Picking up the pieces: contemporary Australian cinema and the representation of Australian film history

Australian cinema is generally under-populated by feature films and documentaries exploring its film history. A small number of works were produced between the 1960s and 1990s (including Forgotten Cinema, Newsfront, The Celluloid Heroes) that acted to recognise a forgotten, if broadly conceptualised history of Australian cinema and make claims for the resurgence and continuity of its "revival". This essay looks at a range of contemporary feature films and, specifically, documentaries, such as John Hughes' The Archive Project (2006) and Mark Hartley's Not Quite Hollywood (2008), that aim to question, revise and fragment this representation of Australian film history and its national cinema through the documentation of marginalised filmmakers and areas of film practice; specific case studies; and the direct or indirect citation of canonical examples of television, documentary and feature filmmaking.