Tom O'Regan. Australian national cinema. London: Routledge, 1996.
ISBN 0-415-05731-0
405pp.
A$29.95
Uploaded 16 June, 1997 | 2360 words
Tom O'Regan, in his new book, recasts Andre Bazin's question "What is cinema?", asking instead "What is Australian cinema?" In some academic work and pronouncedly in reviews and journalistic commentary, tacit assumptions about the answer to this question exercise an inhibiting influence of one sort or another - perhaps manifested as a self - consciousness or as a chronic disappointment. In either case a vexed investment in the local product is evident, one which rests on an overriding assumption that Australian cinema is, and (governed by a range of imperatives) should be, one thing, and very often concomitantly, not something else.But in this book, O'Regan is not in the least driven by an urge to define Australian national cinema as a neat object. Rather it is its very messiness or its "dirty" (in the sense of contaminated or hybrid) nature which appeals (4). His book is the third (following studies of French national cinema and Indian national cinema) in a series by Routledge, edited by Susan Haywood with a brief to "deepen our understanding of film directors and movements by placing then within the context of national cinematic production and global culture and exploring the traditions and cultural values expressed within each" (inside cover). Within its three parts - "Making a national cinema", "Making a distinct cinema" and "Problematizing Australian cinema" - this book addresses a number of ways in which the study of such a dispersed cinema, one "of incommensurate and adjacent projects" (185), can be approached.
O'Regan's study is a lucid, productive and stimulating one, opening out possibilities for, as well as issuing some challenges to, ways of conceptualizing and/or studying Australian cinema. Whilst very clearly presented in terms of organisation and structure, more impressive and evocative are the complex of relationships which connect the book's sections and chapters - relations of amplification, tangential reprisal, reflection and extension. In this way O'Regan takes the challenge of the "dirtiness" of his object of study very much to heart and responds to it with a pluralist approach.
More specifically, O'Regan borrows the term "quasi - object" from Bruno Latour to describe Australian national cinema as a hybrid of contemporary culture, simultaneously real, like nature, collective like society and narrated, like discourse (10). O'Regan's study of Australian national cinema is attentive to each of these aspects, which relate to the section headings. O'Regan makes the further point that not only is Australian cinema an object constituted in relations and various interdependencies, but these very relations themselves are disorderly: Australian cinema is an unprincipled assemblage, in that there is no general principle that coheres its component parts or allows for a unitary explanatory principle productively to combine its many facets. It is an imperfectly integrated assemblage because it is a hybrid of people, texts, elements, social practices, discourses and technologies with all manner of relations between them. It is the accumulation and juxtaposition of its various ... tendencies, the elaboration of its incommensurate ... values, its competing ... identities and the contradictions, disjunctions and complementarities of these. (40)
There is a liberatory element to this embrace of the impure, the hybrid and the disorderly. The drive towards seeing Australian national cinema as a unity often amounts to much the same thing as a desire for a "worthy" cinema. Drawing on arguments made by Bill Routt, O'Regan abhors the "normative strictures" which attend this desire. He insists on the interdependency between the mainstream, the ordinary and the innovative in a cinema industry and prefers anyway "a popular cinema with its dubious moral values and undecidable viewpoints" (135) over the confused and "dangerous" governing imperatives of the "one cinema" arguments (mostly nationalistically driven), which nevertheless, as they certainly have in the past, may serve strategic ends.
One of O'Regan's interests is unpacking the discourses that establish such notions of "worth". He makes this bracketed aside (in relation to a discussion of the generically hybrid nature of Australian cinema): "For my part, I think we should simply attend to [Australian cinema], not denigrate or celebrate it" (237). But an emphasis on attention rather than judgement is a central point of this book. There is some "modest" (232) and qualified celebration therein. And there is some condemnation too, generally reserved for what O'Regan sees as reductive, inattentive claims and generalizations. In a different context he goes so far as to suggest that some critics see themselves as offering quality critique in a move which is intended to compensate for the lack of quality in the cinema's product. But on the whole O'Regan's approach is one of non - complicit engagement, not dissimiliar to the mode of address he claims is a strong element in Australian national cinema, where a certain anthropological distance is maintained between audience and screen. He argues that dull or bad films may be as illuminating a source of study as "worthy" ones and notes that recognition of this fact will "liberate Australian film criticism to investigate its impressive archive" (136).
The "national" aspect of this study is addressed firstly from a point of view of considering the issues of the status, functioning etc, of the middle sized, government subsidized, English speaking cinema of a settler nation, with interdependent if loosely linked branches (avant - garde and other peripheral elements as well as television). In a later chapter, O'Regan discusses "nationhood" from consideration of four "problematizations" of nation and their translation into film - Australia as European - derived society, as a diasporic society, as a new world order and as a multi - cultural society.
The complex nature of Australian national cinema's (and other national cinemas') relations to Hollywood is addressed as an on - going concern, an emphasis which mirrors Hollywood's world dominance. That Australian national cinema is constituted in an unequal exchange, (primarily) with Hollywood cinema, is O'Regan argues, a fact rather than an occasion for "moral posturing and anti - Americanism" (143). The chapter "Formations of value" unpacks assumptions underlying critical and policy positions which structure notions of value in this relationship.
O'Regan describes feature film in Australia as "mundane" - such movies are necessarily and inevitably a modest supplement to dominant trends, styles and movements. This rather unprepossessing term describes a cinema to be located on those endless and often undistinguished `drama' shelves at the video shop, but it is not really a `genre' descriptor. Rather he intends to describe a cinema which may be economically strong and popular but is critically devalued (142 - 3) and of primarily local interest, seen as being without grounds (formal, political) for claiming international attention, in contrast to the "prestige" national cinemas of, for examples, France or China.
A subsequent chapter, "Cultural transfers", reprises such concerns by further examining the nature of this unequal dialogue between Hollywood and Australian cinemas in terms of examinations by Yuri Lotman and Meaghan Morris respectively of stages of cultural transfer and "positive unoriginality". The relation between centre and margin, questions of value and the issue of agency in respect to the receiving culture are explored. O'Regan concludes that the distinctiveness of Australian national cinema may be found in its negotiation of cultural transfers (231), one aspect of which is the indigenization of genre, the more interesting products of which have characterised a number of popular successes (eg Mad Max 1979, Strictly ballroom 1992).
Part Two begins by discussing Australian cinema in its unity and its diversity. Unsurprisingly, given his interest in plurality, O'Regan seems more enthusiastic in his discussion of diversity (Ch.7) than of unity (Ch.8): the latter tends to gloss the ideas of other key syncretists rather more than other sections. However, taken together with the chapter on "A distinct place in the cinema" and whilst ever mindful of the part discourse plays in describing, (selectively) remembering, ordering (or "periodising") Australian national cinema, O'Regan does note recurring tendencies. He examines the "chronic indeterminacy [of its] generic workings" (237), noting that the dominant generic hybrid is that blending art - cinema and melodrama. Such hybridity has both strengths and weaknesses. Markets can "double sell" films - as popular and as art - house releases. However, there is also a degree of "misrecognition" which prevails consequent on this nexus of generic negotiations and prevailing prejudices and imperatives which condition how products of the Australian national cinema are received. This is an important point and links back to the discussion of the investing of value in relation to attitudes towards Hollywood.
O'Regan suggests that Australian national cinema's distinct place may rest on "the way it borrows, its one - off nature and the resulting paradox of its achievements" (232). A major commonality he identifies is the formative influence of documentary traditions. This often acknowledged feature is related to a number of other distinct or unifying features in a discussion which I found particularly useful. O'Regan links documentary tendencies to issues including; matters of finance (making a virtue of lower budgets); to the national cinema's greater dependence on, and interest in, the public record; to naturalism (in stylistic and ideological terms); and to a mode of address in which "othering", or creating relations of alterity after an anthropological style, is a dominant element. The recurring ugliness in Australian national cinema, its fondness for "freaks" such as Barry McKenzie, is linked to its rendering of the ordinary as well as to the function of demarcating difference in traditions of storytelling which draw on both the "tall tale" and social (stereo) types. O'Regan concludes that Australian cinema becomes (via discursive as well as production elements) "a cinema particularly able to air its society's dirty linen" (256).
A number of further points are made about the freak characters who populate the parodic, self - deprecating tradition from On our selection (1920) to Muriel's wedding (1994). O'Regan sees the "unworthy" objects positioned as key protagonists within Australian national cinema as central to identifying it as a cinema of low self esteem, a quality which I agree is not such a bad thing. O'Regan also links this sort of characterization to questions of identification and to the representation of ethnicity. He notes that The adventures of Priscilla, queen of the desert (1994) was initially regarded as a harmless romp mainstreaming gay life - styles: however, the reactions of Philipino groups to the representation of the Philpino wife shifted perceptions so that the film came to be regarded with a certain wariness and suspicion.
In relation to such controversies, O'Regan wonders whether the "invitation" to join Australian national cinema's freak catalogue is not in its own way inclusive, and perhaps a proliferation of such stereotypes may be better than censoring along cautious multi - cultural lines. But there are other issues in the discussion of the reception of this film which O'Regan does not consider, for example those of gay critics and feminists who were similarly disenchanted. The first point to be drawn from this example is that, whilst attention is paid to "popular" responses to films, this book is not always attentive to the constituencies of the Australian audience and the particular stakes they have in a film (the section on Australia as a multi - cultural society is strongest in this regard). O'Regan's interest in discourses about Australian cinema concentrates on critical (academic) positions and he is concerned to demonstrate the gaps between these and popular responses (for example in his discussion of The man from Snowy River 1982) and to highlight the reductive tendency of certain stakeholders in their commitment to their particular position. So, some of his comments offer a deliberate provocation to political sensibilities which he sees as operating like `blinkers'. Secondly, the example of Priscilla demonstrates that there is little sustained textual exegesis in this book and, indeed, to have provided this would have exceeded the aims of the book. I am not suggesting that textual analysis can function as an arbitor in contestation over meaning. However, the combination of these factors does mean that this book makes some claims which are, uncharacteristically, inattentive. O'Regan discusses Muriel (Muriel's wedding) as one of the freak catalogue but overlooks the investment female audiences have in identifying with Muriel. Her freakishness turns, I would argue, on how glaringly public is her underachieving of feminine identity, an experience which is not offered via an anthropological distance, if the reactions of my female friends and students, and my own reading of the film can be taken as any guide. Perhaps a similar lack of attention underlies O'Regan's perverse inclusion of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) in his grouping of "women - centred films". I think close analysis would reveal that while the narrative of Picnic is centered around women, its viewpoint is not woman - .
The book considers Australian film from the silent period and the generally discounted "interval" before the 1970's revival, as well as considering documentaries, short films and television, so it is not surprising that it has little space for extended discussion of particular texts. Nor is it surprising that some areas are dealt with more or less well. These are relatively minor points in a text whose concerns are far more usefully considered in terms of its broad, yet rigorous mapping of the terrain of Australian cinema in all its intermeshed complexities, and for the possibilities it opens out and contribution it makes to dialogue about Australian cinema.
Jane Landman Victoria University, St Albans, Australia
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