The proposed "reforms" to Australian Content rules has once again raised the question of the purpose of the Australian screen production industries, as the battle lines are once again being drawn to protect the telling of "our own stories".    The battle is important and I encourage you to sign the petitions, which you can find here.

But it is amazing that this battle has been fought so many times in Australia since the early 60s and yet still needs to be fought again. Perhaps it keeps coming up because its terms are misunderstood.  The  battle is not about telling our own stories. Telling our own stories is something we can do on Facebook and YouTube, we need high end television drama to make our myths.

To mark the occasion of once more entering the fray in support of Australian creativity on our screens, I  re-publish below salient excerpts, slightly updated, from  my 2009 essay, first published in Lumina, called Make Our Myths. 

The question of the purpose of film was once a hot button issue. It raged in the early 20th century, when the technology was new and people fought over whether its purpose was to be a visual art, or a dramatic one, or if it should be used to record the real or to create propaganda. Debates about purpose no longer rage, but they should. The question of purpose should be at the heart of every production, before cameras roll, before funding is secured. A production that knows its purpose has a much greater chance of achieving it, than one that does not. Just as an industry that knows its purpose has a greater chance of survival than one that does not. It is not just a matter of what is the technology of film for, but what is our film and television  industry for?

The purpose of our television drama industry is, at this moment, a question being pressed upon us proposed reform to the television content rules. 

Usually when the question of purpose is raised at the level of government policy making, our industry is justified as needed to ‘tell our own stories’. But this justification has worn out, if indeed it ever energised us.

The purpose of Australian drama production, I propose, is not to tell our own stories. The purpose is to make our myths.
What’s the difference? Three things stand out for me: scale, dynamics and ownership.

First scale. The potentials that are opening up for the crafting of large scale, long form stories in television series have begun to be exploited in Australia in the last few years.  Rake, The Slap, Underground, Redfern Now, are working on a cinematic scale to give substantive proportions to stories on our now not so small screens.  Australian creativity with cinematic scale in high end drama is just starting to be widely visible.  We are really only seeing the second generation of film and television creatives making their mark, and the first generation of Indigenous Australians having huge successes on screen since the Australian 'New Wave' of the 70s. This generation is making great films and great television because it has a history of creativity to build on, a genetic coding of creativity, creativity in its upbringing on Australian content. Cutting quotas now will mow down that creativity in our industry, and send us back, within ten years, to a culture where every wheel that would make an industry turn creatively will have to be re-invented.

This sense of scale we are beginning to master is also salient to myth making. Myth is, by definition, larger than life. The ancient Greek and Roman Gods who are at the heart of so many western story telling traditions are larger-than-life beings embodying human traits and living those traits in extremes for the purpose of testing their strength and understanding their qualities. They serve the purpose of making something that is abstract into something that is alive and kicking. And there are dozens of these gods and heroes who embody traits like foresight, chaos, wisdom, or trickery. When a myth is made about these traits it is ‘our own story’ in that it is the telling of a story in which some core human quality comes into conflict with another one or with a force that it must change or be changed by. But the story is bigger than just the person who feels chaotic or capricious. It becomes mythic when it embodies that quality on a scale that is potent, active, calamitous and consequential.

I am not suggesting that we should make movies or television about Greek gods, but that we should understand the scale of these qualities of humanity and make stories larger than just the protagonist’s feelings. If we just tell our own stories, we tell of little conflicts that might really happen to us, and use ‘might really happen’ as a measure of strength or truthfulness of the story.  When we make myths, we actively seek strength and truthfulness, not just at the level of our immediate circle, but at a larger level concerning what it means to be human. Qualities we struggle to overcome or which we celebrate, issues which concern generations, questions that have consequences.

We can’t really justify a show about a lawyer or a backyard brawl as myth unless we can explain how, for example, the fight between ordinary people from different backgrounds and cultural perspectives can resonate larger than life. My answer to this is that myth is also made through dynamics, and particularly, dynamic dramatic questions.

Dynamics are central, absolutely core, to the purpose of screen production. The Greek root word of ‘cinema’ is ‘kine’, meaning movement, and this is what we go to the cinema or watch TV series for: an experience of moving images, moving sounds and moving stories. Not static ones, but dynamic ones. Dynamics are the audience’s immediate, kinaesthetic, physiological experience of meaning. Change and modulation of force, and conflict or confluence of energies of life, emotion, image and sound are understood by audiences at an immediate physical level, a communication direct to the body that precedes our cognitive understanding of plot events.

Story dynamics are the rise and fall of movement and energy in the story events. Construction of these relies on construction of dynamic dramatic questions. A dramatic question is a question that implies action and has something at stake. It often starts with the word ‘will’ and it always has an active verb in it, not a passive one. Will someone do something, get something, achieve something, rather than: does someone feel or experience something. Action is dynamic, it forces change, movement of story, emotion, images and sounds. Creating dynamics is the reason for taking human traits and embodying them in gods. In ancient mythology gods give these traits a body and power with which to act.

Having something at stake is the other important half of a dramatic question. Stakes create dynamism by making us care. The more we care, the more we experience the movement between hope and fear.  We hope something will happen, we fear it won’t. These things, in a myth, have room to move dynamically. In real life, relationships that may have potential for hope and fear can stay the same forever. We don’t really want to live dynamics, we want to live peacefully – but we do but want to see dynamics make relationship myths on the big screen.

I have  argued that we should not tell our own stories, we should make our myths, and that the difference between our own stories and our myths are scale, dynamics and ownership. I have sketched out some ideas about scale and dynamics, but I have not yet made a case about ownership. This is where all of the ideas come together.

The notion of ownership is deeply embedded in the phrase ‘tell our own stories’ but the question of who the owner is needs to be confronted here. If the ‘owner’ of the ‘our own stories’ is the person or people with the money to make the screen productions or the producers who raise the money, then we are ascribing ownership to a very small, culturally prescribed group of people.   Myth on the other hand is owned by everyone it speaks to, and it speaks to humans more broadly than within specific cultures or societies. In order to be a myth is has to be a story bigger than ‘our own’. This does not mean it has to be an American re-run, in fact, quite the opposite.

American movies and television are based in American myths, and these are not the same as Australian myths. I speak from personal experience here: Americans believe in manifest destiny and Australians do not. Americans are raised to behave as though they could become the president of the United States and Australians are not. American screen productions uphold or critique uphold the underlying myths of pursuing your destiny or dreams, and taking individual action in the world. So, dynamics and scale come easily to those myth makers, which is why it may seem as though to argue for scale and dynamics is to argue for Americanisms.

But we have the capacity to make myths here, which is why what is really at stake for us in the reform of content laws is not telling our own stories but growing our creativity.   A creative culture is an engaged, responsive, innovative culture - just what a government fears most, in spite of any rhetoric to the contrary. Creativity in television drama made in Australia encourages a sense of 'can do' in people, a sense that their own creativity is being affirmed.

Myth making does not mean stories have to be happy or sad, smart or dumb, expensive or cheap, real or surreal. They must have scale, dynamics, and ownership by more than just their makers. Sign the petition, grow our creativity, make our myths.

This is part one of an essay first published in Lumina, the AFTRS Journal of Screen Arts and Business

Part One: Shifting Purpose from Artist to End User

Making films in Australia is not a very good way to make money, at least not for the filmmakers or investors. Making money can be helpful in some ways in measuring success, it may be a good thing to do, but it is not the purpose of our film industry.

Knowing that the purpose of a government supported screen industry can’t really be to make money, we fall back, instead, on a platitude to justify our existence: ‘to tell our own stories’. This is problematic for a number of reasons, some of which I discussed in my essay for Lumina 2, ‘Make Our Myths’, but here are two reasons I didn’t mention in that essay:

1. it sets the bar too low, and
2. it allows purpose to rest with the creator rather than the end user.

“Tell our own stories” sets the bar too low simply because there is nothing in the idea of telling our own stories that says they have to be good stories. Does ‘tell our own stories’ mean: tell any story as long as Australians, in Australia, tell it? Does it mean ‘speaking in an Australian accent’? (If so, my storytelling doesn’t qualify, nor that of any other first generation immigrant.) There is nothing in that stated purpose to say: tell good stories, stirring stories, entertaining stories, enlightening, exciting or affirming stories.

The other issue ‘telling our own stories’ creates is that it implicitly allows the purpose of storytelling to rest with the teller, not the listener. To tell is a verb, the action it requires is complete once ‘telling’ is done. The focus, therefore is put on telling, and the teller, the speaker, the artist.

This may seem insignificant, but in fact it belies the very idea on which our creative work is based, and to shift it would be much more radical than a simple change of wording would seem to imply. The notion that the purpose of art rests with the artist, the ‘teller’, expressing him or herself is a Romantic notion. It is neither universal, nor grounded in the deep history of our culture. In fact it is directly in conflict with the "Classical" principles of story organisation that many screen storytellers would say should guide their construction of story. This conflict, between formal structures and individual or even national expression of self is an unarticulated battle, going on beneath the surface, without acknowledgement of its battle lines or their implications for defining the purpose of our screen industry. As such it is beyond the scope of this essay to unravel, so instead I would like to propose a truce of sorts. Not that we return to the absolute stricture of a classical model at the peril of divesting our work of individual passion. Nor that we repudiate the Classical and embrace only the individualistic expression that Romanticism seems to promote. But that we find a middle ground by changing the words we use to define our purpose. In particular, shift our verbs so that they define our purpose as an action played on an audience rather than an action executed by an artist.

Rather than falling back on a cultural platitude to justify a production’s existence, what if all funded productions articulated their purpose as a verb, that describes what they want to do to audiences, and then employ known craft skills to achieve that purpose.

For example:

If a team states their purpose as being: to entertain, then their production needs spectacle, action, possibly humour, definitely pace and rhythm. If it doesn’t have these, it won’t entertain. If members of our highly skilled industry know that it is their job to produce these, then they have a better chance of doing so.

A production whose purpose is to enlighten needs metaphor – it has to be bigger than just the ordinary real if we are to see something differently. It needs pattern (aka structure) that is familiar enough to take us along with it, but fulfilled in a way that is fresh, that shows something in a new light. It needs to be about more than just the people, places and problems within it, by making those things metaphorical for the bigger ideas affecting humanity, the world and the challenges of life.

A production that states its purpose as: to engage the mind through innovation in form needs an innovative approach to story structure, image or sound. Producing something with this intent requires a very strong knowledge and understanding of the ways in which story and storytelling have worked in the history of cinema thus far, so that images, sounds and structures can be re-configured meaningfully.

If the stated purpose of a production is to stir, then the story needs some connection to the real - our emotion is stirred by empathy with something or someone we recognise as someone like ourselves (mimesis). It also needs hardship and triumph – release or catharsis has to be earned by overcoming hardship, working through obstacles for our emotions to be stirred.

An often un-stated artistic purpose of many successful movies is to affirm ideals. 20th century art movements, and their theory and criticism, have in some ways made ‘affirmation of ideals’ a passé notion, associating it with the bourgeoisie rather than the avant garde, criticising the ideals many movies affirm from within the framework of a Marxist or Feminist ideology. However, a movie with nothing to say, no underlying philosophical premise, nothing it believes in or ‘ideals to affirm’ can be a pretty shallow experience. In order to affirm ideals of any kind, filmmakers need to know what they believe, what they stand up for, what they have to say.

Entertain, enlighten, engage, stir and affirm are not mutually exclusive (and, of course there are many more purposes or ‘actions’ films can have). If these or other purposes are articulated, their achievement can be measured. We can say more than ‘it just works’ or ‘it just doesn’t work’ we can point to its intent and measure its success against its intent. We can describe what we know to the be factors something needs have to be entertaining, enlightening, engaging, stirring or affirming and ask ‘are these present’? Further, we can feel the films acting on us. We can be entertained, enlightened, engaged, stirred or affirmed and we will know it.

Stating purpose is an important aspect of finding new ways to measure success because it creates a measurable that is clearly aligned with the film itself rather than with a standard that is less relevant to that film. If a good Australian movie doesn’t achieve box office on the scale of a bad American one, but achieves its stated purpose, we can be clear that it is a success.

NEXT POST, PART TWO - OPPORTUNITY FOR FILMMAKERS: ONSCREEN DRAFTS