I am an Australian filmmaker with 49 years of experience. This is my submission.
Why is it important that we have an Australian film industry? Does it really matter if the federal government cuts back funding and allows Australian film to die a natural death, as it does many other inefficient industries? (The Chinese could, after all, make Australian films for a fraction of the cost!) Or is an Australian film industry in some way important to our culture?The word ‘industry’ is problematic - conjuring up, as it does, a product from which a profit is expected to accrue. Very few Australian films make a return on the investment made in them (the Australian tax-payer being the major investor) and to pretend that they ever will is to delude ourselves. Imagine if we referred to ‘the Australian ballet industry’, the Australian Opera industry’, the ‘Sydney symphony orchestra industry’, ‘the poetry industry’ and so on. As industries yielding profits to stockholders they are all abject failures, so why do we bother to subsidize them?
Drop ‘industry’ and think only in terms of ‘Australian film’ (and all the other arts) and the questions become both more interesting and more pertinent to the times we live in.
Harking back to the days when political parties on both sides of the political divide felt that Australian film was important provides us with a context within such questions can (and I believe should) be asked today.
As far back as 1963 the Senate Select Committee Report on the Encouragement of Australian Productions for television felt that there was:
“a responsibility to protect an industry with a strong cultural element.”
In the late 60’s and early 70’s the various bodies involved in providing the industry with a philosophical base stressed that:
“The industry (should be) pre-eminently Australian in character, not dominated by other cultures; that government sponsorship would support ‘film and television projects of quality’ and produce ‘distinctively Australian’ films that would ‘provide the Australian people with a national voice and a record of their way of life.”
The Report of the Interim Board of the Australian Film Commission declared that,
“Australia, as a nation, cannot accept, in this powerful and persuasive medium, the current flood of other nations’ productions on our screens without it constituting a very serious threat to our national identity. The Commission should actively encourage the making of those films of high artistic or conceptual value which may or may not be regarded at the time as conforming to the current criteria of genre, style or taste, but which have cultural, artistic or social relevance. Some may not become commercially successful ventures, but these may include films which posterity will regard as some of the most significant films made by and for Australians. Profit and entertainment on the one hand and artistic standards and integrity on the other, are not mutually exclusive. In the long term the establishment of a quality Australian output is more important for a profitable, soundly based industry that the production exclusively as what might be regarded as sure fire box office formula hits.
These words ring as true today as they did 40+ years ago, not just for film but for all of the arts. They are an integral part of who we are as Australians and our culture will be the poorer in the future, much poorer, if the arts are viewed as a product to be consumed, as opposed to being a way of connecting us as a community, a society, holding a mirror up to ourselves, making our souls and spirits sing.
Another point about the arts and creativity in general that is worth bearing in mind. The only reason why there are bridges, cars, roads, vaccines, modern technologies, space probes (the list is endless) is because someone, at some point in history, imagined into existence, something that no one had imagined before. Or took the fruits of someone else's imagination and built on it. It is not by chance that we refer to ourselves as Homo Sapiens, Latin for 'Wise Man'. We wise men and women, since the dawn of civilisation, have imagined into existence all we see around us. We could quite justifiably, and accurately, have christened our species, Homo Imaginari.
Leaving aside the importance of the arts from a cultural point of view, successive Australian governments must value and nurture the development of the imaginations of young Australians so that they can, when adults, the reins of the future in their hands, imagine creative solutions to the multiple challenges they and subsequent generations will face. The arts provide young people with a template they can apply to all aspects of their lives, both personal and profession, even if they never pick up a paintbrush, a musical instrument or a camera.
Canberra will be betraying the future if it continues to view the arts as either primarily a commodity or some kind of self-indulgence.
For what it is worth, most of us working in the arts earn very little money for the work we do to enrichen our culture.
James Ricketson
22nd Oct 2020
