This book presents an unprecedented analysis of the dynamics of cultural representation and
interpretation in film criticism. It examines how French critical reception of Australian
cinema since the revival period of the 1970s has evolved as a narrative of perpetual discovery
and how a clear parallel can be drawn between French critics' reading of Australian film and
their interpretation of an exotic Australian national identity. In French critical writing on
Australian cinema Australian identity is frequently defined in terms of extremes of cultural
specificity and cultural anonymity. On the one hand French critics construct a Euro-centric
orientalist fantasy of Australia as not only a European Antipodes but the antithesis of
Europe. At the same time French critics have tended to subordinate Australian cultural
identity within the framework of a resented Anglo-American filmic and cultural hegemony. The
book further explores this marginalisation by examining the influence of the French auteur
paradigm particularly in reference to the work of Jane Campion as well as by discussing the
increasingly problematic notion of national identity and indeed national cinemas within the
universal framework of international film culture.
