MOVIES : Down Under the Cheery Surface : Selections in a UCLA exhibition show how the typical character of Australian movies--naive, upbeat--is undergoing an uneasy transformation.

In the 1992 film “Romper Stomper,” one of Australia’s biggest stars, Russell Crowe--head shaved, body covered in swastika tattoos--turns to his girlfriend and says, “I want people to know I’m proud of my white history, my white blood . . . I don’t want to go the same way as the [Aborigines].”

It’s a chilling moment in Geoffrey Wright’s disturbing film about the eventual crackup of an Australian white supremacist.

It is also a signal to audiences that the Australian character--cheery, often naive, predictably well-meaning and the stock-in-trade of the country’s films to date--is undergoing an uneasy transformation, just as Australian society is in flux.

Although it became an independent country in 1901, Australia hung on for years on the apron strings of Britain. Now this multiethnic nation is confronting its destiny as an industrial nation with close ties to Asia.

Its unfinished search for a new identity is reflected in recent films. They are stark, more often thrilling and edgy. It’s as if young Australian directors are rushing to expose what’s really been under the surface of the smiling, Anglo-centric characters lionized by the cinema of the late 1970s.

Grounding their stories in such subjects as mental illness, race relations, the uneasy tensions between men and women, these directors have turned “Crocodile Dundee” into a relic.

The new Australian cinema of the 1990s is a highlight of a comprehensive series being presented by the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

“Strictly Oz: A History of Australian Film,” which begins Thursday and runs through March 14, is a compilation of 64 features and shorts spanning the nine decades of the Australian film industry. As assembled by curator Andrea Alsberg, the UCLA series does not ignore the Australian filmmakers we’ve come to love and respect over the past 20 years.

The series is full of work, some of it lesser known, from the founders of what was in the late 1970s dubbed the “Australian New Wave.”

Many of these directors--George Miller, Gillian Armstrong, Phillip Noyce, Bruce Beresford, Peter Weir and Fred Schepisi--are now well-established. And unlike the directors from the French “nouvelle vague” of the 1960s, the Australians have been successful working within the Hollywood system.

Their classic films--Beresford’s “Breaker Morant,” Weir’s “Gallipoli,” Armstrong’s “My Brilliant Career,” Noyce’s “Newsfront,” even Schepisi’s first film, “The Devil’s Playground”--were historical dramas that were easily accessible to American audiences, along with Miller’s futuristic “Mad Max” series. (“Mad Max,” “Mad Max 2” [retitled “The Road Warrior” in the States], “My Brilliant Career” and “The Devil’s Playground” are included in the UCLA retrospective.)

They were also movies not being made by Hollywood at that time, a “cinema of nostalgia”--precursors to the “English teacup movies” we’ve come to associate with the films of Merchant-Ivory, replete with a rawness appropriate to the continent where they were shot.

These now-familiar directors, however, didn’t jump straight into the straightforward narrative techniques of the nostalgia films. Like all young artists, they played around and experimented. The UCLA series offers a unique opportunity to see their early works.

“The Cars That Ate Paris” was made by Weir in 1974. It is a bizarre tale of a small town whose obsession with the car culture leads to often hilarious and violent results. Another rarity is Armstrong’s first cinematic effort: The eight-minute “One Hundred a Day” is about a woman working in a shoe factory who has a backyard abortion. In a later program is “Bingo, Bridesmaids & Braces,” Armstrong’s version of a Michael Apted-”Up” film. The feature documentary is a poignant look at 22-year-old working-class women facing with humor the limited horizons their lives seem to have, employing footage from when they were 14 and 18.

Noyce, whose most recent hit was “Clear and Present Danger,” had an even more experimental background. Noyce’s “Backroads” was the first Aboriginal road movie. Only 50 minutes long, the film is a rollicking combination of insight into oppression filled with exuberance and humor. For Noyce fans, there’s more. His 1983 film “Heatwave” is a typically Australian political thriller that turns apocalyptic thanks to the director’s use of music, shock slow-motion and ability to transfer a sense of oppressive heat from the screen to the audience.

The Australian “New Wave” of the late 1970s differed from its French counterpart in another significant respect. Even though the director has more power in the Australian industry, few auteurs in the French tradition emerged; no Jean-Luc Godard nor a facsimile of the classy Claude Chabrol.

The singularity of vision associated with such auteur directors, however, is very much in evidence with the new generation of Australian directors.

These are filmmakers whose consciousness and poetry are rooted in today’s urban, often fractured Australia.

If the films of the “nostalgia boom” were rooted in Anglo-Australian mythology--good English folk trying to conquer the harsh land they’d settled--the films of the 1990s are set in a country struggling to make peace with its ethnic and racial makeup and desperate to balance conflicting traditions of private economic adventurousness with the mothering nature of government.

We already know the most unique of these new visionaries: Jane Campion.

The series, however, offers a chance to see this vision--Campion seems unique in her ability to capture the human subconscious on film--in its most extreme and youthful forms.

Campion’s two prize-winning shorts, “Peel” (1982) and “A Girl’s Own Story” (1983), are combined with the director’s devastating look at the Australian family in her debut feature, “Sweetie.”

But in today’s Australian cinema, Campion is no longer avant garde.

Since this program was run at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curator Alsberg has included more of the recent “new and edgy” works.

Perhaps most disturbing is the winner of the 1995 Australian Film Institute’s Award for best picture--its equivalent of the Oscar--a film from first-time director Michael Rymer titled “Angel Baby.”

It is the story of two mentally disturbed people, dependent on medication, who fall into a tortured love affair--a stylized, wrenching melodrama with an unflinching style and desperate view of love.

Saved from over-reaching many a time by a heartfelt performance from Irish actor John Lynch, “Angel Baby” caps a quite unusual strand evident in Australia’s cinema: the social drama where individuals, often sick and disadvantaged, fight against the often excessive moral authority Australians have vested in their government.

(Two earlier gems in this tradition are in the festival: “Annie’s Coming Out,” the story of a physically disabled young woman fighting to be free of being institutionalized for life, and Ian Munro’s “Custody” [1987], an intriguing docudrama about the agonies of divorce and a subsequent fight for custody.)

Equally unsettling, however, is Geoffrey Wright’s “Romper Stomper.” (Although it had a limited release in the United States, UCLA is presenting it in a companion program with Wright’s more recent “Metal Skin.”)

The hero of Wright’s film, Hando, is a skinhead, an ugly defender of the Anglo-Australian tradition so worshipfully embraced in the nostalgia films of the 1970s.

The film starts with a balletic, horrifying depiction of a skinhead attack on newly arrived Vietnamese immigrants. While this racial conflict underpins the narrative--and the subsequent clashes are rendered in gripping, physical montages--what Wright does is chart the gradual breakdown of his ultra-Aussie protagonist.

On the other side of the gender fence is “Vacant Possession,” a stern but visually stunning account of a woman returning to her past in suburban Sydney. She picks through her psychological baggage as she attempts to battle a mental breakdown. Margot Nash’s directing debut resurrects the unflinching and almost Victorian face of Australian feminism, one where the rigorous bonds of repression are pried loose, although at a price.

The series’ other major contribution is an in-depth look at the films of the silent era. Although often with creaky, almost Victorian-era stories, the films are a testament to the early artistic courage of Australia’s pioneer filmmakers. Seen alongside the films of 1995, they are testament to the determination of Australians to chart their lightest and darkest moments on film.*

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“Strictly Oz: A History of Australian Film,” sponsored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, opens Thursday and runs through March 14 at UCLA’s Melnitz Theatre. For ticket information: (310) 206-3456. A companion series, “Being Australia,” runs Feb. 2-24 at the L.A. County Museum of Art. For information: (213) 857-6010.