The Last New Wave: The Australian Film Revival

A few years ago, at the Berlin Film Festival, Istvan Dosai, the head of Hungarofilm and one of the most brilliant film bureaucrats in the world, asked about the success of the Australian cinema. "How did it happen?" he asked. "You came so far, so fast." in writing this book, which covers the 120 feature films made in Australia between 1970 and the end of 1979, I have tried to concentrate on answering Dosai's question and thus 1 have been more concerned to explain bow and why the films were made than to discuss the films themselves in aesthetic terms. The latter approach will become the responsibilities of others in other books. The Last New Wave is based very largely on the comments of the filmmakers themselves. Throughout 1979 I talked to them — directors and producers — and taped what they had to say. Although many of these discussions took place in Sydney and Melbourne, some were held further from home; my interview with Philippe Mora took place in Los Angeles as did one of my meetings with Peter Weir, while my second discussion with Jim Sharman took place in London. The range covered by the book is alarmingly wide, and it is a pity that I was unable to tackle any films which did not fit the feature film category: thus documentaries, including such important feature docu-mentaries as Tom Flaydon's The Last Tasmanian, are not discussed, nor are featurettes running less than one hour, the running time internation-ally accepted as being feature length. And I have not attempted to deal with telemovies, 16 mm feature films made specifically for television and with no thought for theatrical release, though there are two exceptions to this policy: I have discussed two telemovies made by directors (Peter Weir and Michael Thornhill) whose careers 1 have covered in some detail. Otherwise, the large number of telemovies will — I hope — be covered in another book.