Giving pause to screen culture debates of the early 2000s in Australia

Between roughly 1995 and 2010 ‘screen culture’ was a topic of fervent debate in Australia. Best associated with the writings of figures such as Jane Mills, Tina Kauffman and Barrett Hodsdon, and carried out in the pages of Metro, Screening the Past, and Senses of Cinema, the discussion of the term was not always calm or straightforward. It was often tied to anxiety about the way Australian cinema finds, or doesn’t, find an audience, and reactive to neo-liberal market proposals to reduce screen culture funding, specifically the Review of Commonwealth Assistance to the Film Industry associated with the Gonski Report in 1997. At the same time, a common refrain had to do with the difficulty of defining the concept of screen culture. It could be declared ‘missing’ and ‘everywhere’ at the same time. This presentation revisits screen culture debates in Australia, its emergence out of creative development, industry-culture, discourses of the 1970s, in order to explore the limitations and possibilities of the term today. It does not seek to definitively define the term. I seek to focus on what different writers try to do with the concept rather pinpoint its place in the broader film and media culturescape.