Kennedy Miller Mitchell and the relationality of Australian cinema – global film practice in Australia

ABSTRACT Recent work in Australian screen scholarship has been focused on expanding the limitations of our national cinema discourse. Terms like Deb Verhoeven’s ‘Industry 3’ or Ben Goldsmith’s ‘outward-looking Australian cinema’, and the discourse of ‘transnationality’ more generally, exemplify a contemporary tendency that seeks out new conceptual foundations from which to analyse Australian film as interrelated with international industrial contexts. US film historian Janet Staiger has proposed one potentially fruitful alternative conceptual schema. Staiger argues that the concept of ‘film practices’ offers a way to carry out the historiographical grouping of film texts without recourse to categories of nationality or transnationality. In this article, I examine the analytical possibilities of the film practice schema in the Australian context. I focus on the Australian production firm Kennedy Miller Mitchell, which I identify as operating within the contemporary classical Hollywood cinema practice. Scholars have previously encountered conceptual deficiencies in grouping the work of this firm under prevailing terms of national cinema discourse. I show how the application of the film practice schema can make better sense of Kennedy Miller Mitchell’s place in the Australian and international screen industries, and I assess some of the advantages and disadvantages of this approach for future scholarship.