Australian Film Theory and Criticism: Volume 3: Documents

by Deane Williams (Editor), Constantine Verevis (Editor)

Overview

The third part of a three-volume work devoted to mapping the transnational history of Australian film studies, Volume 3: Documents concludes the project by gathering together the documents that were produced during the rise of film studies in Australian academia from 1975-85. Through these sources we see the development of the particularities of Australian film theory and criticism, its relationship to its international counterparts, and the establishment of key positions and the directions in which they develop. Editors Deane Williams and Constantine Verevis here collect key articles, including the works of Paul Willemen, Sam Rohdie, Ross Gibson, and Meaghan Morris, among many others, in order to conclude this pioneering historiographic account of Australian film studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783208371
Publisher:	Intellect, Limited
Publication date:	02/15/2018
Pages:	500
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Deane Williams is associate professor of film and screen studies at Monash University, Melbourne. He is the author of Australian Post-War Documentary Film: An Arc of Mirrors, Michael Winterbottom (with Brian McFarlane), the three-volume Australian Film Theory and Criticism (co-edited with Noel King and Constantine Verevis), The Cinema of Sean Penn: In and Out of Place, and Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality and Technology (with Julia Vassilieva).

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

1972

Lumiere, Nov. 1972, pp. 18-19

Experimentalists 1 Sylvia Lawson

Like the outside of the Sydney Opera House, the Experimental Film Fund is one of those clear reasons for hope that Australia one day will become a civilized country, and plain evidence that it is, in patches, civilized even now.

No doubt too that, like the Opera House, the fund came into being for highly political reasons; at the PR screening of Fund films in Sydney last month, Mr [Peter] Howson [Minister for the Environment, Aborigines and the Arts] left us in no doubt that it is and will continue to be used for political flag-waving. No doubt it has not always been perfectly administered, and that some worthwhile projects have been refused and some less-worthwhile ones accepted.

All that granted, the fund is still one of the best things we have. It embodies our communal recognition that film is something other and more than hove story, that it's a pervasive, polymorphous, infinitely variegated form of late-twentieth-century expression, which can and should be within the grasp of many.

It carries on, however, under running fire. The attacks are generally of two kinds. The film-trade and the TV execs hate the fund because, they say, it encourages sloppy amateurism, self-indulgent individualism – 'these longhairs don't understand that people go to the pictures to be entertained', and so forth.

Some of the distrib./exhib. men like to point to the more incoherent examples of avant-garde filmmaking and use them as sticks with which to beat local film industry campaigners. These, of course, are slingshots from the camp of the Philistines, but they can't be ignored; the film-trade men have been known upon occasions to influence politicians and handers-out of grants.

The other sort of perennial criticism has to be taken more seriously. It comes from film industry people, documentary makers and prospective feature makers, who feel that the fund, along with the proposals for the Film School, exists as a convenient – and not really all that expensive – smokescreen for the government's essential inaction on the question of establishing a viable and continuously functioning film industry.

They are partly right, and Mr Howson, when he stood up in his turn at the Commonwealth Centre theatrette after Peter Coleman had led off, and said his piece like a good schoolboy about how much the government was doing for the film industry, seemed to confirm precisely that argument: that the fund is a piece of tokenism, that it is actually depriving the professionals.

There are two main points to be made against this. The first is that the real tokenism, the real enemy of professional feature-making, is the Film Development Corporation as it is at present constituted, with its implacable policy of rejecting out of hand every project above weird-mob level; and that, of course, is another story.

The second point is that however much the fund may be employed by politicians as a token, it's the sort of token that squirms embarrassingly alive in their grasp. The great and merciful safeguard is that the filmmaker, once approved for his modest grant, has total control of what he does with it. Thus the fund does enable visual art to come into being. And all art is, on one level or another, subversive.

Which was the whole problem, of course, about choosing from the fund's 60 odd completed films for the PR screening. What on earth would qualify as nice, pleasant, safe and inoffensive? Very damn little, and we can all be proud of the fact, Aggy Read's Infinity girl, a segment of Far be it me from it, was listed for screening and knocked out at the last minute, a ludicrous decision – if indeed the problem was one of not offending Howson, Dr Coombs or someone – since of the whole line up, it was probably the only one you could in fact describe as pleasant: a slightly naive montage-lyric centred on topless Julie, a sinuous young boobs-a-lot lady contemplated prettily on the rocks and in the waves.

So they picked films that illustrated poems, or else had verse backing the images: Frank Fletcher's The blind man, essentially a strip of pictures for Judith Wright's rather windy and incantatory poem, and John Scheffer's Drought much more interesting visually, with great Francis-Bacon effects in the distorting mirror images, but marred by a spoken ballad that, though evidently written recently, belonged to the maudlin 90s.

They also picked films with social consciences: Peter Beilby's Eye to Eye, a modest, tentatively probing observation of autistic children in a training centre environment; it makes an incidental visual poem of their lost eyes and faces, but quite deliberately (or so it seemed to me) avoids any sort of resolving statement. Tony Kovacs' The Samaritan kind is a bit schematic – young hoods menace a clutch of late-night ferry passengers; the only one with kindness for their victims is the drunk whom everyone avoided – and clumsy here and there in the filming, but it did evoke the mindless violence with nerve-jangling effectiveness.

The other example of narrative on the programme was Michael Robertson's Rod, coscripted with Buzo; prosperous young married Couple wake up one northern suburbs morning to view the fragmentation of their earlier hopes and feelings. The colours are often lovely, but it misses, perhaps because Robertson views his people too coldly; they're not as typical as he seems to think they are, and too well-heeled and out of touch to merit much sympathy. The script is essentially a questioning and probing one, and fails where it neither questions nor probes enough. All this, however, would obviously bear discussion, and the film should be seen more widely.

Two filmers emerged from the session as real image makers – John Scheffer and Victor Kay. Kay's Magic camera is alternately enchanting and exasperating; double exposed scarlet tinted neg. of cows, beaches, motorbikes, trees in blossom and girls on garden swings can be wild visual magic, when the rhythm of the cutting allows us pause to contemplate the harmonies they offer. When it doesn't, it's all pointlessly frenetic, and sometimes Kay lets himself do all over again what the cigarette ad makers have made redundant and cliched forever. (Neither Kay nor Scheffer match Paul Winkler for originality; Winkler's Scars, of all recent films enabled by the fund, ought to have been shown. Of his films, and others here unjustly disregarded, I hope to write in another issue.)

The fifteen-minute extract from Su and Jef Doring's Tidikawa and friends was, beyond all argument, the best thing on Mr Howson's programme; and in toto the film should be enough to silence the fund's opponents for life. Researched and directed by the Dorings, splendidly photographed by Michael Edels and Jack Bellamy and edited (down from 20 hours to 80 minutes) with brilliant tact and vigour by Rod Adamson, the film comes out of four months' living with the Bedamini, one of the least known of New Guinea highland peoples.

Without commentary, except for the introductory passage, the film offers a partial portrait, an exploration of those parts of their lives that the Bedamini allowed the Dorings to see. Young men prepare for initiation; a medium (Tidikawa) waits the attendance of the spirit child from the treetops; a mother weeps, wails and mourns under a tree that holds, on a high platform, the corpse of her baby; inside the long-house, they eat for the baby's wake.

We come near them with a sort of careful intimacy; close angles of head and shoulder, hands and feet in action, bodies of mothers and children communicate much unselfconscious grace and sensuality; but the Dorings don't force it, and though we know the houses and trees, and have seen the pigs being slaughtered for the initiation feast, we know the Bedamini only so far, and no further at the end. We know, or guess, also how much goes on out of frame and past the end of the film, and we know all that would be worth seeing too. The film preserves vividness and strangeness together, a great balancing feat of craft and sensibility in one. It should, and will, find a worldwide audience.

Any fund that can help – or indeed bring – this sort of footage into the visible world should be defended to the last ditch (with such defence as includes much constructive criticism). Its limits are wide enough to encompass Tidikawa, and also the work of Albie Thoms; the Scheffer, Kay, Read and Winkler and Cantrill films; not forgetting other diverse growths like Or forever hold your peace, The phallic forest, Brake fluid and The machine gun.

Critics of the enterprise may well feel some alarm that what might at first have looked like a neat little cultural enterprise, a tidy garden, has burgeoned and proliferated so abundantly. Nobody, of course, has to like all the varieties on show. But it should be remembered that the ground where they flourish was, only ten years ago, a desert, where the only hope for the short filmmaker was to con a soft sell doco out of BHP or Caltex.

CHAPTER 2

1974

Cinema Papers, no, 1, Jan, 1974, pp. 30-35

Francis Birtles: Cyclist, Explorer, Kodaker Ina Bertrand

Australians have always shared civilized man's fascination for the primitive, particularly If It can be enjoyed from the comfortable security of an armchair or a cinema seat. In spite of our reputations for being hard-riding, hard-drinking, individualists, most of us spend, and have done for close to a century, most of our lives in cities or suburbs. Because we can enjoy the far outback only vicariously, we listen spellbound to the real adventurers, explorers and surveyors who have pitted their human weakness against nature and the elements. Francis Birtles was such a man, one of many whose exploits were followed with enthusiasm by the Australian public through newspapers and journals, books and films, in the first quarter of this century.

Francis' grandparents, James and Jane, and son David, had arrived from Macclesfield, England in the 1870s. David married another Jane and their son Francis was born 7 December 1882 in Melbourne. Francis was educated at South Wandin Primary School, and then took up a life of adventure that included sailing twice round the world before he was 17 years old, becoming an apprentice seaman on a tramp steamer in the Indian Ocean, jumping ship to join the Boer War and acting as a police trooper in Zululand. Though he returned to Australia, the wanderlust was still strong, and he began a series of long-distance push-bike rides, all notable either for their length, speed or difficult route, many of them establishing records.

He took four months to ride from Fremantle to Sydney in early 1907, attempted the Melbourne to Sydney push-bike record in January 1907, travelling Sydney to Sydney via Brisbane, Darwin, Adelaide and Melbourne, covering 8300 miles in thirteen months from August 1907, took only 44 days to ride more than 3000 miles from Fremantle to Sydney via Broken Hill in late 1909 and travelling around Australia once more from Sydney between February 1910 and January 1911. Others attempted similar feats in this period: cycling in fact became, with press encouragement, something of a national sport.

Birtles, however, differed from his rivals in one respect: he had developed an interest in still photography while working as a lithographer and on his trips he always carried photographic equipment. He was not the first to take a camera into the outback: that honour probably belongs to Professor Baldwin Spencer, who pioneered ethnographic film in Australia by recording the ceremonies of the Aranda tribe at the turn of the century. But Birtles was the first whose outback adventures were recorded in a commercially popular form.

At first he took only still photos. For instance, on the run from Fremantle to Sydney in 1909 he carried a No. 3A Graflex, made in Sydney by Baker and Rouse, the predecessors of Kodak, and sufficient film for 500 post-card size exposures. The camera was protected inside its copper case by his clean shirt and socks, and the film was stowed in tins with cotton wool packing and sealed with sticking plaster, so that he was able to report how well the camera stood up to the 'bad spills and jolting' of the journey (Australian Photo-review, 22 December 1909: 661). From 1910 onwards he carried a developing tank as well, and developed as he went. The results were used to illustrate his first book (Lonely Lands), and various newspaper and journal articles, all of which helped to finance further journeys. The dramatic descriptions that these writings contained, of adventures such as swimming 'alligator-infested' tidal streams with his accessories strapped to his back, and the striking photographs of scenes like camel caravans or aboriginal murderers in chains, brought him to the notice of the Gaumont Film Company.

Most film programmes at that time were made up of two or three short features, perhaps half an hour long, and a number of shorter 'scenics' (travelogues), 'industrials' (films depicting industrial or agricultural processes) and 'gazettes' (newsreels). Australian feature films were just beginning; but by 1910 there was a vigorous Australian industry producing shorter films, and local audiences were always eager to see the latest local news on film. Birtles could provide both news and drama, and so the Gaumont Company in 1911 sent a cameraman, Richard Primmer, to accompany Birtles from Sydney to Darwin by bicycle, and to record:

[...] moving pictures or interesting scenes, incidents, studies of native life, habits and customs, kangaroo and crocodile hunting, and in Tact anything or interest [...].

(Australian Photo-review, 22 May 1911: 295)

The resulting film was shown in Sydney in May 1912, and in Melbourne in July. It was 3000 feet long, and the reviews published at the time reveal the attitudes and motives of the filmmakers as well as the content of the film.

Audiences were still delighted to be able to see things previously beyond their experience, things like emus running across the plains, the sugar industry in Queensland, the pearling industry on Thursday Island, the tree on the Flinders River where Burke and Wills carved their initials in January 1862. But already the need to inject spectacle and sensation was recognized, and so the film also contained a 'thrilling encounter' between a dog and a seven feet red kangaroo, showed a snake and an iguana exhausted by their long combat, and included a variety of sports enjoyed by the two explorers. Even this was not enough, and so a fight was staged between 'settlers' and aborigines. A reviewer noted that 'the blacks' were 'good actors', who 'entered into the performance with great zest when they were informed that the fight was a "white man's corroboree"' (Argus 11 July 1912). To engineer such a spectacle would have been anathema to an ethnologist like Spencer, whose purposes were rather more serious than to entertain an audience. Birtles' work was also different from the Flaherty school of documentary filmmaking, in which, despite an acknowledged intention to produce a commercially acceptable product, the only tampering with the 'truth' occurs in the editing (though Flaherty himself departed from this precept in Man of Aran, by re-introducing the characters to a trade long abandoned – trawling). At this stage Birtles probably did not even consider himself as a filmmaker. It was Primmer who was responsible for the filming: for Birtles, the finished product was useful primarily as publicity to encourage sponsors for further trips, and the money won from screening the film was simply useful to keep the pot boiling between journeys.

The promoters of the film set up an essay competition asking children to consider 'Do pictures educate?, with special reference to Across Australia with Francis Birtles, and the film ran for ten days to an enthusiastic audience in the Lyceum, 'crowded to overflowing, both afternoon and evening' (Sydney Morning Herald, 27 May 1912). In Melbourne, West's presented the film on a programme with a 'Danish dramatic masterpiece' called For Another's Guilt, with the Grand National Steeplechase, Distillation of Orange Flowers, Arthur Chubb and the Widow, some gazettes, and 'operatic selections, overtures and incidentals by West's Premier Grand Orchestra' (Argus, 11 July 1912). But it survived for only a week, from Monday 15 to Saturday 20 July 1912.

This was not the first time that Birtles had appeared before the public on film, for after Primmer left him in Darwin to return to Sydney with the film for editing and preparation, Birtles went on to Broome and Perth and from there completed his most famous pushbike ride: Fremantle to Sydney, 3175 miles in the record time of 31 days and two hours. He arrived in Sydney 1 February 1912, to be greeted by an enthusiastic crowd, and this welcome was filmed by Gaumont and presented as part of a gazette on 3 February 1912.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction: 'Notes for a History of Contexts' 1

1972 11

Experimentalist 1 13

1974 17

Francis Birtles: Cyclist, Explorer, Kodaker 19

1975 29

Feminist Critique 31

1976 41

Corsetway to Heaven: Looking Back at Picnic at Hanging Rock 43

Editorial Article 45

1978 49

Gilda: Images of Women - Notes for Discussion 51

1979 55

Fetishism in Film 'Theory' and 'Practice' 57

Towards Decolonization: Some Problems and Issues for Film History in Australia 69

The Australian Journal of Screen Theory 78

Independent Feminist Filmmaking in Australia 83

Oedipal Opera: The Restless Years 95

1980 113

Editorial 115

1981

Stock Shock and Schlock 119

Film and History: Canberra Conference 125

Recent 'Political' Documentary: Notes on Union Maids and Harlan County USA 127

The Second Australian Film Conference: Theory Weary 138

The Second Australian Film Conference, or A Long Way from Lana Turner 141

Editorial 144

On Screen 146

1982 167

Feminist Film Theory: Reading the Text 169

'The Public Wants Features!': The (Creative?) Underdevelopment of Australian Independent Film Since the 1960s 190

1983 203

Super 8: The Phenomenon Turned Eventful 205

Independent Feminist Filmmaking and the Black Hole 210

Pornography and Pleasure: The Female Spectator 217

The Australian Film Industry and the Holy Roman Empire 240

Camera Nature: Landscape in Australian Feature Films 253

Changing the Curriculum: The Place of Film in a Departmentof English 262

Australian Documentary Cinema 271

The Practice of Reviewing 285

Australian Filmmaking: Its Public Circulation 299

A Nation Cinema: The Role of the State 310

'Murder, Murder, Dangerous Crime' 318

Remarks on Screen: Introductory Notes for a History of Context 320

1984 341

'National Identity' / 'National History' / 'National Film': The Australian Experience 343

The Australian Journal of Screen Theory 352

After Futur♦Fall 359

Second History and Film Conference Report 369

1985 373

Glimpses of the Present 375

Don Ranvaud: Of Framework and Festivals 381

Yondering: A Reading of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome 387

1987 397

Charles Chauvel: The Last Decade 399

About the Editors 419