Genres and generalities

'Perhaps because the new Australian cinema - unlike the American cinema in its heyday - has failed to produce a studio system, its films do not easily fit into genre patterns. [Genre films] . . . were essentially the products of, and sustained by, the great Hollywood studios and their tapping of mass audiences' When I wrote that in 1985, it wouldn't have been productive to organise a book about new Australian cinema in terms of genres. One could acknowledge that its two biggest commercial successes to that time - Mad Max (1979) and The Man from Snowy River (1982) - reworked American genres in antipodean physical and social settings, without seriously impairing the generalisation. And it still held in another book in 1992 when, to the two exceptions already named, could be added Crocodile Dundee (1986), and its authors could assert: 'The American [film] industry has always known better than any other what constituted a popular cinema.'