Picking up the pieces: Contemporary Australian cinema and the representation of Australian film history

Abstract

Australian cinema is generally under-populated by feature films and documentaries exploring its film history. A small number of works were produced between the 1960s and 1990s-including Forgotten Cinema (1967), Newsfront (1978) and The Celluloid Heroes (1995)-that acted to recognise a forgotten, if broadly conceptualised, history of Australian cinema and make claims for the resurgence and continuity of its ‘revival’. This chapter looks at a range of contemporary feature-length documentaries and feature films, including John Hughes’ The Archive Project (2006) and Mark Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood (2008), that question, revise and fragment this representation of Australian film history and its national cinema through the documentation of marginalised filmmakers and areas of film practice; specific case studies; and the direct or indirect citation of canonical examples of television, documentary and feature filmmaking.