The golden age
In the early years of the 20th century, Aussies were at the forefront of filmmaking.
Major Joseph Perry forms the Salvation Army’s Limelight Department, an in-house production and promotion unit. UK-born Perry delivers more than 500 religious lectures with projections of painted lantern-slides around Australia between 1882 and ’84.
First film event is held in a shop at 148 Pitt Street, Sydney, on 30 November. Pictures are played on kinetoscopes. Designed by American inventor Thomas Edison, these ‘peep-show’ boxes contain 50ft loops of 35mm film.
Sound brings film to life when Edison’s kinetophone premieres in Charters Tower, QLD. The device plays sound through an earpiece and is synchronised with images playing on the kinetoscope. Aussies begin making films, shooting street scenes or ordinary events. Frenchman Marius
Sestier arrives to film the Melbourne Cup with a Lumière cinématographe. The compact machine photographs, prints and projects films. Sestier opens one of Australia’s first cinemas in Sydney.
In the attic of the Salvo’s Melbourne headquarters, The
Limelight Department establishes one of the world’s first film studios – today, it’s the oldest surviving in the world.
Perry makes many films of different lengths, including Soldiers of the Cross and Inauguration of the Commonwealth.
Soldiers has at times been considered the world’s first feature film, although today it is seen as more of a multimedia presentation.
Melbourne-based film company Johnson & Gibson emerge as a production powerhouse. The Story of the Kelly Gang is filmed in Victoria. It opens in Melbourne on Boxing Day 1906 and is a hit with audiences. Widely considered to be the world’s first feature-length narrative film, it gives rise to a new Australian genre – the bushranger film.
Dentist Dr Arthur Russell screens films at St Georges Hall in Melbourne. He goes on to form Hoyts Pictures.
Citing moral concerns within the industry, the Salvos close The Limelight Department’s doors. More than 50 narrative fiction films are released, many of which are bushranger movies. Australia is producing more cinema content than anywhere else in the world. This rate of filmmaking remains unsurpassed in Australia until 1975.
For glorifying criminal behaviour, the production of bushranger films is banned in SA, VIC and NSW. It is the beginning of a difficult time for local filmmakers.
The government awards its official film and photography contract to French firm Pathé. A number of big production houses intent on exhibiting imported films join forces to create Australasian Films. Smaller production houses can’t compete with this conglomerate – commonly known as ‘the combine’ – and many go out of business. Our first heyday of local filmmaking comes to an end.
camp.The empty settlement for a nearby mine had more than enough accommodation, including a main house – complete with a 20-seater dining table – for Paul Hogan. Next, Craig and the crew not only dammed a waterfall so it would flow strongly on filming days, but also recut roads.
“In those days it was a rough old dirt track in – most of the places we went to we had to get graders and front-end loaders in to regrade the roads,” he says, adding that there were, however, areas into which they wouldn’t venture. “I found amazing places… but there was the whole croc issue where I had to be 100 per cent sure they could swim in the pools without being eaten, because even when I was flying in the chopper we could see croc tracks in bizarre places.”
And it is likely because of this unbridled wildness that Kakadu is more than just a set in the film, but a character in itself. There are various ways a landscape can help shape a narrative, Sally says. “It can be a rival to overcome, a thing of horror or a luscious backdrop mirroring a love story.” These techniques hark “back to the days of Charles Chauvel’s Sons of Matthew [1949], and Franklyn Barrett’s Breaking of the Drought [1920] – big sweeping stories about rural Australia”, she adds. George Miller agrees: “Mind-numbing emptiness, the vastness, the spectacle, and the silence, these are the chords that lay down the base rhythm against which our movie stories are played.”
For Mick Dundee, Kakadu was an ideal counterpart, enhancing his charm and grit and providing an unmistakeable sense of place all at once. From that portrayal, Australia’s Top End was thrust into the spotlight. Ultimately, Crocodile Dundee did for tourism in Kakadu what The Man from Snowy River (1982) did for the High Country. Suddenly, places previously little known to tourists became star attractions with the launch of ‘follow-in-their-footsteps’ Snowy Mountain horse treks and the construction of now-famous infrastructures such as Kakadu’s Croc Hotel.
“Ours is a very different landscape and it has an element of fear about it... survive here and you can survive anything. When a film uses that and it does it well it draws attention,” Sally says. That ‘fear’ is intrinsic to Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). Set in the early 1900s, it’s based on Joan Lindsay’s story of a group of boarding-school girls. Seduced by Hanging Rock – a volcanic formation in central Victoria – they disappear into its shadows.
Oscar-winning cinematographer Russell Boyd helped create the film’s dreamy, romantic mood. Russell, originally from Geelong, was also director of photography on Crocodile Dundee and Gallipoli (1981). Now 72, he began as a roustabout on sets, but has always been fascinated by light, which he attributes to an appreciation for Melbourne’s renowned Heidelberg School of landscape painters.
“I used to sit in a room and look at shadows falling through venetian blinds and how it moves through the day and how it would react with people’s faces,” Russell says. To achieve the natural backlit look he wanted for a key scene on Hanging Rock, Russell realised the light was only right during one hour each day.
“I thought I was going to get fired,” he says with a laugh. “It took five days, but if we’d shot that scene in one day… it wouldn’t have had the same effect.” Russell also placed a net that had been painted yellow over the camera lenses, to soften the image. “I thought it was fitting for that period,” he says. “It helped with that impressionist, painterly look.”
Voted Australia’s most significant film of all time for its breathtaking cinematography, Picnic at Hanging Rock gave the industry here some much needed credibility and saw Russell receive critical acclaim for his artistic talents. It also imbued the Australian landscape with a subtle malevolence.
“I love shooting landscapes and I guess it’s because if I have any creative tendencies they are in that area,” Russell says. “When you’re making a film you don’t know whether it’s going to be successful… But Picnic captured the hearts of a lot of people, in Australia and overseas.”
SITTING ACROSS FROM SALLY JACKSON in her office at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, I learn of other ways cinema can have an impact. Sally, who’s worked for the NFSA for more than 20 years, holds a small black container in her hands. It’s just one of the many Australian films she’ll sort this week.
“The current crop of films and documentaries and shorts the industry is making turn up on my desk. Our role is to process them and make sure they’re here for posterity… There’s people’s lives and creativity in this,” she says. “And that’s what makes it special. It’s their tears and sweat, and we get to keep it for the nation.”
It’s the NFSA’s job to safeguard our audiovisual memories – movies, past and present, are restored and digitised; artefacts and memorabilia like costumes and props are housed in vaults; and personal histories in the form of scripts, set sketches and story plans are sent here to be filed away. “The level of personal involvement from everyone who is part of these teams is enormous,” Sally says. “I don’t think anyone in the film industries just does it for a job, I think they invest something of themselves in their tasks – from the top job down to the bottom, because they believe in what they are doing.”
Since the flourish of filmmaking in the 1970s and ’80s, the health of the industry has continued to fluctuate; like any great story arc, we’re still experiencing highs and lows. According to Screen Australia – the government funding body that supports the production of more than 50 per cent of the nation’s films – 2015 was the best year at the Australian box office for our movies in 14 years, with $88 million generated from local content.
Today filmmakers are still championing our larrikin image (the low-budget, but hugely successful film The Castle, 1997, about the working-class Kerrigan family, was voted in 2010 as the film that best represents Australians), but we’re also diversifying. Horror stories Wolf Creek (2005) and The Babadook (2014) have been international hits, while Aussies have also been involved in the fields of animation and computer-generated imagery (CGI) on local movies and those produced overseas. Thriller Red Billabong, released in August of this year, was promoted as one of the first Australian films to use a CGI character in a lead role.
Our screen icons are also growing up. Mad Max: Fury Road was one of the top performing films of 2015. It won six awards at the 2016 Oscars, after being nominated for 10, including best costume and production design. Sydney-based Jacinta Leong worked as an art director on the film. She designed some of the custom-built vehicles for characters such as Furiosa, played by actress Charlize Theron.
“Her vehicle had a prime-mover, a tank and a pod. These components had to work well as a design, but then also function as a machine,” Jacinta says. Once drawings were finalised, she oversaw construction, working closely with mechanics and engineers. “The storytelling elements besides the characters are the sets and the look of the films. They are meant to transport you to another world where you can live for a couple of hours,” she says.
As a backdrop the outback is multi-layered: it’s alive with colours and textures and sounds. By incorporating the fantastical production elements – costumes, make-up and lights – our modern filmmakers continue to tell stories of offbeat, rebellious characters, albeit in creatively different ways. A busload of sparkly drag queens drives across the arid interior in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), while, in The Dressmaker (2015), Myrtle ‘Tilly’ Dunnage, a seamstress with a flair for high fashion played by Kate Winslet, seeks revenge upon the residents of Dungatar, a seemingly quintessential outback town.
As these stories are pushed to the limits of our imaginations, artists such as Jacinta are given greater scope for creativity. She recently finished working on Alien: Covenant, the latest in UK director Ridley Scott’s sci-fi series
“Ours is a very different landscape and it has an element of fear... survive here and you can survive anything.”
(and sequel to 2012’s Prometheus), shot at Sydney’s Fox Studios. It’s likely that international filmmakers such as Ridley Scott choose to work in Australia because our crews are hardworking, with solid reputations. Our only problem, says Russell Boyd, is keeping the talent here.
At the height of his career in the ’70s and ’80s, Russell says Australian filmmakers would make a handful of films here before moving on. “But nowadays, if someone makes a successful film – not only in the box office but with critical acclaim – they will often be seduced by Hollywood straight away,” he says. “It’s a bit of a pity that that’s what happens because it means there’s a brain drain heading across the Pacific these days, more so than those earlier times.”
Our ‘we can get it done’ attitude is what really sets Aussies apart, says Mark Wareham, a director of photography who has worked on films here and overseas. Based in north Queensland, Mark recently finished shooting an adaptation of Australian author Craig Silvey’s 2009 novel Jasper Jones. Filmed in Pemberton, a small town in south-western WA, it centres on the friendship of two boys in 1965 – one of whom is Aboriginal and accused of murder.
The film’s director, Aboriginal filmmaker Rachel Perkins of Blackfella Films, has spent much of her career focusing on indigenous stories. Before the 1980s, Aboriginal culture was largely absent from, or misrepresented in, Aussie films, but successes such as Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002), The Sapphires (2012) and Rachel’s own Bran Nue Dae (2009) have promoted the work of indigenous filmmakers. For Jasper Jones, Rachel looked hard for the ideal landscape.
A former logging town, Pemberton is surrounded by karri forests, and has a kind of a bygone-era charm. Adjustments to the townscape had to be made – solar panels and other telltale markers were hidden – but largely it remained untouched. Much of the narrative plays out in the forest at night, where the darkness and shadows enhance the mysterious plot. Being in Pemberton, however, meant being far away from the nearest city.
“With that distance and beauty come complications and expense,” Mark says.
“Working in an isolated area, where there’s nothing to draw upon if you don’t have the right things, is the biggest challenge we have,” says costume designer Terri Lamera, who finished shooting Breath, based on Australian author Tim Winton’s popular novel, in May this year. Filmed in Denmark, a coastal town 360km south-east of Perth, the narrative unfolds amid the surf culture of the 1970s. Before shooting began, Terri sourced vintage clothing from all over Australia. Many pieces also had to be dyed or made from scratch to suit a muted colour palette that would complement beach scenes.
Terri, whose father was a keen diver, grew up in the region, and knows how integral the Southern Ocean is to the people there. “I have a big love and affinity with that coastline,” she says. “I also have a lot of friends that are old surfers from that period and I really felt like [director] Simon Baker did – that we needed to translate the story in a very real sense, and true to how it was at the time.”
ALTHOUGH WE’RE NOT the only nation to be inspired by our landscape to this extent, our outback, coastal and wilderness settings have a unique flavour, and are still some of the most remote locations for filming in the world. With improved technology and access, shooting in these places is easier compared with the days of Crocodile Dundee, but there are still difficulties.
A lack of accommodation in some outback towns saw the crew of Last Cab to Darwin (2015) sleeping in swags under the stars; while the creators of Tracks (2013) had to simulate Robyn Davidson’s trek across the desert and accommodate trailers, trucks, equipment and a crew of 80 people.
“What I found fascinating… was how many landscapes the director, John Curran, managed to extract out of one place,” says cameleer Andrew Harper (see AG 125), who trained actress Mia Wasikowska to work with camels for the film. “People assumed we’d travelled around a lot, but most of the shooting was in the Flinders Rangers in South Australia – you can’t just take 70 to 80 people and plonk them in the middle of the Gibson Desert,” he reasons.
Regardless, the setting proved to be a fitting backdrop. “It was interesting how the landscape came to the fore, but not necessarily the landscape you [expected], ”Andrew adds. “You could probably only get away with that in Australia.”
This originality will likely remain our hallmark as the next generation of films is released. And these modern songlines will keep on adding to the fabric of our mythology, said George Miller. With each new, sweeping landscape drama, we will continue to be defined by this colourful country, with its vast wilderness and a homegrown humour that is unashamedly offbeat.