (like P.J. Hogan or Alex Proyas) do not score.
More banally, there are many strange gaps in this book's collective wisdom, a disquieting air of simply not being 'in the know' or up to date. Nothing Albie Thoms has made beyond 1980 is listed. Geoffrey Wright's off-and-on American career post Metal Skin is not detailed. The fact that director Ian Pringle most recently made the news for stealing a Picasso is ignored. The 'director's cuts' of Stone, Picnic at Hanging Rock and Until the End of the World are not noted, nor is the American tele-movie remake of Shame.