‘Extraordinary Undercurrents: Australian Cinema, Genre and the Everyday’
investigates how the critical uptake of genre-based cinema has been incorporated into
the cultural and industrial rubric of Australian national cinema. The thesis offers, in
part, a revaluation of theoretically under-emphasized texts (as well as texts that have
been the subject of much higher levels of scrutiny), in order to establish recurrent
threads within Australian cinema. In doing this, the thesis offers new and original
knowledge in the form of developing a perspective for a revised critical and
theoretical analysis of genre cinema within Australian cinema, challenging the
presumption of the kinds of texts that can be seen as articulating the nation. The
groups of films examined herein form nodes through which a network of important
and divergent ideas about nation, national identity and social organization come
together in the form of narrative and thematic undercurrents.
These (generally malevolent) undercurrents are articulated in the filmic representation
of a range of conventional personal, social and cultural dichotomies, and of particular
interest are the events, characters and narratives in which the everyday is confronted
by the abstract, abject and uncanny. The undercurrents I identify are shown as the
textual sites in which transgression - both inside and outside the frame - and
intertextuality are collocated, representing the convergence of material which
simultaneously operates outside of genres, while reinforcing textual similarity. The
undercurrents I identify provide a theoretical direction in analysing interaction
between national cinema, culture and identity
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/221814 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | davidthomas@arach.net.au, David Glyndwr Thomas |
| Publisher | Murdoch University |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.murdoch.edu.au/goto/CopyrightNotice, Copyright David Glyndwr Thomas |
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