The Talkies Cure: A New Theory of Australian Silent Cinema

The Shock of the New

In Melbourne 1906, a practically new type of film premiered to Australian audiences: The Story of the Kelly Gang (Charles Tait, 1906). Directed by the Victorian entertainment entrepreneur Charles Tait with the help of his brothers—in a curious mirror of the Kelly gang itself—the film dramatises the final exploits of the eponymous gang, from the police who issue their fateful arrest warrant to the sorrowful denouement when Kelly is shot and captured. As Ned Kelly himself was executed only 26 years prior to the film’s release, his mother Ellen was still alive in 1906, suggesting a nation still mourning the loss of the frontier society. It seems Australia has always had a neurotic relationship to its own urbanisation. 

Spanning one hour and 15 minutes of action, drama, and tragedy, The Kelly Gang was not only Australia’s first feature-length film but quite possibly the world’s, an honour it officially received from UNESCO in 2007.¹ At the time, European and American productions averaged around 15 minutes. The wild success of the film, both nationally and internationally, sparked a boom in Australian silent feature production, and the 1910s were among the most productive and the most “local” in Australian feature film history.² A majority of the films had national subjects and settings, with little obvious reference to early American or European film grammar. 

For example, aside from the evergreen genre of bushranger films, local producer and notorious hustler Beaumont Smith churned out a series of mawkish yet popular comedies about the fictional rural family “The Hayseeds.”³ Other key figures in the golden age of Australian silent cinema of the 1910s-20s were Raymond Longford, Lottie Lyell, and Franklyn Barrett. Longford and Lyell were the romantic and creative duo behind what is widely considered Australia’s greatest and best-preserved silent film: The Sentimental Bloke (Raymond Longford, 1918). The largely plotless film follows a Sydney knockabout named Bill—and his very creatively named Irish friend “Ginger Mick”—who vows to give up his life of drinking and gambling when he falls in love with local factory girl Doreen, with whom he eventually settles down to a bucolic family life.

Lottie Lyell and Arthur Tauchet. The Sentimental Bloke

The Kelly Gang’s claim to being the world’s first feature film has been contested in film historiography, depending on one’s preferred definition of “continuous narrative” or “feature length”. Indeed, although several men involved with the film’s production left contemporaneous material attesting to their understanding of its novelty and historical significance, Tait himself was at least partly inspired by the spectacle of the 1903 American outlaw/action film The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter, 1903). A more likely story is that the development of what we now call feature films was occurring in several places simultaneously, as directors pushed at the potential of the new medium. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that such a film was conceived and successfully produced so far away from the European-American metropoles of cultural production, when common-sense understandings of history (and indeed, Australian art) tell us that there “ought not have been sufficient competitive stimulation to urge film makers into such uncharted territory.”⁴

By contemporary standards, it is difficult to call either The Kelly Gang or The Sentimental Bloke “good” (although with only 17 minutes of The Kelly Gang surviving, it is difficult to fairly judge). It is evident that narrative filmmaking and film grammar were still in their infancy—and in the case of The Sentimental Bloke—there is a heavy over-reliance on intertitles taken straight from the satirical verse novel on which it was based. Shots are poorly blocked, editing is ill-timed, and many scenes seem to awkwardly linger longer than they should, with extras and actors milling about and waiting for the cut. Still, they broke box office records in Australia and were popular in Britain and New Zealand.

The Crisis of Australian Silent Cinema

Despite this initial promise, by the mid-1920s the Australian film industry rapidly descended into crisis, and theatres almost completely ceased to screen local product. The yearly production of local feature films plummeted from one of the highest in the world to a virtual standstill. By 1930, the industry was unable to produce more than three feature films a year.⁵ This coincided with, of course, the introduction of “talking pictures”, a transition whose discombobulating effects on not just the Australian industry but the American and European industries as well has been well documented. 

So why this dramatic and precipitous decline in the Australian film industry’s fortunes? The most obvious answer is that the introduction of synchronised sound or “talkies” between 1926-1930 decisively shifted the economics of film production in Hollywood’s favour, certainly in the Anglophone world. Film production in the wild-west early years of Australian silent filmmaking was often the preserve of plucky independent entrepreneurs, a sign of film’s inferior cultural status. This model became much more difficult to sustain with the large technological investments needed to produce synchronised sound.

The technology for synchronised sound on film was the product of competing American breakthroughs, from large corporations like Western Electric to eccentric private inventors.⁶ Hence, by early 1929, multiple competing companies were offering technologies for synchronised sound on film: Photophone, Phonofilm, Vitaphone, European Tri-Ergon, Cinephone, and Movietone to just name a few.⁷ Indeed, by 1930 there were some 230 distinct types of theatre sound equipment. Lawsuits became a constant feature of the industry as exhibitors begged for uniformity. Thus began the era of vertically integrated empires and studios which soon dominated the industry, including Paramount, Warner Brothers, and 20th Century Fox. Local attempts to compete with the flood of American product with Australia’s own studio dedicated to talkies—Efftee Studios—closed down after only 4 years.

The inability of Australia’s fledgling industry to compete with the deluge of American product is a relatively familiar underdog story that Australia often likes to tell about itself, and it belies a latent national ambiguity towards American cultural imperialism. A version of this story, for example, is beautifully narrativised in Philip Noyce’s elegant 1978 period piece Newsfront (1978), which follows the intrepid Australian newsreel cameramen of yesteryear in their futile struggle against American encroachment on their industry. Nevertheless, the thesis of American technological domination is not without its weaknesses. For example, film historian Brian Yecies has documented that the introduction of synchronised sound was not exclusively controlled by American monopolies, and did involve significant experimentation amongst local entrepreneurs with locally made technological competitors.⁸

Newsfront

Still, it is clear that the introduction of talking pictures posed an existential threat for Australian cinema. However, this was not primarily driven by an innate technological inferiority, or an inherently uncompetitive industry unable to contend with the sheer velocity of Hollywood’s cultural hegemony. Instead, I argue it has something to do with the very nature of talking and speech itself, combined with the structuring principles of Australian political economy during this period: the Australian Settlement. This article posits that the crisis of Australian silent cinema was part of a broader cultural malaise during the Australian Settlement. One expression of this sterility was what the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner famously termed “The Great Australian Silence.” 

This thesis explains why the 1930s-60s remained a complete nadir for Australian film production, as the country was relegated to a cheap and “exotic” filming destination for British productions, such as Ealing Studios. Moreover, despite the prevalence of tariffs in Australian economic policy during this period, they were never seriously applied to film, despite local industry lobbying efforts and similar successful policies in Great Britain. Nor did any Labor or Conservative government seriously pursue a policy of establishing national film quotas.⁹

The Great Australian Silence 

The now famous phrase the “Great Australian Silence” comes from Stanner’s celebrated 1968 Boyer lectures, After the Dreaming, although the object of his criticism was not Australian cinema but historiography.¹⁰ After listing a range of general books about Australian history written in the 1920s to the 1950s, he notes their non-existent treatment of Aboriginal people’s history.¹¹ In contrast, 19th-century Australian historians were much more likely to include Aboriginal people and frontier conflict in their story (albeit often in crudely racist ways) and were more inclined to worry about the moral implications of their “extinction”.¹²

The period which Stanner labelled as the “Great Australian Silence” generally maps onto what historians and economists have retroactively termed “The Australian Settlement” or “Deakanite Settlement”, named for its chief architect, the ‘small L’ liberal and protectionist Prime Minister Alfred Deakin. According to the authoritative economic historian Francis Castles, the Australian Settlement comprised of four interlinked policies: tariff protection, compulsory industrial arbitration, White Australia, and state paternalism.¹³ In other words, high family wages for white working men and a soft developmentalist state—premised on exploiting Australia’s vast natural wealth to underwrite protectionism for its uncompetitive manufacturing industry—were sutured to extremely restrictive immigration practices and trade unions relinquishing the right to strike. 

It was a resolution of the fierce industrial strife that destabilised the nation in the 1890s, and was supported by both Deakin’s liberal protectionists and major representatives of organised labour. It promised to resolve the class struggle without decisively ruling in favour of either capital or labour; a class compromise in the truest sense. Although the founding pillars of the settlement were formed in the early 1900s, it took until the end of World War I to truly settle into a stable policy and social formation, precisely the period coinciding with the Great Australian Silence and the crisis of Australian silent cinema. To better understand the Settlement’s curious mixture of developmentalism, social justice, and racism, look no further than the words of Deakin himself:

“A white Australia … means the multiplying of their homes, so that we may be able to occupy, use and defend every part of our continent; it means the maintenance of conditions of life fit for white men and white women; it means equal laws and opportunities for all; it means protection against the underpaid labor of other lands; it means social justice so far as we can establish it, including just trading and the payment of fair wages.”¹⁴

The Negative Commonwealth

In order for the conflict-less social order of the Australian Settlement to run smoothly, it was premised on a series of structural negations, what scholars Lorenzo Veracini and Dan Tout have aptly termed “the negative commonwealth”.¹⁵ The first of these structural negations was that there should be no Indigenous peoples possessing a political counter-will, as abundant land and “free” natural resources were the entire basis for developmentalism, underwriting protectionism for an internationally uncompetitive manufacturing sector. It is for this reason that although the White Australia Policy was explicitly intended at keeping Asian labourers out of the country, it also coincided with the high point of assimilationist and exterminationist policies towards the nation’s First Peoples, aiming at the biological removal of Indigenous physical traits.¹⁶

A second key negation was that there should be no racial diversity. Racial exclusion was necessary to manage a conflict-less social body, because many believed that too much “racial mixing” produced the highly labile social and class struggles in Europe and America. A third crucial negation was that there should be no class strife. Racelessness would be complemented by classlessness. The existence of class could not be denied, of course, but it was displaced by the notion that no fixed borders between the classes would emerge, our own version of the American Dream, expressed in the local vernacular of the “Fair Go” or the “Workingman’s Paradise”. 

These negations would produce a hegemonic national common sense that worked to deny the existence of history (in the Hegelian sense), as to do so would affirm the existence of contradictions that had to be confronted and sublated, potentially through revolution. As Veracini and Tout note, these negations of race, class, and history were aspirational rather than an accurate description of the country. It was about making Australia peaceful again, to reconstitute social peace after decades of bitter political and class struggle. 

In psychoanalytic terms, we would say these negations were Australia’s denial of its symptoms: that it was, after all, a nation with classes, races, history, and contradictions. Symptoms in psychoanalysis are that curious thing which is simultaneously the cause of our suffering and the root of our satisfaction and enjoyment. Yet, to bring these symptoms into consciousness comes with immense amounts of resistance, denial, and outright disgust.¹⁷ 

The Talking Cure

As psychoanalytic categories, speech, symptom, and negation are inseparable. When psychoanalysis cures symptoms, it cures them through speech. It is, after all, the talking cure. The process of analysis itself is really just one very long-winded speech. By speaking to the other (the analyst) and exteriorising themselves in a common language, the analysand (the patient) represents themselves “in front of themselves”, and therefore develops a new way of relating to the symptom. Slips of the tongue, forgettings, bungled actions and words are all paradoxically successful acts in which the truth briefly surges forth in the form of a mistake.¹⁸ Psychoanalysis is precisely interested in wordplay and misspeaking because verbal ambiguity is a way of bypassing psychic censorship.¹⁹

Freud further summarises the paradoxical relationship between negation, speech, and symptom in his pithy 1925 essay Negation. He gives the example of a patient talking about a dream, where they confidently state: “You ask who this person in the dream can be. It’s not my mother.” Freud concludes: “So it is his mother.”²⁰ In other words, we wouldn’t have to negate something in speech if it wasn’t repressed in the first place. To negate is to really say: “This is something which I should prefer to repress!” There is no “no” in the unconscious. The more one lies, the more one tells the truth.²¹ For the analyst, there is usually no greater evidence of success than when the analysand responds with the words “I didn’t mean that.” In short, negation is a way in which the repressed idea or symptom briefly comes into consciousness. 

In this respect, because the Australian Settlement was premised on a series of unrelated and unspeakable negations, Australia was a country perhaps suited only to silent cinema. The minute these negations are articulated in speech, they become their opposite: affirmations. The idea of a “negative commonwealth” based on racelessness, classlessness, and historylessness would have been perilously strained. In other words, Australia’s inability to transition from silent cinema to talkies was not a necessity, but historically contingent on the structural silences and negations required for the Australian settlement to function smoothly as intended.

Indeed, with the widespread adoption of sound technology through radio and recording, historian Joy Damousi has shown that the 1920s represented a time of heightened public anxiety over the nature and appropriateness of the Australian accent and speech in public life.²² The conclusion to these debates was that the BBC radio voice should be imitated as closely as possible. 

Was this a sign of Australia’s enmeshment within an imperial ethos? Almost certainly. Yet, while the perceived homogeneity of the Australian accent is often cited as proof of the nation’s egalitarianism, linguistic historians have demonstrated the existence of different classed (and of course ethnic) accents in 20th-century Australia that were detectable to native speakers: “broad, general, and cultivated”.²³ Until Gough Whitlam, politicians, news presenters, and radio hosts largely spoke with the “cultivated” Australian accent, a sort of Australian version of the manufactured Trans-Atlantic accent which mimicked Received Pronunciation as closely as possible. Again, it is possible to interpret the anxiety over the Australian accents(s) as a way of effacing the social differences and contradictions that did exist, and attempting as closely as possible to develop a style of speech that was free of political signifiers. 

The Australian New Wave: Enjoy Your Symptom!

Because Australian society was premised on these series of negations, it could not confidently articulate speech during the transition to talking cinema. This is why it took until the dismantling of the Australian Settlement in the 1970s for Australian cinema to have a second golden age with the Australian New Wave. It was during the early years of the Whitlam government that the creaking Australian Settlement was briefly replaced with a more expansive and universalistic form of social democracy. Unlike the Australian Settlement’s particularistic subject of the skilled, white, male proletarian, Whitlam’s more Continental style of social democracy embraced the broader category of the “citizen”, all of whom had inherent rights and were deserving of an expansive notion of welfare.²⁴ 

Picnic at Hanging Rock

It was this brief universalist opening that allowed Australian filmmakers to produce aesthetically and politically radical films that did interrogate the nation’s symptoms. In fact, in psychoanalytic terms, filmmakers and Australians followed the injunction to enjoy one’s symptoms.²⁵ Whether that was Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971), which stylised the excessive enjoyments of binge drinking and gambling that structure Australian male sociality, Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975), which aestheticised the fundamental eeriness of settler ontology, or Mad Max (George Miller, 1979), which pushed the inherent death drive of a country whose built environment was structured exclusively for cars to its logical limit.

Of course, this social democratic possibility was short lived, and the crumbling Australian Settlement would soon be replaced by a corporatist neoliberalism which again circumscribed artistic possibility in Australia. First by Whitlam himself, and then most notably with Hawke and Keating. This aesthetic flourishing of the national cinema has never been repeated since, and again relegated the industry to its familiar state of perpetual crisis.

Endnotes