Australia and New Zealand entered the international scene thanks largely to government subsidies akin to those supporting western European cinema. Each was able to create a New Cinema for the festival circuit. In addition, Australian film won some successes in mainstream popular film. As local films won notice abroad,
Australian and New Zealand filmmakers were sought by Hollywood. By the end of the 1990s, both countries also depended financially on local production facilities and talent being used on American and other foreign films being shot down under.
Australian production reached a low ebb in the 1950s and early 1960s. One of the first indications that the country could again make commercially viable films came when Michael Powell, forced to work in television after the scandal resulting from Peeping Tom (p. 454), made an Australian feature film. They’re a Weird Mob (1966), a low-budget comedy about an immigrant worker, proved hugely popular. In 1971, Canadian director Ted Kotcheff made Wake in Fright (aka Outback).
During the early 1970s, the Australian government tried to foster the establishment of a national identity. The arts enjoyed new support. In 1970, the Liberal government formed the Australian Film Development Corporation, which funded Bruce Beresford’s The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), and other films by directors who would soon create a “New Australian Cinema.” The Australian Film and Television School was also formed. In 1972, a Labor government came to power and intensified these efforts, replacing the Film Development Corporation with the Australian Film Commission (AFC). The AFC helped finance about fifty features in its first five years, outperforming its European counterparts by recovering about 38 percent of its investments.
Television had come to Australia in 1956, siphoning off cinema audiences but also fostering a generation of young filmmakers who longed to make theatrical features. Australian film critics of the 1970s favored films of the French New Wave and of auteurs like Ingmar Bergman and Luis Buiiuel. This combination of government support and interest in European-style art cinema
26.39 The hero and his companions find a sacred spot covered with graffiti left by white tourists (The Chant ofJimmie Blacksmith).
26.40 In a shot reminiscent of the wide-angle images of Spielberg and De Palma, The Road Warrior uses a bold depth composition to show the wounded Max flown into the besieged camp.
Led Australian directors toward international elite audiences. The breakthrough film was Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1976), in which a group of schoolgirls mysteriously disappear during an outing. The film proceeds at a leisurely pace, creating intense atmosphere through actual locations, haunting music, and luminous cinematography (Color Plate 26.22).
Although the New Australian Cinema included several genres, including low-budget exploitation films, historical films became the most visible internationally. Bruce Beresford made another film set in a Victorian girls’ school, The Getting of Wisdom (1977), and a Boer War story about an absurd court-martial, Breaker Morant
(1980). Weir’s World War I drama Gallipoli (1981) and The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), re-creating the overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia, construct a comparably rich historical context. One of the rare historical films devoted to the plight of Aborigines, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978, Fred Schepisi) shows a young black man striving to succeed in a white world, only to be driven to murderous rebellion (26.39). Gillian Armstrong used the Victorian era to make a feminist study in My Brilliant Career (1979), and Philip Noyce admiringly portrayed newsreel filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s in his Newsfront (1978). Weir, Beresford, Schepisi, Noyce, and other major directors were eventually lured to Hollywood.
Aside from its prestige pictures, the Australian industry also had some international popular successes. Independently of government funding, a small production firm called Kennedy-Miller made a pair of violent futuristic road movies, Mad Max (1978) and Mad Max II (aka The Road Warrior, 1982). Producer-director George Miller, influenced by the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone and by Roger Corman’s low-budget action films, peopled a savage, postnuclear Australian outback with bizarre warriors. Miller’s aggressive, visceral style owed a good deal to the New Hollywood (26.40). Somewhat later, Crocodile Dundee (1986), a simple action comedy featuring Australian star Paul Hogan, became a surprise hit around the world.
The successes of both art films and popular movies led to a concentration on more foreign investment, coproductions, and export. Mad Max beyond Thunderdome (1 985) was financed by Warner Bros., distributor of The Road Warrior, and Crocodile Dundee 2 (1988) was also a foreign production. By the late 1980s, Australian cinema had moved heavily into an international mode, often depending on foreign stars (e. g., Meryl Streep in Schepisi’s Evil Angels [aka A Cry in the Dark], 1990).
In 1988, the government support agency, renamed the Film Finance Corp. (FFC), linked funding to greater commercial viability, especially on the world art-house market. Soon came a string of successes that seemed to revive the golden era of the 1970s. In 1992, Baz Luhr-man’s first feature, Strictly Ballroom, became an international hit. As with English films, eccentric comedies were often attractive abroad. Muriel’s Wedding (26.41) and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert were both on the domestic top-ten chart in 1994 and succeeded abroad as well. The enormous international popularity of Babe (Chris Noonan, 1995; 26.42) and Shine (1996) seemed to confirm that local production was prospering. Yet Babe was entirely American-financed, while Shine was an Australian-British coproduction. More and more, production depended on foreign funding.
In 1996, a conservative Liberal-National party coalition took power, and FFC budgets were cut the following year. Imported American independent films were increasingly competing for box-office dollars with small-budget local productions. No films of the late 1990s were hits on the level of Shine, and an expensive failure, Gillian Armstrong’s Oscar and Lucinda (1997), made higher government subsidies seem unjustified. The sequel Babe: Pig in the City (George Miller, 1998), produced by Kennedy-Miller but financed by Universal, was an even bigger disappointment. Local production slumped, drawing only 4 percent of domestic box-office receipts.
In mid-1998, 20th Century Fox, owned by exAustralian Rupert Murdoch, opened Fox Studios Australia in Sydney. The Australian dollar was low, and American producers reckoned it was 40 percent cheaper to film there than in Hollywood. Such savings, the equipment of the huge Fox facility, and access to many experienced, English-speaking film personnel also made Australia extremely attractive for runaway production. Portions of the Matrix and Star Wars series were shot at Fox, as was Mission: Impossible 2. European producers wanting to make English-language films also invested in Australian projects.
The American influx made successful Australian directors realize they could stay in their native country and still benefit from U. S. funding. Dark City (1998), coproduced by New Line Cinema and Australian director Alex Proyas’s own production company, was one of the first films shot there. Luhrman decided to stay, making Australian-American coproductions Romeo and Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge! (2001) at Fox Studios Australia. Moreover, Australian stars could be lured
26.41 Toni Collette’s vibrant performance as the marriage-obsessed heroine of Muriel’s Wedding made the film a hit and led to her departure for Hollywood.
26.42 Babe: new computer technology allowed animals’ lips to move as they conversed.
Back from Hollywood, as when Nicole Kidman starred in Moulin Rouge!
Australians weighed the benefits of large-scale foreign income for the industry and its workers against the decline in films with local themes. In 2000, a low-key entry in the eccentric-comedy genre, The Dish, about the role played in the 1969 moon landing by a small tracking station in western Australia, found modest international success. By the turn of the century, however, government funding was targeted at projects more likely to win global audiences than to reflect Australian culture.
New Zealand followed a similar, though shorter, path to national film production. Sporadic filmmaking had gone on since the early silent era, but there was no organized industry until the 1970s. In 1978, the government
Established the New Zealand Film Commission to support films at the preproduction stage and to help them find private investment. By the 1980s, a low, if fluctuating, level of production had been established.
Because the population of New Zealand numbered only about 3 million people during the 1980s, films had to be exported in order to recoup their costs. As usual, directors’ best opportunities often lay with art-house audiences. For example, Vincent Ward’s The Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey (1988) transports its characters from England in the Middle Ages to a modern Australian city. Ward later made the international coproductions A Map of the Human Heart (1992) and What Dreams May Come (1998).
Another major director, Jane Campion, was born in New Zealand but studied at the Australian Film and Television School. Her first feature, Sweetie (1989), was produced in Australia. By contrasting two sisters with differing mental problems, the film explores the boundaries between madness and sanity and between art cinema and melodrama. An Angel at My Table (1990) was planned as a three-part miniseries for New Zealand television but was released to theaters internationally. Based on the autobiographical works of poet Jane Frame, it attracted art-cinema audiences through its subtle performances depicting the heroine’s struggle against being labeled “insane.” Campion used many close shots to emphasize her grubby daily existence, punctuating the scenes with breathtaking landscapes that suggest her lyrical vision (Color Plate 26.23). Campion’s third feature, The Piano, a French-Australian-New Zealand coproduction, won the Grand Prize at the 1993 Cannes Festival. Her adaptation of The Portrait ofa Lady (1996) was a British vehicle, but she returned to Australia for an American coproduction, Holy Smoke, in 1999.
During the mid-1990s, film attendance more than doubled, thanks to the spread of multiplex theaters. The Film Commission was still supporting four films a year, and there were private producers as well. In 1994, Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors proved a surprise hit, eventually beating out Jurassic Park to become the highest-grossing film ever in New Zealand. Its tale of domestic violence in a working-class urban Maori family both reflected local life and had an appeal abroad (26.43) That same year, shlock-horror director Peter Jackson broke into art-house circles with Heavenly Creatures, a stylish depiction of two teenage girls and their fantasies leading up to murder.
Tamahori went to Hollywood, where he directed crime films like Mulholland Falls (1996) and Along Came a Spider (2001). Jackson, however, like the Aus-
26.43 The resilient mother and daughter of the Maori family in Once Were Warriors.
Tralian Luhrman, chose to stay at home, making The Frighteners (1996), coproduced by Universal and Jackson’s own firm, WingNut Films. Jackson also developed Weta Digital, a major digital postproduction studio in Wellington somewhat parallel to Fox Studio Australia in its creation of a local facility appealing to foreign producers. He created a worldwide stir by successfully undertaking the three-feature adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, 2003; see Chapter 28). Filming and postproduction were done in New Zealand, pumping a large portion of the films’ reputed $300 million budget into the local industry. Other filmmakers took advantage of the country’s mountainous beauty, as when parts of The Vertical Limit (2001) were shot there. With such outside income and continued government funding for a few local films per year, the industry in New Zealand moved into the new century with strong prospects.
World History
