The New Australian Cinema

An innovative group of filmmakers has emerged from Australia within the last ten years. Their films have combined a unique blend of tradi­tional narrative film making with themes and concerns that are indigenously Australian.

George Miller has become one of the most successful film makers of the New Australian cinema as a result of his highly charged visual style. Such films as Mad Max (1979)and its sequel Road Warrior (1981) have established a strong commercial niche for Australian films on the international market. In the process, Miller has fashioned a distinctly Australian form of film genre. Although his Mad Max films borrowed heavily from Hollywood examples, he reshaped the conventional forms of American cinema into a strange and fatalistic new manner that defies easy classification.

The first Mad Max film is derived from such traditional genres as police thriller, and motorcycle gang movies, but is combined with a darkly satiric tribute to the Australian's obsession with automobiles. Miller has stated that Australia has a car culture in much the same way as America has a gun culture. In Mad Max, Miller depicts a crumbling future society in which the automobile has become the chief weapon in a manic fight for survival.

While Miller has created Australia's commercial cinema, Peter Weir is the creator of its philosophical context. When Billy Kwan, a character in Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), says that "We are not quite at home in this world," he speaks for all of Weir's protagonists. Weir is sharply aware of the fact that Australia is a land in which European culture has been transplanted and that Australians are not exactly Westerners. In all of Weir's films, the ultimate conflict exists between the materialistic-based rationalism of modern Western society and the metaphysical, seemingly irrational beliefs of non-Western cultures.

In The Plumber (1979), Weir presents an absurdist comedy in which a well-ordered academic household is turned topsy-turvy by the increasingly illogical and aberrant behavior of a plumber. The apparent insanity of the plumber proves to be a force which nearly overwhelms reason. The film also suggests that the plumber is somehow an agent for revenge by a tribal shaman, who the wife admits to having previously insulted. Weir repeatedly returns to the photograph of this shaman and this visual counterpoint reinforces the film's main theme concerning the inevitable clash between a well-ordered universe and the irrational forces which lurks within it.

Even before the international success of My Brilliant Career (1980), Gillian Armstrong had received attention for several short films. She especially won praise for her direction of The Singer and the Dancer (1976), the film which launched her professional career.

The film was adapted from a short story by the Australian author Alan Marshall. With Marshall's approval, she changed the original characters from two young boys to two women, one young and the other old, and restructured the story into an emotionally charged critique of women's role within Australian society. With The Singer and the Dancer, Armstrong provided a balance to the chiefly masculine concerns of the Australian cinema.

Phillip Noyce is best known to American viewers for his feature film Newsfront (1978), but he has also made an impressive series of documentaries and short films. One of the best of these early films is his dramatic production Backroads (1977).

The film explores the darker aspects of racial problems in Australia. The two main characters, a white drifter and an Aboriginal, are both presented as outsiders from mainstream society. Together, they steal a car and travel through the Australian wasteland, picking up hitchhikers and forming their own makeshift society. During the journey, however, the Aboriginal remains an outsider who is refused admittance even within this limited white social group.

For many critics, the New Australian cinema came of age with the production of Sunday Too Far Away (1975). It was the first film made by the South Australian Film Corporation which had been specifically created to produce and encourage regional film making.

The extreme realism of Sunday Too Far Away was achieved by the use of real locations and exact recreation of the harsh, dangerous lives of shearers in the Australian Outback. The cast and crew spent several months living under primitive conditions in this hostile environment, which took both an emotional and physical toll on the cast members. In one scene, when Jack Thompson's character begins weeping from the physical strain of his life, both the strain and the tears were real.

Originally three hours long, the producer of Sunday Too Far Away cut the film in half. Even with the drastic cuts, the film was highly praised by both Australian and foreign critics. It was presented at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, where it played to an enthusiastic audience and its critical success paved the way for the international respect which the new Australian cinema now enjoys.