Notorious social realists give film head vertigo
Australian filmmakers must stop creating boring social realist movies and realise they're in business, not art, which is why they receive substantial government funds, the head of the industry's top lobby group has said in a blistering attack on his own constituency.
Referring to Alfred Hitchcock's quote that "film is life with the boring bits cut out", Antony I. Ginnane, president of the Screen Producers Association of Australia, opened SPAA's annual conference with the observation that "unfortunately, our feature film industry... revels in the boring bits."
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In light of Australian films' 4 per cent share of the national box office, down from 18 per cent in 1988, Mr Ginnane questioned whether the sector's ability to read the market "has been so dulled by the subsidy drug that we have completely forgotten what audiences want". The sector had to resolve one and for all the "40-year push/pull between art and commerce", he told SPAA's 700-odd delegates.
"We have spent over $1 billion on our film industry since the 1970s but we have never stood together and said, 'This is an industry. This is a business. It's not about art. It's not for dilettantes.'"
Of course, culture, including film, should be supported, he said, but it should be separate from and judged differently from the building of a sustainable commercial industry.
When the car sector was subsidised, it used that money to create cars that sold, he said, not to "force a three-wheeled pink variant into the market". But the film industry consistently used its public funds to create "a product the market does not want". Hundreds of social realist films were still being made despite failure at the box office, yet when only a few horror thrillers failed after Wolf Creek, that genre stopped being made.
"Mao's Last Dancer, with a fantastic Australian gross of $13.9 million to date, like Australia, proves that melodrama, not social realism, is the genre our would-be screenwriters should be studying," he said.
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