Sharing our stories
Sarah Catherall looks at 75 years of a unique Kiwi film institution.
Filmmaker Hugh Macdonald points to a sickly turquoise-coloured table in a Wellington cafe and smirks.
When reels of his acclaimed 1970 film, This is New Zealand, were sent over to London to be coloured, editors used to England’s smoggy, grey skies had no idea that trees and hills could be so vividly green. Given the job to colour the black-and-white, 19-minute film they turned the fauna the same off-green hue.
Despite its many technical and artistic hiccups, the film was the most viewed production put out by the former government-owned National Film Unit, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this month, and was a training ground for Macdonald and many other New Zealand film makers who passed through it.
New Zealand On Screen has launched a film collection to celebrate the anniversary.
This is New Zealand was made for the World Expo in 1971, when reels of film and equipment weighing 19 tonnes were sent across to Osaka, Japan, where the flattering production about New Zealand and its scenery was watched by one million Japanese.
When it returned home after much acclaim, Wellington’s Embassy Cinema had to be converted, as the panoramic production was shot on three films, so needed three screens and three projectors to screen it.
Queues snaked along Courtenay Place and up into Mount Victoria waiting to watch it, and 400,000 New Zealanders saw it over the year. It was a unique moment in the country’s film history – only rugby heroes and royalty had ever drawn such crowds, an honour that didn’t happen again for 32 years when Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring premiered in Wellington.
‘‘It became like a national duty for everyone to see it. It helped overcome the cultural cringe that we had at the time. Up til then, we used to think that we were a little country and we couldn’t be as good as Europe or Australia, but it put us up at the top of the heap,’’ Macdonald says.
Set up in 1941, largely to make films promoting the war effort, the National Film Unit was a creative hub with the best filmmaking equipment of its time, initially located in Miramar not far from where Jackson and his Weta team put out million-dollar blockbusters today.
Some of the country’s top artists and film-makers stomped through the unit, producing a treasure trove of documented history about war and tourism, to stories about Opo the dolphin, athlete Peter Snell, and a film about a solo mother, Gone up North for Awhile.
Working at the unit in the 1970s, Sam Neill made a mockumentary, Red Mole on the Road, before he turned to acting.
Making stories about famous New Zealanders and everyday lives, the unit ensured a New Zealand presence on the big screen, especially before the advent of television in the 1960s, when the unit’s short films ran before cinema features.
In 1989, a few years after Macdonald left as he ‘‘got a bit bored’’, the unit was privatised by the Labour Government. Its films were sold to Television New Zealand, and the rights are now jointly owned by TVNZ and Archives New Zealand.
The production facility (relocated to Avalon) was bought by Jackson in 1999, who absorbed it into Park Road Post Productions and used the equipment up until a decade ago. Parts of King Kong were worked on at the unit lab.
Some former National Film Unit staff still work for Jackson today, and Park Road Post gifted the equipment to the New Zealand Film Archive to continue the important work of preserving and maintaining the NZ film history.
In the ’60s and ’70s, Macdonald and film crews travelled around New Zealand and abroad filming our stories with no apparent budget. ‘‘We had really good quality 35mm equipment but in those days everything was manual and everything was handled physically. The main difference between then and now is the technology. A film is still a film, even though film isn’t in it today.
‘‘The grammar and storytelling is exactly the same, and you still use shots in the same way.’’
Currently working on a film, No Ordinary Sheila (about Wellington writer Sheila Natusch), he is particularly proud of one film he made about the Denniston incline, travelling down to the West Coast with a unit cameraman and filming it before the coal transportation railway closed in 1967.
‘‘It’s the only moving record of the incline in action. It’s a chapter in New Zealand history that very few people know about.’’
A keen swimmer and diver, he and a crew travelled down to the Pupu Springs to make the unit’s first underwater film, which won three international awards.
‘‘As long as the Film Unit kept winning awards, the Government didn’t care what it did,’’ he laughs. ‘‘But they are a really interesting record of how New Zealand was and how it saw itself.’’
Cameraman Lynton Diggle shot many of the unit’s best films of the 1960s, including most of the Pictorial Parade magazine film series – short films running before the main cinema feature about life in New Zealand. Self-taught, he was given little direction, and a producer – Oxley Hugan – simply told him: ‘‘Remember, long shot, mid shot, close-up.’’
Now 80, he always wonders what happened to the first feature film, Landfall, he shot for director Paul Maunder about life in a commune. Although it won an international award in Iran, it was made for TV but never screened. ‘‘Someone at TVNZ decided there was too much pot smoking in it. It’s a historic piece of film, we spent weeks filming it.’’
In one of the more tragic jobs he did at the unit, Diggle spent two weeks filming in the Auckland morgue to help police identify victims after the Erebus DC10 crash. ’’Truckload after truckload of bodies were brought to the morgue in Tip Top ice cream trucks. It was harrowing.’’ He also had to film the funeral and mass grave of the victims. ‘‘I could hardly see through the view finder for the tears,’’ he says.
While Auckland-based Diggle remembers his 25 years at the unit as a dream job, not all who worked there were so flattering.
Novelist Maurice Shadbolt was employed from 1954 as a writer, director, and editor, before he began penning novels. Hired for three years to work on the Pictorial Parades, he wrote about his time there in one of his autobiographies, saying the unit was riddled with bureacracy.
His work was often censored: he was banned from taking shots of slums after ‘‘two priceless weeks’’ filming painter Eric-Lee Johnston, whose speciality was derelict and historic buildings.
When he was supposed to make a documentary about the local