In the opening moments of Gillian Armstrong’s first feature, “My Brilliant Career” (1979), a young woman with freckles and tawny hair stands in the doorway of her home in outback Australia and says: “Dear compatriots, a few lines to say you know this story is going to be all about me.” The woman is Sybylla, played by a young and feisty Judy Davis, and she dreams of a long and successful career as a writer – love, marriage, motherhood and all other societal expectations be damned.
Sybylla’s words might as well have been the rallying cry for a whole generation of Australian female directors, who had waited years to tell their own stories. Their provocative and eclectic work is the subject of Pioneering Women in Australian Cinema, a compelling series that kicked off last week at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, NY.
“My Brilliant Career”, which propelled Armstrong to global prominence, was the first feature film directed by an Australian in over 40 years. In 1933, “Two Minutes Silence”, the fourth and final feature film by the three McDonagh sisters – Isabel, Phyllis and Paulette – had closed a brief but flourishing era in early Australian cinema in which women had been active as producers and directors. (The MoMI series includes the 1929 film “The Cheaters,” the only McDonagh sisters feature for which a copy still exists.)
The decades that followed drastically reduced not only the opportunities for women interested in film, but also the reach of Australian cinema itself. Strong competition from Hollywood and the ravages of World War II had more or less shut down the country’s film industry by the 1960s. Government initiatives to subsidize production and establish a national film school eventually spurred a rebirth in the 1970s. The Australian New Wave, as this resurgence came to be known, propelled Down Under cinema onto the world stage with stylized, nonconformist films like Bruce Beresford’s ‘The Adventures of Barry McKenzie’, ‘The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith” by Fred Schepisi and “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith” by George Miller. Mad Max.”
The New Wave was a male-dominated movement, with many films displaying a macabre, macho view of Australian culture; Armstrong often stood out as the only female exception. But ‘My Brilliant Career’ also represented the start of another kind of renaissance in Australian cinema – one led by women. Between the late 1970s and the 1990s, a number of women made landmark films across all genres, bringing compelling new feminist narratives to the Australian screen.
“My Brilliant Career” is one of many premieres in the aptly named MoMI series, curated by programmer and reviewer Michelle Carey. These include Essie Coffey’s ‘My Survival as an Aboriginal’ (1978), often hailed as the first documentary by an Aboriginal Australian; the dystopian lesbian heist film ‘On Guard’ (1984), written and directed by Susan Lambert and considered by some to be the first Australian film made with an all-female crew; and Tracey Moffatt’s three-part horror anthology, “BeDevil” (1993), considered the first feature film directed by an Australian Aboriginal woman. Then there’s ‘Sweetie’ (1989), the eccentric dark comedy that was Jane Campion’s feature debut, followed by ‘The Piano’ (1993), the first film by a woman to win a Palme d’ Gold at the Cannes Film Festival.
This wave of breakthroughs resulted from two intersecting developments: the creation of state film institutions like the Australian Film Television and Radio School and the Australian Film Commission in the 1970s; and campaigns by women’s and Indigenous groups to demand policies that would ensure equitable access to these public resources. Armstrong was part of the inaugural class of 12 at the school, whose graduates also include Campion and his “Sweetie” cinematographer Sally Bongers, as well as Jocelyn Moorhouse, who produced the 1994 crossover hit “Muriel’s Wedding.” ‘Proof’, Moorhouse’s biting and disarming feature debut as a director, is part of Pioneering Women in Australian Cinema.
While state support helped nurture a nascent mainstream industry, it proved crucial in the development of a feminist tradition of documentary and experimental film in Australia, which benefited greatly from the Women’s Film Fund of the Commission. “On Guard” is a striking example. Lambert’s hour-long film follows a group of lesbians who plot to destroy data held by a multinational corporation, UTERO, which they suspect of performing illegal reproductive experiments on women. A sort of Australian sister film to Lizzie Borden’s 1983 cult classic ‘Born in Flames’, ‘On Guard’ subverts patriarchal control in both form and narrative. Told in short, elegant fragments, the film strips the heist thriller of all its usual machinations and violence, instead dwelling on the daily struggles of its heroines – whether with child custody, the division of domestic labor or a openly gay life.
Moffatt’s films similarly reimagine cultural and cinematic tropes, but through the lens of gender and race. The short ‘Nice Colored Girls’ uses clever juxtapositions of imagery, voice and text to turn a cunning story about three Native women who seduce and rip off white men into a historical meditation on the power games between early settlers and the ancestors of women. This theme of colonial haunting is expanded with loud invention in Moffatt’s “BeDevil,” which draws on Aboriginal folklore to tell a series of modern gothic tales. Tracing the lines between past and present evils – colonialism, gentrification, cultural appropriation – with an irreverent and experimental approach to editing and sound, “BeDevil” reshapes Australian history as a deeply unsettling ghost story. Like many films in the MoMI series, “BeDevil” feels surprisingly ahead of its time.
Just like Coffey’s “My Survival as an Aboriginal”, despite its simple and straightforward documentary structure. Directed a year before “My Brilliant Career” – and no less founding than this film by inspiring a whole tradition of filmmakers – “My Survival” is both a personal manifesto for Coffey and a legacy for his descendants. Coffey speaks candidly, directly on camera, about the violence suffered by his people, the Muruwari, at the hands of white settlers. Then she launches in with the camera, brusque and determined, to ensure that her legacy is preserved and passed on to future generations. She teaches local children the traditional skills of her people – hunting, gathering, surviving in the bush – and laments that their upbringing deprived them of this essential cultural knowledge. At the end, Coffey says, “I’m going to live my own life, me and my family, and live off the land. I will not live like a white man and that comes straight from me, Essie Coffey.
Between Sybylla’s fiction this story is gonna be all about mein “My Brilliant Career” and Coffey’s raw and real “I’m going to lead my own life”, a whole history of Australian women’s cinema was born.
“Pioneering Women in Australian Cinema” runs until August 14 at the Museum of the Moving Image. Visit movingimage.us for more information.
