Cirrus@Austlit

'Dominant narratives of the Australian New Wave tend to frame the efflorescence of national filmmaking in the 1970s through the lens of Gough Whitlam’s brand of cultural nationalism. The narrative usually runs as follows: state-funded films tended to favour a conservative, genteel and respectable aesthetic that came to be known as the “Australian Film Commission genre”. This article uses Mark Fisher’s concept of “popular modernism” to challenge this dominant account of the Australian New Wave first put forth by Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka, outlining the ways in which social democracy and state funding provided the conditions that allowed filmmakers to produce radical films that were anti-nationalist in character. As we will argue, when national film production deviated from this configuration and became circumscribed by neoliberal restructuring and economic rationalism in the 1980s, the New Wave took on an increasingly nationalist impulse. The article will trace this trajectory through a narrative analysis of two films from lauded Australian director Peter Weir: The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) and Gallipoli (1981).'  (Introduction)

'Australian cinema has travelled a varied trajectory since its initial development in the late 19th century. The cinema reflected the developing social and cultural tropes of its time, as the concept of a distinct Australian identity began to form. But it is clear that a colonial history of Australian film focuses very clearly and emphatically along lines of class and gender. Rose Lucas notes that there is a “cluster of dominant, recognisable images in our cinema” which consists of the bushman, the ocker, the ‘mate’, and the ‘battler’, a series of male coded tropes which are stubbornly pervasive within this national cinema. These archetypes have trained a concentrated gaze upon masculinity in Australian cinema, but there has been little space in this cultural landscape for the development of archetypical women in Australia’s cultural history with very few valued traits that are specifically coded female. This resolutely masculine perspective seems to have shaped the nation and the national cinema, and Lucas’s observation highlights the key archetypes as embodied as masculine. But these archetypes, long the sole domain of masculine representation, also have historically encompassed female experiences. In this paper we identify the need to broaden such a framework, and by taking the most Australian and most masculine of forms – the larrikin – we argue that the larrikin girl has been hiding in plain sight across Australian film history.'  (Introduction)

'With the release of the first-world-war film Gallipoli in 1981, director Peter Weir could finally shrug off the nickname he had laboured under since making his first films: “Peter Weird”.'