AustLit

'Sue Brook's film Japanese Story (2003) constitutes an important contribution to Australian cinema's ongoing exploration of its cultural encounter with the other. Thematically - and even visually, with its reliance upon the outback landscape as background - the film appears canonical in its approach, reworking ideas and images that have haunted Australian filmmakers since Ralph Smart's Bitter Springs (1950). This tradition testifies to a fascinating and deep-rooted fear of otherness within mainstream Australian culture, even though the exact object of these anxieties - indigenous people, immigrants, global capitalists, to name but a few - has tended to shift in accordance with the pressing concern of the historical movement. The revival of the Australian film industry in the early 1970s provided an insightful and rejuvenated medium for cultural commentary, coinciding as it did with both the flowering of postcolonial criticism and a shift in society away from the stultifying values of the Menzies era. The significance of Brooks's film should, therefore, be assessed from its status as a new voice in the ongoing cinematic dialogue regarding Australia's profound anxiety about its relation to the other (in its various forms).' (p. 185)