A wider angle: Australia's war films of the new millennium

Abstract

Abstract Australian war films have rarely been studied as a genre, though there is an implicit study of the Anzac war movie subgenre, which until the 21st Century has represented the bulk of Australian war film-making. This chapter first offers an overview of Australian war film genres from 1914-2000 and a summary of attempts at war film genre definitions, largely drawn from American studies. It then explores the ways in which post-2000 Australian war films fit, expand, modify and rupture existing war genre descriptions, creating a space which Australian war film productions can inhabit and can intermix both with other Australian genres and with international war film genres. Australian war cinema is part of a wider intertextual representation, and many of these characteristics and trends are shared with Australian television productions on war themes. The subgenre of Anzac movies continues, but with a shift from the relatively simplistic themes of the 1980s to more nuanced representations of Anzac encompassing more than just the First World War. An expanded palette of themes, settings, tropes, iconography and industrial conditions also emerges from other war films. Recent war films frequently cross genre boundaries, are more likely to participate in international collaborations and offer representations of war beyond the purely Australian.