Tom O’Regan’s version of what “national cinema” actually is.

O’Regan places Australian movies inside a messier system of government policy, funding, criticism, international distribution, television, audience expectation and the gravitational pull of Hollywood and British cinema. Published in 1996, it became one of the major studies of postwar Australian film. 

Refreshingly, it refuses the cultural cringe story. O’Regan instead explore how Australian cinema actively manufactures and negotiates Australianness: how filmmakers borrow international forms, indigenise genres, construct local audiences and work inside an industry whose national identity is fraught. The book ranges across film policy, criticism, production and the revival of Australian cinema from the 1970s onward, using individual films to think through the relation between national culture and global cinema. Dense, argumentative and still unusually useful for anyone interested in Australian film, cultural policy or the politics of the “national” itself. 

Routledge, London, 2001 reprint of the 1996 first edition. Paperback. Moderate shelf and handling wear to covers, including rubbing, light creasing and some edge wear; upper corners lightly bumped. Internally clean and unmarked from what is visible; binding sound. Good to very good condition.