AustLit

'This article maps a series of connections between the feature film Emerald City (1988) and a range of contexts seen as informing its generation, operation and reception. Emphasis is placed upon the synchronicity of the movie's appearance with key shifts in government film policy, and the emergence of new critical paradigms within the academy, which reorganized dominant understandings of Australian cinema, and questioned the cultural value assigned to particular works and genres. Through this 'conjunctural' analysis, Emerald City is reread as not only a symptomatic work, marking transitions between "new wave" film-making and the 'post-national' cinema of the 1990s, but is re-evaluated as a significant film, provocative of fresh approaches to both the historiography and practical management of Australian cinema, detectable within more recent archaeologies of screen 'content' and the rhetorics of film policy formulated in its wake. Source: Studies in Australasian Cinema 1.1 (2007): 29. (Sighted 01/09/2009).