New Australian Cinema

Résumé du livre

After World War Two, very few feature films were made in Australia until the production boom of the 1970s and 1980s, so that the films of the revival appear to have emerged fully formed out of a cinematic desert. The institutions and products of the Australian film industry have been extensively surveyed, yet few analyses consider the sources of the revival. This book represents a new way of thinking about Australian cinema as it asks where the origins of the new films lie. The authors place new Australian cinema in contexts which illuminate its nature as a form of art and cultural expression. The book begins by tracing the indebtedness of Australian cinema to the classical narrative style of Hollywood film-making, with its firm grasp of melodrama. A number of Australian films are read in detail within this framework, including Picnic at Hanging Rock, Blood Oath, The Empty Beach and Shame. The book continues by comparing the problems faced by 'high' British cinema of the 1940s and 1950s with those faced by Australia of the 1970s and 1980s in the attempts by both countries to establish national film industries. Many parallels are drawn between the responses of British and Australian cinema to the overall dominance of Hollywood, despite the thirty-year gap between these two periods of film-making. New Australian Cinema will increase the scope of discussion about the revival of Australian cinema and help us to make cultural sense of the films themselves.