Transnational Film Culture in New Zealand

Simon Sigley

Description

In this innovative work of cultural history, Simon Sigley tells the story of film culture in New Zealand from the establishment of the Auckland Film Society in the 1920s to the present day.

Rather than focusing on the work of individual filmmakers, Sigley approaches cinema as a form of social practice. He examines the reception of international film theories and discourses and shows how these ideas helped to shape distinct cultural practices, including new forms of reviewing; new methods of teaching; and new institutions such as film societies, art house cinemas, and film festivals. He goes on to trace the emergence in New Zealand of the full range of activities and institutions associated with a sophisticated film culture—including independent distribution and exhibition networks, film archives, university courses, a local feature film industry, and liberalized film censorship. In doing so, Sigley makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the myriad ways film can shape our thinking, our icons, our institutions, and our conversations. A fascinating case history of how a culture can develop, Transnational Film Culture in New Zealand will be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of anyone interested in film culture and cultural history.

Chapter 1: In Defence of Films as Art

• The Overseas Context

• Film Availability in New Zealand

• The Auckland Film Society (1929)

• The Auckland Star Film Reviews

Chapter 2: Second Thoughts About Art

• The Wellington Film Society (1933)

• The Road to Ruin

• A Parliamentary Inquiry

• Turning Left

• The Federation of Film Societies

• The Film Institutes (1934–39)

Chapter 3: Thesis and Antithesis – Tomorrow on Film

• Early Film Criticism

• Defending the Cinema

• The Importance of Documentaries

• The Cinema and Education

• Other Contributions

Chapter 4: Public Policy and Private Enterprise

• Institutions and Agents

• The National Film Library

• Independent Film Distribution

• Film Criticism Goes National

Chapter 5: Building the Cultural Infrastructure • The Revival

• Developing Discursive Practices

• Collaboration with Business

• The Perils of Passivity

Chapter 6: Happy Together: Education, Networks, Festivals • Magazines and Film Classes

• The Winter Film School

• Commerce and Co-operation

• At the Art-house

Chapter 7: Nouvelle Vague: Film Culture Meets Counterculture

• The Auckland International Film Festival (1969)

• Youth Culture and Film Censorship: 1930s Redux

• The Wellington Film Festival

• Some Conclusions

Chapter 8: Between Spectacle and Memory

• Film Festival Expansion

• Programming the Nation

• Festival Professionalization

• Creating a Memory Site

• Born in Poverty

• The Last Film Search (1993–2000)

• Roadmap for the Future

Sujets

• Energie & environnement
• Nouvelle-Zélande
• Film
• General
• Engineering
• Technology
• Cultural studies
• General officer
• New Zealand
• Nueva Zelanda
• Sciences et techniques
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Public Policy
• Power Resources

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 06 janvier 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783201464
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
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Typesetting: Planman Technologies
ISBN 978-1-84150-660-9
ePUB ISBN 978-1-78320-146-4
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78320-147-1
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
Table of Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1: In Defence of Films as Art
• The Overseas Context
• Film Availability in New Zealand
• The Auckland Film Society (1929)
• The Auckland Star Film Reviews
Chapter 2: Second Thoughts About Art
• The Wellington Film Society (1933)
• The Road to Ruin
• A Parliamentary Inquiry
• Turning Left
• The Federation of Film Societies
• The Film Institutes (1934–39)
Chapter 3: Thesis and Antithesis – Tomorrow on Film
• Early Film Criticism
• Defending the Cinema
• The Importance of Documentaries
• The Cinema and Education
• Other Contributions
Chapter 4: Public Policy and Private Enterprise
• Institutions and Agents
• The National Film Library
• Independent Film Distribution
• Film Criticism Goes National
Chapter 5: Building the Cultural Infrastructure
• The Revival
• Developing Discursive Practices
• Collaboration with Business
• The Perils of Passivity
Chapter 6 Happy Together: Education, Networks, Festivals
• Magazines and Film Classes
• The Winter Film School
• Commerce and Co-operation
• At the Art-house
Chapter 7: ‘Nouvelle Vague: Film Culture Meets Counterculture’
• The Auckland International Film Festival (1969)
• Youth Culture and Film Censorship: 1930s Redux
• The Wellington Film Festival
• Some Conclusions
Chapter 8: Between Spectacle and Memory
• Film Festival Expansion
• Programming the Nation
• Festival Professionalization
• Creating a Memory Site
• Born in Poverty
• The Last Film Search (1993–2000)
• Roadmap for the Future
Conclusion
Index
Foreword
The idea that film is art, and not merely a source of entertainment or social information or moral example, has become an organising principle for film festivals and academic courses. But it is more than that – it is a revelation, a Eureka moment that has excited many film-goers and motivated them to devote a large part of their lives to unpaid work lecturing or writing on the subject or organising film societies and festivals, through the desire to share their discovery that the medium of film has its own aesthetics and is vastly more diverse than the latest crop of Anglo-American titles being screened in local cinemas. In New Zealand, these activities have been almost entirely an amateur enterprise, a labour of love, because of the shortage of public funding.
The lively personal recollections in the first chapter make it clear that writing the first detailed history of these campaigns has been much more than an academic exercise for the author because the idea of film as art is something he cares deeply about. Simon Sigley is a cinephile and filmmaker as well as a historian. He vividly documents the many ways in which New Zealand resisted the new approach to film, either through anti-intellectualism or through scorn for the medium because it was a vehicle for ‘popular culture’. There were also moral panics, an Anglophile suspicion of ‘foreign’ films, the competitive attitude of the older arts towards a new rival, hostility to modernism, the dominance of commercial values, and so on. Of course these forms of opposition were not unique to New Zealand but Sigley’s account leaves us in no doubt that this country has been a particularly ‘unfriendly environment for the emergence of specialised forms of aesthetic taste’.
A distinctive feature of our history is the fact that there was no regular production of feature films in New Zealand until the end of the 1970s. The influence of film societies and festivals was an important factor in inspiring young adults to take up cameras as the first stage in the creation of our long-delayed industry. Strictly speaking, the creation of a film industry is a separate subject from the development of a film culture, yet in a small country like ours the two areas of culture were inevitably linked. Key people in the new industry such as Bruce Morrison, Leon Narbey, Robin Scholes, Geoff Steven, and Tony Williams were energised by the films they had seen in festivals and art-house cinemas. As Sigley notes, John O’Shea, the father figure of the new industry was prominent in the Wellington Film Society. And Lindsay Shelton helped to modernise the Film Society movement and was instrumental in establishing a Wellington Film Festival before becoming the Marketing Director of the newly created New Zealand Film Commission.
The other day I heard a young filmmaker become exasperated as he listened to a group of older directors discussing the hard life of one of their colleagues who had recently died. He exclaimed: ‘Please, no more war stories!’ His impatience was understandable since in his lifetime he had been able to take the existence of a local film industry for granted, with at least half-a-dozen features produced each year with the actors and crew members being paid for their work. In contrast, during the first quarter-century of my own life there were only four 35mm New Zealand feature films, each made on a minuscule budget.
Young filmmakers have also grown up with the opportunity to attend our major International Film Festival (which in recent years has been selling 90,000 to 100,000 tickets annually). Yet, as Sigley documents, the first year of the Festival in 1969 felt to its organisers like a scary leap into the dark. Auckland University now has a large Film, Television, and Media Studies department offering film history, theory, and production courses at all levels, but during the 1970s and 1980s all attempts to introduce the first undergraduate course were energetically opposed on the grounds that film was not a real subject. 1 There are plenty of war stories of this kind, and such campaigns deserve to be documented. Ultimately they are success stories, offering valuable lessons in the development of ideas and the growth of culture. Sigley’s book is the first to record and analyse this history and he has done so with a great wealth of research and a shrewd eye for detail.
Admittedly no New Zealander has contributed anything highly innovative to world film culture, with the partial exception of Len Lye (1901–80), who earned a place in film history as the pioneer of ‘direct film’, the process of making films without a camera by painting and scratching images directly onto the celluloid. He was also a highly original film and television theorist, for example in his essays and interviews for magazines such as Life and Letters Today, World Film News, Sight and Sound, and Film Culture. 2 But Lye’s theories lie outside the scope of the present book because he did most of his work in the United States of America or in Britain.
Peter Jackson and Weta Workshop have done original work in the field of computer generated imagery (CGI), but that is a matter of film production rather than film theory. New Zealand has one other claim to innovation, as Sigley explains in Chapter 8. Frank Stark, Director of the Film Archive, ‘holds the view that at a fundamental level (and in the eyes of the world) the unique component of New Zealand screen culture is Māori-based.’ Certainly the determined efforts of the Archive to involve the indigenous community of New Zealand in the management or guardianship ( kaitiakitanga ) of its collection, backed by the theoretical writing of filmmaker Barry Barclay, has attracted international interest as a new model for film archives, though it has also (as Sigley explains) produced some local controversy. 3
For the most part, this book offers discoveries of a different kind. It tracks the history of ideas, not their genesis but their subsequent nomadic existence – how they have been encountered, imported, challenged, inflected, absorbed, and put to work in original forms of organisation. Radically new ideas are rare, such as the cluster associated with film culture (the notion of film as art, auteur theory, the editing ideas of Griffith and Eisenstein, and so on). New Zealand offers an especially clear situation for studying the process of dissemination because it is such a small country – just under 1 ½ million inhabitants in 1929, and just under 4 ½ million today. Also, this ‘island’ nation is relatively self-contained (unlike the countries of Europe, say). Even Australia is approximately 1400 miles or 2250 kilometres away and its culture is distinctly different.
Isolated as it is, it is still New Zealand’s fate to be swamped by imports. Starting life as a British colony, the country was encouraged to export agricultural produce and to import most of its culture. Those involved with cultural matters saw Britain as the natural source of new ideas and quality products, though imports were limited and there was an intellectual time lag. In contrast, New Zealand’s popular culture came to be dominated by the United States of America. The nation’s culture at large has frequently been shaped by the struggle between British and American influences, and this can be seen particularly clearly in debates about the film medium. Meanwhile, it is fascinating to track the ways in which British and American ideas are subtly changed as they enter New Zealand cult