Melting Pot Cinema Part XXIV: Australia's New Wave.

In the mid-Seventies, the doyen of Australian New Wave - director Peter Weir (b.1944) would inaugurate a vogue for soft-focus nostalgia with the lingering Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). With innovative camera work that came courtesy of Russell Boyd, this was the first Australian art film to ensue worldwide recognition. Weir, would become one of the most consistent of the new Australian directors and made his first films solely for the sake of entertaining his co-workers at a Sydney television station during one of their Christmas dos. His idiosyncratic wit was much in evidence in his very first feature - The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) which concerned the inhabitants of a small town who scavenge the passing cars they have deliberately caused to crash. Though his subsequent features eschewed comedy for a brooding sense of unease.

Weir and Boyd would collaborate again on the supernatural thriller The Last Wave (1977), starring Richard Chamberlain. Despite the film's success (mainly in America), during the next few years Weir was only able to make a television movie , The Plumber in 1979. He returned to the big screen in 1981 with Gallipoli which viewed the thwarted Dardanelles campaign of World War I POV style from a generation of young antipodeans, only just coming into realization about the concept of their own national identity. With 1983's The Year of Living Dangerously, a drama set in Indonesia at the time of the fall of Sukarno, Weir moved with qualified success into international production.

Weir science - Richard Chamberlain in The Last Wave (1977)

Turn-of-the-century Australia provided the evocative setting for My Brilliant Career (1979), directed by a female auteur - Gillian Armstrong (b.1950) based on Miles Franklin's autobiography, the film would be a tremendous success the world over, with its sensitively conveyed story of a young woman who chooses a career as a writer in lieu of an inert marriage and made international sensations of both Sam Neill and Judy Davis. Armstrong then made the high-octane pop musical, Starstruck (1981).

Sam and Judy's got punch in My Brilliant Career (1979)

A director and screenwriter particularly concerned with social themes is Fred Schepisi (b.1939) he would enter the industry through newsreels and documentaries. His formidable first film - The Devil's Playground (1976) is strongly autobiographical in its study of the repressive life of boys in a 1950's Catholic seminary. Schepisi also made one of the most important Australian historical films, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978). an angry indictment of the mistreatment of the Aborigines, he then traveled abroad to the States where he would turn out the western Barbarosa (1982), and subsequently a study of alienation in 1984 with Iceman starring Timothy Hutton as a frozen prehistoric man with blood still coursing through his veins.

A Break of Day (1976) Lobby card.

A neglected area of Australia's past was examined in Break of Day (1976), starring Sara Kestelman, it was set at the time of the first Anzac Day (Australia's Remembrance Day) in 1920 and concerned life in a small town decimated by the loss of its menfolk during the first world war. The director, Ken Hannam (1929-2004), who had previously worked in both radio and for the BBC started his  feature filmmaking career with the inspired Sunday Too Far Away (1975), which focused on the lives of local sheepshearers. He had infinitely less success with his following releases; Summerfield (1977) a mystery thriller and Dawn! a bio-pic chronicling the life and times of Olympic swimming champion Dawn Fraser.

Summerfield makes me feel fine, blowing through the jasmine of my mind (seated Nick Tate - Elizabeth Alexander hovering over)

Jim Sharman (b.1945) a Sydney theatre director whose unique and innovative stage productions of Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar and The Rocky Horror Picture Show garnered international street credit. In Oz, he was known for his standout productions of the plays of Patrick White, The Night the Prowler (1978). Sharman's most famous release however was the now cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Horror and fantasy also made the name of George Miller (b. 1945) a former physician who shot to fame as the director of futuristic fantasies, Mad Max (1979) and Mad Max 2 (1982).

Eat your heart out Tip Anderson Jr  and make way for  Jack Thompson in  1976's Caddie

Donald Crombie born 1942 in Brisbane would score an immediate success with his breakout film - Caddie (1976) and had previously worked at Film Australia on a series of accomplished and acclaimed documentaries. Caddie, featured a standout performance by Helen Morse and was set in the Depression-era, telling the true story of a erstwhile barmaid who as a single mother faced adversity while trying to bring up her two children. Crombie's subtle direction has been likened on more than one occasion to that of John Ford, this comparison was given further credence by Crombie's second effort Cathy's Child (1979), a story of a Maltese woman's attempts to reclaim the baby kidnapped by her husband and would underline the director's concern with revisited domestic themes.