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Homegroan

In an extract from her new book, The Money Shot, Jane Mills argues that the local film industry needs more than patriotism to get bums on seats.

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This is a story about David and Goliath. David is represented by the Australian film industry, its reviewers and critics. Almost any small national cinema could be David in this scenario, but things are particularly worrying in Australia, a nation which prides itself on its battler outlook on life. There's certainly a battle going on for movie audiences. Only this time it looks not only as if Goliath is winning, but as if he deserves to win. There is strong evidence to suggest Australian movies deserve the Australian audiences they (don't) get.

When the Australian Film Institute (AFI) awards, now embarrassingly called the "Lovelies", are presented each year, with their customary slightly tacky Aussie brand of razzamatazz mixed with blatant bullshit, the national film industry inevitably air-kisses itself into a euphoria of self-congratulation.

There are the usual tears, the far-too-long over-the-top speeches in which a seemingly endless number of loved mothers are thanked, and all those frocks - some to die for and some in which not to be seen dead. The event itself shouldn't be disparaged; it makes an important contribution to Australian screen culture, which needs all the support it can get. What is unlikely to be mentioned is that, year after year, few of the films actually deserve any congratulations at all.

Of course some films are highly popular, and achieve big box office and critical success. But during the 1990s, mot years proved disappointing for a national cinema which you'd think would at least try to provide something its own audiences would actually rave about - or even quite like. To be sure, some Australian movies have had their moments, and in a relativist world, most of the nominations for Best Film can claim a right to be there. But, as film writer Tina Kaufman wrote in an article analysing contemporary Australian cinema: "If the films produced in a year are the outward manifestation of a health of the local industry, the Australian film industry is indeed ailing". A close analysis of the films nominated for AFI awards at the end of the last millennium gives a clear indication of how incredibly ordinary and culturally ignorant most Australian films are.

In 1999, Gregor Jordan's Two Hands headed the list, with eleven AFI nominations. Set in and around Sydney's urban beach of Bondi, this film explored adolescence on the fringes of criminality. According to some Australian reviewers, it was a triumph of typically Australian self-parody, and of a kind of critical self-assessment of which Hollywood cinema is incapable. Then along cam Todd Solondz's Happiness and Sam Mendes' American Beauty, which put paid to that line of argument. While it's enjoyable enough, Two Hands is little more than yet another in a long line of films which aim to please by showing how stupid, but lovable, Australian criminals are.

John Curran's Praise got nine nominations. Local critics tried to persuade Australian moviegoers that it represented some sort of filmic breakthrough, with its mix of druggy teen grit and sexual come-of-age angst. Although it has two undeniably strong performances, from Peter Fenton and the wonderful epidermically challenged Sacha Horler, there's no money shot here: it stops well short of delivering the sort of material that made audiences want to sit up and applaud and then count the days before they could take it out on video. A film such as Hollywood's zany and profound Election, for example, told us much more about the roller-coaster hormonal world of teenagers. It also demonstrated the sort of filmmaking skill that comes from a thorough knowledge of screen culture - something that so many of Australia's filmmakers seem to lack.

Christina Andreef's Soft Fruit, with seven AFI nominations, was judged by some to offer something refreshingly different which (just) avoiding quirk-overload. It explored what has become an Australian cinematic preoccupation: the homecoming of siblings to present or absent (it never seems to matter which) mother. John Polson's debut, Siam Sunset, a hybrid road movie-cum-comedy-cum-romance, earned five nominations. This definitely deserved the 'quirky' tag, something Australian filmmakers have a distinctly ambivalent attitude towards. They hat it when the word is used of their own films (especially by a non-Australian), yet they constantly make films that perfectly fit the dictionary definition of 'quirky': 'an individual peculiarity of character, mannerism or foible'. Since another meaning of 'quirk' is 'an unexpected twist or turn', perhaps Australian cinema, in its frequently plodding predictability, isn't quirky enough. It's no surprise that overt the past decade, Australian films have been attracting smaller and smaller audiences. All I all, the AFI award-nominated films at the end of the millennium were simply the best of a poor bunch. The same can be said for the bunches in most other years throughout the 1990s.

Not that this worries Australian audiences, who tend to ignore their national cinema anyway. Most cinema-going Aussies see only one or two Australian films a year, if that. This means that Australian movies seldom earn more than a derisory percentage of the market. In terms of box office returns, of the all-time top 50 films in Australia, only seven are Australian, and only tow of these, Crocodile Dundee and Babe, make it into the top ten. In each of the past 20 years Australian films have seldom earned more than 5 percent of the box office. The average during the 1990s was 6 percent, and this is decreasing. By the end of the millennium, it had sunk to 3 percent.

I don't want to suggest that this decrease I a national cinema's percentage of the total box office is unique to Australia: it's not. Other countries have also experiences an increase in Hollywood audiences at the expense of their own national cinema. But Australia does particularly badly when compared with other medium-sized national cinemas. In France, for example, the national cinema regularly gets around 25 percent of the total box office. This can be explained, in part, by the language factor: when dubbed or subtitled, Hollywood always has to struggle that bit more. But I the United Kingdom, where there is no language barrier, the national cinema has been getting 12 percent of the box office, more than twice that of Australia's national cinema.

Australian films are clearly not to the taste of many Australians. It's necessary, however, to get beyond mere personal taste if the problem is to be identified, let along remedied. It's also important to rise above a level of criticism which relies on a 'if I don't like it, then it must be bad' approach.. Were the 1990s merely indicative of world trends? Was 1999 an aberration, simply one year that happened to be bad? Can anything positive be said about the Australian national cinema?

As it happens, some Australian audiences the previous year had been heard to cheer loudly for Rowan Woods' powerful The Boys about working class male violence (based very loosely on a real story of rape), and Ana Kokkinos' exuberantly queer Head On. An in 2000 the domestic box office perked up to 8 percent of the box office due to Chopper, based on the adventures of a real-life criminal, the cleverly marketed Italian-Australian teenage chick-flic, Looking for Alibrandi, the strategically aimed Greek-Italian Wog Boy, and the highly popular, if very televisual, The Dish. All these exceptions to the rule, however, reveal that the majority of Australian filmmakers lack much knowledge and understanding of how cinema works - from titles design to marketing strategy. If you look very hard you can detect some exuberance (Siam Sunset, Strange Planet), a bit of grit and realism (Erskineville Kings, Praise), some well-crafted genre (Redball), some brave attempts to subvert the norms of dominant cinema (Soft Fruit, Feeling Sexy), and the occasional sign that filmmakers conceive of a world existing beyond the suburbs under a flight path (In a Savage Land had the exotic foreign land, but Fresh Air had the perennial flight path). There were also the inevitable jolly, slightly overweight young women whose conversational skills comprise little more than 'No Way' and 'Yes Way' but who, as in Course Language, have a joyous attitude towards bonking and using the 'F' word.

And that's about it. What's lamentably lacking in much Australian cinema is the 'C' word. C as in 'content'. Most films are unimaginative and empty. It's as if directors have absolutely no concept of their audience, and if they do watch films (and many Australian filmmakers appear to have no terms of reference other than Muriel's Wedding and the entirely televisual The Castle), they lack the necessary skills to analyse and understand film language.

If a filmmaker wants a happy ending - and there's nothing wrong with this just because it's a Hollywood convention - it simply won't do to direct all your cast (and the odd crew member by the look of things, which presumably saved a bit of money) to dance the conga down a sunlit street, as happened in the entirely unmemorable Spank. If you want to persuade audiences to suspend their disbelief by presenting an unlikely romance novel-writing truck driver in a fish-out-of-water situation, you have to do a lot more work on characterisation than anyone proved capable of in Paperback Hero. By all means mix genres - the genre-hybrid has a noteworthy place in Australian screen history (and obviously works for others such as Tarantino, Woody Allen and the Coen Brothers), but a more intelligent understanding of genre is required than is delivered in Two Hands, Fresh Air or The Craic. It sometimes feels as if Australian filmmakers are so excited by the possibilities of film that they bung in every narrative and cinematic device hey can think of. Pity the poor national audiences who, with the best will in the world, are understandably confused by the ensuring product, which has a closer affinity with soup than a movie.

Whose fault is this sorry state of affairs? And why don't other national cinemas suffer from the problem to anything like the same degree? Producers and directors are continually heard whingeing that distributors fail to target the right audience, exhibitors don't take risks, critics don't give enough understanding support, or that Hollywood is too culturally imperialistic. This culture of complaint is combined with an arrogance that leads filmmakers to blame audiences. As the weather is to farmers, so is the audience to film directors. Never having given much - or any - thought to the audience in the first place, when box office returns are small, filmmakers think the problem lies with audiences who, they claim, are too stupid or ignorant to appreciate their films.

The problem doesn't lie with audiences - they don't have any problem with going to see the movies the do like. And they're saying very clearly that they're not going to see an Australian movie when there's a much greater chance of pleasure and satisfaction to be gained by going to see a non-Australian movie. Of course this means they go to see a Hollywood movie, because that's about all there is to choose from.

This is not to suggest that Australians should immediately drop all national cultural elements and attempts to somersault into faux (or even vrai) Hollywood style and content (though Lord knows there have been plenty of thee). But there is a lesson to be learned from the most successful films of recent years. Films such as The Boys and Alibrandi carefully targeted an audience and, in doing so, crafted something to say to their audiences. They had something to communicate because they had an idea of the people they wanted to communicate with. In short, the had content.

When the other 'C' word, 'crisis', is mentioned in connection with the film industry, experienced cineastes tend to yawn or give an exasperated shrug. They've heard it all before. They say there's no easy solution. But with a federal government whose commitment to screen culture is strictly limited (and declining by the day), it is crucial to what could be a thriving national cinema for this to be discussed openly. The lack of any serious open discussion is another factor which contributes to the short-sighted culture of complaint in the Australian film industry: there is very little serious critical analysis of Australian cinema. Reviewers and critics frequently refuse to be honest about Australian movies because they believe this will damage the frail home industry. Filmmakers encourage this dishonesty by talking of the local industry as if it is some sort of charity which has to be protected at al costs. Debut director Neil Mansfield (Fresh Air), for example, said publicly on at least two occasions that he believed Australians had a moral duty to see Australian films.

If too many of our filmmakers believe their industry is simply a good cause that the public should support, alongside charities such as the Wilderness Society and the Fred Hollows Foundation, then the Australian film industry is as good as dead. The industry needs to realise that a culture of intelligent critical analysis doesn't destroy skill, talent and imagination: it can only encourage it. The industry needs more self-criticism if it is to succeed, or it will continue to blame Hollywood, the Murdoch-owned Fox Studios in Sydney, or the Australian people, rather than itself. This is something that reviewers and critics could help with - but only if they're hones and stop acting as unpaid members of the films' publicity teams.

Critics, filmmakers and film funding bodies are only part of the equation. Unlike other countries with medium-sized national cinemas, such as France, Germany and the United Kingdom, Australia lacks a substantially funded, national, accessible screen culture framework. Tina Kaufman believes this 'has a huge amount to do with both the state of the films and the absence of an audience for Australian productions. As far as the funding bodies and the mainstream industry have been concerned, film/screen culture has always been something disposable, ancillary, even frivolous, compared with the main game of feature film development.' The lack of a substantially funded, national, accessible screen culture framework is also responsible for the absence of an audience for the homegrown produce. She goes on to argue that:

For years, those in the film cultural areas have made reasoned, substantial arguments that their existence is important, even vital, to the health and development of a strong national cinema; that to make good films, we need to be able to see the enormous diversity of world cinemas, need challenging and critical publications where every aspect of film-making policy and practice can be debated, need seminars and conferences, need screen studies as a substantial part of production courses.

Proving the link between a strongly promoted film culture and a healthy industry is no simple matter. But this has not prevented other nations from taking steps towards changing the mindset of both filmmakers and audiences. In the late 1990s, the British government, for example, noting that British film audiences were less adventurous than those in several other countries and that British movies were attracting relatively smaller audiences than elsewhere, asked the British Film Institute to convene a working group to draw up a screen culture and education strategy. They came up with a national strategy to raise levels of what they called 'cineliteracy'. This strategy involved the film industry, at production, distribution and exhibition levels as well as film funding bodies and educational institutions.

France tackles the need to develop audiences with a tast for films other than those from Hollywood with its effect Les Enfants du Cinema scheme, which has substantial funding at ministerial level. Each year this provides cinema visits for over 600,000 schoolchildren and 15,000 teachers - the program of films doesn't exclude mainstream cinema but 50 percent are French and 50 percent are classics by filmmakers such as Italy's Vittoria de Sica, Iran's Abbas Kiorastami, Japan's Yasujiro Ozu, and Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, as well as the more familiar films of Alfred Hitchcock and Tim Burton, and The Wizard of Oz. Looking at another English-speaking population, even tiny Northern Ireland has a Film Commission - comprising local authorities, the European Commission and sponsors drawn from the media and film exhibitors - which screens a special program of movies from all round the world; in its first two years attendances increased 50 percent.

In all these countries, schemes to interest national audiences in non-Hollywood films rely upon a national policy towards screen culture that involves regional exhibitors and other regional organizations which wouldn't otherwise have the funding for such programs. The schemes aim to improve the critical and analytical skills of audiences in addition to helping them develop a greater awareness of the cultural diversity of cinema. All this suggests that a greater awareness of film history and culture, greater honesty by critics and filmmakers, and much greater attention to conceptualising an audience are all important factors if the current sheltered workshop mentality towards the Australian national cinema is to be overturned. A genuinely critical culture, as opposed to a complaining, blaming culture, might produce a national film industry that makes the sort of movies that Australians, in their wisdom, would be proud of - and would pay to see. For this to happen, Australia needs politicians and film industry professionals to realise the importance of a nationally funded framework of screen culture.

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»	Activists Notebook

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»	Hamberger on Stellar
»	CHOGM Agenda
»	Ian West on Trades Hall

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