‘Oh, David!’

In the wake of his death, clips of the legendary Australian film critic David Stratton, lifted from his long televisual career, were widely shared online. Many of these were taken from The Movie Show (later At the Movies), the weekly cinema release round-up, which Stratton co-hosted with his critical companion Margaret Pomeranz for nearly three decades. There was, of course, the famous five-star gap between Stratton (zero) and Pomeranz (five) when debating Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000), with Stratton’s disdain driven by his well-known distaste for shaky, handheld camerawork. However, there was another review of a film from the year 2000 that was far more instructive when it went viral. In a back-and-forth between Stratton and Pomeranz about the now largely forgotten Gene Hackman and Keanu Reeves-starring NFL comedy The Replacements (2000) – a film inspired by a 1987 strike that resulted in games with ‘replacement players’ – Stratton saw through the film and took a principled political line:

The exchange delighted the social media followers of pages by the Victorian Socialists and Mums 4 Refugees.

Stratton’s strong stand might have come as a surprise to some: his public image had been shaped – arguably flattened – by popular television, the medium that made him famous. Before becoming a homespun celebrity, Stratton was best known as the director of Sydney Film Festival (SFF). In this role he had famously lobbied against Australia’s overly censorious culture, refusing to screen any film touched by a government inspector. This was part of a wider effort in the 1970s to stop interference on imported films and works of literature. For cinemagoers, these efforts assisted in the introduction of the R-rating certificate broadening what they were able to see. The Victorian Socialists also thrilled to the fact that Stratton had once been on the watchlist of the country’s surveillance apparatus for ‘suspected communist sympathies’ (he had been flagged after travelling to the USSR to attend film festivals to make selections for his own festival; SFF had a long history of programming Soviet films long before his appointment).

There were other political decisions that ushered in his rise. Stratton’s career greatly benefited from then Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s act to establish the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), the key outcome of the National Ethnic Broadcasting Advisory Council, which had been charged to look into ways to adapt news services for the country’s growing immigrant population. Stratton was offered the role of ‘Feature Film Consultant’ to advise on the station’s programming of international films (Stratton’s gatekeeper role at the station and his whiteness speak to broader cultural and managerial issues that have long plagued SBS). From 1980, Stratton presented a Movie of the Week segment for the broadcaster, providing short introductory remarks ahead of a film screening. Film critic Adrian Martin recalled that Movie of the Week was the envy of ‘cinephiles all over the globe [who] eagerly trade[d] home-use-only copies of rare Abbas Kiarostami, Vitali Kanevsky, or Youssef Chahine films taped from SBS’. Indeed, Stratton later confirmed there were bootlegs of the show changing hands across America.

Five years later, Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz – who had produced his Movie of the Week segments – launched The Movie Show, following in the footsteps of their syndicated American counterpart hosted by Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. As a result of the near ubiquity of The Movie Show in Australia, David Stratton became the standard-bearer of Australian film criticism. To say this may seem unfair to Pomeranz – they were unquestionably equals on the show – but Stratton’s film criticism also appeared in print. Stratton might have disagreed with the title; he personally placed greater importance on his work as a curator and educator, happily teaching a film history class at the University of Sydney’s adult education department for decades. Television turned him into a beloved, folksy figure (my own prized memory is of passing him in a packed cinema, where he sat resplendent in the 3D glasses he had donned for the first Sydney press screening of Avatar).

His cultural memory may not yet need reviving, but it is worth thinking about what his legacy might be for future film enthusiasts, for those generations to come without knowledge of The Movie Show. While we can no longer attend his festivals or classes, we can access his televisual archives and read his work. Stratton churned out copy steadily as a newspaper critic and was an occasional film historian. In the work he published as the latter, he often reworked the former. He left behind a small library of useful books, including the popular memoir (I Peed on Fellini), two listicle consumer guides (My Favourite Movies and 101 Marvellous Movies You May Have Missed), and a somewhat baggy trilogy of books that, between them, cover a fifty-year history of Australian cinema starting from the early 1970s with the advent of the Australian New Wave. Both the temporal scope and narrowed generic focus of the trilogy mean that these books meet at least one criterion of legacy-making: utility. In the introduction to his very last book, Stratton wrote: ‘I hope this book will provide useful information and perhaps encourage further investigation and research into some of the forgotten feature films of the last few decades.’ That ‘perhaps’ feels sadly loaded now: interest in Australian cinema appears to be in a state of perpetual retreat, and so writing about film seems even farther back in the line of priorities. If people aren’t going to watch the films, why would they want to read about them? 

This wasn’t always the case. Stratton’s debut book-length work, The Last New Wave (1980), was part of a small boom in books about the history of Australian cinema that arrived in the late 1970s and early 1980s, coinciding with the revival of the local film industry. Alongside Stratton’s work came a number of more academic historical surveys – chief among them Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper’s Australian Film 1900-1977 and Graham Shirley and Brian Adams’ Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years – though The Last New Wave was chattier and anecdotal in style. The book performed well enough at the time to warrant a sequel: The Avocado Plantation: Boom and Bust in the Australian Film Industry (1990) is the most valuable instalment in Stratton’s trilogy because Australian cinema in the 1980s required the kind of map that only a cinephile like Stratton – willing to wade out into an immense volume of work for the rest of us and report back – could chart. The 1980s in Australian film was a period of intense glut – La Décade Prodigieuse as Stratton phrases it, borrowing the French title of a Claude Chabrol film – thanks to the notorious 10BA tax breaks that led to increased independent film investment in an early attempt to wean productions off governmental support.

The title of the book came from a producer who felt that, for the investors he was working with in the 1980s, it really did not matter if they were putting money into a film or a piece of fruit: the products were interchangeable, the returns were (hopefully) the same. Part of the problem with 10BA, as Stratton so effectively documents, is that films needed to be completed within the scope of a financial year, leading to many rushed decisions based on business imperative rather than creative vision. This led to what Stratton terms ‘bunching’, where so many films were in production at once that there were not enough crew in the country to sufficiently staff them, thereby driving up costs. The result was a weird decade for Australian cinema – quantity taking obscene precedence over quality – and one deserving of close study. Without much in the way of competition, The Avocado Plantation did a great deal of work in the area, yet it did not entice readers to quite the same extent as The Last New Wave, partly because the wider interest in Australian film had dimmed too.  

Stratton’s well-timed decennial retrospectives were chances to reflect on the state of the industry. A third title, looking at the 1990s, presumably to be published at the turn of the millennium, did not eventuate. Different reasons were given. Stratton claimed that the duties of co-hosting The Movie Show got in the way. The poor commercial performance of The Avocado Plantation has also been cited. In his memoirs, Stratton details the fact that a director sued over his representation in that book and that the matter was settled out of court. The actors Robyn Nevin and John Hargreaves also complained about their representation, and Stratton agreed to remove material about them if a paperback release eventuated (it did not). It was a shame because Australian cinema in the 1990s was not only deserving of study, but in dire need of it: a course correction from the 10BA era showed promising new directions early in the decade, but the oft-referenced triumvirate of Strictly Ballroom (1992), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and Muriel’s Wedding (1994) were, ultimately, a misdirection. The industry was on a downward trajectory that would not halt.

Stratton’s final book, Australia at the Movies: The Ultimate Guide to Modern Australian Cinema (2024), makes good on the promise to survey the work of the 1990s, while adding in the first two decades of the new millennium. Its impressive comprehensiveness is akin to those earlier history titles, if not more so, given that it covers more than 700 films. In rather stark contrast, however, it lacks an overall thesis. Stratton is up front about this in his introduction, admitting that the book is different to The Last New Wave and The Avocado Plantation insofar as it is ‘effectively an encyclopedia’. It’s not quite the dispassionate collection of material we might expect from such a decades-spanning almanac – instead, it is made up of Stratton’s critical opinions on a vast array of films. He may have reworked his archive of brief observations into the shape of an encyclopaedic text, but it was always Stratton himself who was the encyclopaedia. There is a sense that Stratton could have stretched his personal compendium of opinions even further, closer to the eccentric intricacies of that ‘other David’, David Thomson, author of the regularly revised (New) Biographical Dictionary of Film (1975, 1981, 1994, 2002, 2010, 2014).

Thomson, however, was never a regular newspaper reviewer. His remarkable boundlessness – a key characteristic of most cinephiles – was partly derived from the fact that he was never tied to such pages. Stratton’s roaming nature, in comparison, was assisted and officiated by the institutions he was associated with – particularly SFF and SBS – and his writing was always tied to mass journalism, which the other ‘other David’ – the late film historian David Bordwell – rightly diagnosed as being ‘impatient with exegeses’.  In fact, the majority of Stratton’s published criticism was in an international trade publication, Variety magazine, designed to be read quickly by industry insiders. Stratton saw himself as being extremely good with a deadline and his personal opinion about his reputation at Variety was, in something of a humblebrag, that: ‘I wasn’t the best reviewer on the paper, but I was the fastest.’

This all fits neatly with cultural-studies stalwart and erstwhile film reviewer Meaghan Morris’ lasting argument that the strict layout and word counts of newspapers pushed regular reviewing into an activity that was formalist and unable to invent new modes. For Stratton, however, the influence is perhaps less that of the newspaper page than the teleprompter. In all three of Stratton’s history books, the precise beats of the Movie Show reviews are present: perfunctory plot description followed by brief critical assessment. This mode is extended in the first two books by another feature of his television work: extensive interviews with (primarily) directors that lead him to wider observations about the state of the Australian film industry – an expansive voice which is almost entirely missing from Australia at the Movies. This leaves Stratton operating exclusively in an explicatory mode, the one that he was best known for on television.

Rather than detailing production or pre-production histories, Stratton’s broader analysis in his last book is limited to the aftereffects of releases. Films are often contextualised in relation to having been programmed at certain prestigious festivals, or for having won awards. This should come as no surprise. Stratton was the very model of official film culture, and often in positions of authority to confer such honours. He was, after all, the central figure in the professionalisation of the Sydney Film Festival, overseeing its move away from its passionate, if dilettantish, homebase at the University of Sydney. Attendees used to converge on the university lawns after film screenings to debate what they had just seen. Anyone who has been to SFF’s new HQ at the State Theatre, and been spat out onto the aptly named Market Street as the credits roll, knows that this is no longer possible.

Just as the SFF’s loss of dialogic spaces has been lamentable, so too has there been a slow retreat of critical exchange in the progression of Stratton’s books. Stratton was at his best when in a tête-à-tête with others, and without a Pomeranz by his side countering his opinions, he can sound confoundingly siloed (his dismissal, for instance, of Mad Max: Fury Road as a serious work, and his critique of its director George Miller as being ‘capable of more than this’, go against a wide consensus that the film was among the best of its decade). In the earlier books, too, Stratton was more willing to engage with other critics. Written before Stratton had a regular role as a film reviewer, The Last New Wave is, among other things, a compendium of the opinions of now mostly forgotten Australian newspaper film critics. How many names still register out of the likes of Colin Bennett, Beverley Tivey, Geraldine Pascall, or P.P. McGuinness?

Stratton was not always so generous to writers who took more theoretical starting positions. In a brief scene recalled in his memoirs, Stratton attempts to mock British filmmaking heavyweights Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey – the latter responsible for theorising the ‘male gaze’, which had implications far outside that of cinema – by offering the couple footage from an interview he had conducted with Raoul Walsh, knowing they were working on a monograph on the director. Stratton was supposedly shocked when Mulvey asked whether Walsh had discussed the ‘castration complex’. When Stratton lets them down, Mulvey declines to view it. It is a go-nowhere anecdote intended only, it would seem, to set Stratton apart from his peers. The populist cinephile, mistaking the intellectual rigour of others for pretension, can needlessly limit their own critical thinking, ‘kept in the dark’ of the cinema and the cinema alone.

In The Avocado Plantation Stratton makes a dismissive reference to Elizabeth Jacka and Susan Dermody’s concept of the ‘AFC genre’, launched in their landmark two-volume The Screening of Australia (1987-88), which posited that the films of the New Wave, supported by the Australian Film Commission, tended towards a ‘literary style’ that eventually became staid and overly precious. If anything, reading Stratton’s Australia at the Movies suggests Jacka and Dermody’s AFC genre could usefully be updated. The ‘Screen Australia genre’ might explain a lot about what has gone wrong in the Australian industry over the period Stratton is surveying. Even more so than its precursor, Screen Australia’s lack of purchase on the public imagination belies the immense ‘make or break’ nature of its funding decisions, and, in turn, its cultural influence. By comparison, America has long had studio heads writers could fix their sights on to focus their critiques of the industry. The current line-up, including Netflix’s cinema-sceptic Ted Sarandos, Paramount’s right-wing billionaire David Ellison, and Public Enemy No. 1, Warner Bros’ David Zaslav – who received offers from the other two for the fire sale of his studio – regularly appear in the US news. Australia has never been afforded such figureheads because of the corporate blandness of governmental appointees and a general lack of public and media interest (a video of Screen Australia’s Chair, Michael Ebeid, announcing their 2025 strategic plan has, at time of writing, 665 views). Stratton himself only provides rare rebukes to the country’s national funding body in Australia at the Movies: ‘Why does Screen Australia keep supporting films that have nothing to do with this country?’ Stratton easily could have made the agency, if not the book’s chief antagonist, at least a major character.

It is near impossible to write an Australian film history without thinking about it in industrial and political terms. This is partly because so much of Australian cinema relies on government underwriting and auspices, still haunted as it is by the more than thirty-year gap in production that lasted from the end of the Second World War until the early 1970s, a period of immense indifference presided over by Menzies. Politicians play their part in these histories and have their various walk-on roles. Film fan John Howard, for instance, appears briefly as a historical character in The Avocado Plantation when he visits the Balmain set of Kitty and the Bagman (1982). Perhaps fulfilling Howard’s perpetual desire to time travel to an earlier version of Australia, the film is set in the 1920s. The invitation to Howard was part of a concerted effort to convince the then Treasurer to keep the 10BA tax breaks in place. Howard was so charmed on the set that, four days later, Malcolm Fraser appeared with a security detail in tow. The producer of the film recalled, ‘We had to alert crew members to be on their best behaviour, because Fraser wasn’t the most popular person at the time.’

The cultural policies of successive governments are largely absent in Australia at the Movies.  Howard barely rates a mention despite being the longest serving Prime Minister over the course of the book’s time period. If the New Wave of the 1970s was defined by Whitlam’s cultural nationalism, Howard’s term reprised Menzies’ indifference to local film culture, and Australians largely followed suit (making it perhaps understandable that Howard should disappear as a character, though Stratton’s memoirs suggest Howard frequently accepted invitations to the opening night of the Sydney Film Festival). It is extremely tricky to sustain enthusiasm for the Australian film industry, precisely because it can never be a glimmering imitation of Hollywood. Instead, until Australians can fall in a comically romantic love with governmental cultural policy, the industry will not possess the populist backing it needs to bolster both public and private investment. The recent dragging out of policy negotiations over quotas for streaming giants to produce Australian content suggests as much.

If the conditions of the Australian industry cannot be studied in the same way as those of Hollywood (social-democratic investment vs free-market Wild West), then perhaps the film theories one imports from overseas are not necessarily fit for purpose here either. In a contemporaneous review of The Last New Wave for Filmnews, fellow critic Sylvia Lawson pinned down the politics of the book as being ‘conservative’ because Stratton prized film as art above systems or forms of communication. Stratton’s writing was limited when it came to extrapolating his take on individual films into reflections on broader historical movements. This perceived methodological conservatism was also down to the fact that Stratton structured his material as profiles of individual directors – Bruce Beresford, Peter Weir, and so on – proving, in Lawson’s eyes, that ‘for Stratton, directorial authorship really is an absolute doctrine’. Lawson was, of course, positioning Stratton as a proponent of auteur theory. ‘Politique des auteurs’ had been drafted by François Truffaut and endorsed by his fellow critics at the French periodical Cahiers du Cinéma in 1955. Truffaut elevated the director over all other creative positions, including the screenwriter, to the position of the film’s author. At the time, Lawson argued that Australian film was not an auteur culture, and likely could never be one. In her reading, directors were too rarely the originators of the work that they signed up to helm, and, by extension, rarely produced original styles themselves. The true authors of Australian cinema, according to Lawson, were ‘the middlebrow, middleclass anonymities of the commissions, corporations, and committees’.

The American critic Louis Menand has stated that ‘politique des auteurs’ was not so much a theory or politics as a ‘policy’, lending a useful rhetorical credence to Lawson’s – and later Jackson and Dermody’s – implication that the auteur theory was better applied here to government agencies. Both Stratton and Lawson were writing at a time when most of the directors of the Australian New Wave had not yet made their second or third films. ‘Politique des auteurs’ is a real stretch when you’re only applying it to a body of work of one or two. The problem, however, remains more or less the same today: how many Australian filmmakers have made it past a first feature to make a second? How many have made it past a second to make a third? And so on. Screen Australia research, looking at almost exactly the same period covered by Stratton’s fifty years of writing, found that 67% of all Australian feature film directors made only one feature. Only 5% of them made more than five.

The filmmakers who did make it past five features to join this rarefied 5% do manage to make a strong impression in Stratton’s histories. Paul Cox and Rolf de Heer both stand out. Remarkably, both men were born in the Netherlands. While Cox reworked the same (sometimes sexual) obsessions as chamber pieces, de Heer demonstrated a restlessness with genre worthy of Robert Altman; and both showed how one film could lead into the next. Journeymen like Robert Connolly and Kriv Stenders also jump around genres, but ultimately this feels motivated less by creative instinct than by market testing; they aren’t immune to sequel-ifying if they smell success (the Red Dog franchise from Stenders, The Dry cinematic universe from Connolly).

The other figure with a significant footprint is that of Kaytetye man Warwick Thornton (Thornton blurbs Stratton’s book: ‘Stratton’s sense of cinema and storytelling is bar none, as far as I’m concerned’). The greatest progress in Australian cinema in the last thirty years has been the increased visibility and resourcing of First Nations filmmakers to control and create their own feature films. Stratton’s starting point of the early 1990s in Australia at the Movies dovetails with the beginning of this work in a public sense: the funding of the first feature by a First Nations filmmaker that culminated in Tracey Moffatt’s anthology of ghost stories Bedevil (1993). It is a shame that Stratton leaves out Biripi man Brian Syron’s Jindalee Lady (1990), perhaps discounted as it never received a cinema release; according to Syron, the SFF only offered to screen his film on a television in a tent in the inner city, a proposal Syron declined. Syron documented his problems producing the film in his mammoth Kicking Down the Doors: A History of First Nation Films from 1968 to 1993, a counter-history to Stratton’s, and an annotated reissue of which would greatly benefit students of Australian film. 

Stratton’s accounting, however, does serve to give a sense of a complex, interconnected network of First Nations filmmakers that developed in the years after Moffatt and Syron broke ground. A cursory interest in Thornton’s work, for instance, might only extend to films he directed, but reading Stratton’s exposition reminds us just how intertwined Thornton has been in other productions, working as a cinematographer on Beck Cole’s Here I Am (2011) and Wayne Blair’s The Sapphires (2012). The fact that Stratton groups the majority of First Nations productions together in a single chapter – somewhat confusingly titled ‘Black Like Me’ – helps bring this narrative out.

Stratton’s decision to order the book non-chronologically, however, is something like an unsolvable puzzle. It is equally parts frustrating and pleasurable imagining different groupings, but the non-linear history makes it difficult to prosecute a case for when exactly things went wrong (and when they went right).

Still, Australia at the Movies is undeniably an enormous feat of sustained intellectual labour. It was all too easy to read this book completely forgetting that it only documents the Australian films of the last thirty years that Stratton has seen. My own determination to watch only Australian films while drafting this essay lasted only about a week. I attempted to track the longevity of directorial careers across the decades, which took days on end, and ultimately abandoned the project. It is abundantly clear that Stratton’s book has passed his own test of being ‘useful’ – there is no doubt that someone could use this work to support many theories. For instance, Adrian Martin’s exciting and entirely convincing hypothesis that there are connections between ‘Greek Weird’ and ‘Australian Quirk’ cinemas could be tested with Stratton’s two chapters on Australian comedies of the last thirty years; indeed, there are many such transnational readings that Stratton doesn’t make himself, but which could be easily expounded on by ‘using’ Australia at the Movies.

Freed from the precise paginations of the newspaper or print magazine, film criticism need not necessarily expand. In fact, the genre can quite powerfully contract. A.S. Hamrah’s short monograph Last Week in End Times Cinema takes just a single year (from March 2024 to March 2025) to chart the deranged fraying of an already psychotic industry (the advent of Artificial Intelligence having supercharged the idiocy of surface-level thinking taking place in and out of board rooms in the climes of Los Angeles). The book, adorned with David Zaslav on its cover, collects missives Hamrah wrote as part of an e-newsletter series under the same name – missives that deliberately recalled the concise faits divers articles which appeared in French newspapers in the early twentieth century, a form mastered by Félix Fénéon and spectacularly revived, albeit briefly, by the novelist and photographer Teju Cole on Twitter in the early 2010s. As Cole explained, ‘A fait divers is not simply bad news. It is bad news of a certain kind, written in a certain way.’ An example from Fénéon:

And one from Hamrah, adding our pop culture-driven collective psychosis into the mix:

It is hard to imagine quite what Stratton would have made of Hamrah’s inventive form, or if he would have seen it having any application to the Australian film industry. Yet Hamrah himself leaves enough Australian breadcrumbs among the traces of his increasingly decrepit Hollywood: Mel Gibson is appointed, via social media, by Trump as a Special Ambassador to Hollywood, and after his long-term home burns down in the Palisades fires, espouses a conspiracy theory that the LA winds that day were ‘a little convenient’. Elizabeth Murdoch – scion of Rupert – threatens to buy the cult DVD distributor Criterion. Better Man (2024), principally photographed at Melbourne’s Docklands Studios, is a biopic of Robbie Williams, where Williams is played by a CGI monkey, and is a co-production between Australia, China, France, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The gift bags put together for the nominees of the 2025 Golden Globes awards show are valued at $1 million and include a holiday package to Hobart. Hamrah also cites the ongoing misery behind the musical The Deb (2026) over which first-time director Rebel Wilson has sued her producers, accusing one of them of sexually harassing the film’s lead actress, even though the lead has denied this (if only someone had sent Hamrah the vision of Wilson live-streaming her complaints about the traffic at the new Rozelle interchange). 

Hamrah’s missives practice an almost purely symptomatic form of criticism, mining the daily online entertainment news for readings of systemic ills (or rather, of an industry that is all ills). But do any of these compounding sicknesses suggest a potential cure? What Hamrah and others show is that the act of documentation itself can be an intervention, and the interventionist critic, willing to step in on matters of the industry, not just individual films, is what is needed in ‘end times’. For Australians, the disappearance of a critic of Stratton’s influence – someone who had the power to intervene and mediate – only adds to our woes.

When people write in obituaries that ‘we won’t see the likes of them again’, the implication is that the special characteristics of that person are lost to us. But the statement can also imply that the social and cultural conditions of possibility for that person to get where they did are lamentably gone too. When we read Australia at the Movies – in concert with The Last New Wave and The Avocado Plantation – it is clear the country needs to find its next David Stratton to account for the next fifty years of Australian cinema, even if, on the evidence of these books and our film culture at large, the end credits for that particular story are already playing.