The Australian New Wave

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In cinema history, the 1970s are most well known for the breakout of American independent filmmakers. By the end of the 1960s, Hollywood studios were at a loss as to how to get audiences into theatres, and so gave the green light to young filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Dennis Hopper and so on. This movement is now held in higher popular esteem than virtually any other, due in large part to the cultural dominance of America across the world.

But the 70s also saw the emergence of an Australian New Wave, with filmmakers like Philip Noyce (Newsfront), Gillian Armstrong (My Brilliant Career), Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant) and Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock) all taking advantage of what were mostly Government funds to create distinctively Australian works to local and overseas acclaim. Though it’s worth noting the reception from overseas was usually more positive than our own shores.

“[The Australian new wave] has been extraordinary. It does hold great hope for the future. It has certainly taught the British film industry a thing or two. And as a whingeing Pom, may I say I’m damned jealous.“

- Derek Malcolm, film critic for The Guardian, 1980
From David Stratton’s “The Last New Wave”

The Notorious Salo – Banned Again

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Refused Classification reports that Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Salo has been banned yet again by the wise masters at the Office of Film and Literature Classification.

Having viewed the film myself (it’s freely available at a certain public library, shh…) I have to say there really is no reason this film could not be given an R18+ certificate.

The scenes I found most objectionable were in the “Circle of Shit” sequence, but you can’t ban a work of art purely based on whether or not the scenes depicted are really, really gross. While I wasn’t a fan of the film I don’t think anyone who has the intellectual fortitude to sit and watch a movie with subtitles would find themselves irreversibly damaged by the time the credits roll.

It’s been released in Britain by the prestigious British Film Institute, along with essays on its artistic merits and the censorship troubles it has faced across the world. It’s sad to see that Australia is still stuck in the 1950s when it comes to seeing censorship of art as acceptable, though it probably wasn’t the best idea to submit the film for classification this close to the Bill Henson episode.

Hollowmen – Episode 2

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Episode Two of Hollowmen is now available here at the ABC website. (Why is the first episode no longer available? Anyone who pays taxes in Australia paid for the show, why can’t we watch it on demand?) It details the teams reaction to a report that makes good on the Prime Minister’s election promise to not give diplomatic postings in foreign countries as rewards to those who have served the party. Unfortunately, the party has already planned to give such a position to an obnoxious senator (clearly a riff on the Nationals) who has virtually no qualifications whatsoever.

The Story of Stuff

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I’ll post some original content soon, I promise!

Until then, have a watch of this: “The Story of Stuff”. It’s supremely interesting.

Apocalypse Now originally set to shoot in Australia

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If the Australian Government had made a different decision, Apocalypse Now would have been shot in far North Queensland. Undoubtedly this would have changed the entire film, as shooting in the Philippines famously turned out to be a total disaster. The ending also would have been different, as Francis Ford Coppola only decided on the ending to the film while in the Philippines he saw a cow being butchered. This is from David Stratton’s autobiography I Peed on Fellini.

…An altogether larger project which was nearly made in Australia was Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Sometime in 1974, the year I screened the world premiere of Coppola’s magnificent film, The Conversation, at the SFF [Sydney Film Festival], I received a visit from Dean Tavoularis, who was the director’s production designer, and Fred Roos, one of his producers. They told me that Coppola was planning to make a screen version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, updated to the conflict in Vietnam. They wanted to shoot the film in far north Queensland, and they were passing through Sydney touching base with local production companies that might be of assistance. It sounded like an enormously exciting project, but it hinged on the willingness of the Federal Government to make available to the production men and material, including helicopters, from the armed forces. This the Government was, as it turned out, unwilling to do, and so in the end Apocalypse Now was shot, with great difficulty, in the Philippines, where access to military hardware was easier but where the weather proved to be extremely treacherous. The film wasn’t completed until 1979. Over twenty years later, American director Terrence Malick was able to shoot The Thin Red Line, based on the James Jones book about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal, in North Queensland.

Weekend Music: Warumpi Band – My Island Home

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Is this clip culturally cringe worthy? Or does it make the eyes well up with pride? You decide.

Dexter

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My previous post about Hollowmen got me thinking about the way morality is portrayed in some TV shows. I’m not really a fan of Dexter, though I’ve only seen the first episode. It gives us a serial killer who kills other serial killers, and asks us whether this character is moral in his actions, since in the long run he’s saving lives. The problem with this is that Dexter admits to not having any feelings one way or the other, and hence isn’t really a human character at all. Because of this, questions of morality are purely hypothetical. We can still ask the question of whether he’s moral or not, but the answer doesn’t really have any bearing on us personally.

It’s possible to make a comparison with American Psycho, also about a physically attractive, emotionally empty serial killer, and Michael C. Hall’s performance is as good as Christian Bale’s. But Mary Harron’s film (and the book by Bret Easton Ellis) made no question of showing Patrick Bateman’s actions as horrible, and instead focused on how such a disturbed perspective on life could be reached. Dexter was, we are led to believe, “born” a serial killer, and is incapable of having any moral qualms about what he is doing. Factors that have influenced his way of behaviour have as yet not been brought into question. Hopefully this changes as the show progresses (I know I’m way behind. The show only just came to mainstream Australian TV)

Is it okay for a serial killer to be let loose, so long as his serially killing other serial killers? What if he was found out and accepted by the public to be doing a good thing? Would we get copycat serial killers killing serial killers? What would happen if all serial killers decided to just kill serial killers? Who cares? The whole idea of the Dexter character is ridiculous to begin with.

Of course, it’s just a TV show, but Dexter is seen as “one of television’s most fiendishly intelligent new dramas”. I’ve yet to see much more substance than an episode of CSI.

For an examination of a murderer with real ambiguity, check out Jon Jost’s Last Chants For a Slow Dance.

Hollowmen – Episode 1

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On Wednesday night the ABC screened the first episode of Hollowmen, the new series from the Working Dog team. Directed by Rob Sitch and written by Sitch, Santo Cilauro and Tom Gleisner (but seemingly no Jane Kennedy?). Hopefully their previous production, Thank God You’re Here, is over with, because Hollowmen shows where the teams’ real strengths lie. The most obvious thing to say is that they’re now doing to politics what they did to current affairs programs with Frontline.

Before I spoil it for you, you can watch the entire episode for free here at the ABC website. (Update: Unfortunately you can only watch the latest episode from the ABC site. You could probably find a torrent for earlier episodes if you search on Google, but that would be wrong.)

“I Peed on Fellini”

I’m currently reading David Stratton’s autobiography, “I Peed on Fellini”. His life doesn’t really seem that exciting (apparently on the advice of friends, he took out most of the sex. I’m not sure whether I should be annoyed or grateful) and his descriptions of his interactions with the great directors of previous eras, beyond the titular incident, haven’t yet gone passed the depth of “I met Godard, we talked briefly”, which is a real shame. What’s the opinion of Stratton as to how the personalities of the directors he met affected the films they made? It would have been nice to know.

What is interesting is seeing the growth of the Sydney Film Festival, which he directed for 17 years, and his fights against censorship. Before his protests censorship was simply seen as the norm in Australia, and the changes he brought about helped get Australia out of the middle-ages mentality it was in. Previously, festival audiences weren’t even informed that cuts had been made, something that sounds completely ridiculous now.

Check out this story from the book that highlights just how silly the censors were (and probably still are) about screening Luchino Visconti’s film “Sandra” to the censorship board:

Although I hadn’t seen Sandra I knew its content and I was rather nervous because I hadn’t included in the synopsis, which I was obliged to send to the censors’ office prior to the screening, the fact that incest was involved. At the climax of the film, a brother and sister (played by Claudia Cardinale and Jean Sorel) engaged in discreet sex (just off-screen) on a woollen rug in front of a blazing fire in a sequence well in keeping with Visconti’s operatic modern take on Greek mythology. How would Prowse and his colleagues react to the incest scene, even though it was very tactfully presented? I soon found out. After the screening, Prowse took me to one side ‘You film festival people are a strange lot,’ he said. ‘You like films no-one else can understand. Didn’t you find that confusing? I thought, at the beginning, they were brother and sister.’ The film was passed, without cuts.

Cultural Cringe

Whenever I hear about an Australian film, there’s a part of me that has already decided that it probably isn’t any good. I know I’m not alone in this, but where does this cultural cringe arise?

Perhaps it’s all in the accent. Since we’re so used to hearing American accents as the norm in films, hearing one of our own on the big screen feels unnatural. It goes further than the accent, however, and can be virtually anything that is uniquely Australian that sets off the cringe. Perhaps the pervasiveness of Hollywood has skewed our perspective about what is “real” in a cinema. A movie is set in its own world of make-believe, and when an Australian begins talking with an accent we recognize from reality, the make believe and real worlds clash and it just doesn’t seem right, and then we’re cringing.

Or are the films themselves to blame? It’s seems like this debate has been going on since the beginning of time. Why can’t our films compete with Hollywood? Is it the Governments fault for not funding the right movies, or our own fault for just making garbage?