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By exploring the critical, journalistic and popular reception of Ingmar Bergman's films in Australia in the late 1950s and '60s, as well as tracing their patterns of exhibition and distribution, this essay examines how particular discourses and approaches to Bergman were already well and truly in place by the early '60s and prior to the arrival of most of the director's films in the country. The critical response to and release of Bergman's work in Australia does reveal minor antipodean variations and is an important staging ground for an emerging and quickly evolving screen culture, as well as debates around film as "art". But it is also highly referential and reverential to received opinion from overseas and evidences the truly global reach of Bergman's cinema and reputation during this period. This essay will examine the appearance of a range of Bergman films in Australia starting with Smiles of a Summer Night in 1957 and concluding with the controversial release of the heavily censored The Silence in 1965, fashioning evidence for a boom in "Bergmania" that reaches a peak in 1961–62 and provides an important test case for the rise of "foreign" film distribution in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Screen Australia's report Beyond the Box Office: Understanding Audiences in a Multi-Screen World (2011) identifies the resilience of established access points for distribution and exhibition despite expanding access to new avenues of engagement with screen content and participation with digital screens. Whilst much research seems to respond to a perceived threat about the open windows and unmapped territories of the digital signalling the demise of celluloid film culture, the broader spectrum of multimedia forms creating deep and broad audience engagement are not specific to the new millennium. One hundred years ago, a collection of early experiments in cinema – The Corrick Collection – was one of the first film programmes to tour Australia. Beginning with an examination of contemporary patterns of distribution and then considering the pathways forged by The Corrick family, this article aims to explore how early distributors developed innovative approaches to attracting audiences and exposing them to this new attraction. The Corrick Collection toured capital cities, regional Australia and ventured into South East Asia and Europe. An examination of the innovations developed in early film culture will reveal resonances with contemporary distribution. This historical project will not imagine the new supplanting the old, nor will it account for the emergence of film culture in evolutionary terms, instead, it aims to use contemporary approaches to historiography to highlight the intermediality of early film and to display the presence of celluloid behind digital culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the genial 1950s matinee-styled adventure, King of the Coral Sea, a film set on Thursday Island. With Chips Rafferty playing pearling lugger captain Ted King, the film extends Rafferty's previous iconic national repertoire of digger, drover and bushman in an unprecedented (in entertainment cinema) imaginative 'nationalization' of the Torres Strait. The article proposes that the narrative concerning the protection of the nation's daughters and borders from the threat of shadowy European illegal migration can be read as a fantastic reversal of power relations in the post-war Pacific, where Australian multiracial enterprise is ably supported by American muscle. It locates the production and reception of the film within the discursive habitat of popular illustrated magazines, focusing on the visual deployment of race and gender in respect to assimilationist anxieties that form part of the imagining of a modern 'Australian way of life'. It further considers how this discourse shapes the deployment of the Torres Strait in a diegetic and ext radiegetic relay, in order to imagine an established nationhood for Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]