POPULATING THE VOID

The quarter of a century stretching from the end of World War II to the early 1970s is often characterised as a period of virtually no activity in the Australian film industry. This perception can be best understood as part of an argument considered necessary to help facilitate and evaluate the Australian film ‘revival’ or New Wave of the 1970s. However, such an understanding is only true if discussion is limited to wholly Australian-financed and ‘-created’ feature-film productions and avoids more dynamic and diverse areas such as screen culture, amateur or non-theatrical film, government-funded documentary production, and global trends in co-production and location-based filming. Additionally, it ignores the fact that some of the most enduring and formative images of Australian cinema were fashioned during this seemingly ‘fallow’ period, representing ‘Australia’ to the world on a level unmatched until the early to mid-1980s with the global phenomena of films such as Mad Max (George Miller, 1979), The Man from Snowy River (George T. Miller, 1982) and Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman, 1986). Of particular interest in these earlier, post-World War II films are the views of urban and outback landscapes and the Australian ‘character’ created by significant, sometimes visionary, overseas-based filmmakers such as Harry Watt (The Overlanders, 1946; Eureka Stockade, 1949; The Siege of Pinchgut, 1959), Lewis Milestone (Kangaroo, 1952), Stanley Kramer (On the Beach, 1959), Fred Zinnemann (The Sundowners, 1960), Michael Powell (They’re a Weird Mob, 1966; Age of Consent, 1969), Junya Sato (Koya no toseinin, The Drifting Avenger, 1968), Tony Richardson (Ned Kelly, 1970), Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, 1971) and Ted Kotcheff (Wake in Fright, 1971).

The ‘imagination’ of Australia – the work of identity formation – characterised by these films, and other international features made during this ‘interval’, is one of the key areas investigated in Australian International Pictures (1946–75). The value of this study resides not only in its production of new historical, textual and institutional knowledge, but also in the ways it illuminates and reframes the films and filmmakers of the ‘revival’ themselves, questions essentialist approaches to Australian cinema, and suggests important links between this earlier diverse grouping of films and many developments in the ‘national’ cinema since the mid-1970s, including the current era of local-global film production.