- Title
- "They like all pictures which remind them of their own": The 'Entangled' Development of Australian Westerns
- Creator
- Hamilton, Emma
- Relation
- Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film p. 264-278
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv26qjhx8.22
- Publisher
- Indiana University Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2022
- Description
- Traditional understandings of the Australian Western genre tend toward a bifurcation emphasizing either the distinctiveness of Australian filmmaking or its derivativeness. On the one hand, some posit that, while Australia may have developed cycles of bushranging and other “Western-like” films, these products are distinct from the US-American genre. Following this argument, and despite the remarkable parallels in the historical experiences of Australian and US-American frontierism, colonialism, and displacement, and the development of a national cinema that focused on that frontier experience at the same time, the Australian genre of outlaw/bushranger films should be considered as a separate genre, unrelated to the US-American Western whose worldwide popularity would come to dwarf it. For example, as Ben Goldsmith asserts in his introduction to the Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand edition, “The bushranger film and the Western developed separately and should be considered as distinct” (11). On the other hand, there are those who may argue that, although audiences may receive cultural products in various and diverse ways (see, e.g., Pearson), the Australian Western could only ever be derivative of (and, therefore, also less than) its US-American counterpart given the ubiquity of the US-American genre and the size and scale of Hollywood’s economic and cultural power. Thus, for André Bazin, in his discussion of the Australian film Overlanders (1946), “A Western theme is borrowed . . . [and the film’s] success was due to an unusual combination of circumstances” (131) (see also, e.g., Cooke; Lewis). These bifurcated perspectives, however, rejoin at a similar conclusion: the Western was/is/cannot be Australian. One may have either the “Australian” or the “Western” film but not both at the same time.
- Subject
- traditional understandings; bifurcation emphasizing; Australian filmmaking; outlaw/bushranger films
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1449636
- Identifier
- uon:43717
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780253060761745
- Language
- eng
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