ABSTRACT
Constructing a sense of unity is one response to the diversity of Australian film-making. Here I survey the ways Australian cinema becomes generalizable as a unity for critics, marketers, audiences, producers and film-makers. Talking of Australian cinema’s national specificities, considering Australian cinema as a genre, elucidating its narrative, thematic and stylistic preoccupations and generalizing about its uses of setting, light and landscape produce a sense of its regularity, unity and convergence. These moves are driven by a will to see Australian cinema as a connected family of film-making projects and a coherent film industry. Such unities produce the definiteness of Australian cinema as something. These positivities of unity are functional. Under conditions where variety is typically valued, Australian cinema’s unity can be an unfortunate characteristic needing to be made good, through alternative policy and film-making dedicated to securing difference. For marketing, product recognition, industry and lobbying-and some criticism, unity can be a positive, contributing a sense of Australian cinema as a progressive social institution. Notions of unity provide a way of negotiating, organizing coherence, and foregrounding aspects of Australian cinema and society. Unities of different sorts are a natural accomplishment of any film-making milieu no matter how diverse.
