Ozploitation compared to what? A challenge to contemporary Australian film studies

Abstract

Australian exploitation cinema of the 1970s and 1980s has swiftly become a fashionable topic for analysis, rehabilitation and celebration, especially in the wake of the popular documentary Not Quite Hollywood featuring Quentin Tarantino. Is this Australian cinema's ‘return of the repressed’, at last, in the form of tough, vulgar, anarchic genre pictures—and does this show the way forward for our national cinema? This essay questions many aspects of the ‘Ozploitation’ craze, including its exclusion of art, intellectual or experimental cinema, and its peculiar streamlining of an extremely variegated and still obfuscated national film history. In particular, I argue for a comparative approach to national film cultures—which, in this case, would compel us to ask other, more stringent questions about the ultimate value of the currently baptized Ozploitation ‘classics’.

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