http://www.filmreference.com
National Cinema, Political Economy, and Ideology
http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Independent-Film-Road-Movies/National-Cinema.html
National Cinema is an essay by Christopher E. Gittings on the website filmreference.com. Though the website might not look very reliable (due to the advertisements and the obscure website and navigation structure), but the essay is properly referenced and written by a renowned author (he has published Canadian National Cinema: Ideology, Difference and Representation). The website further includes other essays on different films and film topics as well as biographies of directors and actors, writers and production artists.
The essay is split up into five parts on five separate sites: National Cinema (an introduction); National Cinema, Political Economy, and Ideology; Colonial/Post-Colonial Cinemas; National/Trans-National Cinemas; and Diasporic Cinemas (which includes the bibliography).
The second part (National Cinema, Political Economy, and Ideology) is the most interesting one concerning Australian national identity. Gittings draws on the work of Fredric Jameson to comment on ideology, government funding and national cinemas, and mentions Tom O’Regan’s concept of ‘indigenizing’ (where ‘smaller’ national cultures take the dominant Hollywood genres and transform them according to their own culture, like the Spaghetti western in Italy or the road movie – the Mad Max series – in Australia).
