The year Australian cinema died

The release of a new Australian movie was once an event that whipped up considerable excitement. There was the glamour surrounding the stars, who were sized up to see who would join Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman in the homegrown Hollywood pantheon; there was the prospect of a new Strictly Ballroom, Muriel's Wedding and Lantana to challenge the American domination of our market; and there was the hope of another Oz flick collecting international awards and putting our country in the spotlight.

This year, however, the Australian movies that opened achieved so little traction in the media and earned so little money at the box office, it was as if an entire industry suffered the fate of MH370, that is, it disappeared without a trace.

The big difference is that nobody seemed to care.

There was plenty of hand- wringing and introspection within the film industry, as there should have been.

What is so worrying is that the epic failure of so many Australian movies over the past year has caused little consternation to the general public, who were more concerned about the fate of The Bachelor's Blake and Louise than that of the embattled couples in Josh Lawson's debut feature The Little Death, which made a less-than-orgasmic $150,000.

What has compounded the problem is that very good films (The Babadook, Felony, Predestination) went down as fast as the bad (The Rover, Son of a Gun); lavishly promoted movies such as These Final Hours sank as surely as those promoted with the smell of an oily rag (Healing, The Infinite Man).

Simply, this was the year that nobody wanted to see an Australian movie.

Indeed, the number of people attending these and other films was so low that a quick calculation after the weekend's takings revealed that some sessions must have had fewer people watching the movie than cinema employees coming in after the credits rolled to sweep up the popcorn.

The one exception was The Railway Man which, even though it was as much a British film as an Australian, pointed the way to the kind of subject matter that local audiences are craving (more of that in a moment).

It has been an especially grim time for the WA film industry, which in the past few years has been trumpeting itself as the new Aussiewood, with lower-budget movies getting festival attention (Little Sparrows) and big-budget productions being drawn here by generous cash incentives through both ScreenWest and the Royalties for Regions program.

But the wheels have fallen off the WA film industry.

First, the surfing drama Drift, the $12 million production that lured Sam Worthington back to his home State, wiped out at the box office big time and was barely seen overseas.

While Drift was big, cheesy mainstream entertainment, Zack Hilditch's These Final Hours was so lavishly garlanded - it won the critics' prize at the Melbourne International Film Festival and a prized slot at Cannes - that distributor Roadshow put the film out on more than 150 screens and backed it with a million-dollar-plus advertising campaign.

All to no avail, as Hilditch's debut end-of-the-world drama ended with a whimper, not a bang. The same fate was suffered by Julius Avery's Son of a Gun, which featured a major movie star, Ewan McGregor, yet evaporated as quickly as if it had starred Colin Barnett, who took time out from his busy schedule to be photographed with the Trainspotting and Star Wars actor at the start of production.

While it was a coup for Avery to secure McGregor for his first feature and it drew some national and international attention to the production via his Twitter updates, when it came to selling the movie the Scots actor went AWOL.

He did no interviews while he was on set in WA and did nothing to support the film's release.

The State and Federal governments hand millions of dollars to filmmakers without any expectation of getting the money back yet appear to put no pressure on the recipients to tie their international talent to publicity contracts (you can't tell me that even the biggest stars in Hollywood are not bound to promote their pictures). I'm sorry, McGregor's tweets might satisfy Tourism WA but they do nothing for an embattled film industry.

As the disastrous year unfolded, producers and funding agencies responded by telling us not to worry about the Australian box office because our films were being snapped up by overseas buyers and "getting their money back".

Apart from few if any figures being supplied, the problem with this measure of success is that the industry is retreating from the very raison d'etre for it being established - not to create jobs but to push back the American dominance of our screens and make a space for Australian stories and culture. This is not going to be achieved if our movies are being sold off as fillers for overseas markets.

Actually, one film this year is making a splash on the international stage, Jennifer Kent's horror gem The Babadook. Stephen King raved about it, The Exorcist's William Friedkin declared it the scariest film he had ever seen and it is making the top-10 lists of the US' most important critics.

The success of The Babadook in Europe and the US and its failure in Australia underscore what I believe is the biggest concern for our local industry - that globalisation through the internet is destroying local cultural industries.

Throughout the year the industry has been dissecting its failure relentlessly, with the finger being pointed at the lack of screens given over to Oz movies in the face of Hollywood dominance, lack of money being spent to promote movies, high ticket prices and, as I have argued previously, the disappearance of the younger audience who have no loyalty to local cinema.

I have come to believe that the problem is deeper, more intractable and one that goes back to the origins of our industry - the cultural cringe. Quite simply, the loyalty to and interest in Australian movies is dying.

The internet has opened up borders to the free flow of information and entertainment and nobody feels any more compelled to support a local movie than they do any other product perceived to be better and cheaper (or free) from the US and other places (Arts Editor Stephen Bevis last week wrote of the demise of the local art gallery scene in the same context).

Indeed, the younger generation being used to having the world at their fingertips means they have little sense of the cultural identity that the films made during the renaissance of the Australian film industry in the 1970s did so much to forge. The fightback starts on Boxing Day with The Water Diviner, Russell Crowe's Gallipoli drama which many believe is the kind of traditional Australian movie audiences crave (it has the uplifting Australia/Red Dog factor).

Hopefully, Crowe's directing debut will make its mark. If it doesn't I fear for the next year's batch of Australian movies.

What has compounded the problem is that very good films (The Babadook, Felony, Predestination) went down as fast as the bad (The Rover, Son of a Gun); lavishly promoted movies such as These Final Hours sank as surely as those promoted with the smell of an oily rag (Healing, The Infinite Man). Simply, this was the year that nobody wanted to see an Australian movie.