Five per cent

When I ask people why they don’t see Australian movies, the short answer is usually “because they’re shit”.

Although this is a debatable fact, it is true that Australians go to the movies to see American films. Last year, of all the films Australians went to see at the movies, only five per cent were Australian. Around nine per cent were British, and a full 82.8 per cent were American.

America is the home of mass culture – with so many people living in such an affluent society, they have the resources to invest heavily in entertainment. Strinati said that for critics, the fact that there are so many American movies in our cinemas threatens not just aesthetic standards and cultural values, but national culture as well.

How are Australians supposed to make films if nobody’s going to watch them? It seems like a bit of a cycle to me – nobody watches them, so they don’t have a high budget, so nobody watches them…

Nevertheless, small ripples are being made about Australian content. Triple J is having an AusMusic month, the Australian Communications and Media Authority are keeping up their rule that every television station has to broadcast at least 55 per cent Australian content, and last night Packed to the Rafters drew a crowd of 2.335 million.

So on the theme of Australian-made, here are my favourite six Aussie films of all time:

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
“Now listen here, you mullet. Why don’t you just light your tampon and blow your box apart, because it’s the only bang you’re ever gonna get sweetheart!”

It’s not the costumes, the disco hits or the flouncing about. For me, this movie is about the very real pain of struggling with your identity – and you don’t have to be a drag queen to feel that.

The Castle
“Steve is also an ideas man. That’s why Dad calls him the Ideas Man. He has lots of ideas”
“You’re an ideas man, Steve”

What a classic. The lines, the laughs and the rissoles. Everyone knows rissoles, darl.

Chopper
“Why would I shoot a bloke, BANG, then drive him to the bloody car and whizz him off to the hospital at a hundred miles an hour? It defeats the purpose of having shot him in the first place”

They reckon that Australians love films about crime, because we’re descended from British convicts so it’s part of our cultural heritage. Whether that’s true or not, there is something seriously irresistible about Eric Bana’s portrayal of the cheeky, violent Chopper Read.

Looking for Alibrandi
“Dear Guinness Book of Records: I’ve just been out on a ten minute date. Is that a record?”

Teenagers. Can’t live with their whinging, can’t shoot them. But unfortunately we all know what it’s like to be one, and this movie gives a good perspective on what it’s like to have the added storm and stress of being caught between cultures as well as between being a child and an adult.

Lantana
“This is not an affair, it’s a one-night stand that happened twice”

I love this one because when I watch it, I don’t see plastic characters. I see real people and that’s what makes it resonate with me.

Animal Kingdom

Enough said. (I’ve blogged on this film already, don’t want to bore you to death!)

Slasher

When you watch a slasher film, you know what you’re going to get. While it’s true that every genre of movie has a certain formula, in a slasher you can put the following elements together like a recipe:

• The killer is a white male with his identity concealed
• The victims are attractive young people, mostly females, who are killed one by one
• The murder weapon is handheld, usually a knife
• The film contains a past event that has traumatised the killer, with the main action set in the present where an event reignites the killer’s vengeful drive
• The sole survivor is a girl

Slight variations in character and setting provide a different flavour to the cake that is a slasher film, but it is a recipe, whether the end result is Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Prom Night, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Scream or Psycho. That much is a given. What’s not always obvious at first is who the hero is.

While it’s true that the ‘final girl’ could be seen as the hero of the slasher film, as she alone escapes from the killer, the school of thought I agree with says that in fact, the girl in the slasher film can’t be the main character, because it’s the killer that makes all the action happen. She just reacts.

This theory comes from Laura Mulvey, who argued that when you watch any film, you watch it through a man’s eyes. Her idea of having a “male gaze” meant that whenever you have a female character in a film, she is essentially passive, and males are the active, powerful ones in the story.

In Halloween, the final girl, Laurie, does not move the narrative forward in any significant way. She might end up attacking the killer, but only because she is reacting to the events that he has set in motion by escaping from a mental asylum and murdering her friends. There are several shots that are even filmed from Michael’s direct viewpoint, reinforcing that throughout the film, Michael holds the power. Instead of being substantial characters, the females in the film play passive roles. They are often sexy, meaning they are there to be looked at rather than do anything important.

So who cares if we’re watching a movie through a man’s eyes rather than a woman’s? If films reflect the culture that they’re from, then the danger of always seeing men as active and women as passive in movies might mean that people expect men and women to act like that in real life. That’s not to say that men are suddenly supposed to go around disguising themselves and hacking teenagers to death, but that essentially, men are the important ones while women are mostly there just to be looked at. And I love slasher films – I’d just like to think that as a woman, I can play a bigger part.

Animal Kingdom

Watching Animal Kingdom was like being punched in the face with reality. Ouch. In fact I think it’s going to leave a bruise.

It wasn’t just the dark subject matter, the gritty realism or the compelling acting. It was the fact that such an intensely shot film was produced in Melbourne, my home town. I was mesmerised by the movie – you can see a trailer here. All the previews before it showed American movies with actors so familiar that I’m bored with them. In fact, by the time Animal Kingdom came on, it was a shock to hear an Australian accent. But there it was, in all its rough glory; a film with streetscapes I’d walked on, ‘Victoria: The Place to Be’ number plates, people who could be my friends or colleagues or featured in the Age as local criminals.

Much has been said about the Australian film industry, most of it bad, but through the cringeworthy bogan sterotypes some films really shine. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is one of my favourite movies; every time I watch it I get the sense that these are real people in front of me, and that’s something I rarely feel during an American film.

Australia is not a large cultural power in the world. Leave the country for five minutes and you get people asking if we ride to work on kangaroos and keep koalas as pets. We just don’t have the people nor the resources to create influential culture to the same degree as America – they have 310 million people in the country, we have about 22 and a bit. It’s much cheaper to buy and screen American films than go through the enormous expense of producing an Australian one that won’t gain nearly as large an audience.

But if we keep making movies like Animal Kingdom, I won’t be walking into another Angelina Jolie perve fest anytime soon.