Page 594 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

World C nema |

ausTraLian FiLm rEnaissanCE
During the mid-1970s, Australia was experiencing the heady period called
the Australian Film Renaissance, and directors Jane Campion and Gillian Arm-
strong received their degrees from the Australian Film and Television School.
They would soon add their visions to the aesthetic explorations that came to
define Australian Cinema.
Gillian Armstrong gave life to the plucky young female protagonist in her
1979 film, My Brilliant Career. In doing so, Armstrong helped Judy Davis, the
star who played the 16-year-old aspiring writer who is determined to get out
of the bush, become one of Australia’s most popular actors at the age of 23 and
just out of drama school. Both Armstrong and Davis influenced a generation
of women struggling to define themselves on their own terms. Nine years later
in High Tide, the two reunited to tell the story of anther woman and a complex
emotional struggle. This character lives in a trailer park, the back-up singer for
a band in a small coastal town whose life is forever changed after a surprise
meeting with the teenage daughter she abandoned at birth.
In 1992 Gillian Armstrong directed The Last Days of Chez Nous, a drama
propelled amid the interior spaces of a Sydney household where sibling rivalry,
generational conflict, and family loyalties play out in the life of a writer. Her
quintessential themes elucidate the personal and social conflicts between art
and life. Gillian Armstrong was awarded the Order of Australia in 2007.
Judy Davis enjoys an international reputation, and throughout her career
worked in a number of countries, including the United States. She had a prefer-
ence for the auteur and literary, and accepted supporting roles in such films as
David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991), and the Cohen brothers’ Barton Fink
(1991). She returned to Australian cinema and under the direction of writer/
actor/producer Peter Duncan, she received the Best Australian Actress Award
in 1996 for Children of the Revolution. The quirky, epic farce also starring Sam
Neill and Geoffrey Rush was distributed in the United States in 1997, and is a rare
political satire about communism, one with a singularly Australian voice and
unique vision of the dark comedy of global affairs.
Best known to American moviegoers for her film Piano, Jane Campion
helped define Australian cinema as a writer-director and then producer. With
its dark, defiant female protagonist, Piano won the 1993 Palme D’Or at Cannes,
making her the first woman ever to win the prestigious award. She also won the
Oscar for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards that year and was
nominated for Best Director. But her list of honors before Piano demonstrated
the filmmaker’s growing significance. Her first feature film Sweetie (1989),
won the Georges Sadoul prize in 1989 for Best Foreign Film, as well as the
LA Film Critics’ New Generation Award in 1990, the American Independent
Spirit Award for Best Foreign Feature, and the Australian Critics’ Award for
Best Film, Best Director and Best Actress. Her 1990 film, An Angel At My Table,
also enjoyed international recognition with seven different awards, including
the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and prizes at the Toronto and Berlin
Film Festivals.