state of the cultural nation
31 Dec 2008
How Many Aussie Movies Did You See This Year?
Robert Miller wouldn't blame you if you gave them all the flick. He argues that we are wrecking our industry for the sake of some kind of falsely imagined cultural integrity
Was 2008 another dire year for Australian film? Sadly, yes. And it'll probably get worse before it gets better. I'm sure there's a group of people who'd vehemently disagree with that assertion — but they probably produced the films that we didn't see.From the little seen (everything we made) to the over-hyped (Baz's Australia), the film industry slopped up more of the same: "realistic" dramas set in the bush or outer-suburbs about "worthy" subjects like mental illness, Indigenous rights, refugees, broken families and alienation. These are subjects, it seems, that the great unwashed should be paying money to be "educated" about. As if the public has a cultural responsibility to go and see the story of an outback farmer taking in an Afghani woman who has fled a brothel. Such films are made with good intentions, but without audiences and they are at the heart of the Australian film debate.
Why are they made? And why are they failing to connect with audiences? Quite simply, the public is not to blame for the failure of Australian films to connect. That's backwards thinking. The films are to blame, or — more accurately — their makers. I refuse to go to see a film simply because it's Australian. That's not support - it's pity.
President of the Screen Producers Association of Australia Antony Ginnane recently said, "If they premiered most of the Australian films of the last 24 months on an airplane people would be walking out in the first 20 minutes - and that's not good." This is coming from the head of a body that represents Australian film and television producers on all issues affecting the business and creative aspects of screen production.
We Aussies like movies. We spend between $10 and $12 million on movie tickets each week. But on average, only a tiny 2 per cent is spent on locally produced films a year. The Black Balloon, a film about a kid whose desire for a normal adolescence is thwarted by his autistic brother, was this year's winner of the AFI award for best film. It was made for $4 million. It took $2.265 million at the box office. When you divide that by $16 for a movie ticket, 141,600 people saw it — or 0.6 per cent of the population. Worse still was the performance of The Tender Hook which cost $7 million to make and took less than $40,000 at the box office.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with making "worthy" films about "serious" subjects. I think that's fine if you have a real industry (not one almost entirely subsidised) that produces a good mix of artistic and commercial movies. But if "worthy" is all we're making, the well is poisoned. A situation is created where most of the cinema-going public consider the "made in Australia" tag to be a setback. The term "Australian film" unfairly becomes synonymous with "pretentious wank-fest" (which would in turn make the AFI awards the great incestuous industry circle-jerk).
If you're going to drop $16 on a ticket, do you want to come out of a cinema feeling worse about yourself and your country than when you went in? After a long day workin' at the cattle station, it's easier to go laugh at a Will Ferrell movie about the infantilisation and emasculation of the modern middle-aged man, his dysfunctional family relationship and his difficulty adapting to sudden change. To be honest, Step Brothers is shit, except it took almost $8 million at our box office, more than any Australian film other than Australia. Let's not compare Aussie films to mega budget American films — it's a lop-sided competition. But even if we compare them to American independent films, we're still underperforming.
The content and themes of the films that are being made is a key problem here, one that's amplified by the way the films are marketed to the public. How many of these movies did you see? Bitter & Twisted, The Black Balloon, Cactus, Dying Breed, Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger, Men's Group, Monkey Puzzle, Newcastle, The Plex, Son of a Lion, The Square, The Tender Hook, Ten Empty, Three Blind Mice or Unfinished Sky?
There is simply no viable audience for these films. Not here and not internationally. There are six billion people in the world, why not try and make movies that will interest them too? Why have we been churning out so many bleak, dour, depressing films made with little cinematic panache, handicapped by their insular Australianess over this last decade? Films, in short, that are about as fun to watch as being f*cked gently by a chainsaw? Our movies don't have to be un-Australian — but do they all have to pander to the same battler stereotypes or foster the image that we all wear Akubras and ride horses? Eighty-two per cent of the Australians live in major cities. Couldn't we make a film about them? (Returning from the city to your hometown doesn't count nor does being on smack in the Cross.)
When we do attempt a big budget international film such as Baz Luhrmann's Australia we still can't escape our own ‘stralian-ness. It stars every single Australian actor you'd recognise (all six of them, though not that guy who played Carl Williams in Underbelly) and Rolf Harris composed some wobble board music. Australia was breathlessly touted as the saviour of the film industry. The "saviour" is a $130 million film mostly funded by 20th Century Fox in the US and co-funded by the generous producers offset (aka the Aussie taxpayer who'll kick in about 40 per cent of its budget). Breathlessly compared to Gone With The Wind, it was always going to land below expectations.
And boy was it underwhelming. In the USA, the film opened at number five, behind a slew of forgettable fodder and Quantum of Solace. "[It'll] need strong legs and spectacular international grosses in order to break even" wrote box office analyst Gitesh Pandya, of boxofficeguru.com. Even if it had been a roaring success, what exactly would its legacy have been? A slew of $130 million auteur-driven Australian-themed films funded by Americans? Unlikely.
When Australian filmmakers who aren't Baz try and make something that's outwardly commercial, such as 2007's Gabriel, about, errr, kung-fu fightin' angels who shoot each other with semi automatics, it's met with snide derision from within the industry. Of course Gabriel is not a perfect film, far from it, but it has catapulted director Shane Abbess into directing a $40 million film in America. The same could be said about Greg Mclean, director of crocodile movie Rogue who a few years ago made the horror film Wolf Creek. He got a deal with the Weinsteins.
But what do we do? We go and make a slew of lame copycat films, set in the outback (or forest) featuring serial killers. So we end up with Storm Warning, Gone, Prey and Dying Breed. I'll applaud them for being commercially minded, as for originality though...
Once all these films are made, we are marketing them to the public very poorly. So poorly, that the marketing can unfairly damage the film, as I think was the case with The Square, Nash Edgerton's feature debut. It's a solid, noir-ish thriller with stolen money, murder and an illicit affair. It could've been a crowd pleaser. But how was it marketed? Like another dull arthouse film. The poster sells something quite unlike the film — a man's back, looking into the sunset. Those who don't read Inside Film or Encore would have to research the film to know that it was a thriller, otherwise you could be forgiven for thinking it was just about a building foreman and his struggle to lay the foundation before morning.
The 2008 Bergent report, commissioned by the Film Finance Corporation into attitudes to Australian films, found that, "Australians often feel that Australian films are not ‘promoted' sufficiently and that their awareness is low." How often do you see local films advertised on TV? The Government subsidises production, why not advertising? Wouldn't the producers of The Tender Hook have been better off spending $6 million on production and $1 million on advertising?
And finally, what about the critics? Does a bad review kill an Australian film or do overly enthusiastic reviews hamper it with high expectations? Some filmmakers certainly seem to think critics are to blame for poor results: witness Jimmy the Exploder's best script acceptance speech for The Black Balloon at this year's AFIs. He took the opportunity to read some of Jim Schembri's negative comments about the industry in The Age and then proclaimed "F*ck you!" to applause (this was edited out of the "live" broadcast). This is the same Jim Schembri who championed The Jammed, helping it secure a cinematic release. The notion that critics should remain silent on problems in the industry is deluded. And further, I think most critics give Australian films better reviews than they deserve, behaviour which is in and of itself a problem.
Dee McLachlan, director of The Jammed recently said, "I think it's up to us to get Australian audiences engaged back in Australian stories". I agree with her, though I wonder who she means by "us"? Every year filmmakers say the same thing: it's time to get energised; it's time to make films people want to see. But all we've been able to produce is the opposite. So how do we really energise the industry?
We start with better scripts. We make a mix of films — drama and (a word dreaded by the filmmaking elite) good genre films. They don't need to be sexist shoot ‘em ups or torture porn, just solid stuff people want to see. And I do think people will come to see intelligent, well-made films if the primary objective of the movie is to entertain (with laughs, blood or drama), not to instruct. Wrecking our industry for the sake of some kind of imagined cultural integrity will help no one in the long run. The box office speaks louder than film festivals and AFI awards: a real industry can't sustain this forever.
"Everybody has been troubled by a number of years of very low box office," new Screen Australia CEO Ruth Harley said in the Brisbane Times. "But just through the cycle, it will change next year."
Call me a cynic, but I'll believe it when I see it.
Delicious
Digg
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Newsvine
Facebook
Kwoff
Discuss this article
To participate in the discussion Sign in or Register
One of the most erudite descriptions of the malaise that has hit Australian films.
Here is my take. Some time ago I was the head of a suite of writing programs at RMIT. One of those programs was an excellent screenwriting program. Unfortunately no market analysis was done on demand for new scripts before the program was launched.
We foolishly enrolled 150 students a year and they were older, most had first degrees and they were writing for what I would call the ‘soft intellectual left’ of Paddington or Fitzroy. A few were very good, most were average and about half were woeful.
The teachers were professional screenwriters. We had the best resources, the best equipment, etc. The problem was that there simply wasn’t (isn’t) the demand for these type of scripts. That’s a problem of marketing not meeting education or vice a versa but it points to the phenomenon that the writer is talking about.
I believe that Australian films will almost certainly improve but it’ll take a generational change.
The disaster which is well described in the article is because the Australians movie which are made do not relate to the society and things people see everyday. Worse still, the films about serious subjects don’t fail because they are about serious subjects. They fail because they are often pretentious boring films.
There has not been a film in Australia for a long time on the real economy issues and social problems created by the credit binge. This would be great material for a comedy or a satire. But Australians, and I am sorry to point out the obvious, don’t do humour very well at all.
I want to keep this short: it is not the subject matter, and it is the movie making of films on drugs (Candy, White Fish) or police corruption, or indigenous issues which have precious little to do with Australia today.
I often go to see Aussie movies. I often regret it.
Good films tell great stories they can be about serious matters. Tom Keneally’s book Schindlers Ark was a tremendous story that was made into a great film.
A boring film that lectures you is not a great story it is a wank fest.
The few film makers who tell great stories are hated for being successful. The Bazza McKenzie and Crocodile Dundee series were financially successful and audiences flocked to them. Naturally the film makers were derided and denigrated for such bad taste.
I must say that the Crocodile Dundee series of films left me completely cold - started badly and got worse as they progressed.
But there obviously is a market for this sort of stuff, and there is no reason why an Australian industry should not provide it.
This year I saw six first release Australian films -
Unfinished Sky, Children of the Silk Road, The Square, Not Quite Hollywood, Son of a Lion, and Australia. Son of a Lion I thought outstanding. Australia, my least favoured, at least was reasonable escapist entertainment.
As a regular film goer I saw films from eleven countries in all, and the Australian films compared favourably.
Perhaps a majority of film goers are looking for car chases, loud explosions, non challenging dialogue, and a smattering of toilet humour. Perhaps tastes will develop with time.
I think that we should be making more films, but not necessarily grossly more expensive films. I am not sure that spending 40% of a very large amount of Government money on Australia does much for the local film industry - this sort of incentive serves to bring work into Australia as long as the incentive reduces costs below those of other countries providing incentives to film makers.
Perhaps incentives, as others have suggested, should be in two parts - support for production and marketing assistance.
A good script is the beginning of a good film - so that significant amounts of money must be put into script development, even though we recognise that maybe only one in ten scripts that are funded will actually lead to a film, and, if we are lucky, one in ten films will be a major success.
Glen
Spectacular article. The follow up will be even better.
This cannot be dismissed as ‘whinging’ about the state of the Australian film industry. There are important criticisms which defenders of Screen Australia and the film industry hierarchy must address if they want to be taken seriously.
Being commercial does not mean making Crocodile Dundee’s either. You can’t make an industry based on a single concept. Mad Max should be the better example of commercial film making. It had broad themes with global appeal, and the team managed to produce a film of an astounding technical quality which was innovative. The same could be said of gems like Razorback and Dead End Drive In.
Robert, congratulations on an excellent summary of some of the most important issues surrounding the Australian film industry … and its current deep audience malaise. It should serve as a great discussion generator.
However, you have also prompted me to comment because along the way, your critique of Baz Lurhmann’s ‘Australia’ - in part for its alleged crime of ‘still can’t escape our own stralian-ness’ - unfortunately highlights another side to the nation’s fundamental filmic (and wider cultural) failings. And that side involves not so much the industry, but the underlying mindset of some within the audience itself.
Sadly, I am referring to Australia’s tiresome but enduring ‘cultural cringe’ and its capacity to still at times warp the judgements of both cinema goers and critics alike. (This, coupled with our nasty habit of taking ourselves way too seriously.)
In the audience context it shows up in the form of our strange embarrassment at, and ridiculous rejection of, the creative use of certain overt Australian ‘cultural symbols’ and otherwise highly worthy ‘icons’. (Usually the ones people overseas have come to love most about us. But after all we’re the experts on Australia … and seemingly just about everything else, most of the time!)
Even our magnificent and absolutely unique kangaroo suffers from this syndrome. You need only think back to the bizarre & adverse, early public reaction to the highly whimsical use of this classic Australian icon in the form of ‘kangaroos on bikes’ - as a simple and appropriately minimalist means of announcing the ‘coming Sydney Olympics’ during the closing ceremony to the Atlanta Games.
Imaginative and recognisable use of familiar & classic icons or symbols (such as this) doesn’t automatically make them stereotypes! Or even ‘superficial’ for that matter …
And it certainly doesn’t necessitate thinking we have to, by way of shocked reaction, pathetically attempt to somehow show just what a sophisticated society and bunch of people we in ‘reality’ are!
Where is the missing sense of simply accepting the lighter aspects to such things? The added incentive should be that, when our humour does show at it best in our cinema, we all witness nothing but huge success - think The Castle, Dundee, or The Chaser’s series.
But returning to the case of Lurhmann’s ‘Australia’. While the outback stockman or drover icon … and its accompanying mythology … may never hold true for all 25 million of us (clearly always an impossibility!), it nevertheless definitely draws upon a truly meaningful reality and instantly taps into a potentially deep & rich vein of ‘universal’ storytelling. Thinking its cultural use (even if viewed as authentic, and maybe too much so) is harmful in some way, begs the question:
Are all Americans cowboys? (George W aside for a moment!) Or gangsters? Or all rich and famous?
Even though the answer is clearly no, Hollywood has still constantly drawn deeply on these mythologized, but semi-real characterisations. Which must mean that - using the same logic applied to ‘Australia’s’ alleged shortcomings - let’s have Hollywood eliminate the ‘western’ genre (and while they are at it, the others as well) so that they too can escape their own ‘merican-ness’.
Maybe they could also pretend that all the years of blatant ‘mythmaking’ surrounding these genres worked AGAINST their success.
As is his trademark, Lurhmann was being intentionally playful with a lot of these cultural and mythological concepts when developing his creative approach to ‘Australia’. Underpinning it all there are so many wonderfully conceived cinematic tributes within the deliberate context of the ‘epic movie in the classic mold’. All of this but then much more, particularly his highly significant but totally integrated treatment of the stolen generation, which effectively lies at the heart of the storytelling.
What is crystal clear is that as a homegrown Director, Baz possesses the capacity to fearlessly make creative use of so many of our so called ‘cliched’ cultural symbols in an effort to demonstrate their worthiness & validity.
Australians undoubtedly know a bad Australian film when they see one (and that’s most of the time and for many of the reasons you have so articulately stated), but this serious cultural blindspot - the cringe factor as defined above - is undoubtedly still alive in the judgement of many prospective customers. And can even perversely lead to NOT acknowledging true creative and/or filmic excellence where it really exists. This could partially explain why the box office expectations surrounding ‘Australia’ fell short.
When we do overcome our obsessiveness with how others view us and our importance in the world, or as Robert says so well, finally cease wrecking our film industry "for the sake of some kind of falsely imagined cultural integrity", … we will know this long period of distraction and waste has concluded. Leaving us free to more fully get on with life itself.
A parting confession - I too suffer a form of Australian cultural cringe, the cringe experienced whenever I hear the cry "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oy, Oy, Oy!" (with its borrowed soccer hooliganism roots).
Which compels me to ask (in total jest) - would making movies that have deliberately included this Australian REALITY also mean we haven’t been able to escape our own ‘stralian-ness’? Or would it signify an industry guilty of still pursuing some kind of dangerous, falsely imagined cultural integrity?
By the way, loved your bio at the top right!
Perhaps the real poison is government funding, which creates an industry adept at cutting its cloth to fit the self-important strut of the bureaucrats dressed in the brief authority of taxpayer indulgence.
The result is films which are not just inevitably catering for the tastes of a tiny minority, but which strike the false note the pseudo-process must induce.
Mad Max was audacious enough to have a world view and audacity has underpinned many of our best films. It was our AC/DC.
Most of the writers filtered through by the "industry" have since lost any ruggedness, the young blanded out or pushed back in the order by more senior left liberal gender theory so-styled instructor class. Couple that with public funded elite thuggery that serves the same little toads that took us on a radical rerouting from libertarian values and "fair go" world view instincts back to the "great power" or "pseudo universal socialist green/animal movements" lackey classes that we thought we had eroded and left behind by the 70’s.
If writers can’t make independent observations or have their own independent expectations of culture they are lost in terms of uncovering local identity and translating that into local box office popularity. There is no doubt that 70’s Australia and road kill and rough justice and manliness was out there during Mad Max but the layering of a then uncliched bleak view of resource and social erosion took it to another level and into the consciousness of a world audience.
Does this make a single course, just substituting one bore’s view of righteous cause for another? Not necessarily when "fair go" values and its successes and failures (the Castle) can provide such rich & diverse material from the micro to the macro without having to suck up to Manning Clark styled or any other chardy socialist’s fraudulent history. No prescription applies for any one local world view and the challenge is for the writer is to capture genuine reflections of our psyche anew.
And causes can be left behind to simply discover or uncover in the Shakespearean tradition which is something we still occasionally do well. I unashamedly loved 10 canoes and the whatever it was called with the people smuggled illegals in the desert but it was the humor that grabbed rather than the crusade or the Euro primitive fetish. Romper Stomper was audacity itself, provincial yet able to carry weight across borders. Tongue in cheek and can-do stuff has worked well at times too. The Dho brother’s curious little rugby league film was all soft left mush but survived, and the mixed animation of the misses of the photographer bloke who got cancer and his girl was past quaint to plain lovely.
Film folk often speak of the need to "tell Australian stories", but few seem interested in telling any kind of story - you get a bunch of movies that are just about sad people sitting around staring at each other. The cocnept of "plot" is on life support here.
I think it should also be pointed out that there’s a big difference between international arthouse and the local s**thouse we make here. No Australian director has anything on the talent or ability to push the boundaries and expectations of cinema (whether you like their films or not) as Takeshi Kitano, Gasper Noe, Michael Hanneke, Pedro Almovador, Darren Aronofsky, Wong Kar-Wai, John Cameron Mitchell, Wes Anderson, Lars Von Trier, Michael Winterbottom, David Lynch and many, many others.
You’re right, monkey - although sometimes I wonder whether it’s more that Australian filmmakers simply don’t have the *desire* to be more innovative.
Monkey, I don’t think the "international arthouse" is very far behind the local "s**thouse" as you call it. Pobjie’s complaint that the "desire to be innovative" is lost appears very much an international problem.
For 2008 movie season the New York Post bemoans no fewer than 6 holocaust movies (http://www.nypost.com/seven/12082008/gossip/pagesix/hellish_tales_for_th…) while I count at least 8 and my favourite Jewish Newspaper in New Jersey complains of the same six mentioned by NYP. (http://www.njjewishnews.com/njjn.com/122508/ltSayingNeverAgain.html)
Moviegoers world wide are fed the same diet as moviemakers the world over boycott all things innovative, talented, Moslem, Christian or just plain entertaining.
I’ve already covered this in a previous response but that doesn’t take away from what is a very good article.
The problem is that the Australian film and TV industry is publicly funded, or at least projects have the capacity to be.
Whether it’s the FFC, NSW Film and TV Office, Film Victoria, Screen West, whatever, these are the first points of call for filmmakers, and they are all bolt holes staffed with the politically correct, talentless no-hopers who couldn’t get their own projects up but didn’t want to end up working in Woolies.
What qualifications do they have? How exactly does one individual find themselves in a position where they, a failure, a no-talent, sits in judgement over creative endeavours? Are they likely to be good judges of scriptwriting, or a project’s general worth?
I have witnessed how these cretins stick their fingers in pies, try and insert their own ideas, give preference to their cronies and basically f*ck up anything they lay their hands on.
Ask yourself how much government money goes on developing talent, compared to the amount spent on the wages and overheads of the administrative bodies, CEO-level salaries and CBD office blocks?
Until Australia finds a way of jemmying loose the white-knuckled stranglehold these tossers have on the creative pathways, there will be no improvement in 2009, nor in 2012. There will NEVER be an improvement.