Australia
GOVERNMENT INTERVENTIONIN THE 1920s AND 1930s
A Royal Commission was established in 1927 to investigate the influence of Hollywood films, and although there were concerns over the state of the Australian film industry, the commission was equally concerned by the decline of the number of British films screened in Australia. In 1913 British films represented 26.3 percent of the total number of imported films, but by 1923 this figure had fallen to 3.4 percent. Although the commission recommended protection for the British industry with an exhibition quota, it did nothing to change American domination. In the 1930s the Fox film company purchased a controlling share in Hoyts, while MGM and Paramount secured their own first-run theaters. In 1945 the British Rank Organisation acquired a controlling interest in Union Theatres.
In 1934 an inquiry established by the New South Wales government recommended a five-year distribution and exhibition quota for Australian films. The resultant NSW (New South Wales) Cinematograph Films (Australian Quota) Act of 1935 required that 5 percent of all films handled by distributors and 4 percent of all those screened by exhibitors in the first year should be Australian. The act also encouraged the establishment of a new studio modeled on the Gaumont-British National Studios in London, namely National Studios, built at Pagewood in Sydney. However, its first film, The Flying Doctor (1936), with the American actor Charles Farrell (1901–1990) in the lead role under the direction of the British actor Miles Mander (1888–1946), failed badly, and the company only made one more film, Rangle River (1936), an Australian western written by Zane Grey (1872–1939) during a visit to Australia and starring the Hollywood actor Victor Jory (1902–1982) and the British actor Robert Coote (1909–1982), under the direction of the American Clarence Badger (1880–1964). Although Rangle River was commercially and critically successful in Australia, it did not receive an American release until 1939, and by then National Films had collapsed.
Other than The Flying Doctor and Rangle River , Charles Chauvel's Uncivilised (1936) was the only other film to be made as a direct result of the NSW Quota Act of 1935. In December 1938 the New South Wales government offered guaranteed bank overdrafts to local productions and, again, Charles Chauvel benefited as the guarantee provided 50 percent of the financing for his most popular film, Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940), a stirring war film celebrating the courage of Australian soldiers in the Sinai Desert campaign during World War I. An ardent nationalist, Chauvel directed only nine feature films, including Errol Flynn's (1909–1959) first film, In the Wake of the Bounty (1933).
PETER WEIR
b. Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 21 August 1944
Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) was hailed as a seminal moment in the development of the Australian film industry. This film, together with Sunday Too Far Away (1975), was perceived as evidence that the local film industry had moved beyond the "ocker" comedies of the early 1970s to producing mature, aesthetically complex films. This tale of a small group of late-Victorian schoolgirls, who vanish while exploring the volcanic outcrop known as Hanging Rock north of Melbourne, was heavily influenced by the conventions of the art cinema, with its ambiguous closure and strong reliance on symbolism. The film was a commercial and critical success after it won acclaim at Cannes in 1976.
Weir began directing during a period when there was, in effect, no Australian feature film industry. His first film, made in 1967 for the social club of a Sydney television channel, was a 16mm comedy, Count Vim's Last Exercise . He continued directing 16mm films as well as filming sequences for a local television program. In 1969 he joined the Commonwealth Film Unit and made two low-budget films, the comedy Homesdale (1971), which won the Grand Prix at the 1971 Australian Film Awards, and a rare example of Australian Gothic, The Cars That Ate Paris (1974).
Weir's interest in the mystical aspects of nature is also apparent in The Last Wave (1977), but issues of Australian identity are explored most fully in Gallipoli (1981), a retelling of the military disaster on the Dardanelles in 1915 starring Mel Gibson. The film emphasizes the nexus between athletics and war in the formation of Australian national identity, concluding with a striking freeze-frame as the two young men dash across the bloody battlefields at Gallipoli to their deaths.
After the success of The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), Weir left for Hollywood, where he has continued to explore various permutations of the individual seemingly out of his depth in an "alien" culture. Weir's pre-1977 films were influenced more by European art cinema than by mainstream Hollywood cinema, but since his move to America in the early 1980s, his American films have tried to assimilate aspects of the former mode into the grander narrative and economic demands of the latter. Witness (1985) and Dead Poets Society (1989) have fared better in this regard than The Mosquito Coast (1986) and Fearless (1993). Weir received best director nominations for Witness ; The Truman Show ; and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003). Weir's screenplay for Green Card (1991) was also nominated for an Academy Award ® .
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), The Last Wave (1977), Gallipoli (1981), The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), Witness (1985), Dead Poets Society (1989), The Truman Show (1998), Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
FURTHER READING
Bliss, Michael. Dreams within a Dream: The Films of Peter Weir . Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.
Rayner, Jonathan. The Films of Peter Weir . London: Cassell, 1998.
Geoff Mayer