1

A Small Room with Large Windows

Film-making in New Zealand

“See it if you can

See it (if this is it), half earth, half heaven,
Half land, half water, what you call a view….”

(Allen Curnow, “A Small Room with Large Windows,” 1962)

When growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, I was crazy about films, as almost all
New Zealanders were in those pre-television, pre-Internet, pre-Playstation days.
The riotous Saturday afternoon matinee, a major social event for kids, fed our
hunger for westerns, cartoons, and serials, all American in origin. Occasionally my
mother allowed me to accompany her in the evening to a British “quality film,” a
comedy (like The Lavender Hill Mob 1951), a wartime drama (Dam Busters 1955),
or a literary adaptation (Richard III 1955). The cinema was one of the country’s
few indulgences in the earnest, work-hard atmosphere of the post-war period. In
the words of future film-maker Peter Wells: “Our world, by contrast [with the lives
shown on the screen], hardly existed…incoherent [and] lacking, it seemed, poetry,
magic…. Because we were not James Dean, we were nothing. I guess this is an
experience of colonialism, as universal to a cinema goer in Bombay or Durban as
much as in Auckland.”1

The opening scene of a later feature film, Constance, set in 1948, shows the
teenage Constance devouring a Rita Hayworth film in Auckland’s “picture palace”
Civic cinema. Made 36 years later, the film would go on to show the infatuated
Constance becoming the tragic victim of a man she believed to be a Hollywood
talent scout. There are also cinema scenes in Heavenly Creatures (1994), which
is set in 1953-54 in Christchurch, one of New Zealand’s most Anglophile cities.
Teenagers Pauline and Juliet are in love with Mario Lanza, an American tenor and
Hollywood movie star, and haunted by images of Orson Welles in the 1949 British
film The Third Man. As Juliet yells at her mother at one point: “I don't care what
you do! Pauline and I are going to Hollywood. They're desperately keen to sign us
up. We're going to be film stars!”

Gordon Mirams noted in 1945 that “whereas there is, in the U.S., one movie
theatre for every 8,700 persons, in New Zealand there is one for approximately
every 3,000!”2 World film production was at its height in the 1950s. Most of the
films we saw came from America, and almost all the rest from Britain. The
competition between British and American culture was played out in every area of
our life, as it still is today.3 As Mirams put it: “If ever a national post-mortem is
performed on us, I think they will find there are three words written on New
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Zealand’s heart – ANZAC, HOLLYWOOD and HOME [Britain]. But only a very
rash prophet would venture to suggest which word will be carved the deepest.”4 In
the 1950s Hollywood ruled the cinema, but educated people tended to regard
Britain as the source of “the best” or most worthy material in film and in the other
arts.5

What never occurred to me at the time was the absence of local feature films as
part of the mix. For the first 23 years of my life, only one dramatic feature film
made by New Zealanders turned up in our cinemas - Broken Barrier in 1952, and I
missed it because I was considered too young at the time.6 In the next 24 years
there would be only two more (made by the same company, Pacific Films, and
directed by John O’Shea). Mainstream New Zealand lost no sleep over this
shortage of local feature films because, as Lindsay Shelton puts it, “the notion of
New Zealand stories on the big screen…seemed immodest, or even
embarrassing,”7 and “We didn’t think of New Zealand as having any stories worth
telling, or any places worth showing.”8

There was a trickle of local books, magazines and radio programmes, but our
most popular heroes, slogans and fantasies were derived from Britain or the
United States. Their very foreign-ness added to their fascination. Who would pay
the cost of a cinema ticket to see our own prosaic world? Film was not the only
medium that lacked local content, for in the realm of publishing there was only a
handful of companies producing a very limited range of books. There was also a
lack of dealer galleries for art, and almost no record companies. Popular music
consisted mainly of cover versions. Even our history was considered unimportant,
for at high school in the 1950s all we heard about was British history. All the
literature we studied came from Britain. Teaching us to be consumers rather than
producers, our culture was perfectly complacent about local talent it was wasting.

A New Zealander who had written a novel had to send the manuscript to British
publishers who tended to look down their noses at colonial subject matter. Poet
James K. Baxter remarked in 1967: “I have seen several New Zealand writers
come back from overseas, their confidence shrunk to a dried bean, glancing
nervously over their shoulders, afraid to set pen to paper in case they reveal their
colonial rawness. Myself, I think the best answer is a gigantic bellylaugh.” 9
Unfortunately that “bellylaugh” was not yet heard in the cinema - we would have to
wait for films like Goodbye Pork Pie for that.

Hollywood’s View of New Zealand

There were New Zealanders who had made it big in Hollywood – such as Rupert
Julian who had directed the 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera with Lon
Chaney - but we did not know about them. What New Zealanders did encounter
was the occasional Hollywood vision of their country. The most grotesque
example – before my time - was Alexander Markey’s 1935 Hei Tiki.10 Markey’s
original funding came from Hollywood, but he then persuaded star-struck New
Zealand investors to part with thousands of pounds. In the words of film-maker
Merata Mita: “It appears that Markey had arrived on these shores with already
entrenched ideas about racial superiority, and what his audience’s expectations of
the romantic South Seas should be, ideas he immediately put into practice…. He
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not only caused offence but…stole taonga which had been used in the film as
props”.11

A few more British and American films about New Zealand turned up during the
1940s and 1950s. Employing overseas actors, they offered an exotic dream of the
country designed for global consumption. MGM’s Green Dolphin Street (1946), an
historical epic about 19th century New Zealand, was filmed in the Canadian
redwood forests. The Evening Post reviewer summed it up as “frivolous jiggery-
pokery that Hollywood offers its consumers as history and romance”.12 The
Seekers (1954) was a British film about Māori and Pakeha relationships in pioneer
days. In the words of Sam Edwards, “The images…emerge from Eurocentric
fantasies about cannibal islands, evil witch doctors, and dusky maidens.”13 It was
re-titled Islands of Fury for its American release. I can also remember the local
audience bursting into laughter in 1961 as we watched the MGM film Spinster
(distributed elsewhere under the title Two Loves). Based on a novel by Sylvia
Ashton-Warner, it portrayed a charismatic woman teacher played by American
actor Shirley MacLaine who pioneered innovative methods of teaching Māori
children. British actors Jack Hawkins and Laurence Harvey played the Pakeha
men in her life. What ruined credibility was the fact that the film had been shot in
Hawai’i with Hawaiians standing in for Māori.

The perennial attitude of the big overseas film studios was summed up by Denis
Stanfill, chairman and president of 20th Century Fox, when he heard in 1977 that
the New Zealand government was considering the creation of a film commission.
He “told [Minister for the Arts Alan Highet] firmly there was no need for a local film
industry because Hollywood could supply all the needs of New Zealand film-
goers.”14 That such attitudes persisted at least until 2004 was shown by the giant
model of the globe that stands at the entrance to the Universal Studios theme park
in Los Angeles. Roger Wadham, a New Zealand expatriate who lives in Los
Angeles, noticed that alongside Australia there was nothing on the globe but a
blank space - despite the fact that Peter Jackson was then re-making King Kong
for Universal. In response to Wadham’s initial complaint, a senior executive told
him to “sod off”.15 It took a world-wide email campaign to persuade Universal to
relent. New Zealand has since been welded onto the steel structure – an overdue
response to the comment by Carl Denham in the 1933 Kong Kong: “You won't find
that island on any chart.”

Local films

For those of us who left school in the 1950s, the idea of a career in films seemed
as absurd to parents and teachers as Juliet Hulme proclaiming that “we’re going to
be film stars.” Future actor and director Ian Mune recalls: “Youngsters who said to
the careers adviser at school, ‘I want to get into the movie business’ got the same
answer I got when I said I wanted to be an actor – a blank stare, followed by an
enquiry about when I was going to go to England.”16 When future director Tony
Williams spoke to his school careers advisor about film-making, the only
comparable job the advisor could suggest was training to be a hair-dresser.17

Yet, as the present book reveals, while there was no local feature film industry,
there were a surprising number of short films being made by enthusiasts such as
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Rudall Hayward, Robert Steele, and John O’Shea. These individuals were
inspired by a powerful (if controversial) pair of ideas - that the local had potential
for film (and are Hollywood films any less a product of their local culture than ours
are?), and that realism could be as fascinating as fantasy. The most productive
group was the National Film Unit (NFU), which from 1952 to 1971 produced a new
Pictorial Parade news magazine every month. These mini-documentaries were
screened during the “first half” of programmes in the Kerridge-Odeon chain of
cinemas. They held more interest for my parents than for me, but I also remember
two feature-length documentaries from the NFU: The British Empire Games (1950)
and Royal New Zealand Journey (1954). Watching New Zealand athletes winning
at an international event, or being noticed by the Queen (as we were during her
1953-54 visit) were forms of local content that New Zealanders welcomed without
hesitation. Incidentally, at the start of every cinema programme, we had to rise to
our feet while a short film about the Queen was screened, a ritual that continued
until the 1970s. (This practice would be recalled ironically by Peter Jackson at the
start of his 1992 horror film Braindead.18)

Local films tended to produce laughter of two distinct kinds. On the one hand there
was a warm “feelgood” pleasure in seeing sports people, soldiers (New Zealand
troops were cheered), and local landscapes. Future film maker Gaylene Preston
remembers as a child coming across “a road safety film that John O’Shea had
made in the 1950s. I remember [it] vividly because the van in it was the same sort
my dad had. I wasn’t used to that when I was growing up in New Zealand in the
1950s and 1960s – everything came from everywhere else. So [today as a film-
maker] I have a commitment to that.”19 At other times, however, the presence of
kiwi faces and accents tended to produce scornful laughter. Who did they think
they were, trying to mix with the film stars? To appear on the big screen was to
display self-importance. In the words of Jane Campion: “New Zealand is…a
country hysterically concerned with playing yourself down. I was trained up at
school to abhor any sign of ‘falseness’ or display – Kiwis have a very big radar for
anything like that.”20 If a local feature film had come along, we would have
assumed it was going to be amateurish. Dramatist Roger Hall summed up the
feeling by saying that local plays and films once needed to carry a health
warning.21

There are many comments to confirm how deeply entrenched these attitudes once
were. For example Robert Allender wrote in a 1948 issue of Landfall: “The
appearance of our Prime Minister on the screen always caused loud amusement.
It was all very well for Winston Churchill, but fancy our Mr Fraser in the pictures. It
was all too funny.”22 Lindsay Shelton observed that this reaction was still present
in 1980 when the opening credits of the film Beyond Reasonable Doubt (about the
Arthur Allan Thomas case) “brought laughter from the audience. It was the same
embarrassed laughter I had heard as a child, when a local politician flashed by
during a newsreel.”23

In 1982 the television reviewer for the largest New Zealand newspaper confessed
that the very sound of New Zealand drama still made him uncomfortable: “In the
manner of the shock that most people get when hearing themselves recorded on
tape, television viewers are not used to hearing the New Zealand accent in a
dramatic situation. And at first it sounds incongruous.”24 Television from its advent
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in 1960 had required local presenters and actors to adopt BBC or Oxbridge style
voices.25 Even Pacific Films re-voiced its 1964 feature film Runaway to give it
accents that were more British. As recently as 1992 when the country’s first daily
television soap opera, Shortland Street, was being rehearsed, the actors and
programme-makers were “biting their nails” because they feared that the audience
would not accept so many “kiwi accents”.26 Suspicion of local culture tends to be
particularly strong among teenagers who value the sense of expanded horizons
they get from overseas material. Market research conducted in the previous year
by NZ On Air had suggested that young people “quite like the idea of a New
Zealand [soap], provided it doesn’t have New Zealand actors”!27

Back in the 1950s, serious New Zealand literature and painting already existed at
the so-called “high culture” level, but it was a minority interest that had not yet
reached most schools or mainstream culture. We were still a colony and the
centre of gravity of our cultural life was “HOME” in Britain – or, in the case of films,
in Hollywood. From today’s perspective, these symptoms of “cultural cringe” seem
like a crazy dream from which eventually we had to awaken.28 Other former
colonies have had similar problems (as reflected in the poet’s saying that
“Australia was made to rhyme with failure”).29 John O’Shea used to describe the
New Zealand situation as “surrealist”: “It’s not easy to fit most New Zealand films
into a surrealist category, but it does help to think about the strangeness of our life
and times here…mysterious and enigmatic – in fact surrealist”.30 In some respects,
the cringe continues to this day – such as the tendency (well known to the local
film business) for local work to struggle to be noticed unless magically it receives
overseas recognition.

From Colony to “Middle Earth”

Flash forward to the present, when New Zealand culture has a strikingly different
dynamic. There are now many publishers, art dealers, song-writers, composers,
dramatists and film-makers – and New Zealand history and literature are
embedded in the curriculum. The rise of a feature film industry has coincided with,
and assisted, the growth of a stronger national awareness and sense of
independence.

Such films may still represent only a small fraction of our cinema-going but most
New Zealanders are aware of Once Were Warriors, The Piano, Heavenly
Creatures, Boy, Whale Rider, Footrot Flats, Goodbye Pork Pie, The World’s
Fastest Indian, etc. Local films have become part of our social imagination,
contributing character types, comic allusions and catchphrases to the nation’s
culture. Some have even impressed teenagers, the hardest audience to reach. As
producer John Barnett observed at the end of an overseas trip, he was
“astonished to find that what people see in a New Zealand film is often the sum
total of their knowledge of this country”.31 Film marketer Lindsay Shelton notes
that he has often been “asked if New Zealand was near Greenland or New
Guinea.”32

Today, producer and director Peter Jackson and special effects expert Richard
Taylor have made themselves so desirable to Hollywood that it is obliged to come
to them (as Geoff Lealand exlains in Chapter 10 of this book). And there is a nice
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irony in the fact that some of the British or American films my family once saw -
such as Dam Busters and King Kong - are being re-made by Jackson and Taylor’s
companies from their base in Wellington. Their Lord of the Rings films have been
so helpful to tourism that they have effectively become part of kiwi culture despite
their overseas origins. Times have certainly changed, but if the tourist industry is
correct when it says “New Zealand is now known as Middle Earth,” then O’Shea’s
term “surrealist” seems still relevant! 33

New Zealand culture has always (since the arrival of European settlers) been an
odd hybrid. A quick way to understand this is to look at our free-to-air television
system. Television takes about 50% of its programmes from the United States,
another 20% from Britain, 5% from Australia, and finally 25% from New Zealand.
My figures are a broad guess, but the percentage of local content has been
carefully monitored.34 It has hovered around a quarter, and is one of the lowest in
the world. It is also clear that British influence has declined (it was at 50% when
local television began), and Australian influence has gradually increased. That mix
sums up our mainstream (Pakeha) culture as very much a hybrid. Some viewers
are still allergic to local films and television programmes, and some parents are
eager to enrol their children in British-oriented examination systems which bypass
the study of New Zealand history and literature.

For all that, New Zealand may be said to have entered a “post-colonial” phase.
Many films (even some of Jackson’s) bear distinctive signs of their New Zealand
origins. Today, so many students dream of film careers that careers advisors
groan. Provided one is talented and determined enough, such a career is a
genuine possibility. It is now even possible to propose the branding of Wellington
as “Wellywood” by building a sign like the famous one in the Hollywood Hills. It is
interesting that during the ensuing debate (in March 2010), some residents
opposed the idea because it seemed to them to symbolise a continuing nostalgia
for Hollywood rather than the hard-won independence of our film industry.

The Creation of an “Industry”

So far I have tried to suggest some of the reasons why it was important for the
country to make its own films, and to give a sense of “before” and “after”. But how
did New Zealanders succeed in creating a film industry? This provides a dramatic
case study of how a small country can grow its culture - a process at least as
complex and precarious as (say) developing a wine industry.

It was not at all inevitable that a small country would develop such an industry. As
Chris Pugsley’s first chapter will show, there has been film-making since 1898, but
it was never certain that the various pieces of the jigsaw would come together.
The term “film industry” is often used loosely, but overseas it tends to imply: (1)
continuing production, on both a small and a large scale; (2) a complete
infrastructure (for film is a medium dependent upon a host of technologies and
specialised skills); and (3) significant funding, profit-making, and the ability for
some individuals to earn a full-time living as professionals. When these various
elements work together, there is synergy.
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For the first 80 or so years New Zealand had a reasonably steady flow of
production but only on a modest scale (there were few feature films). The
infrastructure was fragmentary. For example, early film-makers had to do their
own processing, and even the feature films of the 1970s could not get their
“rushes” (the first prints from a day’s filming) back as quickly as they needed them.
To finance ambitious projects was an epic struggle, and almost without exception
such films lost money. Today, though the financial problems have persisted, even
the most sceptical film-makers have come round to using the word “industry”.
There is now a full range of technical facilities (sophisticated enough to attract
major Hollywood films), and there are active guilds for directors, producers, writers,
actors, and technicians.

If we flash back to the beginning there was no industry, only the aspiration to
create an industry (as Diane Pivac describes in Chapter 2). The struggle to
maintain that aspiration provides our early chapters with their historical drama.
The film industry as we know it today was a construction over more than 80 years,
acquiring a specific shape as it moved through particular times and places.
Necessarily our story does not focus only on fiction feature films. Such films are
certainly the first thing that most viewers think of when they hear the word “film” or
“cinema,” but our tradition also involves a large number of important short fiction
films and non-fiction newsreels and documentaries. Indeed, for nearly 80 years
these genres dominated film-making in New Zealand. For the last 30 or so years,
feature films have taken over the spotlight, but those other traditions remain strong
(as we see from Ann Hardy’s Chapter 9 and Lawrence McDonald’s Chapter 11).

The very first steps towards a film industry came not by government decree but by
the efforts of individual enthusiasts, excited about working with the new medium.
Their work was on a small scale and technically somewhat limited, but still
amazing to us today as a record of local life. The film-makers who carried on were
seldom motivated by money - their main qualities were determination and
ingenuity. The great portrait of kiwi ingenuity is the film Forgotten Silver, in which
Peter Jackson and Costa Botes re-discovered “the early New Zealand film-maker
Colin McKenzie.” (The film is discussed in Chapter 9.) McKenzie was so far ahead
of his time that he invented colour film and made the first “talkie”.35 He also
attempted to make an epic film of the Salome story, before disappearing into
obscurity. Though Forgotten Silver was first screened in a Sunday evening
television slot normally devoted to drama, Jackson and Botes presented it in the
style of a documentary. Next morning, thousands of viewers were outraged to
hear that it was really a “mockumentary.” Their kiwi pride had been boosted by the
re-discovery of such an inventive film pioneer, and they were now dismayed to
learn he was only a fictional character.

Because I had a small involvement in funding the project, I was sworn to secrecy
until the screening took place. Next day when I read through TVNZ’s telephone
log I was fascinated by the flood of angry feedback. A frequent comment was “I’ll
never believe television again!” That seemed to me a valuable lesson for viewers
to have learned; but what I would have wanted to say to the callers was: “Actually,
early film making was full of New Zealanders just as ingenious and enterprising as
Colin McKenzie!” As evidence, I attempted to persuade TVNZ to screen Rudall
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Hayward’s epic 1939 film Rewi’s Last Stand, but the broadcaster had been so
shocked by the public’s reaction that it simply wanted to drop the subject.

A further example of kiwi ingenuity were the films of Len Lye who pioneered a
completely new method of film-making. In the middle of the Depression Lye was
too broke to hire camera equipment, but he discovered it was possible to paint
and stencil images directly onto celluloid. Many other animators adopted this
method, along with some of his many other innovations. Lye was working
overseas at the time, but those who stayed were no less resourceful, as Ian Mune
has reminded us in his essay “From Hand-made Cameras to Hand-morphed
Creatures.”36 This offers one way of explaining how the New Zealand industry was
created. Gaylene Preston has objected to this “No.8 fence wire” conception of the
film-maker as the ingenious, do-it-yourself handyman, because she thinks it
encourages a macho culture around film-making. Certainly it has taken on mythic
proportions in all areas of our society, which helps to explain why Jackson and
Botes were so successful in exploiting the desire of the audience to add McKenzie
to its list of heroes. Yet ingenuity clearly was an important ingredient in our history
- a legacy of pioneer days, and a natural consequence of the fact that a film-maker
in a small country needs to make the most of whatever resources are available.
Preston herself seems to qualify as an example in the way she first learned to
make films. Organizing projects with the patients in a psychiatric hospital, she
would create costumes, film and edit the results.

When sound arrived in 1928-29, it wiped out virtually all the feature film-making
that had developed in the 1920s. Sound doubled the cost of making films and
Americans controlled the patents on the technology. Since New Zealanders were
already struggling to finance silent films, this was the last straw. New technology
tends to be a mixed blessing for a small country. But resourceful film-makers
immediately set to work, such as Edwin (Ted) Coubray who invented his own
sound-on-film system, the first of its kind in Australasia. Rudall Hayward
developed his own talkie camera, which was ready in time for him to film a sound
interview with George Bernard Shaw when he visited New Zealand. (Clive Sowry
discusses these pioneers in Chapter 3.)

In 1952 when John O’Shea and Roger Mirams set out to make Broken Barrier – a
huge undertaking since it was the first New Zealand feature film for 13 years -
“they constructed their grip equipment and lights from scrap materials and the
entire production was run out of Mirams’ Vauxhall car.”37

In the 1970s, the most iconic piece of equipment was a camera crane carrying the
motto “We will get the New Zealand film industry off the ground.” In Mune’s words:
“[Geoff Murphy] got together with Andy Grant who had a garage called Mouse
Motors up in Aro Street, and between them they designed and built the Acme
Sausage Company Crane, and it was the only crane you could get for about six
years. It travelled up and down the country like a hungry salesman.”38

Peter Jackson’s work represents yet another phase of the No.8 story. Jackson
started out as a child making Super-8 movies, then in his early 20s he spent his
weekends filming Bad Taste with his friends, creating its many special effects by
hand. The resulting film ended up at the Cannes Festival. Jackson then moved
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into more elaborate special effects through his collaboration with Richard Taylor
and his partner Tania Rodger who started their company (today known as Weta
Workshop) in the back room of their Wellington flat. In 1992 the group made
Braindead, which created a whole range of new “splatter” effects.

The combined production of three Lord of the Rings films involved the same spirit
of innovation in its use of “virtual puppetry,” the creation of fully digital characters
such as the Cave Troll and Gollum (considered the best virtual film character to
date). Jackson also developed the ability to direct as many as seven different film
units, as well as soundstages around Wellington and Queenstown, by means of
live satellite feeds and the latest digital technology.

The continuing examples of ingenious “blokes in sheds” ensure that the theme
holds a perennial appeal for local audiences. One of the most popular New
Zealand films ever made is The World’s Fastest Indian (2005) about an eccentric
kiwi bloke in his 60s who builds a motorcycle that succeeds to everyone’s
astonishment in breaking the speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats. The theme
of a kiwi sportsman winning on the world stage has always been a local favourite.
Unlike Colin McKenzie, Burt Munro was based on an actual person whom Roger
Donaldson had known and filmed.

Are there are female equivalents of the bloke in the shed? Certainly there were
many resourceful women working behind the scenes of early New Zealand film-
making, such as Rudall Hayward’s first wife Hilda who scouted locations,
“managed the finances, ordered film stock and chemicals, interviewed actors,
arranged costumes and applied makeup.” She was also skilled at film processing
and became New Zealand’s first known camerawoman.39 Her work was seldom
acknowledged in film credits.

A second way to look at the development of the industry is to focus not on

technology but on lateral thinking – creative ways of solving problems. The
creation of the industry was certainly not just a matter of building cameras but also
involved skills in script-writing, directing, acting, and camerawork, not to mention a
great deal of business acumen. Early film-makers had to be creative in making the
most of what they had. For example, Pacific Films could not afford sound cameras
for Broken Barrier so they came up with the cunning idea of treating the voice-over
narration as a stream of consciousness, as the spoken thoughts of the characters.

Making use of an existing community continues to be the basis of many New

Zealand films, especially those set in small towns or rural areas. In 1927-29, the
final years of silent films, Rudall and Hilda Hayward made a number of two-reel
regional stories such as Daughter of Christchurch and Daughter of Invercargill. As
Ian Mune describes them: “”Rudall would turn up in a town with his script in his
pocket – it was always pretty much the same script – hold auditions, and the
whole town would get involved. One of the young local girls would be the star. And
a couple of local lads – one in from the farm maybe, and the other from the Post
Office – [as] rivals in love. And they’d shoot the movie and whack it together and
by the time it hit the screen, [they’d] leave Wanganui watching Winifred, while
[they] whooshed off to notch up a Natalie for Napier.”40
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It is also typical of small industries to use existing locations. Geoff Steven’s ideas
for the 1979 feature Skin Deep grew out of his video documentation of Raetihi
which was exhibited at the Auckland City Art Gallery. With only a tiny budget
available, the story of the feature film was shaped to make the most of the main
street and nearby locations. And two years later Roger Donaldson shot Smash
Palace in the premises of a huge, rambling vintage car yard he had discovered
just up the road at Horopito.

Cultural Nationalism

Another perspective is relating the growth of film to what was happening in the
other arts. We can take our bearings from the well-known “origin story” (a term
used in the study of myths) that associates the emergence of the first
sophisticated and original work in New Zealand poetry and painting with the start
of the 1930s. Those arts went through a dramatic change following the arrival of a
new generation. The first wave was led by artists born in the 1900s and 1910s,
followed by a second wave born in the 1920s who added some new ideas and
interests. (The equivalent takeoff period for film - the 1970s - would involve a
similar pattern of two waves.)

The ensuing work is often described as “the Landfall tradition.” The magazine
Landfall did not start publication until 1947, but it then became the focus for the
arts in this country for the next 20 years until the retirement of its editor Charles
Brasch. (“The Landfall tradition” as a compendium term should not be confused
with the 1975 film Landfall which will appear later in this essay.) This tendency can
alternatively be described as “cultural nationalism,” or more bluntly, “Nationalism,”
the term used in the 2009 book The Invention of New Zealand: Art and National
Identity, 1930-1970 by Francis Pound, which aims not merely to document “the
Nationalist movement” but also to highlight its weaknesses. 41

The movement did sometimes display a narrowly Pakeha perspective. In his poem
“The Silent Land” Brasch wrote: “The plains are nameless and the cities cry for
meaning….” which seems to ignore centuries of Māori occupation of the
landscape. Elsewhere, however, Brasch did write respectfully about those who
“trod first the soil / And named the bays and mountains.” And while Brasch’s
Nationalist poetry is coloured by myth and melodrama, his urgent appeal for local
writers to “lie with the gaunt hills like a lover,” and to seek “a vein of speech” for
“the stunted township,” had the power to inspire many local writers and artists
(and potentially film makers).42

During the grim days of the Depression and the Second World War, a critical
mass was reached for serious, thoughtful work in poetry (by Allen Curnow and
A.R.D. Fairburn), painting (by Colin McCahon, Toss Woollaston, Rita Angus),
fiction (by Frank Sargeson, Alan Mulgan, Dan Davin) and music (by Douglas
Lilburn). If the equivalent breakthrough in film was delayed, this should not
surprise us as it is a medium more dependent on money and technology.43

Although “Nationalism” was never as unified a movement as later critics have

suggested, much of its work was shaped by four big ideas:
 11

(1) Artists sought to make art out of the details of local life, to replace an imported
colonial culture with an authentic local culture. Their aesthetic was realist, albeit a
sophisticated version of realism which implied a desire to know the whole truth,
however unpalatable. They took a particular interest in the lives of ordinary people.

(2) Their passion for the local coincided with an interest in sophisticated overseas
art (especially what was then called “modern art”). Their nationalism was outward-
looking, for they searched for forms of modern art that they could apply to the local
situation – such as innovative versions of realism and regionalism.

(3) Their nationalism was critical rather than jingoistic. Because fervent forms of
nationalism were common in areas of New Zealand life such as sport, politics and
war, these artists were uneasy about being called “nationalists” (and film-makers
would later share the same reluctance). They preferred to be described as
localists. The artists involved were intellectuals and bohemians, often left-wing in
their politics.44 They were very much on the margins of society. Their work was a
challenge to the dull, puritanical, parochial, conformist aspects of New Zealand.
Their particular energies would carry over to a lot of later film-making.

(4) They had difficulty defining their stance towards the national audience, for
initially they had hardly any audience outside of their fellow artists. The public
disliked their links with modern art and the way they ran down New Zealand. The
artists were creating a local culture that the country did not yet know it needed.
Their left-wing sense of community made them want to criticise but not to be
arrogant; so, to engage the public, they needed a good bedside manner - or in
James K. Baxter’s words, “One has to put off the policeman’s overcoat”.45 This
would become a major issue for film-making because film is an expensive medium
that demands a sizeable audience. As late as 1964, local cinema audiences were
simply not open to critical work in a modern idiom, as John O’Shea was dismayed
to discover when he released the feature-film Runaway.

Some of the 1930s artists such as Sargeson and Lilburn sought to develop a
multi-level strategy where the surface of the work was user-friendly but
complexities lurked at deeper levels. Lilburn commented: “I’ve always felt…that
I’d like my music to be a bit like a parable – both very simple and to have many
degrees of meaning, according to how far one wants to move into it.”46

Films and Nationalism

Early film-makers shared the first aim of the “Nationalist” (or “localist”) programme
but not the other three. Basically they sought to be community entertainers. They
had their hands full dealing with technical problems and searching for audiences,
without venturing into the territory of the art film, or modernism, or critiques of
society. To emphasise this point is in no way to diminish the importance of what
they achieved.

Rudall Hayward (whose work is discussed by Diane Pivac in Chapter 2) in most

respects belongs to that earlier phase. With few contacts among the Nationalists,
he started out with a colonial perspective and took his artistic models from older
film-makers such as D.W. Griffith. In one respect, however, his work drew closer
 12

to the Nationalists and arguably he ended up doing a better job than them. This
was his awareness of the Māori dimension of New Zealand history, which
developed strongly after Ramai Te Miha became his second wife and fellow
filmmaker. Hayward was not trying to be a provocative social critic, but he took his
bearings from the popular New Zealand historian James Cowan who was familiar
with both the Māori and Pakeha worlds. In his 1939 version of Rewi’s Last Stand,
Hayward presented both sides of the New Zealand Wars as brave, intelligent
warriors, with a sense of chivalry and respect between them. Today this attitude
may seem old-fashioned, a kind of benevolent paternalism, but it was certainly
progressive in its day.

In 1941 the government created a National Film Unit to help the war effort. (This
phase is discussed by Geraldene Peters in Chapter 4.) After the war the NFU
continued to serve as an important source of newsreels and documentaries. It
incorporated the first two principles of the Nationalist programme, but had to do so
within limits set by the government. The original conception of the NFU was based
on a report by John Grierson, head of Britain’s GPO Film Unit, who was an
enthusiast for modernism. He had proved that a film unit serving a government
department could do great things if it tapped top creative people such as
composer Benjamin Britten and poet W.H. Auden (a favourite of New Zealand
Nationalists), and innovative film-makers such as Len Lye and Robert Flaherty.
Documentary was still a new genre - Grierson had coined the term - and he invited
his staff to experiment. Up to a point he was also happy to indulge their left-wing
energies. This openness gave an edge to the GPO’s films, many of which became
famous in film history. During his visit to New Zealand, Grierson was virtually a
spokesman for the Nationalist programme, insisting that he was interested not in
“scenery” but in the “faces” of New Zealanders – “the human factor, which is the
Vitamin D of nationality.”47

The government took a more conservative view of the NFU’s brief, and in 1950 it
put the Department of Tourism and Publicity in charge. The public service staffing
environment was somewhat rigid. Nevertheless, in some respects the NFU was
the only game in town so it attracted some lively people. Among Nationalists it
called on the talents of Curnow, Baxter, and Denis Glover at least once. Lilburn
wrote music for several films, and photographer Brian Brake and writer Maurice
Shadbolt became staff members. Aware of the conservatism of the New Zealand
public, however, the organization tried not to be seen as too arty. “In 1949, when
Unit producer Oxley Hughan was asked if he thought the Unit could become a
base for the arts in New Zealand, he was quick to dampen expectations: ‘These
few occasions provide excitement for the few people who like that sort of thing -
the majority of film-goers are not excited by them and the Unit does exist for the
[majority].’”48

Shadbolt wrote enthusiastically in Landfall about “that period in the Unit’s history
which saw the emergence of a certain maturity – following the hesitancy and early
fumblings of the now defunct Weekly Review – which was exemplified in such
films as Margaret Thomson’s Railway Worker, Cecil Holmes’s The Coaster and
Michael Forlong’s Journey for Three.” These were reminiscent of Grierson
documentaries, and indeed Thomson had worked in that tradition in England
during the 1930s before returning to New Zealand. But after a few years these
 13

talented directors got fed up with “the dead hand of the Tourist and Publicity
Department pressing on much of the Unit’s work” (in Shadbolt’s phrase) and went
overseas. After a scandal concerning his Communist Party membership, Holmes
left to make films in Australia. Shadbolt was particularly distressed by the
departure of John Feeney whom he saw as the Unit’s best director. By treating
documentary as “poetry,” Feeney’s NFU work had been “close in mood and
feeling” to “the New Zealand literary mainstream.”49 (His films are described by
Lawrence McDonald in Chapter 5.) Feeney and Brake went off to join the Film
Unit that Grierson had established in Canada.

Pacific Films and the Arrival of Television

The full force of Nationalism reached fictional film-making through the work of
Pacific Films. This independent company was founded in 1948 by Roger Mirams
and Alan Faulkner, but historian John O’Shea (who joined in 1952) became the
leading figure. For the next 30 years, Pacific’s ramshackle buildings in Kilbirnie
would serve as a kind of revolutionary head-quarters for the struggle to create an
industry.

On an everyday basis, “commercials production was all that kept the independent
industry going,” as O’Shea later observed.50 But he was dedicated to ploughing
any profits back into the creation of feature films and innovative documentaries.
He mixed with Nationalist writers and artists, and, as a prime mover in the Film
Society movement, made sure that his staff saw the most exciting new films. With
a spirited anti-establishment attitude, he viewed the NFU as bureaucratic and out-
of-touch – and there is evidence that the NFU was distinctly unhelpful to
independent film-makers, whom they disdained as rank amateurs or as pirates of
the private sector. The NFU owned the only film processing equipment, and it
refused to process O’Shea’s features. This was an unfortunate attitude because,
in a small country, only by the combined efforts of the public and private sectors
could a New Zealand film industry be built.

O’Shea and Mirams’s 1952 feature Broken Barrier (described by McDonald in

Chapter 6) was influenced stylistically by British documentary and Italian Neo-
Realism. The film promoted the ideal of biculturalism (He iwi kotahi tātou, we are
all one people), but along the way it also acknowledged that racism was
widespread in the Pakeha world. By telling a simple story with a great deal of
human warmth, the film-makers attempted to not make the film so confrontational
that it was rejected by the community. Broken Barrier was widely seen and
stimulated much public discussion, but it lost money and Pacific was not able to
mount another feature for a dozen years.

Runaway (1964) was a critique of Pakeha society for not giving young adults any
clear and inspiring goals beyond materialism. Its central character, David Manning,
was a rebel without a cause, but O’Shea wanted Manning’s unsuccessful search
for identity to be symbolic of New Zealand’s situation. As the band U2 would later
say: “I’m still running… And I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” Like many
New Zealand novels and later films, Runaway focused on a “common man” as its
central character. Sometimes Manning acted like an intellectual but the script
writers seem deliberately to have held that tendency in check. In a similar way,
 14

Roger Donaldson’s Sleeping Dogs (1977) would take an intellectual called Smith
from the novel Smith’s Dream and recast him as an “ordinary bloke”. One of the
models for both Runaway and Sleeping Dogs was Man Alone, the 1939 novel by
John Mulgan which told the story of a “runaway” pursued by the forces of law and
order - an influential book for Nationalist writers and later for film-makers.51

Manning acknowledges the depth of Māori culture but decides it is not for him. His
struggle not to succumb to a life of shallow hedonism may remind us of Bill
Pearson’s shrewd observation in his 1952 essay “Fretful Sleepers” that Pakeha
New Zealand was moving from Puritanism to a state of shallow hedonism.52 In
other words, our society was evolving from barbarism to decadence without ever
passing through the stage of civilisation (as Oscar Wilde once said of the United
States). There were thought-provoking aspects to Runaway but unfortunately it
was rejected by mainstream audiences, perhaps because of its “non-happy
theme” (as an NFU boss characterised it).53 O’Shea admitted that “the film was
more allegorical drama than action movie. It puzzled local audiences….”54 A
decade later, he would still be paying off the bills.

Since local audiences were not yet ready for a serious drama of this kind, Pacific
attempted to win them over by a feel-good feature film about a festival of popular
music in Rotorua. Its title, Don’t Let it Get You, was a phrase O’Shea liked to use
when reminded of “the financial debris of Runaway”.55 This 1964 project was
funded by contra deals and a frenzied attempt to maintain cashflow by doing lots
of corporate work. The resulting feature was a lively bicultural project, but O’Shea
later described it as “a bit like whistling in the dark as far as its national identity
themes were concerned.”56 Audiences and reviewers enjoyed it, but it made no
money.

By this stage the crew had become an efficient unit, spurred on the thought that
they were laying the foundations for a feature-film industry; but although a script
written by Barry Crump was ready to film, the money had run out. New Zealand
was simply not ready for an industry - and Pacific’s three narrative feature films
were the only ones to appear during the first 35 years of my life. Nevertheless,
O’Shea had kept the lamp burning, and it was from his projects that many of the
young people who would shape the next phase of film-making had received their
training.

Meanwhile television had reached New Zealand in 1960 and had a devastating
effect on the cinema business. In 1960-61 there were 41 million admissions, which
meant that the average New Zealander visited the cinema 17 to 18 times per year;
but by 1972-73 the number of admissions was less than 12 million, or only 4 visits
per year. By 1991 the average New Zealander went to the cinema only twice per
year. More than three-quarters of the country’s cinemas disappeared (from 600 in
1949-50 to 140 in 1991).57 Fortunately the number then levelled out and began to
rise again.

Television had a profound effect on the cinema audience. Older viewers and
parents with small children preferred to stay home in the evening and watch the
box, whereas young people were still eager to go out. The core cinema audience
thus changed from families to teenagers and young adults. In the late 1960s and
 15

early 1970s, all the major Hollywood studios went bankrupt and were re-structured
as they struggled to adapt to similar changes in the USA. This transformation of
the cinema happened during the period when teenagers were particularly active in
developing a distinctive culture of their own.

Television helped enormously to make New Zealanders more familiar with local
images, but local production was only one of its functions. It cost a lot more to
produce local programmes than to take advantage of the vast quantity of overseas
programmes that were available at bargain prices; so local production was limited
initially to news, current affairs, sport, and light entertainment. Television suffered
from a constant shortage of money, and its original model of non-commercial,
public service broadcasting became increasingly diluted by advertising.
Nevertheless it gradually extended its range of local content to include one-off
studio dramas and series such as Country Calendar (which began in 1966). A full
range of local programmes would not emerge until the 1970s.

For Pacific Films, television had created the opportunity to make commercials, but
O’Shea was critical of television because he saw it managed – like the NFU - by
bureaucrats rather than by creative people inspired by the ideals of the Landfall
tradition. Within television, however, there were a few individuals with Nationalist
sympathies who would do their best to develop local production and to offer
occasional commissions to the independents.

The Explosion of the 1970s

The 1970s was a turning point for New Zealand culture in many areas. Like the
1930s, it created a heightened sense of before and after. Of course, history is
never quite as tidy as a decade, but the term does help us to identify these two
extraordinary periods of collective innovation.

The period of the counter-culture, known in other countries as “the sixties”, started
late in New Zealand. Effectively, our “sixties” was the 1970s. This period released
a burst of new energies as New Zealanders made their own films, published their
own books, exhibited and sold local art, produced local plays, and taught New
Zealand history in schools. These activities had a long history but now they
reached critical mass as the Nationalist project came to full bloom. Film had a
particularly important role to play because of its reach. In the 1970s, a serious
New Zealand novel became a best-seller if it sold (say) 20,000 copies – a big step
forwards from the modest sales of novelists like Sargeson in the 1930s and 1940s
– but now, a popular film could reach hundreds of thousands of viewers.

These were years of activism in politics as well as art. The 1930s similarly had
involved many battles against the status quo. Granted, that had been a period of
economic Depression whereas the 1970s were a period of relative prosperity; and
now the political issues were different – not poverty and union struggles but
Vietnam War protests, Māori activism, feminism, and gay rights. More generally,
young people saw their parents as having created a small-minded, out-of date,
drab, puritanical culture. It was hardly surprising that the older generation had
focused its thoughts on work, consumer goods and a quiet life after the
insecurities of the Depression and War years; but now the young took revenge,
 16

challenging conservative New Zealand in films such as Gone Up North for a While,
The God Boy, Trespasses, Jack Be Nimble, Braindead, Constance, An Angel at
My Table and Skin Deep, and the documentaries of Tony Williams such as
Deciding and Getting Together.

Until 1984 when Robert Muldoon ceased to be Prime Minister, there were
constant collisions between the old New Zealand and the new. In 1977 any
serious viewer of the feature film Sleeping Dogs, about New Zealand becoming a
dictatorship, could not help thinking about Muldoon. Under his management the
public sector had become increasingly bureaucratic, and both television and the
NFU suffered from an “old school” atmosphere. Nevertheless, there were now
some young turks on the staff. The 1970s proved to be a breakthrough period for
television with local drama series such as Pukemanu (1971-2) and Close to Home
(1975-83). Between 1970 and 1974 Executive Producer Michael Scott-Smith
offered documentary commissions to the independents, an opportunity they used
to maximum advantage. Pacific Films produced Williams’ innovative
documentaries and Barclay and King’s Tangata Whenua series (1974) which (in
Merata Mita’s words) “broke new ground” because “it put Māori perspectives on
the small screen, in most cases without Pakeha interpretation”58. Television was
gradually softening up audiences to accept the sight and sound of New
Zealanders on screen. Meanwhile, the arrival of television had shaken up the NFU,
forcing it to rethink its role so that some of its directors were allowed to experiment.

Up until 1976 it even looked as though television and the NFU could provide an
outlet for the energies of the new generation. But Maunder’s remarkable television
movies Landfall and One of those People Who Live in the World went too far for
the NFU which was willing to give them only minimal distribution. Sam Pillsbury,
Greg Stitt, and Sam Neill also directed interesting films, but, like Maunder, they left
the Unit after a few years. Meanwhile, television was re-structured in 1975-76 by
Minister of Broadcasting Roger Douglas. To borrow O’Shea’s phrase, this was the
first of many “campaigns of destruction” with which Douglas would be associated
in the course of his political career.59 (O’Shea added: “The wasteland of today’s
television is his legacy.”60) The re-structuring meant that there were no more
commissions for the independents. The young film-makers who were hitting their
stride in 1974 now found themselves out of work. Intense lobbying to promote a
Film Commission had been under way since 1970, but neither the Labour nor the
National government had been willing to commit the money. In contrast, Australia
was already providing its film-makers with funding at both national and state level.

The best independent film makers (such as Donaldson, Williams, Geoff Murphy,
and Geoff Steven) were faced with the choice of leaving the country or making a
last attempt to create an industry. Donaldson said in 1976: “When I came back
[from a trip to Cannes] I was convinced that if I was going to make feature films,
then I was going to do it immediately. I wasn’t going to delay any longer. I decided
I would give myself to Christmas to get a feature off the ground. If nothing was
shaping up by then, I would try my luck overseas.”61 Other film-makers joined the
race. Murphy’s group reached the cinemas first with Wildman, a great “bellylaugh”
of anarchic humour (to use James K. Baxter’s term); but this was a 16mm film
blown up to 35mm, and effectively a half-hour television programme stretched to
 17

feature length. It took $100,000 at the box office, greater than expected, though it
still made an overall loss of $8,000.62

Donaldson and his team were close behind with Sleeping Dogs. This had involved
extraordinary funding manoeuvres, including the director mortgaging his personal
property. The crew accepted modest wages in return for a share of (unlikely)
profits. This 35mm film did not recover its costs but it sold nearly $500,000 in
tickets at the local box office – a record for a local film. It ended with a favourite
1970s gesture as its central character Smith gave the finger to authority before
being shot. Sleeping Dogs launched Sam Neill’s film acting career – it was not his
first role, since he had acted in Barry Barclay’s Ashes and Maunder’s Landfall, but
it was the first to attract international attention. Neill was offered a lead role in the
Australian film My Brilliant Career.

Although C.K. Stead was disappointed that some of the intellectual elements of
his original novel (Smith’s Dream) had been replaced by fights and chase
sequences, several reviewers spoke enthusiastically about the film as a victory
over “kiwi cringe.” For example, David Gunby in Islands was happy to assure
those who dutifully attended local films that “our patriotism need no longer be
tinged with masochism”.63 Wildman and Sleeping Dogs were soon followed by
Williams’s Solo and Steven’s Skin Deep. Clearly a “new wave” of New Zealand
features had arrived. This wave would, however, have run out of energy – like
O’Shea’s attempt in the 1960s - if the government had not finally agreed at the
end of 1977 to create a Film Commission. The Commission’s funding was modest
but enough to ensure a few films each year. Another crucial piece of the industry
jigsaw was now in place. The brilliant comedian John Clarke had already decided
to leave for Australia, but other film people were happy to start thinking about their
next feature.

Nationalism - or Something New?

In dominant, colonising countries - such as the United States, Britain and France –
the counter-cultures of the 1960s saw nationalism as their enemy. But our colonial
history had created a different relationship, and the campaign to establish a New
Zealand film industry was a struggle led by the counter-culture. I have suggested
that the success of this crusade can be seen as another stage in the development
of the Nationalist tradition; but it is important to complicate that claim by
acknowledging that the 1970s generation was bound to do things differently. Like
earlier artists, they took their bearings from the cutting-edge work being done
overseas, but obviously there had been changes even in the decade since O’Shea
had made his features. To compare the work of the 1970s film-makers to the
Nationalist tradition, sorting out similarities and differences, can provide a useful
framework for understanding many of the feature films that have appeared since.

First, the continuities. The nationalism (or localism) of the new film-makers was
not sentimental but highly critical. Noone was seeking to create the Great New
Zealand Film (in the pompous spirit of Australian epics such as Australia or The
Man from Snowy River). Many of the new films were based directly on New
Zealand literature. Donaldson and Mune’s Woman at the Store (1974) and the
Winners and Losers series (1976), dramas based on short stories, served as a
 18

showcase for the new film generation, and became a popular resource for schools.
Filmed novels included The God Boy, Sleeping Dogs, and the features based on
Ronald Hugh Morrieson (The Scarecrow, Came a Hot Friday and Pallet on the
Floor). In the 1970s this was partly a result of the Education Department’s
willingness to invest money in such projects now that New Zealand literature was
entering the curriculum. Education was also important to the growth of the industry
in other ways, for Mita, Murphy, and John Reynolds started out as teachers
making films at school with their classes, and universities were now offering their
first film-making and film history courses.64

Later films based on New Zealand writers or novels included Angel at my Table,
Sylvia, and In My Father’s Den. The End of the Golden Weather and Middle Age
Spread were derived from plays. A number of films with original scripts also
echoed the critical nationalist tradition by theme and/or approach. They included
Pictures, Vigil, Smash Palace, Trespasses, Illustrious Energy, Jack Be Nimble,
The Quiet Earth, Bad Blood, Out of the Blue, Beyond Reasonable Doubt, and Mr
Wrong. (Such films are described in Chapter 7 by Bruce Babington and in
Chapter 8 by Frank Stark.)

The approach was largely (if not always) realist, in the same way that realism still
dominated New Zealand fiction, as Lawrence Jones confirmed in his 1977 essay
“The Persistence of Realism.”65 Documentary has been a strong tradition in New
Zealand, and often local audiences relate more strongly to docudrama (drama
based on fact) than to fiction. Combinations of drama and documentary include
Beyond Reasonable Doubt, Out of the Blue, Home by Christmas, War Stories,
Rain of the Children, We’re Here to Help, and Feathers of Peace. (The first five
did very well at the box office.)

The films of the new wave had a tendency to linger reflectively over local details.
This made New Zealand films seem low-keyed and slow-moving to those who
preferred the faster pace and larger-than-life characters of American films.
Interestingly, when such characters did appear, they were often villains or femme
fatales from overseas.66 The new generation still preferred characters who were
ordinary blokes and sheilas. Donaldson described the central character of Derek
as “a bit like all of us. In many ways he is not an impressive person”67. Arthur
Thomas in Beyond Reasonable Doubt was a common man victimised by the
police. “Smith” in Sleeping Dogs was as much an everyman as “Manning” in
Runaway. Murphy said of Goodbye Pork Pie: “The characters are not supermen at
all; they are ordinary guys,”68 and Gaylene Preston said of Meg in Mr Wrong:
“[She] isn’t a super hero…. She’s just normal like you and me…. I had to empower
the silent ones.”69 This approach reflected a political sympathy for “ordinary
people” and underdogs, and a dislike of American extravagance.

Just how different this approach was from the Hollywood norm is illustrated by the
fact that aspects of Smash Palace (1981) were criticised in New Zealand for being
too sensational and melodramatic, whereas the influential American critic Pauline
Kael loved the film’s “freshness and depth” and wrote in her New Yorker review:
“the surface seems almost documentary” and “Donaldson has the kind of neo-
neo-realist technique that a viewer is unconscious of; he doesn’t tip us to how
we’re supposed to feel…. Smash Palace represents a high point of a certain kind
 19

of realism which [some] people don’t respond to, because they feel it’s too much
like life.”70 This recalls Jane Campion’s earlier comments about New Zealanders
having “a very big radar” for “any sign of ‘falseness’ or display”. Nevertheless,
New Zealand films did start to speed up their story-telling, and the new wave did
develop a more heightened sense of the ordinary. Sam Pillsbury argued that if
“you develop your characters as really crazy people, you actually come close to
being something like real people.” 71 Later he showed what he meant in his film
version of The Scarecrow.

Film Models

The film-makers of the 1970s were a film generation and they were raring to go.
Critical mass is important in a small country like New Zealand, and the baby
boomers, as a bulge in the population, were now young adults, the group that had
become the most loyal audience for films.

The first type of film that interested them had also been one of O’Shea’s favourites
– the work of the new British film-makers of the 1960s and 1970s. Maunder and
Williams spent several years in England and this influenced their later film work.
Realism was a strong strand in the British tradition thanks to film-makers such as
Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, whose work had a clear influence on Maunder. The
films of Ken Russell and Richard Lester were more stylised and closer to the
counter-culture. They influenced Williams both as the cameraman of Don’t Let It
Get You and as a director in the 1970s.

The second film-making model was European “art house” films, which O’Shea had
also known. A remarkable new wave of films had emerged from France and other
European countries in the 1950s and 1960s – fascinating to young adults because
they pushed the boundaries both intellectually and sexually. Important new films
were still appearing in the early 1970s (such as Cries and Whispers 1972, Tout Va
Bien 1972, and Amarcord 1974), but arguably the energy of the upsurge was
declining. All the future New Zealand film-makers frequented art-house cinemas.
John Laing, for example, remembers the State in Dunedin as “a great theatre – a
real fleapit, full of people in dufflecoats who’d read Dostoevsky at half-time!”72
When we took a big gamble and started the Auckland International Film Festival in
1969, we were amazed by the number of young adults who flocked to it. While few
New Zealanders would go on to create thorough-going “art films” – apart from
Vincent Ward, David Blyth, and some others making short experimental films – the
work of the European New Wave was so rich in ideas that it held a continuing
interest for all the local film-makers of the 1970s.73

The third influence was the most important. The “New American Cinema” (1967-
1974) emerged from the turbulent period when Hollywood’s major studios were
being re-structured. Starting with The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider (1969),
American film moved in new directions, catching up with the European New Wave
and more directly with the ferment of the American “sixties”. This was a period
when young adult audiences in the United States were prepared to seek out
maverick, low-budget films with a subversive slant on politics and film genres. The
results were distinct from either European art cinema or from traditional Hollywood
– serious and provocative but also cool and funky. Then by 1975 it was all over -
 20

Hollywood had regained its composure and the counter-culture audience had
evaporated.

These films influenced Donaldson, Murphy, Williams and Pillsbury, among others,
so that their own work could be described as a meeting between the Landfall
tradition and the methods of the New American Cinema. Sleeping Dogs included a
sequence clearly derived from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). It
starred American actor Warren Oates (persuaded to come to New Zealand by
Donaldson’s offer of a fishing trip) and it echoed films such as Straw Dogs (1971)
and Five Easy Pieces (1970). Goodbye Pork Pie drew on American road movies
such as Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971).
Williams was deeply impressed by watching Martin Scorsese at work, and the
American director’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More (1974) influenced
Williams’s approach to Solo. Not surprisingly, three of those four New Zealand
directors later worked in the United States.

It is interesting to note that the Australian industry did not become a strong
influence, even though their new wave had had a few years head start. The
Australians were busy making sex films (like Alvin Purple 1973), cult films (Pure
Shit 1975), action films (Mad Max 1979 and The Man from Snowy River 1982),
and romantic historical films (such as Picnic at Hanging Rock 1975, Eliza Fraser
1976, Caddie 1976, and The Getting of Wisdom 1977). With a few exceptions,
these were genres that would not interest New Zealand. Australia did, however,
set an inspiring example through the rapid growth of its industry.

The Hippie Way

Resourcefulness and group effort had always been crucial aspects of New
Zealand film-making, and the 1970s bought a powerful development in the form of
the hippie commune. Communes were an international idea but New Zealand took
a particular shine to them. In 1973 Donaldson made Start Again, a documentary
about local communes. In the following year Kirk’s Labour government attracted
world attention by giving official support to the setting-up of communes as ohu (a
related Māori concept). The scheme encouraged groups to go back to the land as
an antidote “to the ills of modern society."74

Central to hippie culture, the idea of the commune provided an excellent

organizational basis for a music group, theatre company or film crew. Blerta (“The
Bruno Lawrence Electric Revolutionary Travelling Apparatus”) was all three. The
commune ideal was perhaps the only way a feature film industry could have been
created at a time when it was necessary for people to work for nothing or for
minimal wages. In 1975, the 16mm feature Test Pictures (about a couple leaving
the city to return to nature) was made over a period of months by a hippie
commune established at Huia, an Auckland West Coast beach. Sacks of
vegetables were contributed by sympathisers; some equipment and sets were
built from junk; and friendly local residents would call by with tea and scones.
Meanwhile the Blerta music and film-making group had established a commune at
Waimarama in search of a cheap place to live. After contact with local Māori, they
were inspired to make Uenuku in 1974, a Māori language film ahead of its time. In
1980 the group went on the road to make Goodbye Pork Pie in the spirit of
 21

legendary bus trips by the Merry Pranksters in the United States. The crew
included the family and friends of director Geoff Murphy who were known as “The
Murphia”. He invested his own fee in the film.

Communes in the city were set up in big old houses. One variation was the idea of
a “film co-op.” It was not a place to live but it held a range of 16mm equipment
available cheaply to everyone. In Auckland, a sizeable part of the film industry
started out from Alternative Cinema, a co-op established in 1972 in a dilapidated
three-story wooden building in Hobson Street. The premises were provided free
by colourful property developer Sam Harvey. Some film-makers – Murphy, Mita,
and John Maynard - took offices upstairs. From 1972 the co-op published an
influential magazine, and this truly co-operative venture functioned for over 14
years, mostly by volunteer labour. Dozens of first-time film-makers used its
cameras and editing equipment, came to see screenings, and joined in the fierce
debates about politics and film-making.

The Counter-Culture and Censorship

Disrespect for the establishment was most intense during this decade. At risk of
being arrested for smoking dope, using swearwords in public, or crossing the line
at a Māori land protest or a Vietnam War demonstration, many young New
Zealanders came to regard the law as an ass. Director Roger Donaldson’s initial
reason for coming to New Zealand was to escape the Australian draft for Vietnam.
Though the war was over by the time he made Sleeping Dogs in 1977, it remained
central to the film. Meanwhile, the starting point for Goodbye Pork Pie was Abbie
Hoffman’s subversive manual Steal This Book (1971). Blerta became experts at
surreptitiously tapping television resources, sneaking their rolls of exposed film
into the Avalon system for free processing, and unofficially expanding their
Wildman television programme into a feature film. In 1981, almost the whole of the
film industry joined the Springbok protest, thus giving the film Patu! its wide-
ranging, front-line coverage, and helping director Merata Mita to keep the footage
out of the hands of the police who tried to requisition it for “evidence.”

A quick comparison between three films with a “runaway” theme highlights the
changes that had occurred between the 1960s and the new wave. It is clear from
O’Shea’s Runaway that the 1960s counter-culture had not reached this country by
1964, for the film looks back instead, to the Angry Young Men of the 1950s, to the
anti-heroes of existentialism, and to the 1939 New Zealand novel Man Alone. The
film was unlucky to be a few years too soon, and its narrative seemed bleak and
backward looking, except in its sympathy for Māori culture. Sleeping Dogs (1977)
provided a fresh perspective on Man Alone and Bill Pearson’s 1952 essay “Fretful
Sleepers,” texts which had influenced C.K. Stead’s source novel, Smith’s Dream.
Compared with Runaway, its rebellion had more energy and there were
references to the Vietnam War, the oil crisis, and Muldoon as Prime Minister.
Goodbye Pork Pie, made 6 years later, was like a new version of Runaway
enriched by the counter-culture, its dope smoking and anarchism. Its rebellion was
perhaps equally pointless but it had a lot more joie de vivre, and the audience
responded warmly to it. 600,000 cinema tickets were sold, and its first screening
on television “was watched by 50 per cent of the population over five.”75 The film
made a profit.
 22

Not everyone approved. A letter to the Herald from L. R. Filmore (15 August 1981)
remarked: “I had hoped that the film Goodbye Pork Pie would not be shown
overseas – such films suggest to overseas audiences that we are a breed with the
morals of alley cats. It is a pity that the writers and producers deemed frequent
insertions of sex an essential ingredient, so that even our beautiful scenery
becomes contaminated.” Today this letter would be interpreted as a joke, but such
sentiments were common at the time. The film grants made by the QEII Arts
Council (a crucial source of funding for films during the early years) upset
politicians such as Norman Jones, the MP for Invercargill, who opposed
“homosexual law reform” and “weird film grants.” In 1982 he raised the film issue
in Parliament: “In my view it is time the Government had a good look at those on
the [Arts] Council and replaced them with a few hard-nosed peasants and a few
backwoodsmen who will bring a bit of commonsense into what should and should
not receive taxpayers’ funding in the name of art.” 76

It was inevitable that the interests of the new generation of cinema-goers would
clash with a system of film censorship still based on the family audience. There
were censorship battles in many areas of New Zealand culture. The Customs
Department worked hard to intercept immoral literature, and – to mention one
ludicrous example – it banned a book of games for sick children because of its title:
Fun in Bed.77 Film censorship had not always been out of touch, for John O’Shea
and Gordon Mirams had once been censors, but the Chief Censor from 1960 to
1976 was the uncompromising Douglas McIntosh, and it was during those years
that the system grew increasingly out of touch with film-making and with changes
in society. It still operated on the assumption that the cinema was a public place,
hence there could be no nudity, drugs or swearing. In 1973, Last Tango in Paris
and Fritz the Cat were banned, along with films by Andy Warhol and Pier Paolo
Pasolini. By the mid-1970s, almost half of all the films submitted to the New
Zealand censor were cut or banned. In 1976, when One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest reached Auckland via the Film Festival, the Censor cut 50 swearwords,
making so many jump-cuts that it now felt like an experimental film.78 By 1975 our
country had gained an international reputation for having “the most outmoded
censorship system in the world outside the Iron Curtain.”79

Television censorship was equally as strict. Cuts were made to Tony Williams’s
documentaries without consulting him (such as an episode of streaking at a
yachtie party in The Hum). And television initially refused to screen Geoff Murphy
and the Acme Sausage Company’s 1972 film Tankbusters because its credits
included the name “Rigid Nipples” (a nickname for Richard Nichols). Censorship
was a serious disincentive to local film-making because, as Tony Williams
explained in the Listener: “The last straw [is] the censorship problem. It’s hard
enough to make films, but when you can’t even see them…!”80

Patricia Bartlett, a former nun, established the Society for the Promotion of
Community Standards and became the leading moral crusader of the 1970s. One
of her first campaigns was to ban images of bare female breasts. To support her
various causes she collected huge petitions and won the support of conservative
MPs and religious groups. When Maunder’s film Landfall won first prize at the Abu
Shiraz Young Film Makers Festival in Iran in 1975, Bartlett was outraged that a
 23

film about a drug-smoking commune had been allowed to represent New Zealand.
She was equally shocked by the sex and drugs in Test Pictures, but failed to
prevent the film from obtaining an R18 certificate rather than being banned.
Bartlett’s campaign (reported with much relish in Truth) provided plenty of publicity,
though prurient viewers who came to see the film at the Classic Cinema (which
screened soft-core porn) must have been bewildered by it.

In 1976 new legislation took some of the pressure off, and a new Censor replaced
McIntosh, but there were still conflicts for many years. For example, in 1977
Bartlett was instrumental in persuading the government to add a clause to the Film
Commission’s Act which required it to “have due regard to the observance of
standards that are generally acceptable in the community.” Her immediate aim
was to prevent the Commission from giving any money to Richard Turner’s gay
film Squeeze, and she succeeded (though the Commission was never willing
publicly to explain its reasons for turning the film down). Squeeze was finally
completed with the help of a large number of small donations, but Turner was left
in debt and went to England to continue his film-making career.

The Second Wave

The new wave of film-makers who came to prominence in the 1970s belonged to
a particular generation born between 1938 and 1948. They included: Barry
Barclay, John Clarke, Roger Donaldson, John Laing, Bruno Lawrence, Paul
Maunder, Merata Mita, Bruce Morrison, Ian Mune, Geoff Murphy, Leon Narbey,
Sam Pillsbury, Gaylene Preston, Martyn Sanderson, Geoff Steven, and Tony
Williams. Following the pattern of the 1930s, there was a second group, another
collective burst of energy but with different interests. Born in the 1950s and
coming to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, they included: David Blyth, Costa
Botes, Jane Campion, Alison Maclean, Stewart Main, Shereen Maloney, Gregor
Nicholas, Melanie Read, Harry Sinclair, Greg Stitt, Lee Tamahori, Vincent Ward,
and Peter Wells. The arrival of this second wave was well timed because in 1984
the government put an end to the “tax break,” a four-year period when finance had
been readily available. Fearing that the funding situation was returning to the bad
old days, some of the established film-makers had decided to head overseas.

John Maynard and Bridget Ikin produced the First Hand series in 1985 as a
showcase for the second wave (in the same way the series Winners and Losers,
produced by Donaldson and Mune in 1975, had introduced the first wave). It
included short films by Nicholas, Wells, Main, Botes, Stitt and Maloney. While the
younger group shared the same passion for local details, they wanted to pay more
attention to the concerns of women, Māori, and gay and lesbian New Zealanders.
These themes had been touched on by the first wave but they now emerged more
clearly and sometimes angrily. Māori and feminist protests were making headlines,
and there was a bitter public debate over the Homosexual Law Reform Bill (finally
passed in 1986). The new film-makers were not merely propagandists but they
were passionate about these issues. They tended to see the films of the first wave
as still compromised by old-fashioned New Zealand culture. Their films also
tended to be more urban and stylized, and in some cases - such as Harry
Sinclair’s The Price of Milk – their realism became “magic realism.”
 24

Peter Wells clearly signalled the new approach: “The [previous] feature
films…simply did not touch my life at any point. They were nearly always rural in
their setting…and of course that standard line of the emotionally inarticulate New
Zealander just drove me nuts. Nearly everyone I knew seemed very articulate
about what drove them nuts.”81 A lively, innovative culture of gay film-making
developed around Wells, Main, Garth Maxwell, and others. Their feature films
would include Desperate Remedies (1993), When Love Comes (1999), and 50
Ways of Saying Fabulous (2005).

Merata Mita, for different reasons, dismissed most of the films to date as the
product of “a white neurotic industry”. To her, Pakeha films were characterised by
a restless mood of dislocation (settler anxiety), whereas Māori films were
concerned with the reclaiming of lost identity. She added: “It is going to be a long
time, and many movies, before this country finds real maturity and independence,
if ever.”82

The Māori equivalent of About Face was E Tipu E Rea (1989), a breakthrough
series of short films as a showcase for Māori directors, producers, and actors,
including Riwia Brown, Rena Owen, Rawiri Paratene, Larry Parr, Joanna Paul,
Don Selwyn, and Lee Tamahori. Selwyn produced a follow-up series, Nga Puna,
in 1993.

By the end of the 1980s New Zealand had not only a feature film industry but one
with a genealogy of several generations. (These new developments are
documented by Frank Stark in Chapter 8 and Ann Hardy in Chapter 9.) The period
had seen the first features directed by women – The Silent One (Yvonne Mackay),
Trial Run (Melanie Reid), and Mr Wrong (Gaylene Preston). Melanie Reid
commented in 1985: “The situation for women film makers seems to have been
different in New Zealand because the industry developed later. When the new
wave of [feminist] political awareness came in Australia, the industry was already
entrenched…. In New Zealand, the feminist awareness was there before the
industry developed so they were able to have more impact. Women film makers
here tend to be political – for example, Merata Mita, Gaylene Preston, and
myself….whereas in Australia the political woman film makers have tended to be
shunted off into the alternative, underground, low budget area. Here we seem able
to make a mark on the mainstream.”83

Other women who later directed features include Christine Jeffs, Jane Campion,
Niki Caro, Vanessa Alexander, Sima Urale, Simone Horrocks, Athina Tsoulis, and
Armagan Ballantyne. There have also been award-winning women directors of
feature-length documentaries such as Leanne Pooley and Shirley Horrocks,
writers such as Philippa Boyens and Riwia Brown, film fund managers such as
Ruth Harley and Jan Bieringa, and influential producers such as Robin Scholes,
Robin Laing and Caterina de Nave. This is not to deny that women may still
encounter male bias in some areas of the industry. Deborah Shepherd’s book
Reframing Women has documented the obstacles women have had had to
overcome, and the 1987 black comedy Instincts by Pat Robins and Helen
Bollinger has put on record their personal experience of the Waimarama
commune where the women were expected not only to help the men with their
projects but to take care of all the housework and child-minding.
 25

…and a Third Wave

Peter Jackson was born in 1961, and he and his collaborators – Fran Walsh,
Philippa Boyens, Richard Taylor and Tania Rodger - could be seen as
representing a third wave. Jackson has achieved the seemingly impossible task of
staying in New Zealand to direct large overseas projects. In his words: “It’s a little
bit of Hollywood coming to New Zealand; it’s not me going to Hollywood – that’s
something I’ve always resisted”.84 Top Hollywood movies like Avatar (2009) now
seek the help of Richard Taylor and Weta Workshop.

This third wave has certainly brought some major changes. Since Jackson’s first
large budget Hollywood-style film The Frighteners in 1996, his studio has become
a kind of separate industry, or a new layer to the New Zealand industry as we
have described it so far. Films that are New Zealand-oriented, with traditionally
small budgets, continue to be made, and there is a healthy exchange between the
two worlds, either through Jackson’s projects or through his Park Road Post film
facility.

Although Jackson’s films mark a distinct break with the Landfall tradition, other
film-makers of his generation continue to make films that link up with that earlier
body of work. Directors born in the 1960s include Niki Caro, Simone Horrocks,
Christine Jeffs, and Brad McGann, and in the 1970s Armagan Ballantyne, Toa
Fraser, Florian Habicht, Robert Sarkies, and Taika Waititi. Their output makes it
clear that the interests of New Zealand film-makers are become more diverse.

In the last 20 years Pacific Island culture has had a huge impact on local theatre,
music, poetry, and painting - not to mention television (Bro’ Town) and film (No.2
and Sione’s Wedding). In 1995 the Tala Pasifika series of short films served as an
introduction to a new generation of Pacific Island actors, writers and directors.
Oscar Kightley has earned national recognition for his work in comedy, and Sima
Urale has made a big impact with her short film O Tamaiti and poetic documentary
Velvet Dreams.

Many other ethnic and cultural groups have entered the arena of local film-making.
Athina Tsoulis made the short films A Bitter Song and Revelations about girls
growing up in a Greek family in New Zealand. Lisa Reihana made the
experimental film Wog Features about racist stereotypes; and Roseanne Liang’s
Take 3 is a wry comment on the assumptions about Asians encountered in film,
television and advertising companies. Shuchi Kothari has introduced Indian
themes, and Nomadz Unlimited – the company she started with Sarina Pearson -
has produced a range of short films with an emphasis on cultural diversity,
including Sima Urale’s Coffee and Allah and the television comedy series A
Thousand Apologies. Some of these film-makers would argue that it is time to
forget about the Nationalist tradition because film has completed the task of re-
visioning New Zealand as an independent country, and its priority now is to think
harder about its relationship with the rest of the world.
 26

What Makes a Good New Zealand Film?

Tony Williams said of the new wave of film-making in 1975: “I’m reminded of a line
in one of Herzog’s films, ‘Now that we have learned to speak, what is there to
say?’ We’ll never know unless we try.”85

Since then there have been about 160 feature films made in New Zealand. This is
to concentrate on 35mm dramatic features, shot mostly in this country, with New
Zealand directors and producers. The number is necessarily a little fluid since this
does not include 16mm films, telefeatures, offshore films shot in New Zealand, or
low budget digital features. Even if we are selective in this way, it works out to
about five per year. A few years have been exceptions – especially 1983-84, the
last two years of the tax break, when 26 films were made.

Geoff Murphy has noted that “most film-making countries can produce about one
[35mm feature] film per year for every million of population. This is because
population defines the size of the domestic market and…it takes a large talent
pool to sustain an industry.”86 Thus New Zealand has done four or five per year,
which has added up to a sizeable body of local culture, to stand alongside our
fiction, poetry, theatre, art, and music. A DVD rental store can offer a sizeable
selection of New Zealand films. There are university courses and (occasional)
overseas festivals of New Zealand films. Granted, five per year is only a drop in
the bucket in view of the number of American films screened in our cinemas, but a
local film can have a special resonance for our community or at least a group
within it.

Which have been the most successful New Zealand films? It is necessary to give
at least two different answers. On the one hand, we can ask which films have
been most enthusiastically welcomed within popular culture. In other words,
which films have become a household name, and which have sold the most
tickets? On the other hand, we can ask which films have received the most critical
acclaim within “serious culture,” on the festival circuit and in film magazines. A
related question is: “Who are our auteurs (our most distinctive directors)?” Both
types of film have their champions, as some cinema-goers always head for a
multiplex while others prefer an art house or a Film Festival. The Nationalists
would favour the second set of questions, though they have always dreamed of
reaching a large audience, and they would see the most popular New Zealand
films as having taken elements from the Landfall tradition.

The New Zealand films that have been more warmly received within popular
culture include Goodbye Pork Pie, What Became of the Broken Hearted, Footrot
Flats, Boy, World’s Fastest Indian, and Lord of the Rings. Films more deeply
appreciated within “serious culture” include Rain, Vigil, The Navigator, Illustrious
Energy, Feathers of Peace, Crush, Desperate Remedies, Woodenhead, and The
Price of Milk. Just to complicate matters, some films have managed to impress
both audiences: Once Were Warriors, Heavenly Creatures, Whale Rider, Angel at
my Table, and The Piano. It is hard to derive any clear rules from these diverse
groups, though it is clear that films that appeal to ‘popular culture’ tend to place
more emphasis on action, a fast-paced script, and accessible story-telling, and
have closer links with other forms of popular culture (Michael Jackson, pop music,
 27

newspaper comic strips, etc). Art house films tend to have a looser narrative,
being more interested in characterization and psychological nuance; and they
place more emphasis on artistic camerawork and editing. They have close links
with ‘high culture’ (literature, painting, classical music, etc). Interestingly, many
New Zealand “art house” films directly raise the theme of New Zealand being an
unfriendly environment for art or serious culture – including An Angel at my Table,
Iris, Pictures, A State of Siege, Vigil, and The Piano. This wild country is no place
for Ada’s piano, Manfred’s painting, or Toss’s ballet!

It is important to acknowledge how hard it is to predict box office. Jane Campion

was not sure that her own film An Angel at my Table would work in the cinema,
and at first she was “resolute” that it should only be screened on television.87 In
the case of Once Were Warriors, which would turn out to be New Zealand’s most
popular film ever, a pre-sale of the television rights was turned down by TVNZ,
and the project was initially rejected by the Film Commission on the grounds that
“the story was utterly bleak, very violent, racist, misogynist. How could it succeed,
on any terms?”88

A related question to “popular” versus “serious” is whether the New Zealand film
industry should be thought of primarily in business or in cultural terms. Film is an
expensive medium that involves both aspects, and this is a debate that has
cropped up during each period of New Zealand film-making. While it is difficult to
predict success, it is obviously possible to aim for either the more populist or the
more cultural end of the scale. Culture has several possible meanings here – to
create art, to create something that’s important for New Zealand culture, or to
represent a minority audience. Some local films have given minorities the
satisfaction of seeing their culture on the big screen for the first time.

The New Zealand Film Commission inherited this tension between commerce and
culture. The organization has been pushed around by the political priorities of the
day, especially through the government’s choice of Board Chairperson. For
example, Phil Pryke who was Chair between 1993 to 1996 was a former
investment banker and a “more market” advocate. He focused on box-office
success and the promotion of New Zealand as a location for overseas films.
Challenged by film-makers who attached more importance to cultural factors, he
insisted that “All cultural agencies have an obligation to make their output as
accessible as possible to the domestic market. Culture is about the participation of
the widest possible number of people in the domestic market.”89 That was far from
a Landfall point of view!

The Commission was created not only to grow a business but also because of its
cultural benefits, along with its ability to make the country better known overseas.
In economic terms the Commission is a response to “market failure” (the idea that
certain products are needed which we can not expect the market to supply), a
problem to be remedied by public funding. The Commission’s staff and most
board members are fully aware of the cultural issues, and the organization has
tried to juggle the different priorities. If its investments in film became commercially
too successful, then politicians would see no further need for public funding; but if
its films became too specialised and unpopular, then politicians (and the news
media) would complain about taxpayers’ money being wasted. So it’s a balancing
 28

act, similar to that performed by “serious” publishers such as university presses

who need at least one bestseller each year but will also publish a few books that
they regard as important for cultural reasons.

The way this has worked out is that most films made in New Zealand since 1977
occupy the middle-ground. There have been few films of a purely escapist kind -
only Battletruck, Race for the Yankee Zephyr, and Savage Islands. The films
made here by overseas companies – the Hercules tele-features, Aces Go Places,
Cupid’s Prey, Treasure Island Kids, and so on - tend to be generic entertainment,
more straightforward than our local films. Even our most popular genre films have
a serious edge to them, such as Goodbye Pork Pie, Braindead, and Lord of the
Rings. A kind of humanitarian liberalism is widespread in New Zealand films, and
even our comedies (such as Sione’s Wedding, No.2, and Boy) usually have a few
serious points to make.

At the other end of the scale there has been a small number of art house features
- such as the work of David Blyth, Florian Habicht, Geoff Steven, and Vincent
Ward, and some great short films such as Kitchen Sink - but most New Zealand
film-makers are nervous about being seen as “arty.” For better or worse, most of
our films are a mixture – they have a serious side but also try to be entertaining,
down-to-earth, and accessible.

Several factors complicate the Commission’s task. First, four or five films a year
are not enough to spread the risks. Overseas studios make more films because
the industry is so unpredictable – they know they will be lucky to get one hit out of
their year’s output. New Zealand has had the occasional run of success such as
1993-94 (when Once Were Warriors, Heavenly Creatures and The Piano
coincided) but other years have passed with no box-office hits. The second
problem is that when we “aim for the mainstream,” we have to decide which one.
As Lindsay Shelton, who was Marketing Director of the Commission for many
years, explains: “The question of what films to make is further complicated by the
fact that overseas our films (like other ‘foreign’ films) are screened at art-house
cinemas, whereas in New Zealand film-makers are encouraged to aim at multiplex
audiences. After the 1980s successes of Donaldson and Murphy, efforts at
making populist films for New Zealand audiences often produced features that
failed to get a theatrical release elsewhere, because they had no attraction for
international art-house audiences. This dilemma has never been resolved.” 90
Once Were Warriors and Heavenly Creatures earned about $3 million each in the
United States, which was very good for New Zealand films, but hardly the huge
success that New Zealanders imagined them to be.91 It is often said that overseas
audiences love something fresh and foreign, but this optimism is true only up to a
point. Viewers enjoy a taste of difference, but lose their appetite if the film is too
foreign.

Some films have worked better with local audiences than with overseas audiences
– such as The World’s Fastest Indian, Sione’s Wedding, Scarfies, Goodbye Pork
Pie, Second Hand Wedding, and Once Were Warriors. Some have done better in
the South Island than the North (Scarfies, Out of the Blue, or the 1935 film Down
on the Farm) and some have appealed more to the North (No.2 and Sione’s
Wedding). Of course film taste is also influenced by other factors such as gender,
 29

age and ethnic group. It is pleasing, however, to see the development of a

sizeable bi-cultural audience for Māori Television and for films such as Boy and
Whale Rider.92

Key Themes

Looking at the 160 New Zealand feature films made since the arrival of the new
wave – plus the 17 silent features and 12 sound features made previously – what
are the key themes? (The number of films is approximate because some early
films have been lost.) From the beginning, many films display a profound interest
in landscape. The New Zealand landscape is able to help a small-budget film to
look large and distinctive. Many National Film Unit films focused on landscape.
Some were as conventional as a picture-postcard, but there were some
outstanding examples by directors such as John Feeney.

The Nationalist painters had a deep respect for the environment and a strong
suspicion of the sentimental, picturesque images current in Pakeha art circles,
which celebrated the pioneers’ “conquest” of the land. The Nationalists wanted to
show the landscape as having its own spirit and wildness. Literature and art set
about giving the landscape a symbolic resonance, as James K. Baxter explained
in 1954 in his essay “Symbolism in New Zealand Poetry.” For example, the beach
is “an arena of historical change, the arrival and departure of races; and as a
place where revelations may occur,” as well as being associated with “erotic
adventure.”93 (A number dramatic beach scenes come immediately to mind in
films such as The Piano, Memory and Desire, Test Pictures, and When Love
Comes.)

The films of the new wave showed a consistent interest in transcending the
picturesque, to explore the wilder and stranger aspects of landscape. In this
respect they were often reminiscent of New Zealand painting, such as Vigil’s
affinities with Colin McCahon. Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka have
described a similar effect in Australian films as “a frisson set up between
European culture, vision and look, and a resolutely antipodean geography, idiom
and abrasiveness”94 Other New Zealand films with memorable landscapes of this
kind include Runaway, Wildman, Bad Blood, Utu, Pictures, Trespasses, The Lost
Tribe, Bridge to Nowhere, Illustrious Energy, The Navigator, Crush, The Piano,
Fifty Ways of Saying Fabulous, River Queen, Whale Rider, After the Waterfall and
The Strength of Water – an impressive list. Some wild landscapes in the Rings
trilogy could also be included, though their “frisson” is of a different kind.

Strangely, New Zealand films have sometimes lost overseas sales because the
landscape contained too much open space. Goodbye Pork Pie could not obtain a
release in Japan because distributors simply could not believe that the car was
doing much travelling. “They said Japanese film-goers would expect to see many
buildings on such a long journey.”95

After 40 years of Nationalist art, there was a reaction by young painters against
the dominance of landscape. A similar reaction occurred in film in the 1980s and
1990s, shifting the focus to city life, as though recalling John Grierson’s advice not
to spend so much time on “scenery”. One of these films, Harry Sinclair’s Topless
 30

Women Talk about their Lives (1997), includes a scene on Karekare beach which
ends as a joke. German tourists turn up to see the beach because it was the
location for the opening of The Piano. They find a script that has been thrown
away, entitled Topless Women Talk about their Lives. They take the script back to
Germany and make a bad film out of it.

Māori Culture on Screen

“That [country] background gave me a touchstone for every single major film I
have made. It gave me a deep respect for rural people. My one rule in making any
film, no matter how complex or seemingly remote the issue, is whether I can take
it back to my home town and show it there with pride.” (Barry Barclay) 96

Māori have known the landscape through their long tradition as tangata whenua,
people of the land. The series of that name, which Barclay directed in 1974,
interwove rural lives with the landscape in a strikingly intimate and respectful way.
This series had a profound impact on some viewers, including its producer John
O’Shea: “It took parts of [Tangata Whenua] to grasp the fact that I was not Irish,
not British, and not Māori – so what was I? Was I indeed a Pakeha? And what
was that?”97

Barclay outlined a distinctive Māori film aesthetic in his book Our Own Image
(1990). This was a style available to all New Zealand film-makers as an alternative
to the over-heated approach that characterises so much television and Hollywood
film-making today. (“A camera of that kind is wont to pace here and there,
attempting to hype things up like a vain bird during mating rituals.”98) His feature-
length documentary The Neglected Miracle (1985), about the guardianship of
plants and seeds, showed how a Māori perspective could function as a global
perspective, relevant to indigenous communities everywhere.

The representation of Māori life and culture in films is a particularly clear

touchstone to how Pakeha viewpoints have changed over the last century. In the
earliest days it was one of the novelties of the film medium that it could introduce
people to distant peoples and places. Māori subject matter was presented in
exotic terms from an outsider’s point of view. When good story-telling became
more important, the New Zealand Wars of the 19th century were seen as our
greatest source of historical stories. They had already provided the basis for best-
selling epic novels such as The Greenstone Door (1914). Hayward’s films on this
theme broke new ground by their greater awareness of the Māori perspective,
thus launching a tradition of New Zealand films that sought to educate the Pakeha
audience. In the words of Gaylene Preston: “Keri Hulme says, in a film I made
called Kai Purakau, that there’s a melding of two cultures going on here. It’s not
happening fast enough and it’s only a small group of people, but the arts [including
film] are leading the way.”99

Murphy’s representation of the Wars in Utu in 1983 is strikingly different from

Hayward’s in Rewi’s Last Stand in 1939. Hayward draws on Victorian ideals of
military conduct – Māori and Pakeha have respect for each other’s prowess, and
in battle they follow the rules of chivalry, whereas Utu views both sides with tough-
minded realism, coloured by the contemporary examples of the Vietnam War and
 31

Latin American liberation struggles. The opening scene shows the massacre of a
Māori village, which calls to mind My Lai and so-called “Vietnam Westerns” such
as Soldier Blue and Little Big Man (both 1970). While giving equal attention to
Māori and Pakeha characters, Utu reflects the black humour and rascal spirit of
the counterculture.

Merata Mita (an advisor on Utu and a member of the cast) once recalled how she
had seen her first movies as a child: “Our picture theatre was on the marae. This
Greek guy used to bring the film and set it up in the meeting house. Sometimes for
fun he would project the film onto the carvings.” 100 Mita came to see her own work
as an attempt to get beyond this kind of incongruity between overseas films and
Māori culture. “As the producer or director of a film, I’m actually in the position of
the person who carried the oral tradition in olden times…. It’s similar to the way
the whaikōrero, and the stories that are told on the marae, keep history alive and
maintain contact with the past…. And it means I’m not just motivated, I’m
driven.”101

Māori were initially involved in feature-film making as actors, crew members and
writers. Witi Ihimaera’s writing was an important source for short dramas such as
Mune’s Big Brother Little Sister (1976), which anticipated some aspects of Once
Were Warriors.102 When Māori also became producers and directors, films started
to represent Māori life fully from an inside perspective. Barclay (as director and
writer), Mita (as actor and director), and Don Selwyn (as actor, director and
producer) were key figures, serving as influential mentors and role models. All of
them directed feature films. Their recent deaths (Selwyn in 2007, Barclay in 2008
and Mita in 2010) represented the end of an era, the passing of a great generation,
though there are many young people continuing their tradition. Some feel today
that Māori film-makers have yet to gain the support and autonomy (rangatiratanga)
that was promised by the Treaty of Waitangi, as Tainui Stephens explains in his
sidebar to Chapter 11.

When New Zealand films go overseas, they still encounter the old demand for
straight-forward exoticism. Overseas audiences struggle to relate Māori culture to
the categories they know – African-American, Australian Aborigine, or Native
American - but the existing stereotypes do not fit. Utu proved to be too complex for
overseas audiences accustomed to the traditional framework of white-skinned
cavalry fighting brown-skinned Indians. While Utu did allude to John Ford’s films,
and the publicity described it as a “New Zealand western,” Murphy treated the
American genre satirically in attempting to do justice to the complexities of colonial
history.

Peter Debruge, a reviewer in the influential American film industry weekly Variety,
felt that Taika Waititi’s Boy should have made his Māori characters more exotic,
more ancient and mysterious: “Waititi has scrubbed away all culturally specific
traits from his growing-up-Kiwi comedy…. Without that arthouse-ready
anthropological edge…Boy’s prospects look more cult than commercial…. Only
Boy’s kid brother, Rocky, seems remotely spiritual… daydreaming about magic
powers (blending comic-book fantasy with a sense of Māori mysticism).”103 Back
in New Zealand, actor Tammy Davis wrote an ironic reply, explaining to Debruge
that “growing up Māori on the East Coast of New Zealand is not all riding
 32

whales…. Were young Māori in the early 1980s too busy learning to keen and
chant and wail to be concerned with schoolyard crushes and the phenomenon that
was Michael Jackson? Then I am afraid to say I am a let down of a Māori,
because in the 1980s this was all there was for me.”104

A favourite theme of New Zealand films has been a troubled love affair between
Māori and Pakeha, starting in the 1910s with Loved by a Māori Chieftess and A
Māori Maid’s Love. Later examples include Rewi’s Last Stand, Broken Barrier, To
Love A Māori, and Mauri. One of the most memorable was a short drama by
Stewart Main, Twilight of the Gods 1995, in which a Māori and a Pakeha –
enemies on the battlefield - start a gay relationship in the midst of the colonial
wars. Film-makers have used this Romeo-and-Juliet theme to help New Zealand
viewers to understand conflicts associated with other cultural backgrounds. Sons
for the Return Home (1979) describes a relationship between a Samoan boy and
a Palagi girl. Other Halves (1984) tracks a relationship between a 16-year-old
Niuean and a 32-year-old Palagi woman. (In Sue McCauley’s original novel, the
teenager was Maori.) Broken English (1996) pairs a Pakeha boy with a Croatian
girl. Shereen Maloney made a short film, Mother Tongue, about a troubled
romance between a Catholic girl and a Jewish boy (1993). Rosemary Liang
directed a documentary Banana in a Nutshell (2005) about the opposition of her
Chinese parents to her relationship with a Pakeha boy, and is now dramatising
this conflict as a feature film.

Horror and Other Genres

The most common method of grouping films is by genre, and certain genres are
so firmly established overseas, that they make it much easier to market a film.
New Zealand film-makers have tended to be suspicious of the tendency for genres
to limit naturalism, though it could be argued that the interracial romances
described in the previous section constitute a genre. And it is possible to use a
genre in an original way, as Murphy subverted the Western in Utu. Peter Jackson,
who derived his creative sensibility from Anglo-American popular culture rather
than from the Landfall tradition, has always felt at home with genres. He has his
own way of pushing the boundaries, as he explained in 2004 to an American
interviewer when asked why there was so much gore in his early films (Bad Taste,
Meet the Feebles, and Brain Dead, known in the U.S.A. as Dead Alive): “They all
represent the type of film I would be entertained by. That's why you make movies.
Because you're interested in a genre. I'm a huge horror fan and I always will be.
My horror movies were made on the backs of films like Evil Dead that were
extremely graphic. I had to top those films. I had to be more outrageous and more
extreme. Not that I'm competitive with others, but when filmmakers raise the bar in
terms of portraying something in a way you've never seen before, it's
inspirational.”105

Jackson’s successes gave New Zealand an international reputation for horror and
“splatstick” that helped to grow this genre locally. It is interesting, however, that
films such as Black Sheep, The Tattooist, The Locals, The Irrefutable Truth About
Demons, The Ugly, The Ferryman, and Perfect Creature tended to be more
popular overseas. “New Zealand film-goers – or at least the ones who went to
horror films – retained a strong predeliction for horror with an American accent.”106
 33

Generally, New Zealanders have preferred home-grown films to retain a sense of

realism. They showed this lack of enthusiasm for local horror films as early as
1984 when Death Warmed Up – a film ahead of its time – was chastised by local
reviewers for undermining the seriousness of New Zealand cinema, though it went
on to win the Grand Prix at the Paris Festival of Science Fiction and Fantasy Films.

Yet while local viewers are uncomfortable with horror, they love “unease” – or so
Sam Neill and Judy Rymer argue in their film Cinema of Unease (1995). This
feature-length documentary still determines what many overseas reviewers expect
a New Zealand film to be like. Neill and Rymer describe our film industry as
“uniquely strange and dark,” haunted by the presence of a “menacing land” and by
the ghost of Man Alone. Their documentary performed the useful task of linking
New Zealand films with the Nationalist tradition, but they chose to concentrate on
one aspect of that tradition. It was like assuming that all Swedish films matched
the coldest, most claustrophobic moments of Ingmar Bergman. Cinema of Unease
also failed to acknowledge the post-1970s changes, and for that reason its
argument was brusquely dismissed by the second wave of film-makers. A
conciliatory Neill later remarked that “Now I favour the phrase ‘cinema at ease’.”107
Nevertheless, there is indeed a mood of “kiwi gothic” (or expressionism) which
darkens much art and literature in the Landfall tradition, along with films such as
State of Siege, Vigil, Crush, Memory and Desire, Jack Be Nimble, and Perfect
Strangers, to mention just a few.108 After the 1970s, however, such films did not fit
the Man (or Woman) Alone stereotype as closely, because a more self-conscious
or ironic sensibility had developed (such as the black humour of having Sam
Neill’s character preserved in the freezer in Perfect Strangers).

Coming of Age

“We see…the children playing Indians in the long grass beyond the railway
yards...[and] the lovers walking by the swans…. they are temporarily free to do
what they choose.”109 (James K. Baxter, 1955)

The theme of adolescence or rite-of-passage is extraordinarily strong in New

Zealand in both literature and films, assuming prominence in 30 features since the
arrival of the new wave along with a number of well-known short films.110 These
are films about young people made for an older audience. The prominence of the
theme has led to the discovery of some great young actors – Keisha Castle-
Hughes, Anna Paquin, James Rolleston, Hato Paparoa, Melanie Mayall-Nahi,
and many others.

Why so many films of adolescence? One theory would be that our youthful years
tend to be the most intense period of our lives in a country that has been judged to
be the most peaceful on earth. A 2010 Global Peace survey by the Institute for
Economics and Peace put us first in a list of 149 countries, at the opposite end of
the scale to Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan. Iceland occupies the second place on
the list.111 To many young people, “peaceful” means “boring”.

The critical nationalist tradition offers another explanation – that adult life in our
society is bland, conformist and repressed. Baxter summed up the prevailing
“Calvinist ethos” in 1966 as “Work is good; sex is evil; do what you’re told and
 34

you’ll be all right; don’t dig too deep into yourself.”112 (An example of Baxter’s
strong influence on the film makers of the first wave was The Road to Jerusalem,
Bruce Morrison’s 1997 feature-length documentary about this poet.) Hedonism
and consumerism have largely replaced Puritanism, but local artists continue to be
fascinated by the transition from the open horizons of childhood to the conformity
of adult life.

Some feature films – such as Once Were Warriors, The God Boy, Jack be Nimble,
Heart of the Stag, It’s Lizzie and In My Father’s Den – portray an adult world that
is actively destructive towards young people. Dame Silvia Cartwright has said:
“We may lead the world in family-violence legislation and policy, but at least on the
face of it, we are also at the forefront in the perpetration of child abuse, family
violence and serious sexual assaults".113 A high rate of teenage suicide can be
added to that list. Through its dramatic presentation of these issues, Once Were
Warriors has played an important role as an educational tool.

Some films focus on young people who are seriously ill (The Whole of the Moon),
or get into trouble with the law (Kingi’s Story, Kingpin, Mark II, Other Halves, and
Heavenly Creatures); but most films focus in a more general way on young people
learning about sex, death, and the strengths and weaknesses of the adult world.
Granted, they tend to present quite a dangerous vision of society, which links back
to the Landfall tradition and to the dark tendency within New Zealand cinema.
They include: An Angel at my Table, Scarecrow, Vigil, Crush, The Piano, End of
the Golden Weather, Among the Cinders, Starlight Hotel, 50 Ways of Saying
Fabulous, Whale Rider, and Boy.

In New Zealand cinemas Boy has become the best-selling local film ever, grossing
more than $7 million on its first cinema release. It seems to have found the ideal
mix of ingredients to attract a broad local audience: it is a coming-of-age drama,
with engaging young actors, strong comic elements, an underlying dark strain (a
sense of potential tragedy), and a great deal of down-to-earth, male kiwi culture. It
also offers a hybrid mix of overseas and local culture, and we are at home with
that because our culture has always been a patchwork, cleverly evoked in the final
dance scene which combines a Māori haka with Michael Jackson’s Thriller and
the popular British/Indian film Slumdog Millionaire.

Kiwi Male Culture

“The feeling of 1,800 people laughing and sometimes cheering as the film played
was a huge buzz. The atmosphere was more like the atmosphere at a rugby
match than a film festival….” (Robert Sarkies’s description of the New Zealand
premiere of Scarfies)114

A final ingredient of New Zealand films that is important to discuss is “kiwi male
culture,” aka blokeish behaviour. This is a stronger identifier than “cinema of
unease.” When an overseas visitor turns on television in New Zealand, the sight
that he or she is most likely to encounter is of male bodies straining, colliding, and
competing on the rugby field or engaged in outdoor adventure. As O’Shea pointed
out, “New Zealand [is] best known internationally for its male prowess in body
contact sports.”115 Many New Zealand films contain scenes that display this same
 35

sense of shared male physicality and the robust humour and mateship between
members of a team – for example, Sleeping Dogs, Good Bye Pork Pie, Smash
Palace, The World’s Fastest Indian, Came a Hot Friday, Once Were Warriors,
What Becomes of the Broken Hearted, Footrot Flats, Savage Honeymoon, Old
Scores, Sione’s Wedding, Boy, the four films based on the novels of Ronald Hugh
Morrieson, and parts of Quiet Earth and of Peter Jackson’s work.

Boisterous male behaviour is not unique to New Zealand - the term “blokeish” is
also used in Australia (along with “larrikin”) and in Britain (along with “laddish”). In
New Zealand it is associated with “Westies,” “hoons,” “bogans” and “hard men” in
black singlets. It suggests physicality, high energy, comradeship, hard drinking,
and combat. Early films by Murphy and Donaldson placed a great emphasis on
home-made explosives, while the Jackson era has shifted the focus to home-
made splatter effects and computer-game battles.

Some associations are not so obviously macho, such as a sense of informality, an

impatience with moralizing, a respect for practicality, a dislike of refinement, and a
suspicion of authority. Male culture has a distinctive style of “kiwi humour,” which
is laconic, self-mocking, egalitarian, and rude. The best-selling local writer Barry
Crump specialised in this type of humour, and it permeates our favourite
advertisements (such as Toyota’s “Bugger!” ads), television comedies (Fred Dagg,
Billy T. James, Outrageous Fortune and bro’ Town) and popular films (from
Braindead to Goodbye Pork Pie). The humour of the counter-culture is often no
different.

Of course this kind of male culture is not restricted to films. It also dominates beer
advertising, crops up in popular music, and has a strong presence in sport and
outdoor adventure. The country’s most talked-about theatre play - Greg McGee’s
Foreskin’s Lament – deals with rugby culture. (McGee also wrote a film version,
Skin and Bone.) New Zealand has fine actors in this tradition such as Bruno
Lawrence, Ian Mune, Temuera Morrison, Cliff Curtis, and Kevin Smith. (Russell
Crowe was born in New Zealand but moved to Australia.) Some critics have
described this as a “white male” tradition, but there are plenty of Māori actors
involved, and the concept of the Māori warrior can be linked with it. Rugby and
other forms of male culture are so prominent in New Zealand that many women
are also familiar with them. The most popular women comedians are the Topp
Twins (subject of the feature-length documentary Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls)
who both satirise blokeish behaviour and in their own way play with it.

The kiwi bloke has become a much mythologised figure, but – like the “No.8”
tradition - remains a literal social phenomenon. Writers unsympathetic to blokeish
culture have long predicted its decline, and with the rise of the “metrosexual” they
see this culture surviving merely as male wish-fulfilment. Certainly the second
wave of film-makers moved deliberately away from it, but the old culture is still a
source of fascination for the mainstream audience. If we look at the 15 New
Zealand films that did the strongest business at the box office, 11 belong to this
tradition: Boy, The World’s Fastest Indian, Once Were Warriors, Sione’s Wedding,
What Becomes of the Broken Hearted, Footrot Flats, Goodbye Pork Pie, Scarfies,
and the three Lord of the Rings films. The exceptions were: Whale Rider, Second-
Hand Wedding, In My Father’s Den, and (arguably) The Topp Twins. What seems
 36

to have happened in film, television, and advertising is that blokeish behaviour

(“men behaving badly”) is now presented in a more self-conscious, comic style.
We laugh or disapprove, but can still privately enjoy it.116 Arguably, this kind of
complex, love-hate response was already present in Foreskin’s Lament and Once
Were Warriors.

Earlier films such as Skin Deep and Mr Wrong have offered a more direct critique.
Particularly subversive were gay films that sought to reveal a gay subtext behind
mateship. The classic example was Peter Wells’s subversive, camp reading of an
innocent National Film Unit film directed by Arthur Everard in 1979 entitled Score,
which won a jury prize at the Montreal Film Festival. This presented a French
rugby tour of New Zealand in slow motion, set to music by Tchaikovsky, thus
turning rugby into ballet. “The Centre for the Study of Psycho-Sexual Activity” went
one step further in 1991, creating the film A Taste of Kiwi by inter-cutting footage
of the All Blacks (from a beer commercial) with a gay porn film. This film earned
the distinction of being banned by the New South Wales Film Censorship Board in
1992 when brought to Sydney as part of an important exhibition of New Zealand
art.

To distance themselves from male culture stereotypes, other directors have

concentrated on creating subtle, intimate New Zealand dramas comparable with
European ones. For example: In My Father’s Den, Rain, Angel at my Table, After
the Waterfall, The Strength of Water, Ngati, The Footstep Man, Vigil and The
Piano.

Originality and Nuance

“What can I take that will make my song news?”

(Charles Brasch, “Self to Self”, 1951)117

Troubled by enthusiastic claims that New Zealand films are “unique and
audacious and…don’t compromise”, Bruce Babington has suggested that “An
equal case can be made that much of New Zealand cinema is more derivate than
original” and is “tailored to the more commercial inflections of funding policy”. 118
Babington is a careful and thoughtful critic, and it could be added that the themes I
have just emphasised – landscape, “unease”, coming-of-age, and male culture –
are far from original and play an equally important role in other cinema traditions.
Māori culture is, of course, an exception. But even if Pakeha New Zealanders
have not created any original film styles, forms, or themes (apart from Len Lye’s
discovery of new animation methods), what we should be looking for are not large
differences but subtle nuances, like the small variations of accent and vocabulary
that make New Zealand English a distinct dialect.

Allen Curnow, a leading figure in the Landfall tradition, had a useful perspective on
the ways in which local literature was and was not original. He knew some local
writers were simply engaged in import substitution, a “mistaken attempt to create
the identical article, manufactured under licence, as it were, out of local materials
by local industry.”119 A more positive approach involved “borrowing [overseas]
ideas and tools to do your own thing locally.” But this process was far from simple
and the New Zealand poet was likely “to feel underprivileged in his geographical
 37

isolation…. He is of the greater traditions, but not in them. When he recites his
pieces they do not come, like Alice’s, wrong from beginning to end, but with ever
so slight differences. He wants to know what those differences are, for in them the
crux of his art may lie. Daunting questions confront him,…but he can formulate
them only in the terms of his art, and answer them only with poems.”120 This offers
a useful way of thinking about how a New Zealand film may end up with
“differences” that are “slight” but crucial.

Granted, we need not relate nuances only to a national tradition. This book has a
national framework, but to balance that, the writer of each chapter will seek also to
acknowledge the individual and the group as shaping influences. The “ever so
slight differences” can also emerge from a particular ethnic group (such as Māori
or Pakeha) or from the individual (as auteur). Vincent Ward has a useful way of
summing up that complexity: “If you said that my films ‘aren’t New Zealand,’ I’d
say, ‘By Jesus they are!’ and stamp my foot. But if you said, ‘They aren’t universal’
then I’d say ‘By Jesus they are!’ I’m interested less in objective or social realities
than in private realities, so it’s a special kind of landscape I’m exploring, an interior
landscape. In some respects these are New Zealand interior landscapes, because
they’re the people I know. But I don’t see myself as a ‘New Zealand film maker’ in
any absolute sense.”121

A very simple example of how things work in a local culture is the way my
childhood friends and I would come home after watching an American western at
a Saturday afternoon matinee and proceed to play our own version of “cowboys
and Indians” in the wilderness of gorse at the end of the street. An infinitely more
complex example is Utu, which became a new sort of “western” because of its
New Zealand historical context, the input by Māori and Pakeha participants, and
the director’s individual decisions. Being aware of those “ever so slight
differences” can also help us recognise distinctive inflections in the way New
Zealand films have dealt with landscape, gender, adolescence, and other favourite
themes.

This approach acknowledges the hybridity of New Zealand culture. Gaylene

Preston presents the local as both ordinary and hybrid in her comment about
coming across New Zealand films and books when she was living overseas: “I
thought, ‘That’s my culture, that’s where I come from. When I think about what I
have to say, it’s to do with telegraph poles and Morris Minors and growing up in a
puddle on the edge of the world – and I knew I had to re-establish those roots to
be whole.”122 The Morris Minor was a British car but it was assembled locally and
became hugely popular in New Zealand. In a similar fashion, Geoff Murphy turned
the humble Mini (designed by the same British team as the Morris Minor) into a
kiwi icon in Goodbye Pork Pie. In his words: “in New Zealand it’s very much the
people’s car…. It gives the film an underdog quality!” 123

New Zealand Film Then and Now

In 1972 when Rudall and Ramai Hayward “arrived in each town they worked the
phones, using two copies of the local phone book and calling every person with a
Māori name to tell them about their film [To Love a Māori]. The campaign worked
 38

well…. But the demands were exhausting : two years later they were still on the
road promoting the film when Rudall Hayward, aged 73, died.”124

This story is typical of New Zealand film-making before 1977. Since then, the Film
Commission has been established, along with other pieces of the jigsaw. A
complete industry has been established. Granted, film-makers still need to be as
energetic and commited as the Haywards, but those born after the 1970s need
never know what it was like to live in a country where no local features were part
of their film-going options, no local plays were a regular part of theatre-going, no
local literature was taught in schools, and few local books were published. The
1970s transformed our culture; but it is still wise not to assume that such changes
are going to last for ever. A country needs to look after its film industry because it
is always vulnerable to economic and technological changes.

Some of the problems that the Haywards had to contend with are structural and
perennial such as the fact that New Zealand is one of the smallest countries to
have a feature film industry. (That’s if we leave Peter Jackson out of the picture.
He makes a huge difference, but his part of the industry could disappear if this
one-of-a-kind film-maker ever decided to shift overseas.) The size of the New
Zealand market is extremely small in comparison with countries where film-makers
can seek to cover their costs at home and then make a profit overseas. Also, there
is not only a shortage of funding but a bias towards new talent. As Vincent Ward
explains: “There are many people who make one or two films in New Zealand and
that’s it. Very few can stay and make more than two. So it’s wonderful, in a way,
that people get a chance, but then it is very hard to survive and continue.”125 The
only compensation is that many of the film-makers who have moved overseas
have returned occasionally to make another local film.

Another disadvantage is our marginality. Unlike the small countries of Europe

which constantly work together as co-production partners, we are not linked to any
continent. Even Australia is a distinctly different culture and separate market.
Geoff Murphy’s 1984 comment is probably still accurate: “I think here we are
dealing with…a big brother syndrome. The Australian general public cannot
believe that a New Zealand film can be any good.”126 Marginality also makes it
expensive for New Zealanders to travel overseas to form relationships with
distributors and producers and to attend festivals. Emails can never entirely take
the place of personal contact.

A perennial problem on our own doorstep is the fact that the exhibition business
has always been dominated by overseas companies and films. As John O’Shea
summed up the situation: “Getting your local film made was one thing: getting it
exhibited was another.”127 And Lindsay Shelton spoken eloquently of “the enormity
of the task of launching a New Zealand film. For distributors of Hollywood films,
each title reached New Zealand with a ready-made identity, boosted by months of
exposure in international magazines, television shows and music charts, and
supported by the lavish attention given to American releases and their stars. Each
New Zealand film, however, started from scratch.”128

The fact that English is the language of choice for most New Zealanders also has
its disadvantages. We are not like Iceland, say, where the population is hungry for
 39

any film in their own language. Plenty of other countries can provide films in
English and they have had years of practice in listening to British and American
accents, whereas they are not familiar with ours. Rhys Darby from Flight of the
Conchords noted in a recent interview that “Some people over here [in the United
States] are convinced that our nationality is completely made-up. They really
believe New Zealand is a fictitious country. I've had quite a few emails from people
asking me where I'm really from, and complimenting us on inventing such a funny
accent.”129 Many successful New Zealand singers and actors lean towards a
British or American accent to make things easier for the overseas market. Singer
Neil Finn says: “I’ve developed this kind of mid-Atlantic, mid-Pacific accent that I’m
fine with, but it’s probably not a particularly New Zealand voice.” 130

The New Zealand film industry has had many years of experience in living with
these disadvantages of a small, marginal industry. Now, however, we are living
through one of the greatest shake-ups in the history of the media, and established
strategies may not be adequate for the digital age. Of course, over the years, the
film community has already had plenty of changes to deal with. In the course of
my own life I have seen film formats come and go. The only format available to me
in the 1970s when I began teaching Film Studies was the 16mm film. There was
often only one well-worn print of a film available in New Zealand and Australia,
and it had to be projected with great care. Then video and video shops came
along, and it was possible to treat a film like a book, stopping and starting the tape
at any point. Then DVDs replaced videos. This was an extremely user-friendly
format, but I was aware that some of the analogue qualities of film were being lost,
in the same way that vinyl recordings may have a warmer sound than CDs. And,
so far, celluloid has lasted longer than the ever-changing digital formats. But the
digital revolution is unstoppable, and noone knows ultimately what it is going to
mean for the culture and business of moving images.

As we saw with the coming of sound, technological change can be a very mixed
blessing for a small country. At one end of the scale, enhancements such as 3D
and high definition are adding to the cost of film-making. At the other end of the
scale, editing equipment and small digital cameras continue to get cheaper. Still, it
is important to remember that there are limits to the kind of film that can be made
on a small budget, since the level of funding can determine production values,
lighting, travel, extra effects (including helicopter, crane or tracking shots), and the
ability to pay professional crew, actors, writers, producers and directors.
Nevertheless, low-budget digital features are proliferating (as Lawrence McDonald
documents in Chapter 11), and the international marketplace has become more
crowded and competitive.

Meanwhile television broadcasters are under increasing pressure from all the new
digital options. Young adults are spending more time with computer games and
the Internet. Rather than watch television or buy a cinema ticket, they can access
YouTube and browse images on their iPhone. While the New Zealand television
system has never collaborated with the film industry as closely as the networks in
Europe, it has at least provided some documentary and drama work for the
independent industry. Now that work is disappearing.
 40

Some would say that in an era of globalization we should simply stop talking in
national terms. But, apart from Jackson, our film-makers continue to depend upon
the New Zealand Film Commission for their core funding. And as John O’Shea
used to say: “If you don’t have a film from Iceland, maybe people will forget
Iceland exists, and New Zealand is in about the same category.” 131 Also, New
Zealand film-makers who have worked in the United States have been struck by
the localness of American films. Ian Mune has said that he returned because his
experience as a script-writer in Hollywood had taught him that “different cultures
see stories in different things. The Americans wanted me to tell their stories,
stories with their myths behind them.”132 His conclusion was: “I’m going back to
New Zealand where I can talk my own language. I don’t have to pretend to be
someone else. We can do it the other way – whatever that is.”133

This Nationalist – or rather, localist – impulse has remained strong within the film-
making community. While it is a tradition that has undergone extensive changes
since “the Landfall era” first emerged in poetry and painting - and as successive
generations of film-makers have appeared since the 1950s – it continues to
provide a useful starting-point for understanding many (if not all) of the films made
in New Zealand – films full of sharp, local details, offering fresh perspectives from
our “small room with large windows.”

-Roger Horrocks
 41

ENDNOTES

1 “Glamour on the Slopes” Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. Jonathan Dennis and Jan Bieringa,
Wellington, Victoria University Press, 1992, p.175.
2 Speaking Candidly, Hamilton, Paul’s Book Arcade, 1945, p.6.
3 For example, in popular music, British punk competed in the 1970s with American disco; then

Britpop, rave music and dubstep have since competed with American grunge and hiphop. See
Twin Peeks: Australian and New Zealand Films, ed. Deb Verhoeven, Melbourne, Damned
Publishing, 1999, p.132 for my list of other examples.
4 Speaking Candidly, p.125.
5 .See the pompous British-oriented teacher parodied in End of the Golden Weather.
6 As a homage to Pacific Films, Sam Pillsbury’s Scarecrow (1982) imagines Broken Barrier being

screened at a Saturday afternoon matinee.

7 The Selling of New Zealand Movies, Wellington, Awa Press, 2005, p.81.
8 ibid, p.3.
9 “Aspects of Poetry in New Zealand” in James K. Baxter as Critic, ed. Frank McKay, Auckland,

Heinemann Educational Books, 1978, p.79.

10 The case is documented in Geoff Steven’s documentary Adventures in Maoriland..
11 “The Soul and the Image,” in Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, pp.41-42.
12 7 June 1948, p.8. Quoted in the excellent essay by Brian McDonnell, “Postwar Hollywood

Representations of New Zealand,” in the New Zealand magazine Film Criticism Spring 2001.
(Available at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3076/is_3_25/ai_n28865935/)
13 Helen Martin and Sam Edwards, New Zealand Film 1912-1996, Auckland, Oxford University

Press, 1997, p.53.

14 Lindsay Shelton, The Selling of New Zealand Movies, p.22.
15 “Email Protest puts NZ on Universal's Map,” NZ Herald, 10 May 2004.
16 Ian Mune “From Hand-made Cameras to Hand-morphed Creatures” in Onfilm Dec 1994-Jan

1995, p.13.
17 Susy Pointon, “The Independents: The Creation of a New Zealand Film Industry,” PhD thesis,

University of Auckland, 2005.

18 The Royal Visit of 1953-54 would also be remembered by Peter Wells in 1984 in his short film

Little Queen which offered a gay perspective. For a less subversive account, see the 2001 feature-
film Her Majesty, directed by Mark J. Gordon.
19 “Gaylene Preston,” New Zealand Film Makers at the Auckland City Art Gallery #5, November 1

1984.
20 Jane Campion, “Different Complexions,” Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, p.95.
21 Roger Hall makes this comment in Shirley Horrocks’s 2006 documentary Who Laughs Last. Hall

explained, in a personal email (1 July 2010) in reply to a question from the author, that “This is a
phrase I coined and have used in talks but never put into print (possibly for my own safety)” He
added that it was equally applicable to some local films.
22 Landfall, December 1948. [I need to check the page.].
23 The Selling of New Zealand Movies, p.42.
24 NZ Herald, 1 March 1982, p.21.
25 See Shirley Horrocks’s 1998 documentary Kiwi As.
26 Elizabeth McRae, quoted in the Autumn 1995 issue of Shortland Street Magazine. p.42.
27 See Roger Horrocks, “Construction Site: Local Content on Television,” in Television New

Zealand: Programming the Nation, ed. Roger Horrocks and Nick Perry, Melbourne, Oxford
University Press, 2004, p.281.
28 The term “cultural cringe” was coined by Australian writer A.A. Phillips in a 1950 essay (re-

printed as A. A. Phillips on the Cultural Cringe, Melbourne University Publishing, 2005).

29 The phrase is usually attributed to Australian poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe (see Peter Conrad,

"Expatriate games," The Age, 25 March 2005).

30 John O’Shea, Don’t Let It Get You: Memories – Documents, Wellington, Victoria University

Press, 1999, p.30.

31 Quoted in The Selling of New Zealand Movies, p.56.
 42

32 ibid.
33 As one example, see: www.tourism.net.nz/lord-of-the-rings.html
34 See NZ On Air’s annual Local Content surveys.
35 “Silver” in the title of the film refers to the light-sensitive crystals of silver chloride that provide the

basis of the film medium.

36 Onfilm Dec 1994-Jan 1995, p.13.
37 Susy Pointon, “The Independents: The Creation of a New Zealand Film Industry,” PhD thesis,

University of Auckland 2005.

38 Ian Mune, “From Hand-made Cameras to Hand-morphed Creatures” Onfilm Dec 1994-Jan 1995,

p.13.
39 See Deborah Shepard, Reframing Women: A History of New Zealand Film, Auckland,

HarperCollins, 2000, pp.20-23.

40 Mune, op. cit, p.13. Note: a “two-reeler” ran for approximately 20 minutes.
41 Auckland, Auckland University Press, 2009.
42 “The Silent Land” (first published 1945), The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, ed. Allen

Curnow, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1960, p.183; and “Forerunners” (first published 1948), ibid,
p.183.
43 Technology was less of a problem for the other arts, though printers were needed. Denis Glover

and Robert Lowry became expert printers and played an important role.
44 See Rachel Barrowman’s book A Popular Vision: The Arts and the Left in New Zealand 1930-

1950, Wellington, Victoria University Press, 1991.

45 “Conversation with an Ancestor,” James K. Baxter as Critic, p.108.
46 Quoted in “Lilburn Remembered,” NZ Listener, 1 June 2002, p.66.
47 Quoted in Jonathan Dennis and Clive Sowry. The Tin Shed: The Origins of the National Film

Unit. Wellington: The New Zealand Film Archive, 1981, pp.21-22.

48 Susy Pointon, “The Independents: The Creation of a New Zealand Film Industry,” p.69.

(Hughan‘s comment appeared in Canta, 28 September 1949, p.4.)

49 Maurice Shadbolt, “John Feeney and the National Film Unit”, Landfall vol.12 no.3, September

1958, pp.226-232.
50 “A Charmed Life,” Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, p.32.
51 See James K. Baxter’s description of Man Alone as “the dominant symbol…of New Zealand

literature,” in James K. Baxter as Critic, p.62.

52 See Bill Pearson, “Fretful Sleepers” in Fretful Sleepers and Other Essays, Auckland, Heinemann

Educational Books, 1974, pp.26-27.

53 “A Charmed Life,” Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, p.32; and John O’Shea, Don’t Let it Get You,

p.46.
54 “A Charmed Life,” Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, pp.31-32.
55 Don’t Let it Get You, p.46.
56 ibid, p.105.
57 “Going to the Movies” New Zealand Official Yearbook 2000, Auckland, Statistics New Zealand /

David Bateman, 2000, p.305.

58 “The Soul and the Image,” Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, p.46.
59 “A Charmed Life,” Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, p.33.
60 ibid, p.34.
61 Zoom, October-November 1977, p.26.
62 See Geoff Murphy, “The End of the Beginning” in Film in Aotearoa New Zealand p.134
63 “Sleeping Dogs,” Islands no.20, December 1977, p.134. Also see Peter Harcourt’s review

(quoted in Lindsay Shelton’s The Selling of New Zealand Movies, Wellington, Awa Press, 2005,
p.21).
64 See Roger Horrocks, Media Teaching in New Zealand: Sketching Out a History, published by

the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies, University of Auckland, 2007.
65 Islands, vol.6 no.2, December 1977, pp.182-200.
66
For example, in Sleeping Dogs, Crush, Constance and Utu.
67 Quoted in Arthur Baysting, “Is New Zealand ready for Derek?” Playdate, June 1974, p.25.
68 “New Zealand Supplement,” Cinema Papers, May-June 1980, pp.18-19.
69 Quoted in Deborah Shepard, Reframing Women, p.111.
70 Pauline Kael, “Fighters,” New Yorker, pp.81-82. New Zealand criticisms include “Smash Palace

in the Capital of Sex and Violence”, New Zealand Times, 6 June 1982, p.10. See also Reframing
Women, op. cit., pp.97-98. Patricia Bartlett’s campaign against was reported in Roger Horrocks,
 43

“Social Problems and Stereotypes in New Zealand Films,” Inequality and Ideology, Massey
University Department of Sociology, 1982.
71 “Philosophy of a Self-Starter,” Pillsbury interviewed by Wayne Sellwood, Voice Over no.24, April-

August 1977, p.31.

72 John Laing, New Zealand Film Makers at the Auckland City Art Gallery #12, July 4 1985.
73 For the New Zealand experimental tradition, see my essay “Alternatives” in Film in Aotearoa

New Zealand, pp.56-88; and Martin Rumsby, “Genres of New Zealand Experimental Film,” Onfilm
March 2010, pp.12-13, and “Experimental Film” in Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New
Zealand, Vol.3, ed. Ben Goldsmith and Geoff Lealand, Bristol, Intellect, 2010, pp.280-85.
74 Margaret Hayward, Diary of the Kirk Years, Wellington, Cape Catley Reed, 1981 p.173
75 Geoff Murphy in Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, p.145. Also see Shelton’s The Selling of New

Zealand Movies, p.41.

76 Quoted in “Alternatives,” Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, p.87.
77 Gordon Tait, The Bartlett Syndrome: Censorship in New Zealand, Christchurch, Freedom to

Read, 1979.
78 In 1976 the Censor made 1076 cuts in films. See The Selling of New Zealand Movies, p.14.
79 Tony Williams quoted in “Alternatives,” op. cit., p.62.
80 “Now that we have learned to speak.” NZ Listener, December 6 1975, pp.36-37.
81 “Glamour on the Slopes” in Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, p.176.
82 Merata Mita, “The Soul and the Image,” Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, pp.36-54.
83 New Zealand Film Makers at the Auckland City Art Gallery #8, March 7 1985.
84 Quoted in The Selling of New Zealand Movies, p.136.
85 “Now that we have Learned to Speak,” pp.36-37.
86 “The End of the Beginning,” Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, p.148.
87 See The Selling of New Zealand Movies, pp.108-09.
88 David Gascoigne, “John O’Shea Memorial Speech,” 16 November 2006; and see The Selling of

New Zealand Movies, p.140 and p.142.

89 Onfilm vol.11, no.3, November 1994.
90 The Selling of New Zealand Movies, p.176.
91 ibid, p.144.
92 See Elizabeth Binning, “Maori TV’s wide popularity attracts British researcher,” NZ Herald June

24 2010, p.A9.
93 This essay forms the third part of The Fire and the Anvil in James K. Baxter as Critic (see p.61).
94 The Screening of Australia, vol.1, Sydney, Currency Press, 1987, p.217.
95 .The Selling of New Zealand Movies, p.41.
96 Barry Barclay, New Zealand Film Makers at the Auckland City Art Gallery #6, December 6 1984.
97 Don’t Let it Get You, p.12. Barclay and O’Shea then made Autumn Fires as the pilot for a series

on Pakeha culture but television would not fund the series.

98 Our Own Image, Auckland, Longman Paul, 1990, p.18.
99 “Reflecting Reality” Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, p.171.
100 “Interview with Merata Mita,” Alternative Cinema, Winter/Spring 1983.
101 “Interview,” The Republican, No.44, February 1983.
102 Other films based on Ihimaera’s fiction include The Makutu on Mrs Jones (1986) and Whale

Rider (2002).
103 Variety, 23 January 2010.
104 Tim Hume, “Munter lashes out over US film review”, Sunday Star Times 31 January 2010.
105 “For the Greatest Show on Middle-Earth,” Wired, April 2004.
106 The Selling of New Zealand Movies, p.163.
107 From an interview on National Radio, April 7 2006. On the reception of the essay, see Roger

Horrocks, “New Zealand Cinema: Cultures, Policies, Films” in Twin Peeks: Australian and New
Zealand Films, pp.129-30.
108 See Alexa Johnston, Anxious Images (Auckland City Art Gallery, 1984); Gothic New Zealand:

The Darker Side of Kiwi Culture, ed. Misha Kavka, Jennifer Lawn and Mary Paul (Dunedin, Otago
University Press, 2007); or the discussion of “psychodrama” in my “Alternatives” essay, op. cit.
109 From “The World of the Creative Artist” in James K. Baxter as Critic, pp.181-82. (I have taken

the liberty of reversing the order of the phrases about “children” and “lovers”.)
110 Notable short films about adolescence include Little Queen, My First Suit, One of Them, O

Tamaiti, A Bitter Song, Revelation, Two Cars One Night and Big Brother Little Sister.
111 NZ Herald, June 9 2010.
 44

112 Baxter, “On Returning to Dunedin,” Otago Daily Times, 22 September 1966, p.4.
113 She made this comment in April 2001 at her swearing-in ceremony as Governor General.
114 Quoted in Thirty Years of New Zealand Film: A Coming of Age by Duncan Petrie and Duncan

Stuart, Auckland, Random House, 2008, p.48.

115 “A Charmed Life,” Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, p.17.
116 See Sue Abel’s extensive research in “It’s girls being girls!”: Young women reading gender in

advertising, Ph.D thesis, University of Auckland, 2005.

117 The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, p.186
118 Bruce Babington, A History of the New Zealand Fiction Feature Film,.Manchester University

Press, 2007, p.14.

119 “New Zealand Literature” in Essays on New Zealand Literature, ed. Wystan Curnow, Auckland,

Heinnemann Educational, 1973, p.141.

120 The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, pp.59-60
121 “Vincent Ward”, New Zealand Film Makers at the Auckland City Art Gallery #9, April 4 1985.
122 Gaylene Preston, “Reflecting Reality,” Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, p.166.
123 “New Zealand Supplement,” Cinema Papers, May-June 1980, pp.18-19.
124 Lindsay Shelton, The Selling of New Zealand Movies, p.18.

125 Vincent Ward, “Perimeters”, Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, p.90. See also “Ward to leave NZ

over film funding problems,” TVNZ website news story, July 4 2010.
126 “New Zealand Supplement,” Cinema Papers, May-June 1980, pp.18-19.
127 John O’Shea, Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, p.22.
128 The Selling of New Zealand Movies, p.170.
129 Sunday Star-Times, January 1 2009.
130 Quoted by Diana Wichtel in “We got him,” Listener, June 19 2010, p.26.
131 Quoted by Jonathan Dennis in “John Demsey O’Shea: A Tribute” on the NZ Film Archive

website (accessed 8 July 2010).

132 “Ian Mune”, New Zealand Film Makers at the Auckland City Art Gallery #7, February 7 1985.
133 Ian Mune “From Hand-made Cameras to Hand-morphed Creatures,” p.13.