Before and after ACMI: a case study in the cultural history of Australia's State film centres

ABSTRACT The 2002 opening of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne reconfigured the State Film Centre of Victoria (SFCV) for a new millennial moment of cinema and media, and within the context of the new languages of post-production, media convergence, digitisation, and globalisation. This occasion, with its ongoing emphasis on immediacy and the future, urgently requires a substantial research project that looks backwards and forwards at the same time: that is, a project that at once provides an understanding of the historical underpinning that gave rise to the present institution, and also of the current context that will give shape to the institution as it evolves into the future. Like all public institutions, ACMI evolved from, and is currently made up of, a complex series of threads drawing on a host of ancillary organisations, events, locations, and individuals that have a similarly intricate history that stretches back to the immediate post-WWII period. This essay provides an outline of a larger research project that will investigate the ways in which these various forces have given rise to the character of ACMI, informing an ongoing understanding of the place of ACMI within Australia's cultural profile. In this way the project will explain how ACMI has become – and can continue to be – an enormously successful model for government-supported, cultural institutions locally and internationally.