This article reviews the 1973 Tariff Board Report on film and TV production in Australia and the experience of Australian film making it examined. The Australian government asked the Board to look into the economic base of TV and film production and out of this to frame an affirmative policy for an Australian film and TV industry. McMahon had succeeded Gorton as Prime Minister. By announcing an independent enquiry he was looking to defuse the demands being made upon his government. These were to extend Australian content on TV and to build upon, rather than whittle away, Gorton's film production initiatives.
The films produced from these initiatives were coming on line. They found trouble getting exhibited and distributed. The Tariff Board took their negative experience with exhibition and distribution to be representative of the structural difficulties facing Australian feature film (but not TV production).1 These films were the first 'ocker' films: Stork (1971), The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), The Naked Bunyip (1970), Stockade (1971), and Libido (1973).
This article will be in four parts, starting with a discussion of the complex emergence of 'ocker'. This is followed by a discussion, firstly, of the Tariff Board Report and, secondly, of Alvin Purple (1973). Significantly made after the Tariff Board Report's condemnation of Australian exhibition and distribution, this film represented a decisive shift within industry thinking. The article will conclude with an examination of ocker's paradoxical centrality to definitions of popular culture yet seeming demise within feature production schedules in the mid-seventies.
The Emergence of Ocker
The 1973 Tariff Board Report rightly saw that problems to do with sustaining levels of Australian film and TV production were related to the industry's organisation as an import market. The 'ocker comedies' represented an attempt to make viable films (primarily) for an Australian theatrical market, then as now dominated by
72 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
Hollywood products. These films marked themselves off from other films being screened down the road, and in a way typical of the Australian response to the traffic in cultural imports that makes it so hard to sustain local production: the Tom Collins' approach— 'temper democratic, bias offensively Australian'.
The ocker comedies, particularly Barry McKenzie and Stork, set about self-consciously highlighting 'the Australian'. Their pleasure had to do with turning anything outside the male vernacular (through which the Australian was defined) into an object of spectacle, a mere exhibit to be ridiculed, misrecognised and consumed as if from the outside. If women were to find little place in this, it had as much to do with ocker's anti-glamour discourse (which amongst other things attacked the currency of woman as aestheticised object) as it had to do with any entrenched misogyny of Australian culture.
An endemic weakness of Australian cultural studies is the tendency to look at locally produced culture in isolation. This would be fine if these cultural objects were the dominant ones, but, more often than not, they just simply are not. Outside of the normal lines of supply they are sustained with difficulty—and distributed with irregularity. The markets for culture in Australia have been historically formed as import markets. The Sullivans' Lorraine Bailey died on a regional TV station some two years after the show's cancellation, yet that same regional station screened the American series The Thorn Birds before its Perth showing. What is needed in Australia is neither a history of Australian culture as if it were not affected by imports (their styles, their ideas, etc.), nor a history of Australian culture as if it were all imported, all a repetition of something done better elsewhere. Rather, what is needed is a history of imports—their speeds, their consumption, their reading and their rewriting in the Australian context. This history should be written in relation to a history of local cultural production—its changes, its priorities, its structures, its institutional trajectories. The issue is not whether one takes precedence over the other. Texts, like theories and ideas, are open to many interpretations, each engendering its own particular trajectory of practice. That Australia imported culture does not mean that its inhabitants were automatons in the way they used it.
Nowhere is this point about 'rewriting' better illustrated than in the ocker prehistory. The personnel in the ocker films—from actors, to directors, to script-writers—were drawn from the radical, experimental, non-subsidised theatre of La Mama, the Australian Performing Group (APG) and the theatre revue. Some, like David Williamson, became successes in subsidised theatre and screen writing later
73 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
on. Some, like the APG's Graham Blundell, became Alvin Purple. As Fitzpatrick (1979: 84-91) points out, an important notion within this diverse theatrical practice was Peter Brooks' imported notion of "rough theatre". As Brooks defined it:
The rough theatre is close to the people. . . Style needs leisure: putting over something in rough conditions is like a revolution, for anything that comes to hand can be turned into a weapon. . . . The arsenal is limitless: the aside, the placard, the topical reference, the local jokes .. . the shorthand of exaggeration, the false noses, the stock types, the stuffed bellies. ... Of course, it is most of all dirt that gives the roughness its edge: filth and spectacle takes on its socially liberating role, for by nature the popular theatre is anti-authoritarian, anti-traditional, anti-pomp, anti-pretence. This is the theatre of noise. (in Fitzpatrick, 1979: 84)
Brooks' prescriptions, enthusiastically put to work in the Australian context, produced 'ocker films'. As Rohdie (1982) has pointed out, the films made under its auspices depicted:
not a nostalgic rural Australian beauty, but the vulgarity, philistinism and energy of an urban contemporary Australia. These were not the distanced and distancing vignettes of the past, a parade of Australians buttoned up in costume, but vicious, zany comedies of the present. (39) But this was not ocker's only prehistory.
It also came out of a government policy which advocated low-budget, 'frankly commercial films' (Interim Report, 1969), designed to gain initial success with their Australian public. Ocker, then, had much to do with calculations of viability by funding bodies and producers alike. One government report (Spencer, 1971: 3) of the time even spoke of the need for 'a recognizable Australian genre' that audiences would to go because they were Australian. If market acceptance of Australian films had to be predicated upon a strategy of Australianness, their frankly commercial requirement was reliance on the sex comedy.
At the time the sex comedy with an R or M rating had a different social value than it has today. Historically the relaxation of Australian censorship provisions was associated with both cineaste and liberationist perspectives. In 1970 it was a progressive measure. Subsidies to film production crucially coincided with the relaxation of censorship and a related discourse of bringing sex out into the open (Clancy, 1979: 195).2
To some in the film trade these new classifications were supposed to usher in a new era for the motion picture by opening up a new mass adult market. This was a section of the market Hollywood had
74 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
not yet conquered, though it was reluctantly moving into. Low-budget film making looked to tap this market (Thorns, 1978: 361). By doing so local film making would not have to compete against older established film industries and their well established genres.
The obsessive depiction of sex and other bodily functions, normally the subject of toilet jokes, had a double sale: on the one hand, an appeal to a permissive counter-culture where representations of the body and sex were held to be liberatory (Horne, 1980: 14-23); and, on the other, a risque, vulgar, vaudevillian titillation. Tim Burstall described it:
One of the best ways of getting an Australian audience to accept itself, one of the things we're fondest of, is the send up; we're prepared to look at our life and laugh at it in a way that we're not prepared to look at our life and be serious about it. (The Age, 5.12.72)
Up until Alvin Purple these films were unacceptable to the theatrical management of the larger cinema chains. They gained their initial release in independent cinemas. Often the producer hired the theatre from its owners, as Adams did in Sydney and Melbourne with Barry McKenzie.
Their success, then, was not due to any help from the larger chains whose capacity to order a film's trajectory in the local market later benefitted Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Caddie (1976). Their first release had to be successful in downmarket independent theatres, sometimes outside the inner city. The campaign and publicity were the onus of the producer. If the films were a success under these difficult conditions, they might then be picked up for release by Roadshow/Village (the smallest of the three national chains) for national distribution.3
Given these conditions, many producers looked to independent theatres to get their first screening and lamented a lack of them within Australia. It was difficult to hire a cinema for extended seasons. Getting the film consistently before the public in one venue was the problem for ocker's producers. Barry McKenzie, for instance, was attracting large audiences when it was taken off to be replaced by another arranged by the exhibitor earlier. Primarily the producer was after continuous and favourable exposure in one theatre in the major cinema markets of Sydney and Melbourne.
To these producers the future of Australian production seemed to hinge upon securing better exposure from independent exhibition and this is what they told the Tariff Board. Their films existed in a different space to those of the majors showing in the choice Hoyts and Greater Union (GU) inner-city venues. They were in opposition
75 Aust J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
to them. For different reasons the independent exhibitors who screened their work were also opposed to the chains.
How these films were marketed and why there was such a resistance to them from the major chains had to do with the kind of product they were. Within a context of the mainstream exhibitors' resistance to the liberalisation of cinema exhibition and to the treatment of sex as a theme, these Australian films were firmly in the other camp. Hoyts and GU were fighting a rear guard action against the increased audience segmentation implicit in the R classification. So part of the explanation for their resistance lies in the censorship controversies and the forces operating there.
Hoyts and GU, with their inner-city holdings and affiliate drive-ins, were reluctant to see the family picture challenged. General audience films generated the substantial volume of revenues for these companies. The R classification itself and the sex and violence films with an M rating had the capacity to disrupt established viewing habits and family attendance (The Australian, 10.10.70). The introduction of the R certificate was also seen to interfere with the play-off capacity that the drive-ins and suburban cinemas afforded to general films after their inner-city first release. The market for the films and chains predominantly screened would thus be reduced. And the Australian market would be opened up in way that it had not been before, thus allowing for some challenge to the exhibition chains' hegemony over first and residual release. The commercial Australian film would have to come under another guise to be screened by Hoyts and GU. Significantly, they had no objection to the serious films, like Weir's Picnic or Crombie's Caddie, or even the more serious ocker of Petersen (1974).
Of the major cinema chains, Village, the smallest, supported the introduction of the R certificate (The Australian, 10.10.70). It is not hard to see why Village looked to secure new audiences. They handled an American product that GU and Hoyts either did not pick up or to which they were not affiliated. The family audience was the zone of its competitors, whose effective stranglehold over both prime inner-city first-release venues and the big movies of the American majors left Village out in the cold. Village either picked up the films late in their run when some of their earning potential had been exhausted or alternatively picked up a product the others did not want. This product had less chance of success, since it was predominantly for specialised audiences. Given this, it was no accident that Village and its distribution affiliate Roadshow gave Australian films their first sustained Australian-wide exposure and were the first to become financially involved in feature production.
76 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
The question of content was not the only thing working against these frankly commercial films within the exhibition/distribution complex. They were assessed as unviable and non-commercial. This assessment not only lay in a desire to maintain the predominant American fare against Australian interlopers. It also lay in the trade's own structural incompetence to deal with the risks attendant upon unknown, unproven films—films with no proven stars, directors, producers or studio-distributors with a record of successful film production behind them. They were not as expensive and therefore devoid of the glamour associated with 'stars' and high-budget spectacle. And, most importantly, they had no prior record of success in a theatrical market (unlike their American counterparts).
The exhibition/distribution complex was also not geared to handling Australian films in the same way that it was geared towards their Hollywood counterparts. There was no infrastructure of promotion for launching films. The facilities for trailer making were limited. The advertising campaigns and the promotional approach were, by and large, generated overseas and so were already packaged for Australian release. Catering for Australian films would involve the expansion of promotional and distribution operations to include these capacities. Roadshow/Village, with its connections to independent production in Australia and overseas, saw an opportunity for itself. It became extensively involved in the distribution and exhibition of Australian programmes.
More generally, the large chains' opposition to Australian films can also be understood in terms of their unwillingness to give way to the pressure being exerted upon them by production lobbyists and governments. Giving in, on however small a point, would be the thin edge of the wedge, leaving themselves open to ever-increasing demands to screen and fund Australian production.
The Tariff Board Report
The Tariff Board, investigating the prospects of Australian film at the time, used ocker's experience at the hands of exhibition/distribution to formulate a radical program for Australian film.4 The Board's recommendations for an Australian feature industry were sweeping. They confirmed the necessity of production subsidies and urged their extension to promotion, distribution and lesser exhibition (Tariff Board Report, 1973: 13-17). Further, the Board recommended a fundamental change in the existing nature of Australian exhibition and distribution. Options included divesting the cinema chains of a
77 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
proportion of their cinemas (20), and ending contractual and company ties between exhibition and distribution sectors that so disadvantaged independent exhibitors, distributors and producers (21). These options were designed to demonopolise the Australian cinema market. Such a structural change was seen as crucial to the long-term success of an indigenous feature film industry (13).
When the Board began its enquiries, it was not clear about how it should recognise the film production industry (Australian Financial Review, 28.3.72). All it had to go on were: (l) the conflicting submissions put before it by producers, exhibitors, distributors and TV stations; (2) its mandate to look after national, cultural and aesthetic aspirations; (3) its own predilections as an economic advisory body to see an industry as an economic object and to seek remedies within the market place; and (4) relevant overseas precedent.
To make sense of the squabbles within the film production industry between production and exhibition/distribution, the Board enlisted the anti-trust analysis of the film industry undertaken in the USA courts in the late forties (the so-called Paramount decrees). Australian cinema appeared to the Board as a classic case of over-monopolisation to the detriment of Australian film producers (19) and, to a lesser extent, independent exhibitors. Consequently, the findings of the Board on the effect of cinema exhibition and distribution upon Australian production shared a great deal with producer agitation.5
The effect of adopting the production vision of exhibition and distribution was that both were seen as marketing mechanisms for film production. This was the case in Australia, but with this difference— Australian exhibition and distribution were marketing mechanisms for foreign, not Australian, films (7). An extension of the American and British production industries (43), they were fundamentally skewed away from local production.
This contention was based upon the Board's investigation of the foreign studio control of Australian exhibition and its contractual and ownership links with large foreign-owned distributors. Distributors, the Board pointed out, were really forwarding agencies, remitting practically all their returns to their overseas principals to be divided there (4l). They had no competences to create campaigns, make trailers, assess projects or launch films (18). Their distribution charges were not competitively determined (2). Exhibitors, on the other hand, were efficient mechanisms for the Australian screening of groups of foreign films with proven track records overseas. Some of these films were from their own stables (47); Fox, the American
78 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
major, had a majority shareholding in Hoyts, and Rank, the British major, had a 50% equity in GU.6 Similarly, their affiliation with particular distributors dictated an exhibition policy favouring their source of supply. They just were not geared to the needs of Australian film production. As the Board put it:
To say that the Australian distribution/exhibition network is to a great extent an integrated part of the marketing activities of foreign film producers is to emphasise that there is no substantial distribution/ exhibition system operating specifically with the purpose of marketing Australian produced films. (43)
All of these factors worked against Australian films: they were independently produced; they were not 'their' films; they were an unknown commodity without promotional campaigns, etc. Best results with them had occurred when film producers acted as their own distributors and screened the films in independent theatres. Australian film, the Board concluded, was crucially independent of mainstream exhibition and distribution. It would realise its potential only if the complexion of exhibition and distribution was changed.
To realise this potential government intervention would be required. This intervention would 'establish genuine and effective competition between the major commercial elements of production, exhibition and distribution within the industry' (7). Through it, a structure would be created in which 'all commercial films shown in Australia have exhibition opportunities commensurate with their box office potential, irrespective of their country of origin or the production or distribution company to which they belong' (19). This would be achieved by a 'reduction in the present concentration of control within the industry' and by 'restructuring the industry to provide a greater number of suitable alternate outlets for any films' (19). These structural changes would facilitate the distribution and exhibition of Australian films on the basis of the proven benefits to Australian production of independent exhibitors. The Board saw the existing relationship established for films such as Stork and Barry McKenzie as the model to follow.
Under the existing industry Australian film production had been disadvantaged because it was structurally independent of the powerful exhibition/distribution machinery; now this independence would go for all films, not just Australian ones. The trajectory of an Australian film and all films within the market would need to be recreated for each film.
The Board's emphasis upon the future of Australian production being crucially tied up to the number of independent theatres availa-
79 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
ble was supported by the evidence of the independent exhibitors' commitment to Australian production.7 Their support for Australian production in the seventies has to be understood in the context of their relations with the powerful cinema chains which effectively controlled most outlets in Australia. The Tariff Board provided many instances of the way exhibition chains were able to routinise a film's run in such a way that films were made available to independent exhibitors when the revenue generating capacity of a film had all but expired. That these dominant exhibition interests were mainly foreign owned and controlled and that the independent exhibitors were Australian capitalised provided the independents with a proto-nationalism that made 'Australian films' both ideologically and practically attractive (Australian Financial Review, 3.8.76). They were 'our' rather than 'their' films. There was a corresponding concern and commitment to see 'our films' succeed that 'they', the dominant exhibition/distribution combination, did not have.
The Tariff Board Report presented a great number of problems for government. The Broadcasting Act that was cited as precedent could not be applied to film. Cinema exhibition was in state rather than federal jurisdiction. Immediate unilateral implementation of its recommendations to alter patterns of control in the cinema was politically out of the question. States' agreement to hand over their powers relating to exhibition would have been essential, but was not forthcoming. And then Doug McClelland, the Minister for the Media, was against most of the report. Not addressing the issues the Tarrif Board raised was one of the many failures in communications policy under McClelland's stewardshi.8
The Moment of Alvin Purple
Whilst controversy over what to do with the report was going on, the R rated, Jerry Lewis inspired Alvin Purple was released.9 This film marked the first serious involvement of exhibition/distribution with Australian film. Village/Roadshow, the most sympathetic group to Australian film, formed a partnership with Tim Burstall {Stork's director) to make Alvin. They intended to make this film in the same vein as Stork but with guaranteed exhibition and distribution.
Non-commercial considerations were also part of the motivation for Village/Roadshow's involvement (and the later involvements of Hoyts and GU). With the threat of government action hanging over them, the chains needed to prove that they were not inimical to
80 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
Australian products. The Tariff Board thus ended up giving a tactical push, forcing exhibition and distribution interests into film production and into securing good screenings and release patterns for Australian films.
Alvin's demonstrable success, built upon the active involvement of a major exhibition/distribution group, changed many official and producer notions as to how success could be achieved on the local market. Here was an Australian film where its producer/director did not act as its distributor. It went out through an exhibition chain and not through independent exhibition. Its aim was not just to secure a release in the major markets, but also to be released Australia wide. It was an instance where distribution/exhibition, far from shunning local productions, committed their funds and facilities to it. The chains could now be a precondition of, not an obstacle to, the local success of Australian films. In doing so, the film effectively countered both the Board's arguments and the production agitation as to exhibition/distribution's intrinsic prejudice against local production. The film's success called for a different sense of what could and should be the appropriate forms of viable Australian film distribution. Producer concern shifted in its wake from a problem of securing continuous exposure within a city arena to that of securing Australian-wide exposure in general and residual release.
The independent city cinema gradually lapsed as a premiere venue for Australian film. Along with this shift came the break up of the earlier coalition of interests between producers and independent exhibitors. In order to gain the widest possible release and the greatest profits in Australia, the horizon of the film producer had now to extend beyond obtaining first release space in the inner city of the major markets of Sydney and Melbourne. Films needed to get playoffs in drive-ins and suburban theatres as part of double bills over extended periods of time in order to generate their maximum earning potential. A distribution facility was necessary to achieve that, and Roadshow provided it. Australian film making became geared to getting the same release within Australia that Hollywood films obtain.
Now an ordered and accessible route for Australian films on the domestic market was available. The distributor links with theatres even appeared an advantage. Australian films could be inserted as part of the circuit from which they had hitherto been excluded. Indeed, by 1978 the producer's guide (Beilby, 1978) was recommending that only under particular circumstances, where there was a particular/specialised kind of product, should a producer act as his/her own distributor. This feature of the early seventies became increas-
81 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
ingly confined to the experimental independent sector.
The obvious point to be made here is that many of the early films were of this type. They were made for the difficult release conditions an Australian film could expect to get through independent cinemas. In this way they were marked off from their Hollywood counterparts, which expected to get the majority of their revenue through continuous showing in one theatre in one city.
In the years that followed Alvin, the complaints against the exhibition chain hegemony were registered by producers whose films were read as noncommercial propositions. For a film maker who had a minority audience in mind, the absence of unattached theatres for screenings to limited audiences mitigated against the viability of that film making. With few independent theatres, and with the major theatres and drive-ins being tied to a steady stream of larger budget products, it was impossible for film producers to deal directly with theatres. So criticism of exhibition and distribution persisted, but it was now in the margins. The preferred audience was a general Australian one. The mainstream of Australian film making, financing and production was concentrated there.
Ocker's Heyday and Demise
The only problem was Alvin itself. It was an R film about a young man who aroused strong sexual responses in women. Despite its public appeal, the film attracted bad publicity as a crass and demeaning product. Tittensor's review (1974) of it was typical:
There was no question of Alvin Purple's making any kind of contribution to the cultural life of this county at any level because it is a film that seeks only to exploit, never to enrich. What it betrays is not a lack of commitment but rather a failure to grasp what is worth being committed to; and any modern film industry that aims to establish itself on this kind of foundation is selling itself, and its public, very short indeed. (179)
Critics and politicians alike demanded a less vulgar, more culturally elevated film making in keeping with government support.
The need for government sponsored feature film making to distance itself from ocker was further compounded by growing numbers of ocker productions right across the media. Alvin was followed by Alvin Rides Again (1974); Grundy's produced the second Adventures film, Barry McKenzie Holds His Own (1974); and Crawford's released a feature version of their TV soapy The Box (1975), which was an imitation of Cash/Harmon's sex soapy Number 96. The latter also pro-
82 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
duced a feature of the same name (1974) and Abigail from Number 96 appeared in Alvin. The ocker of rough theatre had merged into the ocker of Hogan, Singleton and a soap opera stripped across the week to save Channel 0/10 for Murdoch to take over a decade later. As the poet Pi O (1984) put it:
(i mean:)
big-business welcomed the likes of: Tim Burstall
(of La Mama) who wrote the script to:
Alvin Purple starring Graeme Blundell
(of the APG) Jackie Weaver
& 'Abigail' : about a man & an irresistible waterbed (the
upshot of which
was the Capt. Snooze
commercials on TV....
In this scenario, where ocker seemed only too well catered for, it was hard to justify government support. The 'frankly commercial' film production policy would have to go. Regarded as the worst form of parochial '(s) exploitation', it was out of kilter with what was now government support for culturally acceptable film. It threatened to bring a hard won independent production industry back within the exhibition/distribution/TV nexus. And it did not confer the kind of national and cultural prestige that was expected from it.
The alternative to ocker was the higher budget 'quality' film. It too sought general theatrical acceptance within Australia. But to guarantee its quality and its independence from the kind of commercial exploitation that the local market required, it sought overseas circulation in order to recoup its higher production costs. Antithetical to Alvin, the quality film had its apotheosis in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). Government bodies and film industry personnel now marginalised ocker as their preferred industry strategy.10 It was simultaneously 'too Hollywood' (by being concerned with just entertainment and not culture or quality) and 'too parochial' (that is, too vulgarly Australian) to secure international acceptance. Weir's Picnic had the internationalist yet culturally valorised address necessary for overseas acceptance that ocker did not seem to have. Indeed, Australian culture is said to have arrived with Picnic and not
83 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
with Alvin, Barry McKenzie or Stork; but Picnic was a film made by Australians for (local and) international audiences, whilst the others were films made by Australians for Australians.
At issue with ocker's demise was not only definitions of Australian popular culture, but also definitions of Australian film: not just whether the grossness of ocker was acceptable or not, but what kind of Australian film would now be acceptable and to what audiences. Ocker entertainment implied a different audience than the quality film.
Burstall (1977: 53) was clearly aware of this. He saw himself and the other ocker creators (Beresford, Williamson and Barry Humphries) meeting 'the disruptive, anarchic entertainment values of the cinema-going public'. To do this they either portrayed Australians as vulgar but lovable in our vulgarity' (Barry McKenzie and Alvin), or they stressed 'sharp and uncharitable social observation [and] accurate delineation of contemporary social types' (Petersen and Don's Party, 1976). On the one hand, they sought a 'western suburbs and radical audience' as befitted their origins in TV/vaudeville, and, on the other, a Carlton counter-culture.
And these films certainly invited their audience to position itself in a social knowingness about society's archetypal values and figures. Audiences were to be cynical of establishment figures (be they academics, bosses or artists) and their values (education, work and art), cynical of opponents of the establishment (feminists and counterculture figures), and cynical of socially valorised institutions (family, marriage, the church and the police). As Morris (1980) has noted about these films:
There is a process of holding figures up to be surveyed and identified, which places them at a distance, and virtually calls upon the audience to play anthropologist to their own culture. (146)
Character played second fiddle to sociology within their dense textual fabric:
Relationships, particularly those involving men with women, assume the status of a symbolic background (comic, grim or both) for the working out of conflict, antagonisms and hostilities; collisions of class, race, culture and environment which become dizzying in their diversity. (137)
Clearly this film making was defining itself in relation to particular fractions of Australian society. As such, it left no room for the general claims of national identity and cultural expression able to be espoused on the backs of films like Picnic. By not being concerned with either sensibility or well rounded characters, it could not provide
84 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
good role models, traditional heroes, nor a warm sense of national pride. Its play with recognitions rather than intense audience identification made its images of Australian society acceptable or unacceptable depending on where you stood or how you felt about them (depicted misogyny would allow misogynists to comfortably remain that way).13
Furthermore, its uncomplimentary images did not portray Australia or Australians in a good light. Its insistence upon signs of disunity and difference rather than unity and accord, of vulgarity and obtuse-ness rather than sensitivity and sophistication, made it at odds with what was expected from films in general. As a consequence, a certain gaucherie came to surround ocker. An embarrassment was felt about its local success because it reflected badly upon its country and its audiences. Another way of constructing and positioning an Australian audience was called for. This was the film of culture and quality, a self-consciously high-standard film making more in keeping with other State cultural policy initiatives.
A measure of the subsequent demise of ocker was Tim Burstall's 1977 attack upon the industry where he was no longer at the centre (quoted in Bromby, 1979: 87). Burstall argued that state funding had ensconced staid high culture values in film production. It implied meeting 'the safe and respectable values of the educated middle class'. In consequence, a 'town councillor art' had evolved. He even argued that support from the much maligned exhibition/distribution complex was more progressive than state funding on cultural terms. A film maker who had been so reliant upon government funding to begin his career, who had been so persuasive before the Tariff Board regarding the way that chains prejudiced local production, now argued against the very planks on which his film career had started.
Clearly another chapter in Australian film had begun. It was the one through which the seventies' revival is known today. But with it, the Australian re-writing or Brooks' 'rough theatre' had been replaced by another re-writing—this time of the 'art film'.14 Of course, the fact of this 're-writing' is not intended to either discredit ocker or the quality film. Nor should it be taken to exhaust the meanings of each. These re-writings obviously negotiated other locally inflected discourses and film-production experience. Indeed, some, like Max Harris (1979), have argued that 'ocker' and the 'quality' film are not as mutually discrete as has been thought—rather they exist upon a continuum of film practice.
Tom O'Regan teaches at Murdoch University.
85 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
Notes
1. The Board, in fact, saw within TV the kind of competitive situation
that Australian cinema could benefit from. If anything, it argued,
there was too much competition in TV, but too little in the cinema.
2. Perhaps it was inevitable that a discourse of bringing sex out into
the open should have produced a flurry of narratives where sex
occupied centre stage in both character motivation and narrative
logic.
3. As John Murray, The Naked Bunyip' producer, put it:
There are very few independent exhibitors left with whom one
can deal directly; most of the independent exhibitors are
controlled by the established distributors who govern major
releases, therefore limiting the exhibitor's autonomy. The cost
of leasing cinemas is high and the producer can be exploited;
the limited number of outlets available prevent the Australian
producer/distributor from planning a continuous run or having
access to the most suitable outlets; considerable advertising
expenditure is needed to create a satisfactory image and to
compete with the extensive advertising of exhibition chains
and finally there is the cost of setting-up management and
promotion facilities throughout Australia for one product at a
time, (in Wade, 1972: 13)
4. Given that the general support for Australian film was not support
for the highly contentious ocker film, it is surely a paradox that this
radical Australianist program of the Tariff Board's was based upon
the experience of the ocker film.
5. The remedies the Board projected were different, however, from
those of the producers. It sought structural changes to the industry,
eschewing quotas, box office seat levies and taxation concessions
and compelling distribution companies to invest a proportion of
their revenues in Australian films. These differences in remedies are
an effect of the different outcomes and explanatory structures in
volved in each.
6. It is perhaps worth speculating upon what kind of analysis the
Board would have done if Hoyts was then, as it is now, Australian
owned. So too Rank has largely withdrawn from film production.
7. This commitment extended not only to a willingness to screen
Australian films, but also to provide finance for their production.
Further, there was evidence that theatrical independence could in
crease the revenues available to a film production.
8. For an account of Doug McClelland's Media Ministry and its rela
tion to the film industry, see Adams and Shirley (1983: 249-273).
9. For an account of the development and thinking behind Alvin, see
Finney(l974: 123-125).
86 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
10. A measure of the marginalisation of the brash Australian product
was the trajectory of the Adams-Bereford partnership. It went from
the ebullient Barry McKenzie to the period piece The Getting of
Wisdom (1977), in which Barry Humphries had gone from Dame
Edna to an inconsequential teacher. Alvin seemed left behind, not
because the cycle had run itself out, but because it had been
nipped in the bud.
11. Burstall himself attempted to counter these assumptions about his
film making not being able to gain international circulation with
Eliza Fraser (1976). He employed a foreign star in Susannah York
and the film's budget was a record for an Australian film at the
time. It was a picaresque comedy of manners—certainly not a seri
ous view of Australia's past. This caused the film some problems,
given audience and critical expectations of a serious nostalgia film.
Burstall was out of step, his audience led astray by the cultural
romance of the public agenda. As he put it:
The public wanted to see it as an epic. They didn't want to see
their history portrayed on the screen as basically bullshit, even
though they know it is really the case, (in Bromby, 1979: 87)
12. As Rohdie (1982: 40) later put it, Barry McKenzie, Stork and Alvin
created 'freaks' and 'monstors' rather than characters, whilst the
films themselves were 'marked by an excess rather than a tasteful
balance'.
13. The issues at stake here are concisely presented in the following dis
cussion of the criticism directed at David Williamson in the mid-
seventies:
Their [the critics] central worry is: Does Williamson approve or
disapprove of what he describes? If what he is doing can be
seen as an indictment of modern Australia—its vulgarity, its
crassness, its shallow social goals—then he can be praised. But
f it is sensed he is either the impartial recorder—or what is worse—
a man who rather relishes the vigour, energy and 'tastelessness' of the
life around him, then he is described—I quote Colin Bennett of The Age—
as 'hollow', a man without vision. (Burstall, 1977: 50)
14. See Dermody (1983: 11) for a discussion of the 'art film' in the post-
Picn ic repertoire.
87 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
References
Adams, B. and Shirley, G. (1983) Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years. Sydney: Angus & Robertson/Currency.
Beilby, P., ed. (1978) The Australian Film & TV Producers' and Investors' Guide. Melbourne: Cinema Papers.
Bertrand, I. and Collins, D. (1981) Government and Film in Australia. Sydney: AFI/Currency.
Bromby, R. (1979) Test for Australia'. Sight and Sound, 48 (2): 85-87.
Burstall, T. (1977) Triumph and Disaster for Australian Films'. The Bulletin, 24 Sept. 1977: 45-54.
Clancy, J. (1979) 'Australian Films and Fantasies'. Meanjin, 38 (2): 193-205.
Dermody, S. (1983) The Australian Film Industry and the Holy Roman Empire'. Filmnews, 13 (6): 10-12.
Finney, A. (1974) 75:25'. Cinema Papers, 1 (2): 123-5. Fitzpatrick, P. (1979) After The Doll'. Melbourne: Edward Arnold.
Harris, M. (1979) 'Sense and Sensibility in the Film World'. Weekend Australian, 22-23 Apr. 1979.
- - - (May, 1969) Interim Report of the Film Committee. Sydney: The Australian
Council for the Arts.
Home, D. (1980) A Time of Hope. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
Morris, M. (1980) 'Personal Relationships and Sexuality'. In Murray, S. (ed.) (1980) The New Australian Cinema. Melbourne: Cinema Papers/Nelson, 138-152.
Rohdie, S. (1982) 'Gallipoli as World Cinema Fodder'. Arena, 60: 36-44.
Spencer, M. (June, 1971) Australian Feature Film Production. Sydney: The Australian Council for the Arts.
- - - (June, 1973) The Tariff Board Report Canberra: A.G.P.S.
Thorns, A. (1978) Polemics for a New Cinema. Sydney: Wild & Woolley.
Tittensor, J. (1974) 'Alvin Purple'. Cinema Papers, 1 (2): 179.
Wade, E. (1972)' The Distribution Hang-Up'. Lumiere, Sept.: 13-15. TTO (1984) 'Ockers' Arema, 66: 167-186.
88 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
New: 3 October, 1997 | Now: 13 November, 2019