40,000 Years of Dreaming

40,000 Years of Dreaming is an hour-long documentary film presented by George Miller and produced by the British Film Institute, as part of their Century of Cinema series.

The film acts mainly as a collage of various pieces of Australian film, past and present, including Miller's own Mad Max series. In the film, Miller focuses primarily on Australian cinema as a vessel of public dreaming, creating a link between contemporary Australian cinema and ancient Aborigine dreamtime stories, while at the same time providing leigh-way to those elements that Miller posits make Australian film such a unique blend - the archetypal landscape, and the idiosyncratic Australian types, among them. Miller also places Australian cinema in the context of Joseph Campbell's monomyth, of which Miller has long been a proponent.

Since its release in 1997, it—along with several of the other films in the Century of Cinema series, outside of Martin Scorsese's feature—has long been out of print, minus the occasional television showing.

External links

• 40,000 Years of Dreaming: A Century of Australian Cinema at the Internet Movie Database