Jack Clancy

The dilemma faced by the Australian film industry after a decade – and about fifty feature films – of revival is neatly put by the Foreword and the Introduction to The New Australian Cinema. One kind of pioneer, Phillip Adams, to whom some credit for the early impetus is due, has one kind of warning. ‘Our politicians, film corporations and investors are insisting on the need for commercial success in the U.S.’, he says, and reminds us of the reasons some of us thought an Australian film industry was important: ‘We needed to hear our own accent. We wanted our voice to be heard in the world.’ Another and earlier kind of pioneer, Ken G. Hall, speaking from the bitter experience of the immediate post-war years (when, as he says, ‘I made newsreels’) has the opposite warning; ‘There will be no enduring film industry in this country unless it is based on commercially successful films.’

This is the third edition of the Australian Motion Picture Yearbook, a production of the leading Australian film magazine Cinema Papers, which is itself solidly established with Issue No. 41 currently on sale, and a circulation of over 12,000 per issue. The Yearbook is one of a number of publications to come from Cinema Papers Pty Ltd, their range – from The New Australian Cinema and The Documentary Film in Australia to the Film Expo Seminar Report – indicating the task the magazine sets itself.

The end of the decade seems an appropriate time for a re-assessment of the revival of Australian cinema, since the beginning of the seventies can be taken as the time when it struggled towards life. Somewhere between the two Burstall films, Two Thousand Weeks (1968) and Alvin Purple (1973), there took place the various stirrings of conscience, consciousness, initiative, and enterprise that led to something over one hundred and fifty films in the next ten years. David Stratton’s book lists one-hundred-and-twenty-eight films, although different listings have discovered more, and he is also at pains to pay appropriate tribute to the pioneering efforts of Burstall.