The Australian Film Revival of the 1970s — also known as Australian Film Renaissance, New Australian Cinema, or Australian New Wave — was the last major “new wave” to erupt in the wake of France’s nouvelle vague. Beginning in the early ’70s, with films like Nicolas Roeg’s “Walkabout” (1971), it lasted until the mid-1980s. Between 1970 and 1985, Australia produced nearly 400 films (more than had been made in the history of the Australian film industry), including films like “Mad Max” (1979) and “The Year of Living Dangerously” (1982).
After a fallow period of several decades when, for economic reasons, the country produced practically no feature films, the Australian government stepped in, subsidizing production and establishing a national film school. The pent-up creative energies released by this infusion of public money meshed with a pool of technicians and actors who had considerable experience in Australian television, which had remained surprisingly robust while the country’s film industry went dark.
The films of the Australian Film Revival shared a vitality, a love of open spaces, and a propensity for sudden violence and languorous sexuality that may have reminded Americans of their own new wave, the Hollywood-maverick period of the late 1960s and early ’70s that had just about run its course. The films didn’t stray far from Hollywood norms. Movies like “Backroads“ (1977) and Tim Burstall’s “Petersen” (1974), combining loose-jointed, turbulent stories, working-class protagonists and an acute consciousness of the politics of class and race, felt like those earlier American [movies of the late ’60s and early ’70s].
The era also marked the emergence of the “Ozploitation” style characterised by the exploitation of colloquial Australian culture, such as in the “Mad Max” films. Strong themes and motifs run through the series, beginning with the omnipresence of the sweeping Australian landscape. Few of these films take place in cities; it’s a cinema of countryside and suburb. And whether that was a choice or a response to a lack of studio spaces, the outdoor settings are defining: lush caldrons for tension and violence or drab rural prisons to be escaped. Complementing this is a focus on cars, both as symbols of pride and prerogative and as crucial possessions in a country where great distances separate small pockets of life. The most noticeable thread linking the films, though, is their emphasis on questions of class and race. Social mobility is the subject of [many of these] films. And the question of the relationship between black and white, indigenous and colonizer, is nearly always present, whether as a background note or a central theme. An avoidance of the purely happy ending — instead, eg. a pessimistic take on the possibility of understanding between aborigines and white Australians — is another thing that characterized the Australian New Wave, and it gives the series a weight.
The end of the era — the period after the end of the 1980s, starting with the arrival of “Crocodile Dundee” (1986) — marked the beginning of the “Post New Wave” period in Australian cinema. Since then, the industry’s main exports have been tinselly comedies, such as “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” (1994), “Muriel’s Wedding” (1994), and “Babe” (1995), and the fantasies of Baz Luhrmann. [The Australian New Wave] captures a moment of freedom and abundance that was over almost before we knew it.
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The Smoke Screen 