Pure Sh-ocker (2016) is a Mock- Mockumentary, investigating the potential for Australian exploitation (Ozploitation) films—specifically those from the 1970s to the new millennium—to open up a space for questioning the production and communication of Australian identity through the medium of film, as was received by both national and international audiences. Closer examination of the Ozploitation genre reveals that what could be dismissed as crass entertainment can also be read as a site for maintaining and reproducing the fantasy of a homogenous national identity. While such films helped put Australian culture on the international map, they nevertheless maintain a lingering unease as sites for the production of exclusion. This is evident in the persistent search for cultural independence and self identification, which reveals the tension between the adherence to or rejection of old icons and the pursuit to create new ones. Furthermore, through exploring the Ozploitation films that proliferate Youtube’s ubiquitous archives, they can function as a quasi time capsule or cinematic window, offering a space to look out beyond their ‘origins’ toward their fragmented condition as a product of this highly mediated, contemporary landscape into new defamiliarised territory. Pure Sh-ocker reflects on this immaterial acceleration by drawing out the potential of appropriation to reflect on these past representations of Australian identity. To further observe how this pursuit has morphed through their dissemination online and what inextricably remains the same.
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