Stephen Elliot, the director of PRISCILLA - QUEEN OF THE DESERT, said his desire in making this film was "to revive the movie musical" (1). In many ways this film could be an example of a
Hollywood musical set in Australia. For instance the film follows the genre inasmuch as it focuses on putting on a show at the end while overcoming difficulties and obstacles on the way. There is a grand finale which involves spectacular costumes, but as in the finale in the classic musical 42ND STREET, the sequence is not set in real time or space. The costumes are changed in a split second. But here the similarities to a classic Hollywood musical narrative end. The rest of the film focuses on three men who cross dress. One is gay, one a transexual and one a bisexual.

Unlike other Hollywood movies about men cross-dressing, these men are not figures of fun to be laughed at as happens in SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959) or I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE (1949). This film allows these sexually ambiguous men their dignity and shows them being emotional and vulnerable, and celebrates their cross-dressing. Such gender representation would be unique in a Hollywood film. It is also unique in Australian films, where the men are stereotypically portrayed as beer-swilling, macho lads as in THE ADVENTURES OF BARRY MACKENZIE. PRISCILLA allows men to be the spectacle, which is usually the woman's r"le as Laura Mulvey suggests: "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female" (2).

These men relish their sexuality and exhibitionism as their journey takes them through the Australian desert. It is ironic that in most films this landscape is a symbol of the "real" Australia where only "real" men, such as Bushmen, survive. And yet these cross-dressing emotional men not only survive their journey; they all learn something from it. The outback in Australian movies, unlike the wild west in American movies, has not been conquered and controlled though it has become a symbol of white Australia, just as in US Westerns. Australians are proud of it because it is different and their land unites the different nationalities, symbolising a united country. Although the aboriginals wouldn't agree with this idea of unity.

In the 1970s a new left wing government was elected which began to sweep away the influence of British colonialism and culture. In its place they wanted to establish a uniquely Australian national identity. "Film makers ... were attempting to create a cohesive view of national character through the rendition of Australian landscape", writes Ross Gibson (3). So through a series of Australian films in the 1970s and 1980s an attempt was made to find this identity. They focused specifically on the Australian landscape but also on other themes such as: Their classless society, their competitiveness, their innocence, their negative feelings towards authority - especially the British - and their image of the Australian battler - crude but honest. These films, unlike Hollywood films, didn't follow one genre or have international stars. Some of the films didn't really have a strong narrative trajectory at all, but were more a series of beautiful images.

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK could be in the murder mystery genre, or be a melodrama. As Geoff Mayer and Brian McFarlane comment, the "implied sexuality of their journey into Nature introduces a recurring convention of the horror film." (4)

But in fact it is not like any Hollywood genre. For example it tells you what happens at the end right at the beginning, with an inter-title explaining that the three girls disappeared without a trace. Also as Peter Weir, the director, says himself "what interested me were ... sounds, smells, the way the hair fell on the shoulder, images - just pictures." (5). This means the narrative structure of this film is secondary to the images.

This can be seen particularly in the sequence of shots of the girls climbing up the rock. Weir uses interesting camera angels, looking down on the girls from the POV of the rock, or peeping through a gap in the rock. He has an innovative shot which focuses on the three girls, then pans round the landscape 360 degrees and ends up back on the girls. This panoramic shot emphasises the overwhelming beauty of the girls' surroundings and breaks all the conventions of the 180ø rule that Hollywood followed. Weir emphasises the supernatural quality of the film by using dissolved edit points, overlapping exposures and slow motion camera work. The effect is dreamlike and mesmeric and the Australian landscape features almost like another character. It swallows up the three girls and at several points the rock is made to look like a profile of a man's face which personifies it. This image confirms the idea of the rock sexually awakening the girls as the rock is also seen as a phallic symbol and the girls remove their stockings as if to commune with the rock and nature.

This coming-of-age theme is one of Peter Weir's recurrent themes in his films as we will see later in his film GALLIPOLI. Australia is a very male dominated society and this emancipation of the girls would be considered unusual. Australians are proud of their ancestry and because they all originate from convicts they are proud of their classless society. In PICNIC there is a strong anti-British element in the portrayal of the repressive and obsessive head mistress who represents a class ridden society that actually crumbles after the disappearance of the girls. The British dominance is perceived as bullying and the Australians as innocent victims of this hierarchical society. This can be seen again in GALLIPOLI.

To describe GALLIPOLI as just a war film would not do justice to Peter Weir's film, which is a personal story and not just an historical epic. Like Weir's other films it is about more than it seems on the surface and it uses the landscape again as an important symbol. As Marek Haltof remarks, "Weir's film does not intend to discuss real issues connected with "war", "patriotism" and "the nation". Instead, it tries to present the essence of the "true Australia" - a mythic, pastoral landscape peopled with mythic characters." (6). The story is like an epic myth focusing on the life cycle of two
young boys beginning with their roots (birth) and following them through growing up, their coming of age and maturing and ultimate death in one case. Archy is from the outback, the "real" Australians live there. He is portrayed as innocent and connected to the earth. We first see him running barefoot in a race - echoes of the girls in PICNIC. Frank on the other hand is from the corrupt city, he is knowing and cynical. they become close friends with a competitive edge which encapsulates the
feelings of Australians about themselves. They feel they are the battling underdog who is loyal and trustworthy and competing against the corrupt outside world. This can be seen in the Egyptian sequence when one of the lads is conned by an Egyptian salesman. This mateship is embedded in the Australians' working class values. This contrasts with the arrogance and rudeness of the British, again this can be seen in Egypt with the British officers riding past on their horses.

The landscape features particularly in the scene where the two friends travel through the desert to Perth. The "knowing" Frank is hopeless and is protected by the "innocent" Archy. These two
lone figures lost in the vast expanse of desert is like a national symbol. The innocent boys (innocent Australia) against an unyeilding vast land (the rest of the world). The acute camera angles Weir uses at this point are reminiscent of the ones in PICNIC. Marek Haltof explains that its "mythic content,
enhanced carefully used cinematic devices, produces a dreamlike effect." (7).

GALLIPOLI is about the maturing of Australia as a nation, its loss of innocence. The battle itself marked a new beginning for Australia as it gave them a uniting tragedy and their mark on history. The film of that battle made a mark on the film world.  The anti-British feeling is summed up at the end of the film. The coarse, crude but honest Australians are seen dying in their thousands as canon fodder while the insincere, refined British are drinking tea on the beach.

HIGH TIDE as Brian McFarlane and Geoff Mayer point out "provides a contextual basis for melodrama, but the film tries to disguise its dramatic form with an episodic plot, moral ambiguity and a cool emotional tone." (8). The film simply does not follow the genre of a Hollywood melodrama. Firstly, the protagonist called Lilli is a free spirit who does not follow the law of the fathers. She is unreliable, irresponsible, not maternal towards her daughter, she drinks and she runs away from emotional situations. In fact she is very manly and dominant. This can be seen at the very beginning when she ignores her boss and drives like a madman. Unlike in a Hollywood film, the female rebel in
not punished or suppressed. She is allowed her freedom and even takes her daughter away at the end.

This film uses landscape too. It uses the sea as a symbol for Lilli's dead husband and their daughter communes with him through her love of surfing. The vast land is a symbol of freedom, there are long tracking shots of roads leading to nowhere, which contrasts strongly with Eden, the ugly caravan park the characters are stuck in. The people have ruined the landscape. The women are portrayed as multi-dimensional characters while the only significant man is one-dimensional and emotionally needy.

So from these four films that have been discussed, it is easy to see that the Australian Cinema's renaissance has produced films much more complicated and multi-dimensional than just following
in the footsteps of the Hollywood genre. They do not feature international stars, the genres are mixed and numerous as in PRISCILLA - is it a musical, a road movie, or just a gay movie. The landscape is featured strongly as an emblem of Australia's unique national identity. The narratives are often secondary to the look, image and style of a film as in PICNIC - which is usually a feature of an "Art House" film. The representation of gender is interesting, strong women in HIGH TIDE and emotional
men in PRISCILLA. The story of a war is not jingoistic but personalised and humanised in GALLIPOLI. As Jane Freebury says, it is not a war film but a "celebration of the national identity." (9)

There is one film that could be seen to fit the description of an Australian film being no more than a Hollywood genre in disguise.  It is a Western called THE MAN FROM SNOWY RIVER. The narrative structure of this film is based on many classic Westerns about a boy proving he is a man in a harsh world. The film has an American star - Kirk Douglas - playing brothers. The characters
round up horses, not cattle. The baddies are Americans, not Indians. The landscape is Australian and not American. The film is about mastering the landscape and it is irrelevant which landscape in a way. This Western was a big box office success which overshadowed the other films coming out of Australia during this period, but it was an exception rather than the norm.

Stephen Elliot, the director of PRISCILLA, says his "film broke a lot of rules". (10).  I believe this is also true of HIGH TIDE, GALLIPOLI, and PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK.

EMMA LONDON

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1.   BRUNETTE, Peter. New York Times 7.8.94.
2.  MULVEY, Laura .Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. SCREEN Vol 16. No 3. Autumn 75.
3.  GIBSON, Ross. 'Formative Landscapes' in Australian Cinema. (Allen & Unwin, ed. Scott Murray, 1994).
4.  MAYER, Geoff & McFARLANE Brian. New Australian Cinema: Sources and Parrallels in American & British Film (Cambridge, 1992
5.  Ibid.
6.  HALTOF, Mark. 'GALLIPOLI, Mateship & The Construction of Australian National Identity'. Journal of  Popular Film &TV Vol 21, No 1. Spring '93

7. ibid.
8. MAYER, Geoff & McFARLANE Brian op.cit.
9. FREEBURY Jane Screening Australia: Gallipoli - A Study of Nationalism on Film. Media Information Australia, 1987.

10 BRUNETTE, Peter New York Times 7.8.94