ABSTRACT
The international cinema has always been important to Australian film-making. The Australian contribution to the several pathways of the cinema turns on local film-making as a negotiation and dialogue with the international cinema. But this is not, as we have seen in Chapter 4, an equal dialogue or a symmetrical negotiation. Australian agents negotiate with the international cinema on a permanently unequal basis making cultural transfers much more important to Australian film production, circulation, appreciation and criticism. It is a film and television milieu configured by flows and transfers (of concepts, genres, styles, texts, fashions, etc.) which shape film-making, criticism and consumption in a variety of antipodal ways. In this chapter I will theorize on this variety by drawing on the work of Yuri Lotman (1990) and Meaghan Morris (1988), who have made cultural transfers central to their understanding of national cultural formations and Australian film respectively.
