AustLit

'This article explores the many parallels – but also discontinuities – between the interpersonal communication medium and research enterprise pursued by Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld in Personal Influence (1955) and the social media agenda and associated research enterprise of Facebook and Instagram. The essay begins with a discussion of ‘personal influence’ as the concept was first developed in the 1950s, outlining its historical context and initial limited application. It then shows how key ideas of Personal Influence can be seen as having been applied and embedded in the very fabric of social media itself. Yet Facebook represents a significant departure from both Katz and Lazarsfeld’s research agenda and from the market research and information regime of traditional media. Their audience research work of 1955 was avowedly public and transparent in its commitments. They were providing a market research product for advertising agencies, advertisers and media providers to re-purpose. In contrast, Facebook is private, proprietorial and opaque in its research provision. Facebook combines, under one roof, the roles of market research provider, media provider, and advertising agency. By prioritizing the collection and analysis of individual user profiles, Facebook has created a media enterprise that seamlessly integrates user-generated content, data collection, analysis, strategy, media provision and associated advertising machinery.' (Publication abstract)

'The widespread focus on policy moments in Australian cultural, academic and political debates is discussed, also describing the processes of policy formation. The narrowing gap between ‘unattached’ intellectuals and academics or cultural critics and ‘bureaucratic’ intellectuals in their participation in policy formation is considered unnecessary and ineffective.' (Publication abstract)

'The celebrated poet invented his own way of writing about the films of the early sound era, says Tom O’Regan' 

'One option for television drama producers confronted by rising production standards and increasing costs is to become more international in orientation, leading to speculation that national and cultural boundaries may become less important at the higher end of drama series production. Television drama would then become the ‘decontextualised space for universal modes of storytelling’, with lifestyle and reality television formats the more likely vehicles for expressing ‘cultural specificity’. But national and cultural boundaries do matter. The particularities of national television cultures – local policy configurations, historical and cultural influences, technology uptake, the size and wealth of national economies – all impact on the ability of television producers to engage with the global trade in television fiction. This article examines the way in which this global trade internalises and works with national particularities through the sense of a national brand that locates Australian content within a certain value hierarchy. The following discusses three successful examples of internationalised television programming – McLeod's Daughters (2001–2009), Sea Patrol (2007–), and the children's series H2O: Just Add Water (2006–) – that have worked within international perceptions that differentiate Australian content according to perceived cultural sensibilities and national image.'

Source: Abstract.

'The first book about Australia's very own outpost of Hollywood. Hollywood films and television programs are watched all over the world. Using the Gold Coast as a case study, this important new book shows how a combination of circumstances created our own outpost of Hollywood in Australia. ' (Source: TROVE)

'"What does Australian cinema have in common with other national cinemas—no matter how diverse?" This chapter answers this question by establishing the characteristics of national cinemas generally through a survey of different aspects of Australian cinema. In inspecting Australian and other cinemas, I aim to generalize the shape and outlook of national cinema as a category. Like all national cinemas, the Australian cinema contends with Hollywood dominance, it is simultaneously a local and international form, it is a producer of festival cinema, it has a significant relation with the nation and the state, and it is constitutionally fuzzy. National cinemas are simultaneously an aesthetic and production movement, a critical technology, a civic project of state, an industrial strategy and an international project formed in response to the dominant international cinemas (particularly but not exclusively Hollywood cinema). Australian cinema is formed as a relation to Hollywood and other national cinemas.'

Source: Abstract.

Examines the paradox of Australian films, made locally using Australian crews, but with all aspects of local identity and imagery erased.

Tom O'Regan examines the two types of Australian filmmaking which dominated the local cinema experience during the 1970s. The 'ocker' film, represented by Don's Party (1976), The Adventures of Barrie McKenzie (1972), Stork (1971) and Alvin Purple (1973) celebrated the contemporary Australian. The second type of production, the 'quality' film - those such as Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Caddie (1976) and My Brilliant Career (1979) are positioned between art-cinema and classic Hollywood filmmaking.

The essay argues that the ocker films were central to public definitions of Australian cinema in the first half of the decade; while quality films were central in the second half of the decade. 'These films, the filmmaking milieu that produced them and the all too public debates surrounding them,' writes O'Regan, 'provided a particular experience of the cinema.'

'Australian television has been transformed over the past decade. Cross-media ownership and audience-reach regulations redrew the map and business culture of television; leading business entrepreneurs acquired television stations and then sold them in the bust of the late 1980s; and new television services were developed for non-English speaking and Aboriginal viewers.

'Australian Television Culture is the first book to offer a comprehensive analysis of the fundamental changes of this period. It is also the first to offer a substantial treatment of the significance of multiculturalism and Aboriginal initiatives in television.

'Tracing the links between local, regional, national and international television services, Tom O'Regan builds a picture of Australian television. He argues that we are not just an outpost of the US networks, and that we have a distinct television culture of our own.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

In this essay Tom O'Regan explores the Australian film industry in relation to filmmaking, audiences and government influence. 'It would be difficult to find a more interesting period in Australian film history than the 1980s,' he writes. 'There was the experiment of a government inspired tax shelter: the so-called tax incentives which provided levels of production funding and activity that had been hitherto unheard of in Australian film production. The average number of feature films made per year doubled from 15 in the 1970s to 27 in the 1980s when some 65 mini-series were also made. Additionally the budgets for all these rose sharply. The incentives exempted film production from the full pressures of the market. They permitted the industry to withstand the pressures for internationalisation by providing cheap finance and insisting on Australian creative control to secure the tax benefits.'

The 1980s saw a boom in the production television mini-series, including Vietnam (1987), and the release of several blockbusters, the most significant being Mad Max 2 (1981), Gallipoli (1981), The Man from Snowy River (1982), and the international box-office hit, Crocodile Dundee (1986). It was also an era when Australia's art cinema flourished, principally through the works of Paul Cox.