ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates and articulates some of the influences of modernism, modernity, and modernist thinking within the development and experience of cinema in Australia, New Zealand, and proximate Pacific Islands. Such an endeavour necessitates a return to the familiar business of grouping together countries, technologies, histories, and aesthetics in terms of a regional experience. As I have written elsewhere, regarding the use of a term such as Australasian to this end,
The troublesome aspects of the ‘Australasian’ provide wide and liberating passages for the excavation of shared (and specific) regional, geographical, linguistic, historical, technological and colonial/post-colonial experiences as they shape and are shaped by screen production. Cinematic and televisual representations and industrial practices further delineate the ongoing effects of colonial history as well as transnational cultural and economic power, influence, exchange and dialogue.
(Lambert 2013: 4)