Film Criticism as Cultural Fantasy: The Perpetual French Discovery of Australian Cinema (review)

French criticism has evidenced a perhaps surprising degree of fascination with Australian films over the past forty or so years, as Andrew McGregor demonstrates here. The 'cultural fantasy' to which he alludes is a twofold one: Australian cinema constructed as on the one hand exotic through its distance and décor, on the other accessible to French audiences 'in so far as it represents a hybrid of British and American cultural identity' (p. 175), and thus in some sense 'the antithesis of Europe' (p. 13). This focus is developed through a thorough charting of what would seem to be virtually all Australian films reviewed in France since Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout of 1971, a film whose inclusion at once calls the very definition of 'Australian cinema' into question, for its director is, of course, British. Similarly, the auteur who emerges as chouchou of French critics since Sweetie (1989) is Jane Campion, a New Zealander. 'National cinemas' are notoriously, and increasingly, difficult to circumscribe, and McGregor's broad definition of the category, given the comparatively fledgling status of the Australian industry, was probably a wise choice. His desire for comprehensiveness, alas, often leads him to adopt a 'scissors and paste' approach in which brief summaries of a hundred or so films are interspersed with liberal quotation from Cahiers, Positif, and the non-specialist press, so that there is a tendency to lose sight of the wood for the trees. The French perception of Australian cinema as an outpost of the 'Anglo-American' tends to be a generic one, leading to a periodic eliding of national specificity, so that the Outback is seen as a more exotic avatar of John Ford's Monument Valley. Counterposed to this is 'the auteur-formalist approach' (p. 295) adopted towards the work of Campion and other directors (Rolf de Heer, Baz Luhrmann), so that in the end Australian cinema is read, perhaps inevitably, in a perspective familiar from the early days of Cahiers' and Positif 's early engagement with Hollywood. McGregor's taxonomic eagerness sometimes does his survey a disservice, for not enough is said about how the different journals' theoretical and ideological perspectives inform their responses to the films reviewed, and his intertextual cupboard sometimes turns out to be surprisingly bare. It seems extraordinary that he should have presented Scott Murray's Devil in the Flesh with no reference whatever to either of the other adaptations of Radiguet's novel, by Autant-Lara and Bellocchio; and the mini-succès de scandale of Sweetie could have been illuminated by a reference to Josiane Balasko's Sac de noeuds, or, more accessibly, the work of Blier. The book is well presented, despite the absence of illustrations or index, and certainly represents a useful resource, but might be thought to be in some respects less than the sum of its parts.