ABSTRACT
As an international center for film production with its own prolific cinema, Australia has become vital to the global film industry. However, the nation’s ongoing efforts to come to terms with the relationships between Aboriginal Australians and its settler colonial descendants coupled with the USA’s post–World War II cultural influence over Australian culture have complicated both Australia’s cultural identity and global perceptions of the nation. Consequently, Australian film must grapple with the traumas of the colonial past while interrogating and resisting Hollywood influence. As an Australian filmmaker who has succeeded both in his native land and within Hollywood, Peter Weir perhaps most clearly illustrates what Neil Rattigan refers to as this “fundamental schizophrenia” of postcolonial Australia through both his work and career trajectory (Images 11). Weir cemented his reputation with a host of Australian films that directly address the nation’s legacy of British colonialism and its anxieties over its vast landscape and treatment of its indigenous population: the pastoral horror film The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), the meditation on the mysticism of the Australian landscape Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), the World War I polemic Gallipoli (1981), and the Australian in Indonesia comparative postcolonial romance The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) (Stratton 57). After initially rejecting Hollywood projects such as television adaptations of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1979) and Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds (1983), Weir eventually established a successful career in Hollywood with a series of films about outsiders interacting with institutionalized cultures: Witness (1985), The Mosquito Coast (1986), Dead Poets Society (1989), Green Card (1990), Fearless (1993), The Truman Show (1998), Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), and The Way Back (2010) (Stratton 80–81).
