There have been times in years past when my own house made me so bored and restless that I spent whole Saturdays doing the rounds of my friends, dropping in for cups of tea and a chat. My behaviour in the blogosphere lately has been exactly like that – for some reason everybody else’s blog has been more interesting to read and write at than my own. So this is where I’ve been for the last couple of days…

At Junk for Code, I’ve been engaged with Gary’s posts (one, two and especially three) about the idea of Australian identity and cinema. We’ve had some productive and enjoyable discussions about all this and as always I’ve been especially concerned with the (im)possibility of presenting a “cosmopolitan” Australia to the rest of the world. The problem as I see it is that it is not yet possible to imagine a “cultured’ Australia in any terms other than those of European modernism. In a postcolonial (or “settler”) culture this is obviously not good enough on its own. In fact, uncultured multiculturalism might be a better way to think of it – uncultured meaning not owned, managed, and maintained by a white, middleclass, urban elite. I also took issue with Gary’s use of the term “lowest common denominator” in talking about mass culture in this post.

Another of my daily reads is Anne Galloway, who has been thinking about Nietsche, machine memory, and the idea of the Forgetting Machine, which I’ve found absolutely fascinating. In the comments section of her post she has drawn in a bunch of people thinking about various kinds of remembering and forgetting (nostalgia, dementia, and hope for example). And I had my own intense stab of nostalgia on coming across this post at antipopper about 90s indie-swoon-pop band The Clouds.

So if I were to synthesise these two areas of concern, it might be to start thinking about the cinematic imagination as a powerful nostalgia engine, especially when it tries to imagine “Australianness”. The cinema remembers selectively, intensely, and affectively, and forgets far more than it remembers. Case in point: while reading Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang I also watched the recent movie Ned Kelly on video. Despite starring cute boys (Heath Ledger, Orlando Bloom), it was a wimpy, romanticized whitewash of what is already a dangerously white and masculinist tale. The direct comparison with the written, but still fictionalised version, made the limitations (rather than the evocative power) of cinema glaringly obvious.