Beyond the Cringe: Australia, Britain, and the Post-Colonial Film Avant-Garde

For some decades there has been two-way traffic between the avant-garde film worlds of Australia and the UK. Australian artists arrive from a local scene that continues to resonate with the influences of an avant-garde historically centred in and driven from Western Europe and the United States. The experimental film and video practices that are discussed here encompass a range of critical concerns around form, structure, reflexivity, specificity, material and so on, which have their roots, if not their current philosophical concerns, in the modernist avant-garde. Addressing these practices as ‘post-colonial phenomena’ relates them to a broader constellation of historical cultural concerns.