Its interest is in describing the structural and institutional ‘conditions of existence’, the ecology or economy, of Australian cinema; concretely, in terms of industry, economics, policy, production, distribution, and reception, and conceptually, in terms of how our different ideas of a national cinema are ‘made operational’. It’s not a book that will appeal to everyone. O’Regan isn’t much interested in performing his critic’s sensibility, celebrating the culture’s ‘coming of age’ or doing a virtuoso demonstration of its failure. The argument is more original than any of these familiar critical options, which it duly puts in their place – it shows just where they live in the Australian cinema terrain, but why they can never constitute the whole.

O’Regan begins with the question of ‘national cinema’ itself. What is Australian cinema considered as a national cinema? Not only a bunch of movies, it is an industry, a production process, an aesthetic object, a critical practice, a policy goal, a civic project, a means of consumption, a market strategy, an international relationship. A national cinema is fundamentally dispersed, characteristically ‘messy’, constitutionally ‘fuzzy’ (O’Regan has a gift for picking up mundane words and giving them analytical point). Film-makers, government, industry, critics, and consumers all make contingent and, like my students, potentially contradictory links among the disparate elements, mobilising one or other notion of Australian cinema. For O’Regan, characteristically, this diversity is cause for neither cringing nor celebration: it is a structural condition of the national cinema which inevitably effects how we go about making sense, making policy, making money and, not least, making ‘Australian’ films.

An account of Australian cinema must attend to all these different dimensions, from texts to taxes, but not to produce a neat totality, if this were possible, or to ‘clean up’ its messy relations and project their ideal form. On the contrary, O’Regan wants to unravel the disparateness of film-making and film reception projects – mainstream and minor, local and anti­local, arty and trashy – and the ‘antagonistic, complementary and simply adjacent’ relations between them. The study is structural and always relational in its sense of the nation, its internal and international coordinates.

Many of the points seem simple enough: Australian cinema is a medium-sized English-language cinema. But more than mere description, this is a way of locating Australian cinema in relation to international cinema and among other national cinemas, smaller and larger, English and other-language. It establishes a clear but flexible framework over which O’Regan can plot the similarities and differences which define Australian cinema, both its specificities and what it shares mundanely with national cinemas elsewhere – its ‘one-off’ nature; its ‘perpetually emergent’ state; its televisual qualities; its dependence on government and co-production; its minority status among local consumers; its ‘dullness’ and its ‘exoticness’. At the centre, necessarily, is the relation to American cinema (in the USA the national cinema is the cinema). If anything defines Australian cinema it is the inevitability of its having to negotiate this relationship. In Australia, too, Hollywood is more ‘naturalised’ as cinema than are local films.

Some of the book’s most important work is on this negotiation. Again, the fact that Hollywood has long been part of Australian cinema is cause neither for rejection nor rejoicing but a condition of its being to which we must attend. O’Regan shows how the equation can be worked to value or devalue Australian cinema. So Crocodile Dundee was criticised for being too Australian, not Australian enough, too American, and not American enough. Although it is inevitable that the national cinema be understood in opposition to Hollywood, such a claim needs to be broken down and ‘redistributed’ across a much more varied and subtle array of production, consumption, and lobbying strategies. Australian cinema is a supplement to international cinema, a manifestation of cinema’s internationalism, and a distinctive indigenisation of its forms.

The book favours a model of cultural transfer over cultural becoming, a model which undoes stubborn dichotomies which have driven Australian cinema critically, aesthetically, and industrially: commerce versus culture, originality versus imitation, imported versus indigenous. Hollywood’s omnipresence is not the opposite of Australian originality or distinctiveness but a pre-condition. It has defined Australia’s relative cultural weakness, but also the distinctive nature of its relative success.

O’Regan shows how we ‘routinely’ use cinema to problematise the nation internally as well. In a wonderfully complex and commonsensical chapter, he considers Australian society alternatively as a European-derived, diasporic, new world-settler, and multicultural society. Each has its cinema, its power to make sense of history and experience, its critical perspective, its blindness and partiality; each needs to be understood in relation to the others. Most interesting are a discussion of the non-diasporic culture of ‘Anglo-Celtic’ Australians (those for example who distinguish themselves from British migrants); and a defence of the mainstream cinema of the 1970–80s for its creation of a generous democratic space which bypassed ethnic particularity. Here was a cinema that was relatively inclusive because its objectives were popular and commercial.

O’Regan disturbs the conventional dismissal of it as merely homogenous and monocultural. Then he makes a strong case for multicultural criticism. O’Regan is less interested in the spectacular, exceptional moments of Australian cinema than in its unexceptional, even routine operations; or rather he’s interested in the relation between the two. He has a terrific sense of the field of Australian cinema, its nuts and bolts, its accidents and inevitabilities. And for a book with large scope, its interpretive cameos on individual films are frequent and pointed.

O’Regan has a sharp eye for both the routine and absurd aspects of critical hubris. His own critical disposition might be described as agnostic, generous, pluralist, modest, and sceptical. Film-making, he suggests, will always be something more and less than criticism wants it to be. He favours a ‘less principled criticism’ with critics acknowledging their ‘implication in what is before them’. Best of all, he wants an Australian cinema that can be bad as well as good.