A Dense Web of Relationships

In 2016, Screen Australia released two major studies on the value of Australia’s screen sector: the first, prepared by Deloitte Access Economics, measures the economic value of the screen sector,^[1]Deloitte Access Economics, What Are Our Stories Worth? Measuring the Economic and Cultural Value of Australia’s Screen Sector, 2016, available at <https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/13dceb59-0a88-432f-adb3-958fcc04e6bb/Deloitte-Access-Economics-Screen-Currency.pdf>, accessed 2 June 2019. while the second, undertaken by Olsberg•SPI, appraises its cultural value.^[2]Olsberg•SPI, Measuring the Cultural Value of Australia’s Screen Sector, 2016, available at <https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/1dce395e-a482-42d1-b5a9-47bb6307f868/Screen-Currency-Olsberg-SPI-Nov2016.pdf>, accessed 2 June 2019. The findings of both were collated into a report entitled Screen Currency: Valuing Our Screen Industry. ^[3]See ‘Landmark Report Shows Australian Screen Stories Worth $3 Billion’, media release, Screen Australia, 15 November 2016, <https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/sa/media-centre/news/2016/11-15-screen-currency>, accessed 2 June 2019.

When the Screen Currency summary document^[4]Screen Australia, Screen Currency: Valuing Our Screen Industry, 2016, available at <https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/1b1312e5-89ad-4f02-abad-daeee601b739/ScreenCurrency-SA-Report.pdf>, accessed 2 June 2019. became available to the public, it was widely welcomed among screen communities because it provided hard data to bolster claims for the importance of the sector to Australia’s economy and national culture.^[5]See Don Groves, ‘Industry Welcomes Screen Currency Report’, Screen Australia website, 18 January 2017, <https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/sa/screen-news/2017/01-18-industry-welcomes-screen-currency-report>, accessed 2 June 2019. However, when I read the cultural-value report itself, I was disappointed to see that it did not make mention of the teaching or studying of film; critical writing about film; film reviews and journalism; or forums, festivals and screenings – various activities I consider integral to building Australia’s film culture. Despite its focus on cultural value, the Olsberg report does not consider the significance of a film culture: what it might entail, how it is developed and fostered, and what contribution it makes to amplifying cultural value. It is as if the Australian screen industries, and even Australian films themselves, exist in a complete vacuum of ideas – as if they miraculously emerge from nowhere and their reception by audiences is completely unmediated.

The implications of excluding this lively discourse are far-reaching, and, to appreciate this, we don’t need to look any further than the debates within the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) over the last few years about the role of film studies, as film history has been excised from the undergraduate core curriculum, which now has a more narrowly craft-based focus; as a result, film history has been relegated to optional electives. Across the university sector, the growing influence of the ‘cultural industries’ paradigm has increasingly had a similar effect, as film and screen studies are reframed within the industry rubric. This increased predominance of the political-economy model in cultural-industries curricula is not restricted to Australia; film scholar Thomas Schatz has examined the widespread tendency to explain cultural value in economically quantifiable terms. He asks where questions of aesthetics fit in this model, and argues for the retention of the creativity and humanistic concerns developed in film studies within the screen sector’s industry-focused agenda.^[6]Thomas Schatz, ‘Film Studies, Cultural Studies, and Media Industries Studies’, Media Industries, vol. 1, no. 1, 2014, <https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mij/15031809.0001.108/–film-studies-cultural-studies-and-media-industries-studies?rgn=main;view=fulltext>, accessed 2 June 2019. For a discussion of the creative-industries agenda in the Australian context, see Stuart Cunningham, ‘From Cultural to Creative Industries: Theory, Industry and Policy Implications’, Media International Australia, vol. 102, no. 1, 2002, pp. 54–65.

This article sets out to challenge the Screen Currency report as the most recent iteration of a longstanding marginalisation of film culture that has the potential to significantly reshape screen policy over the next decade. Not only do I want to reframe the question about how to measure the cultural value of Australian cinema, but I also seek to ask additional ones: How does a dynamic film culture enable, activate, mobilise and amplify the cultural value of Australian cinema? And what is the role of film studies, critical writing and public discussion within it?

Not only do I want to reframe the question about how to measure the cultural value of Australian cinema, but I also seek to ask: How does a dynamic film culture enable, activate, mobilise and amplify the cultural value of Australian cinema?

W(h)ither Australian film culture?

The omission from the Olsberg report’s bibliography of the most substantial analysis published to date of the importance of Australian film culture, Barrett Hodsdon’s Straight Roads and Crossed Lines, is telling. This 2001 account documents the decades-long marginalisation and evisceration of film-culture funding programs by the country’s peak film bodies; in the national agenda, Hodsdon argues, by 2001 ‘film culture [had] been seconded […] to the commercial imperatives of the mainstream film industry’.^[7]Barrett Hodsdon, Straight Roads and Crossed Lines: The Quest for Film Culture in Australia from the 1960s?, Bernt Porridge Group, Shenton Park, WA, 2001, p. 168. Two decades on, this claim is just as pertinent.

Screen Australia pays lip service to the development of film culture in its priorities, including the goal to ‘provide opportunities for critical debate and analysis of screen content’,^[8]See, for example, ‘Screen Culture: Australian Festivals and Events’, Screen Australia website, <https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/funding-and-support/industry-development/screen-culture/australian-festivals-and-events>, accessed 2 June 2019. but responsibility for film culture has largely been deferred to state-based agencies. In-depth examination of state funding is beyond the scope of this article, but a brief comparison of New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria highlights the patchwork commitment. Under the banner of audience engagement or development, both fund diverse metropolitan and regional film festivals and some events. NSW has no specific strategy for fostering ancillary film-culture activities, and the support it can offer is limited.^[9]A perusal of funding decisions under the Screen NSW Audience Development Program (now under the auspices of Create NSW) over the last five years indicates this emphasis on screenings and events; see <https://www.screen.nsw.gov.au/funding/industry-support/audience-development-program/funding-approvals>, accessed 2 June 2019. Despite Sydney being named, in 2001, a UNESCO City of Film – with a commitment ‘to promot[ing] the enjoyment of screen culture by Sydneysiders and tourists for cultural and economic benefit’^[10]‘About Sydney City of Film’, NSW Government website, <https://www.screen.nsw.gov.au/page/about-sydney-city-of-film>, accessed 2 June 2019. – its 2017/18 report to UNESCO focuses on production; beyond festivals, no specific film-culture initiatives are listed.^[11]Sydney City of Film, UNESCO Creative Cities: Membership Monitoring Report 2015–17, available at <https://en.unesco.org/creative-cities/sites/creative-cities/files/monitoring_reports/unesco_monitoring_report17_sydney.pdf>, accessed 2 June 2019. Film Victoria, in contrast, has stood out for its explicit commitment to supporting film culture; indeed, the agency lists the promotion of film culture as one of its three strategic priorities.^[12]Film Victoria, Corporate Plan 2017–20, p. 8, available at <https://www.film.vic.gov.au/images/uploads/2017-2020_Corporate_Plan.pdf>, accessed 2 June 2019.

Foregrounding film culture in its policy agenda has allowed Film Victoria to fund initiatives that have helped the state become ‘a vibrant hub for screen activity and culture’.^[13]ibid., p. 8. In line with this agenda, in 2008, Arts Victoria (now Creative Victoria) released a major report on the role of arts and culture that gave ‘liveability’ equal weight to ‘competitiveness’, explicitly naming the contribution of film and new media to producing a dynamic and sustainable cultural environment; see The Role of Arts and Culture in Liveability and Competitiveness, 2008, available at <https://creative.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/56756/Role_of_ArtsnCulture_in_Liveability-submission-precis-2.pdf>, accessed 2 June 2019. The ATOM Awards, Senses of Cinema and even this very magazine – all vital to building a national film culture and putting Australian cinema on the map internationally – have all, at various points, received funding from Film Victoria. However, the winds of change have also hit Film Victoria’s film-culture commitments. In 2017, funding criteria included support for organisations ‘that promote, discuss and show screen culture’;^[14]Film Victoria, ibid., p. 8. in 2018, the guidelines were changed, support was pared back to emphasise festivals and events, and publications were explicitly excluded, thus knocking Metro and Senses of Cinema off the funding slate. It is notable that, in 2016, coinciding with the publication of Screen Currency, Deloitte was enlisted to produce a report analysing the Victorian screen sector.^[15]Deloitte Access Economics, Analysis of the Victorian Screen Industry, 2016, available at <https://www.film.vic.gov.au/images/uploads/FV-DAE_Analysis_of_the_Victorian_screen_industry_Key_Findings_2016.pdf>, accessed 2 June 2019. And it does not appear to be a coincidence that, on the back of this report, a more expansive approach to sustaining the state’s screen sector has been curtailed.

Excluding the contribution of film culture to the mobilisation of Australian cinema’s cultural value undermines the potential of Screen Currency to contribute to effective strategic thinking for our screen industries. The year before its publication, Screen Australia issued a report on issues facing the distribution of Australian feature films. While this earlier document pinpoints a ‘tight and unforgiving theatrical market’ and argues that ‘[a]ll players will need to maintain a strong focus on the audience’, with producers ‘need[ing] to think and act creatively to connect their film with its identified audience’,^[16]Screen Australia, Issues in Feature Film Distribution, 2015, pp. 18, 36, 6, available at <https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/1216e7e0-59a1-4e16-906a-8809b8b7be0c/IssuesInFeatureFilmDistribution_2015-07-30.pdf>, accessed 2 June 2019. it ignores the cultural context within which such issues and strategies unfold. As critic Tina Kaufman has noted, in ongoing debates about why Australian films do not reach audiences, ‘a serious look at the importance of screen culture in this equation is conspicuous by its absence’.^[17]Tina Kaufman, ‘Australian Screen Culture: The Hard Yards’, RealTime, issue 96, April–May 2010, <http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue96/9810>, accessed 2 June 2019. The 2015 distribution report suggests that the screen industries ‘will need to […] learn from failures as well as from successes, in order to make good decisions and provide the best possible opportunity for films in this changed marketplace’.^[18]Screen Australia, Issues in Feature Film Distribution, op. cit., p. 5. I would suggest that one of these failures is the sector’s long-term inability to achieve substantial audience share for Australian films.^[19]See, for example, Don Groves, ‘2019 Outlook Part 1: The Challenges and Opportunities Facing Feature Filmmakers’, IF.com.au, 7 January 2019, <https://www.if.com.au/2019-outlook-part-1-the-challenges-and-opportunities-facing-feature-filmmakers/>, accessed 2 June 2019.

It is not too hard to join the dots here. Arguments about the crucial role of film culture in audience development have been presented in multiple Australian contexts over many years. In their 2013 book Shining a Light, media academics Lisa French and Mark Poole cite many of these arguments for the importance of a vibrant film culture in building ‘communities around the moving image’, providing context for the reception of films through ‘breadth of activity, lively debate [and] analysis’, facilitating audience discussion and engagement with films, and enhancing screen literacy to encourage viewers to engage with innovative films.^[20]Lisa French & Mark Poole, Shining a Light: 50 Years of the Australian Film Institute, 2nd edn, The Moving Image series, no. 9, ATOM, St Kilda, Vic., 2013 [2009], pp. 17, 12. Even on the most basic economic level, it is undeniable that a vibrant field of film-critical work is essential to sustaining Australia’s screen industries. French and Poole cite interventions over several decades by many key players in the Australian screen sector who have argued, as former Australian Film Institute chief executive Ruth Jones has, that ‘the production industry and screen culture are “inextricably” linked’.^[21]Ruth Jones, paraphrased in French & Poole, ibid., p. 12. Or, as former AFTRS director Rod Bishop has suggested, ‘production, exhibition, distribution and training [are all] “glued” together by screen culture’.^[22]Rod Bishop, paraphrased in French & Poole, ibid., p. 4. Or, as broadcaster and former Film Australia head Robin Hughes has described it, film culture is ‘the plankton in the food-chain that feeds the imagination of our creative cultural producers’.^[23]Robin Hughes, quoted in French & Poole, ibid., p. 4. French and Poole echo many Australian film luminaries when they write that ‘regarding screen culture as a discretionary extra, rather than a central ingredient, is a shortsighted view that potentially threatens the whole industry’.^[24]French & Poole, ibid., p. 12.

Assessing cultural value: Conceptual methodology

Olsberg based its assessment of cultural impact on a survey of 928 Australians and 121 international respondents, taken to be representative demographically. Respondents were asked about their preferred genres and modes of viewing as well as their engagement with Australian screen content, and were required to nominate culturally valuable Australian content. The ranking of these works was taken to indicate cultural impact and value, with Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman, 1986) emerging as the ‘most culturally impactful’ Australian film.^[25]Olsberg•SPI, op. cit., p. 15. A key metric of the study is the distinctiveness of Australian content, but no discussion ensued as to how ‘distinctly Australian’ content may have been understood by respondents. This survey laid the groundwork for a number of case studies into cultural impact and value, which are included in the report.

Olsberg used a methodology for assessing cultural value developed by cultural theorist John Holden in 2004. In an attempt to move beyond economic instrumentalism, Holden proposed understanding cultural value in three categories:

• instrumental, in the sense of ‘direct social or economic impacts’, such as defining Australian identity

• institutional, taken to mean building ‘the trust and esteem of the public’ in government and other institutions

• intrinsic, understood as aesthetic excellence, such as creating poignant stories and images.

Arguments about the crucial role of film culture in audience development have been presented in multiple Australian contexts over many years … Even on the most basic economic level, it is undeniable that a vibrant field of film-critical work is essential to sustaining Australia’s screen industries.

Using these categories, Olsberg identified key cultural-value outcomes, such as enhancing social understanding, ‘shaping the national conversation’, building international ‘soft power’, developing ‘a positive perception of Australia and its natural landscape’, boosting tourism, developing Indigenous stories and educating children.^[26]ibid., pp. 2–3, 6. For Holden’s full study, see Capturing Cultural Value: How Culture Has Become a Tool of Government Policy, Demos, London, 2004, available at <https://www.demos.co.uk/files/CapturingCulturalValue.pdf>, accessed 2 June 2019.

The only critical response specifically addressing the Screen Currency report that I’ve been able to find is a 2017 article by Lauren Carroll Harris, published in Metro; she challenges the use of quantitative methods and commercial indicators to assess cultural value, and raises questions about how we want to think about cultural value outside this framework.^[27]Lauren Carroll Harris, ‘What Are Our Stories Worth? Value, the Culture Wars and the Screen Currency Report’, Metro, no. 192, 2017, pp. 120–3. One way to approach these questions is to open up a discussion about aesthetic and affective experiences of culture and how it is meaningfully integrated into our societies. This topic is the focus of a broad body of literature that exposes some of the gaps in the conceptual framework of the Olsberg report. A recent discussion by Julian Meyrick, Robert Phiddian and Tully Barnett, for instance, explicitly challenges government ‘evaluation strategies’, which ‘aren’t grounded in cultural experience’, as well as the ways in which culture is ‘treated as a function’: ‘Functionalism rules so completely that culture isn’t considered in any meaningful way at all.’ The authors claim that, in the current economic-rationalist environment, ‘cultural organisations are regarded as scaled-up delivery mechanisms for policy outcomes, rather than as a serious and nuanced ecology’, and argue that we must ‘change the conversation around the evaluation of culture in all domains, but especially the government one’.^[28]Julian Meyrick, Robert Phiddian & Tully Barnett, What Matters? Talking Value in Australian Culture, Monash University Publishing, Clayton, Vic., 2018, ebook version, emphasis removed. Rather than exploring that direction, however, I will tackle the Olsberg approach on its own terms. While the research I have cited addresses arts and culture more broadly, my primary interest is in cinema, and I use this body of work with an assumption that it can readily be adapted for discussions of the screen sector.

Questions of cultural value have been debated in Australia for decades, drawing on a range of conceptual frameworks. The response to the specific conceptual foundations that underpin the Olsberg report has been quite robust in contexts outside Australia, particularly the UK and the European Union. The most comprehensive response I have found dissects the assumptions of the cultural-industries model and contests it from the inside. In 2015, the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded a large research project, Understanding the Value of Arts & Culture, to examine in depth the concept of cultural value.^[29]Geoffrey Crossick & Patrycja Kaszynska, Understanding the Value of Arts & Culture: The AHRC Cultural Value Project, 2016, available at <https://ahrc.ukri.org/documents/publications/cultural-value-project-final-report/>, accessed 2 June 2019. The starting point for this project, led by scholars Geoffrey Crossick and Patrycja Kaszynska, was a critique of the division of cultural value into the instrumental, institutional and intrinsic silos proposed by Holden. They argue that the instrumental–intrinsic distinction identified is not sustainable.^[30]Geoffrey Crossick & Patrycja Kaszynska, ‘Under Construction: Towards a Framework for Cultural Value’, Cultural Trends, vol. 23, no. 2, 2014, pp. 120–31. The Olsberg report cites this article (op. cit., p. 6), but overlooks its critique of the fundamental assumptions relied on by Olsberg. I want to highlight a number of key arguments from Crossick and Kaszynska’s research:

• The arts and cultural sectors have felt obliged to make their case for public funding in terms different from those of cultural experience itself. This ‘defensive instrumentalism’ seeks to explain the value of art and culture in terms of benefits outside their own sphere, ranging from urban regeneration and social inclusion, to community, cohesion, health and tourism.^[31]Crossick & Kaszynska, Understanding the Value of Arts & Culture, op. cit., p. 17; here, they are citing Eleonora Belfiore, ‘“Defensive Instrumentalism” and the Legacy of New Labour’s Cultural Policies’, Cultural Trends, vol. 21, no. 2, 2002, pp. 103–11. The paper suggests the importance of ‘looking at the actual experience of culture and the arts rather than the ancillary effects of this experience’, and that we need to regard the arts as ‘instruments of experience’ (in the words of academic Kees Vuyk) because all of these other benefits ‘cascade’ from the nature and quality of this experience.^[32]Crossick & Kaszynska, Understanding the Value of Arts & Culture, ibid., pp. 21–2, emphasis removed.

• Cultural value is incredibly complex: ‘Culture is an organism not a mechanism; it is much messier and more dynamic than linear models allow.’^[33]ibid., p. 97. Here, they are citing John Holden’s 2015 The Ecology of Culture, also commissioned by the AHRC; see <https://ahrc.ukri.org/documents/project-reports-and-reviews/the-ecology-of-culture/>, accessed 2 June 2019.

• There have been many arguments made about how the creativity and creative thinking that develop within the artistic and cultural spheres feed into innovation across other sectors of the economy. However, the authors ask: What about innovation within the cultural industries themselves? Why aren’t we talking, for example, about what gives rise to an innovative film sector?

• Culture is – to draw on Holden – not an economy; it is an ecosystem, and it is made up not of parts but of incredibly complex relationships.^[34]Crossick & Kaszynska, Understanding the Value of Arts & Culture, ibid., p. 95.

Culture is not an economy but an ecosystem

One of the most interesting investigations commissioned under the umbrella of the AHRC’s cultural-value project was headed by the same John Holden whose 2004 framework for defining cultural value was used by Olsberg. In this 2015 report, however, Holden has completely supplanted this earlier model, understanding cultural value through ecological terminology – interconnectivity, entanglement, intricate webs of connection, permeable boundaries, symbiosis and cross-fertilisation. Relationships now form the core of Holden’s thesis on cultural value: ‘cultural ecology is intensively interlinked, with many feedback loops and systemic strengths’, and ‘we are embedded in [the ecosystem] – it makes us, at the same time as we make it’.^[35]Holden, The Ecology of Culture, op. cit., pp. 2, 12. Three of Holden’s core arguments are useful for thinking specifically about the role of film culture – in the form of film criticism and film education especially – within a larger screen-sector ecology:

• In order to regenerate itself, the cultural sector needs the flow of ideas, people, finance and products. Ideas are as essential to these networks as the other three elements.

• Educational institutions play a major part in training and fostering filmmakers, but privileging skills development at the expense of nurturing ideas restricts the capacity of education to produce the complex factors that enable creativity. Holden calls the focus on talent development a ‘frontloaded’ approach, which is only the ‘supplyside’ of cultural production; however, we must also look at the demand side – as much as educational institutions train creative workers, they also educate and create audiences.

• What is most important for a vital, fertile, regenerative cultural ecology is a healthy cultural education sector. However, Holden warns against a ‘spillover’ model: the idea that academic scholarship and writing trickle down into criticism and talent development in a unidirectional flow. Instead, he encourages us to understand the complex and multifarious feedback loops and systems that work in both directions between educators, scholars and critics and filmmakers.^[36]ibid., pp. 3, 11–2, 19, 29.

Film criticism, film studies, film culture

Where does this ecological metaphor get those of us who work in the film-culture sphere? On one hand, it gives us a way to think about and articulate more clearly the significance of the film-critical work that we do. In the academy, this is important, as film scholars increasingly need to justify research and teaching in terms of the current impact and engagement agenda. Often, scholars will consider their extracurricular activities as the ‘engagement’ part of their work and their scholarship as something else; this distinction helps us recognise the importance of the differing discourses enabled by both film criticism and film studies and argue for them. On the other hand, as an academic who writes across scholarly and critical genres, I find that Holden’s ecological model helps me to think in more flexible and open ways about what I write and how I write. That image of an enormous, networked web of interrelationships with two-way feedback loops reminds me of how I both feed and am fed by those networks.

Holden stresses that the health of a system can be assessed by looking at the ‘number and density’ of its relationships and cross-fertilisations from multiple inputs. As cultural ecologies are so complex – and their connections, so dense – that it is impossible to fully grasp them, he proposes mapping out these flows and interdependences on the small scale of local ecologies.^[37]ibid., p. 32. This kind of mapping would give a completely different picture than the quantitative methods informing Screen Australia’s investigations. In a great example of this kind of mapping (which also brilliantly exposes what is missing from the Screen Currency report), a 2018 essay by film critic Adrian Martin lays out the vibrant cultural ecologies of Melbourne in the 1980s and the creative outpourings generated by the complex interactions within this local cultural scene.^[38]Adrian Martin, ‘Retying the Threads’, in Mysteries of Cinema: Reflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982–2016, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2018, pp. 13–28. We can trace back to this ecology the foundations for Film Victoria’s ongoing prioritising of film culture.

Given the agenda-setting role of Screen Australia, it is important to question the terms of reference of its milestone cultural-value report, as the questions we ask determine the answers we are going to get. A standard critique is that, under the ‘tyranny of metrification’ (as Meyrick and his co-authors describe it), resources are channelled to what can be counted.^[39]For a substantial, recent critique of this agenda, see Meyrick, Phiddian & Barnett, op. cit. If the assessment of cultural value focuses on quantifiable measures of production and distribution, and ignores the ways that production and distribution interlock with film education, criticism and broader cultural debate, the default economic-rationalist approach would entail the sidelining of these fertile screen-culture ecologies. But, as critic Peter Thompson has asserted, culture ‘is not an optional extra […] Culture is oxygen.’^[40]Peter Thompson, quoted in French & Poole, op. cit., p. 8. Nor can we ignore the myriad ways that these government-set agendas intermesh with shifting priorities in film training and education, as vocationally oriented curricula focus increasingly on building skills and product. Holden’s understanding of the crucial role of complex ecologies starkly exposes the shortcomings of such tendencies by institutions devoted to film education and training, whose model of a cultural environment is like a petri dish – a sterile culturing system in a lab. Yet what we need is a microbiome: a bubbling, thriving multitude of complex, competitive and symbiotic intermingling and cross-fertilising relationships – a ferment of ideas. Of course it is important to train talent, but we should not think of talent without the field, the creative product without the discursive sphere.

Just as a course on writing fiction is best served by the requirement that students read fiction and literary analysis, or music training is enriched by the study of the existing musical canon and related theory, we need film curricula underpinned by a serious consideration of where cinematic ideas come from and how they circulate. By extension, we need to challenge any approach that places substantial emphasis on practice without accompanying engagement with conceptual research and development as well as contemporary discourse; this especially applies to film production, distribution and exhibition today. Film culture affords us a diverse, ongoing archive that offers filmmakers and film consumers kernels of future innovation, so the neglect of film culture – of the ways that education, artistic engagement, debate and criticism sustain the industry – feels like an affront to the generations of film scholars, critics and creatives who, since the beginning of cinema, have reflected on what the artform is, how it works and what it could be: to intervene in and nurture a dynamic film culture.

The Screen Currency report offers no conception of a film-culture sector – of contexts within which ideas are generated, fermented and disseminated – nor does it give a sense of what an aesthetic field might be, or of the reasons that the country’s pre-eminent screen agency might consider all of these important. In our bid to value ‘Australian storytelling’, however, should we not also be fostering an appreciation of, better engagement with and innovation within the modes of storytelling themselves? As long as the framework for understanding cultural value focuses on quantitative metrics and industry outcomes only, we will continue to overlook the vital role played by film culture in keeping the screen industries healthy. As Holden reminds us, the screen sector also has a role to play in creating and sustaining its own audiences. Without a vibrant ferment of ideas about film, television and digital media, on their own terms, fuelled by critical writing, debate, education, and the training of future film and screen workers, we cannot realise the full potential of Australia’s screen sector.

This article has been refereed.