Australian cinema up in the air: Post-national identities and Peter Duncan's Unfinished Sky

Abstract

This paper examines Peter Duncan's film Unfinished Sky as an example of post-national Australian cinema. Addressing dominant frameworks in Australian film criticism that focus on the concept of the national, the paper argues that the ‘national’ has in fact been reconfigured in the cinema of the new millennium, placing it within a post-national or regional environment. In several recent Australian films there has been an increased engagement with the region, both in terms of the representation of regional areas outside Australia, such as Asia and the Middle East, as well as demonstrating a growing sense of openness to global influences and connections in remote or regional settings within the country. Addressing these various shifts, the paper questions how relevant is it to continue to define Australian cinema in terms of the ‘national’, as has long been dominant in Australian film scholarship, when aiming to take into account different races, ethnicities, and identities appearing on screen today. This is especially worth reconsidering since the demise of multiculturalism from the mid to late 1990s as an official cultural policy situated squarely within the framework of the national.

Notes

1. Stiller says that he first had the idea for the film after his small role as a prisoner of war in Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun (1987), another stratospherically titled film.

2. Test screenings went well; there was more outcry from disability groups over Stiller's portrayal of an intellectually-challenged young man, ‘Simple Jack’. More recently, in the Australian context (in October 2009), there was controversy over a blackface Michael Jackson skit on the popular television programme Hey, Hey It's Saturday. Guest judge Harry Connick Jnr's incensed reaction, as well as entertainer Kamahl's negative response, provoked both outrage and support.

3. Kangaroo Jack is a 2003 comedy directed by Jerry Bruckheimer starring Jerry O'Connell. An animated children's sequel, Kangaroo Jack: G'Day USA!, was released on video the following year.

4. The film is the first feature produced by New Holland Pictures, a film and television production company formed in 2005 by Australian producers Cathy and Mark Overett and Dutch producers Anton Smit and San Fu Maltha. (A third of the budget was financed from Holland).

5. The latest in a string of policy debacles concerning Australia's ‘border protection’ policy is current Prime Minister Julia Gillard's proposal for an East Timor regional processing centre, which has been rejected by the East Timor parliament. This proposal has been likened to former Prime Minister John Howard's ‘Pacific Solution’; both highlight the role of the region.

6. In this list I have not included films about migrancy and immigration in general such as Floating Life (dir. Clara Law 1996) and The Home Song Stories (dir. Tony Ayres 2007).

7. Best Director for Peter Duncan, Best Actress for Monic Hendrickx, Best Editing for Suresh Ayyar, and Best Production Design for Laurie Faen.

8. Benjamin Zeccola, executive director of Palace Films which distributed Unfinished Sky, commented that the film was continuing to do strong business in regional areas: ‘People are really enjoying the film; there's been strong word of mouth and a lot of demand from regional locations. It's proven to have really long legs. … The [box office] over the last couple of weeks has come from regional business and … [t]here are still a lot of regional bookings to come in’. http://www.newhollandpictures.com.au/UnfinishedSkyinchestowards1m.asp.

9. The fact that Hendrickx's portrayal of an Afghani refugee did not generate the same kind of controversy as Downey Jnr's blackface portrayal in Topic Thunder probably has more to do with US racial politics than it does with Australian identity politics.