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Traditions in World Cinema

Australian International Pictures (1946 - 75)

By Adrian Danks and Constantine Verevis

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£95.00

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About this book

Offers an important insight into the formative moments of transnational film culture in Australia
  • Provides vibrant textual studies of under-evaluated Australian international pictures
  • Develops an understanding of international film production in the years following WWII and before the Australian film revival of the 1970s
  • Corrects the perception that there was no significant feature film production in Australia after the 1930s and before the revival
  • Offers background and important precedents for the more recent practices of global co-productions and ‘Hollywood Down-under’

Australian International Pictures examines the concept and definition of Australian film in relation to a range of local, international and global practices and trends that blur neat categorisations of national cinema. Although international co-production is particularly acute in the present day, this book examines the porous nature of Australian International filmmaking, and the intriguing transnational and cross-cultural formations created by globally targeted but locally focussed films made in Australia in the period 1946–75.

Case Studies:
  • The Overlanders (1946) and Ealing Down Under
  • Kangaroo (1952)
  • On the Beach (1959)
  • The Sundowners (1960)
  • The Drifting Avenger (1968)
  • Age of Consent (1969)
  • Color Me Dead (1970)
  • Ned Kelly (1970)
  • Walkabout (1971)
  • Wake in Fright (1971)
    • The Man from Hong Kong (1975)

Reviews

Offering sharp and smart close-readings of films in Australia through the long post-war period, a moment often understudied and underappreciated (if not downright dismissed), the authors revise, yet also productively revive, conceptions of national cinema through a composite framework nicely attuned to scales of global and local and their necessary interaction.

Before Australian cinema’s breakthrough in the early 1980s, visiting filmmakers made important and varied contributions to what Danks and Verevis call ‘the imagination of Australia’. The Overlanders, On the Beach, Age of Consent, Ned Kelly and Walkabout are among the international productions here valuably reconsidered from a contemporary Australian perspective.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements

1. Australian International Pictures (1946–75)

2. The Overlanders (1946) and Ealing Down Unde

3. Kangaroo (1952)

4. On the Beach (1959)

5. The Sundowners (1960)

6. The Drifting Avenger (1968)

7. Age of Consent (1969)

8. Color Me Dead (1970)

9. Ned Kelly (1970)

10. Walkabout (1971)

11. Wake in Fright (1971)

12. The Man from Hong Kong (1975)

References

About the contributors

Adrian Danks

Adrian Danks is Associate Professor in Cinema Studies and Media at RMIT University. He is also the co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque and the author of many publications including the edited collections A Companion to Robert Altman (2015) and American-Australian Cinema: Transnational Connections (with Stephen Gaunson and Peter Kunze, 2018).

Constantine Verevis

Constantine Verevis is Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. His publications include:Australian International
Pictures (co-authored with Adrian Danks, 2023, EUP), Film Remakes (Edinburgh UP, 2006), Transnational Film Remakes (Edinburgh UP, 2017), Film Reboots (Edinburgh UP, 2020), and Flaming Creatures (2020). With Claire Perkins, he is founding co-editor of Screen Serialities (Edinburgh UP).

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