Dazzled by the Sun: Corporatising Queensland Film Culture

Abstract

In the wake of economic rationalism and the failed cyber-fantasies of Creative Nation, there has been an increasing tendency towards the corporatisation of film funding bodies at a time when a loosening of self-defensive bureaucratic systems might have been expected.

For example, the Film Finance Corporation has created increasingly complex ‘professional’ systems of management and has foreshadowed a ‘last stage’ script assessment process that has created dismay in industry guilds. After exhaustive prior script development (and many funding and script editing stops), a project will face yet another barrier immediately prior to shooting.

In addition, the increasing invocation of ‘craft skills' themselves as somehow learnable and precisely quantifiable processes, has dug an even deeper moat around funding bodies.

The winding down of Film Queensland and the enhanced corporatisation of the Pacific Film and Television Commission (even to office dress codes!) and incorporation of events such as the Brisbane International Film Festival into an Events Corporation are signs that many largely discredited constructs of The Market are still being applied — to strengthen the power base of the apparatchicks at the expense of their local clients.

The events sketched in this paper are paradigmatic of over-regulated and inner-focused arts funding systems that have lost sight of who their real clients should be.