Kennedy Miller Mitchell and the relationality of Australian cinema – global film practice in Australia

ABSTRACT

Recent work in Australian screen scholarship has been focused on expanding the limitations of our national cinema discourse. Terms like Deb Verhoeven’s ‘Industry 3’ or Ben Goldsmith’s ‘outward-looking Australian cinema’, and the discourse of ‘transnationality’ more generally, exemplify a contemporary tendency that seeks out new conceptual foundations from which to analyse Australian film as interrelated with international industrial contexts. US film historian Janet Staiger has proposed one potentially fruitful alternative conceptual schema. Staiger argues that the concept of ‘film practices’ offers a way to carry out the historiographical grouping of film texts without recourse to categories of nationality or transnationality. In this article, I examine the analytical possibilities of the film practice schema in the Australian context. I focus on the Australian production firm Kennedy Miller Mitchell, which I identify as operating within the contemporary classical Hollywood cinema practice. Scholars have previously encountered conceptual deficiencies in grouping the work of this firm under prevailing terms of national cinema discourse. I show how the application of the film practice schema can make better sense of Kennedy Miller Mitchell’s place in the Australian and international screen industries, and I assess some of the advantages and disadvantages of this approach for future scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• National cinema
• Australian national cinema
• film history
• mode of production
• mode of film practice
• production studies
• Australian film
• George Miller
• Kennedy Miller
• Kennedy Miller Mitchell

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I will use the name Kennedy Miller Mitchell throughout, to preserve a sense of the firm’s continuity up to the current period.

2 For an antecedent instance of this kind of analysis see French and Poole (2001). The authors argue that the Experimental Film and Television fund, an early government subsidy mechanism, facilitated the expression of a modernist film practice.

3 Fury Road complicates this centre/periphery division by locating the habitable spot—the Citadel of the Immortan Joe—in the desert, rather than on the coast as in the prior two films. But the basic principle remains.

4 This can be contrasted with Bordwell’s analysis of the art cinema practice, the implicit viewing procedures of which count on the audience to intellectually decode an ambiguous text by reference to the explanatory forces of realism or authorial intention (1979).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Douglas

Dr. James Douglas is a film and media studies researcher, and sessional teacher at RMIT University.