Earlier posts (here and here ) circulated around the idea of film culture in Australia. Extended comments made by James Russell (here, and here and here) about some brief remarks of mine on video-educated cinephile in formation got me thinking a bit more. And remarks by Jean from Creativity Machine on this post pushed me into starting this post.
Thsi is an exercise in remembrance.
Film culture? What does that mean in an environment where a commercial production ethos is hegemonic? My immediate reaction is that film culture in Australia (not the national film industry) died in the 1990s. Film culture is different from the cultural nationalism of the 1970s associated with the Australian film revival.
My initial understanding of film culture is that it has its roots in the independent film makers, film societies and film festivals of the 1960s; cultural organizations such as The National Film Theatre of Australia (NFTA) with its imported screenings and the Australian Film Institute (AFI); and the radical and avant garde film making of the 1960's and 1970's. The film culture of the cinephile was the independent axis that negated the film industry as the culture industry.
From memory in the 1960s it was a culture fascinated with the Cahiers/French new wave model of cinema. This linked criticism and film practice (critics becoming fimmakers), assumed film makers to be bearers and modifiers of filmic traditions, held film makers to be auteurs and a love of Hollwood cinema (Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford etc).
I've sketched this account of film culture as high art because that is my background. As an account of film culture it is pretty constrictive, since it boils down to independent avant garde cinema as art, which is oppositional to the commercial Australian films as the culture industry. It is pretty much the view of the old Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative (SFC) and the Media Resource Centre (MRC) in Adelaide.
It was constrictive because I found the formalism of the underground avant garde films (as show cased in Cantrill's FilmNotes) deadly boring, and quite enjoyed the mainstream kitch films, such as Murials Wedding. The avant garde (eg., Screen. This inwood looking theory, where Christian Metz was all the rage, had little connection to the practically-orientated national film training school in Sydney.
Then film studies became a satellite of Cultural Studies in academia.
i seem to remember seeing a documentary a while ago about an experimental film maker from adelaide, but i can't recall his name.. some of the films i remember were fairly short (10mins?) closeups of different textures.. others reminded me of early derek jarman (although i would be the last person to trust my memory)..
does anyone know who might be talking about?