“Clay…the least commercial work ever made in the history of cinema.”[1]

Almost two decades ago Graeme Cutts quite rightly characterised Giorgio Mangiamele as “one of the forgotten directors of the Australian cinema” (Cinema Papers, 1992, p. 17). In the intervening years, Mangiamele has frequently scored a mention in the new standard histories that have appeared, and has now achieved his own entry in the Oxford Companion to Australian Film. In spite of such formal acknowledgement, however, his actual work has remained largely unexplored. It’s true that in more recent times Raffaele Lampugnani and Gaetano Rando have written illuminatingly about several of Mangiamele’s migrant films, and his only foray into screen comedy, Ninety Nine Per Cent (1963), has also recently received closer analysis.[2] However, either because it never achieved a wide theatrical release or in part simply due to general neglect, what is surely Mangiamele’s most accomplished film, Clay (1965), has continued to be frequently cited but has never received the critical attention that it undoubtedly deserves. The recent restoration of the film by the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) and its release on DVD by Ronin Films provides a golden opportunity for a closer look at what must be one of the most remarkable but also most neglected early films of the Australian revival, indeed only the third Australian feature ever invited to screen in competition at Cannes.[3]

Fashioning Clay

As filmmaker Nigel Buesst amply documents in his Carlton + Godard = Cinema (2003), a widespread cinephilia and more general cultural ferment in the inner Melbourne suburb of Carlton played a significant role in attempts to relaunch Australian feature filmmaking in the early 1960s. Mangiamele, himself a resident of Carlton, was certainly part of what Bruce Hodgson has called the Carlton “ripple” in the revival of Australian cinema during this period.[4] Yet, as Buesst’s documentary also makes clear, Mangiamele operated largely apart from the more university-oriented and French New Wave obsessed movement, and not only because he was a recent immigrant to Australia (naturalised in 1957), with his early films, Il Contratto (1953) and The Spag (1962), focused so squarely on specifically migrant issues.

Just how much, and what sort of, experience in filmmaking Mangiamele brought with him from his period in the photography and film unit of the Italian police force when he migrated to Australia in 1952 remains, despite some concerted research, a matter of conjecture. What is clear, however, is that Mangiamele’s cultural and artistic formation in art schools in Italy—institutions which until the early 1960s remained stubbornly permeated by the idealistic aesthetics of Benedetto Croce—brought him to filmmaking with a very different approach to even that of an other aspiring “art” director such as Tim Burstall, with whom Mangiamele briefly collaborated during this period. It’s Clay, I would suggest, that really embodies this different—and Mangiamele’s very characteristic—approach to cinema.[5] Indeed, as soon as one begins to look more closely it becomes clear that, leaving to one side the migrant and social themes which he had treated in the earlier films, Mangiamele was here attempting quite self-consciously to create something analogous to that “cinema of poetry” that Pasolini was theorising (and practising) in this very same period.

The Italian treatment of Clay, a 19-page typescript conserved at the NFSA, strongly suggests that the film was conceived, rather remarkably, in one fell swoop.[6] The final version of the film certainly does show a number of significant changes and additions—Margot’s voice-over about the possibility of it all being a dream is completely absent from the original treatment, as is the scene in which the well-off couple come to buy some pottery and the one in which the priest comes to scrounge some chickens—but in many ways the film appears to be “all there” in these 19 pages. Interestingly, when asked, many of the actors who worked on the film have declared to have never seen a complete screenplay and yet even such insert shots as that of a car wheel splashing through a puddle can be found, clearly delineated and visualised, in the Italian script, suggesting that much of what’s most distinctive about the film was already there as part of its original conception.[7]

Since the script is undated one wonders when and how it came into being. According to newspaper reports of comments made by Mangiamele himself on set, the original idea for the film had been sparked by a chance visit to the former artist colony of Montsalvat at Eltham, Victoria.[8] One can only presume this to have been after the completion of Ninety Nine Per Cent, and therefore sometime in 1963. By the end of that year Mangiamele must have already completed the Italian version and possibly had it translated into English since by early 1964 he had begun to assemble and rehearse the willing cast in Melbourne and by May was actually shooting the film at Montsalvat.[9] After seven gruelling weeks of filming in very trying wintry conditions, Mangiamele, assisted by actor, Chris Tsalikis, edited the film in his photographic studio at Rathdowne Street, although Tsalikis remembers that post-production of the sound (both Tsalikis and Janina Lebedew were dubbed by Robert Clarke and Sheila Florance respectively) required a further week of work in facilities in Sydney.[10]

Exhibiting Clay

Pre-announced by largely complimentary previews—in The Age by film critic and vocal advocate for a local film industry, Colin Bennett, and in the Herald by David Bornstein—Clay was given its premiere before an invited audience at the Palais Theatre in St. Kilda on 13 December 1964.[11] By all reports the film was received warmly enough by the invited guests although Chris Tsalikis recalls that many attendees also appeared rather puzzled by what they took to be an “arty” film.[12] Ironically, given Mangiamele’s self-professed atheism and hostility to the Catholic religion, one of the most enthusiastic responses to the film came from the reviewer for the Catholic weekly, The Advocate, who characterised it as an “arresting” film and advised its readership to “See this film Clay if you have the opportunity.”[13]

Mangiamele was certainly keen to get the film to an overseas festival but, given that the Commonwealth Government showed absolutely no interest in supporting the film, it remains unclear how it received its invitation to Cannes.[14] Nevertheless, by the end of March 1965, the film had been officially accepted for screening in competition at the French festival.[15] Having mortgaged his house to finance the film, Mangiamele had difficulty in finding the money to follow it to France but the Sitmar Line eventually provided a discounted sea fare for himself, assistant director, Ettore Siracusa and actor and assistant editor, Chris Tsalikis. The extraordinary, and continuing, lack of interest by the Commonwealth government, which failed to even advise its ambassador in France about the fact that an Australian film was competing at the prestigious festival, came to be matched by the ingenuity of Mangiamele who exploited the opportunity of the ship’s docking at Naples on the way to Cannes to invite Italian journalists to an on-board screening of the film. This succeeded in creating a certain amount of ongoing interest in the Italian papers for this “expatriate” Italian filmmaker and the film he was taking to Cannes.[16]

The film screened in the afternoon of 25 May. In the 1992 interview Mangiamele told Cutts that the film’s reception at Cannes was “very, very good” (Cinema Papers, p. 20). Lead actor, George Dixon, who flew there independently for the occasion, remembers a more mixed reaction.[17] Certainly most reviews praised the film’s visual poetry although many also voiced some reservations about the narrative and dialogue. Perhaps none more so than Variety which had reviewed the film at its Australian premiere in December of the previous year and had concluded that, “Photographer Mangiamele emerges streets ahead of scripter Mangiamele or director Mangiamele”. Though it conceded that, “Visually it’s frequently a poem brought to life with some breathtakingly poignant and arty shots”.[18] In its review of the film at Cannes, Variety now suggested that “[the] Pic is technically good and has some okay conception” but “is somewhat too grandiloquent for much chance abroad except for a few arty spots”.[19]

A month later, with Mangiamele still in France exploring the possibilities for European distribution, the film, which in the meantime had won several awards in the Australian Film Award Competition, was included in both the Melbourne and the Sydney Film Festival programs.[20] Curiously enough, in spite of Colin Bennett’s strong praise for the film six months earlier, neither Bennett himself, nor Erwin Rado, director of the Melbourne festival, did anything to promote what was, after all, the only Australian-made feature among the 139 films being screened. This might seem all the more curious given the widely-reported call for government support for the local film industry with which renowned architect, Robin Boyd, opened the festival on 4 June.[21] In the event, the Melbourne festival audience reacted rather tepidly to the film, while the Sydney audience proved to be decidedly hostile.[22] By the time Mangiamele returned to Melbourne in late July, the film had already dropped out of sight in Australia although it was screened in late September of that year in both London and Glasgow as part of the Commonwealth Arts Festival. In August of the following year, undoubtedly hoping to give the film one more airing, Mangiamele personally organised a short season of screenings of both Clay and Ninety Nine Per Cent at the St. Kilda Palais (27–31 August). Competing for attention with foreign big-budget blockbusters such as Doctor Zhivago, Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady, it appears to have done poorly in box-office terms but did attract at least one positive review from Leonard Glickfeld in the Australian Jewish News which highlighted the “pure cinematic poetry” of the film and concluded that Mangiamele “has the potential to be Australia’s first Fellini.”[23] The film received another showing when the ABC, which had bought the television broadcasting rights in March 1965, screened a drastically-shortened 50 minute version as their Thursday movie on the evening of 10 November 1966. Mangiamele was interviewed for the occasion and was reported in that week’s TV Week as characterising Clay as “an experiment, not a money-making deal” in which “the camerawork expresses poetry in a visual form”.[24]

The Film Festival report in the Federation News resorted to metaphor in its characterisation of Clay: “In agricultural terms, Clay is heavy and requires careful handling.”[25] In continuing the metaphor one might say that Clay was effectively buried for the next three decades. In 1998 SBS bought the television rights for a 54 minute version which came to be screened in an afternoon slot on 13 November 1999. The film only surfaced theatrically again in 2003 when an incomplete version of it was shown as part of a Mangiamele retrospective at ACMI.[26]

The Art of Clay

In a very thoughtful account of a long interview with Mangiamele published just after the filmmaker’s death in 2001, Quentin Turnour remarked on the difficulty of teasing formative influences from Giorgio. The neorealists, De Sica and Rossellini? Yes, but only acknowledged after prompting. Warmer and more spontaneous, Turnour recalls, was Mangiamele’s response to the suggestion of a possible influence of the so-called French Impressionists of the 1920s, filmmakers such as Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac and the early Jean Renoir, with the ensuing discussion demonstrating what Turnour judged as “a now rare knowledge of their work and [of the] the importance of the image and the use of silence in cinema.”[27] Following this lead, Turnour later on in the piece advises a downplaying of that neorealist heritage with which Mangiamele has come to be so predictably associated in favour of a recognition that, in fact, “Mangiamele shares with the ‘high’ silent era an interest in allegorical narrative, the Symbolist image and the filmed dream.”[28] Turnour’s characterisation is, I believe, both perceptive and compelling, and provides something of a key to appreciating the cinematic poetry and the artistry of Clay.

Clay begins with what is surely one of the most stunning and lyrical opening sequences in any Australian film. Amid the high-pitched sound of a whistling wind, the camera floats aimlessly as a leaf between the stark bare branches of gum trees thrust towards the sky like the plaintive fingers of so many upturned hands. A disembodied voice, which we will later recognise as belonging to Margot, begins: “Everything seems so unreal now. Perhaps it’s a dream. Perhaps … what?” [29] As the title appears, unseen kookaburras begin to cackle and the whistling wind is joined by the doleful notes of a muted trumpet sounding alone in the wilderness. The simply-styled credits appear, the camera continues to float erratically through an almost-abstract high-contrast black-and-white treescape, and the wind and the trumpet continue their mournful duet. As we’re drawn, almost hypnotically, in to the image we realise, with a startle perhaps, that the extreme high contrast of the black and white derives from the direct use of the negative rather than the printed positive of the film (see Figure 1).

Figure 1
Clay: Opening image
(Courtesy: Rosemary Mangiamele)

The boldness of such a move is typical of the daring that Mangiamele displays throughout his film, a film made, we will remember, on a no-shoestring budget. Making a virtue of necessity, one might think, by “the poorest (financially) film director in the world”, as N.A. Kovach called him in a report from the Sydney Film Festival.[30] And yet if one were willing to dig deeper one might find an artistic precedent for such a stratagem in a number of silent films, most notably perhaps, in Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet (1930). In a sequence towards the end of Cocteau’s film when the black angel lies over the body of the dead boy in order to take up his spirit, the transformation is imaged by several seconds of the film switching to negative (Figure 2). [31] Now it is true that Cocteau is not a filmmaker that Mangiamele ever explicitly acknowledged and it would seem almost impossible to establish any direct influence. And yet as soon as one begins to look closely at Clay in this light it becomes almost impossible not to notice the insistent presence of what one might call Cocteau-ean stylemes in what is, significantly, an allegorical—indeed a dream—narrative.

 Figure 2
Angel covering boy’s body in
Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet (1930)

Nick’s dramatic eruption into the landscape, and into the narrative, is done in what at first appears to be a highly-stylised and choreographed naturalism: he is clearly a criminal on the run, desperately flailing his way through a waterlogged countryside with a dozen anonymous policemen in close pursuit. Exhausted and mud-spattered, he collapses onto the wet earth, where he will soon be discovered by Margot and her father as they are driving in the torrential rain to their home at Potters’ Point. But if Nick’s connection with mud and clay is at first accidental and external—he has simply been spattered with it as he has fled from the police—it is soon transformed into a figural identification. Sitting inside the car between Margot and the father, Nick is presented as a clay bust, his face completely covered in mud (Figure 3). Indeed, much more completely muddied than when we last saw his face (Figure 4) in an image strongly reminiscent of Vittorio/Accattone in Pasolini’s Accattone (1961) (Figure 5).

Figure 3
From Clay: “He’s like one of your clay models.”
(Courtesy: Rosemary Mangiamele)

 Figure 4: Clay
(Courtesy: Rosemary Mangiamele)

Figure 5
Vittorio (Accattone) in
 P.P. Pasolini’s Accattone

Significantly, to Margot’s question “Who is he?” the father answers: “He looks like one of your clay models”.[32] At this point (but only after running her fingers over Nick’s profile as though he were a clay model), Margot wipes the mud from Nick’s face with a cloth to uncover the human skin beneath. The identification is soon strongly reiterated, however, when Nick, after having had his feet washed and rested, awakens to see that Margot has indeed sculpted a clay model of him (Figures 6-8).

Figure 6: Clay
(Courtesy: Rosemary Mangiamele)

Figure 7: Clay
(Courtesy: Rosemary Mangiamele)

Figure 8 – 10: Clay (Courtesy: Rosemary Mangiamele).

It is difficult, especially given the other clay statues which we have seen earlier looking down from the shelves of the workshop, not to be reminded not only of the appearance of the statue in Blood of a Poet but also of the ubiquity of animated and non-animated statues in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946) (Figures 11 and 12).

Figure 11-12: Jean Cocteau, Beauty and the Beast (1946)

In his TV Week interview with Annamaria Ardossi, just before that drastically-shortened version of Clay was screened on the ABC in 1966, Mangiamele downplayed any symbolism in the film. “The word ‘clay’, he said, “was chosen for its visual character, not for its symbolism. There is a lot of mud and rain in the film.”[33] But whether Mangiamele was being playfully disingenuous or simply trying to avoid scaring away ordinary television viewers, the film itself amply demonstrates not only its symbolic but, at least in places, its Symbolist poetics. While hardly in the way of an imitation or even homage, the film appears, at least at one level, to be constructing a complex allegory of art and of the artistic struggle very much in the style of Cocteau. We should note that the film is set and shot, of course, at the former artist’s colony of Montsalvat. Significantly, a range of the arts (with perhaps the odd exception of verbal poetry) seem to be purposely included in the film: the father is a potter but also an accomplished painter, Margot is a potter who also sculpts. Nick, who now also exists as one of Margot’s clay statues, is shown in one sequence to be himself sculpting a head in wood. Earlier, outside the dance hall, when quizzed by Margot, he has confessed a passionate desire to return to painting in order to express the beauty of the natural world to which he had only recently awakened. In the climactic fight between Nick and Chris, his rival for Margot’s affection, Chris rather appropriately throws a heavy clay bust at Nick which Nick narrowly manages to avoid. Most Cocteau-like of all, perhaps, a defeated Chris stumbles up from the mud beside a broken statue that perfectly mirrors his broken spirit (Figure 13).

 Figure 13
Clay: Chris defeated
(Courtesy: Rosemary Mangiamele)

Given Mangiamele’s reticence to acknowledge cinematic influences, such allusions can’t but remain tantalisingly conjectural.[35] If even minimally tenable, however, they would confirm a style of cinema inspired more by the great cinematic experimenters of the silent period than by the modernists who were achieving dominance at the time the film was made. One wonders: was it this orientation that, at least in part, made the film so distasteful to viewers at the Sydney festival?And yet one would want to note that the allegorical dimension of the film is far from being single-tracked. Or rather, within what appears to be its over-arching Symbolist allegory, the film seems able to bring together into a relatively-seamless unity a whole series of disparate poetic and cinematic allusions. The film’s success in kneading these together to the point of expressing them as its own makes their individual identification at times quite difficult. So, for example, one is left to wonder whether Mangiamele’s “rare knowledge” of the French Impressionists conserved a memory of Jean Epstein’s whimsical The Three-Sided Mirror (1927), a film that includes, even if in quite a comic tenor, an episode featuring a male flâneur who frequents a female sculptress who has created a bust of him. Significantly, Epstein’s enigmatic film ends with a speeding car careering out of control, killing the male protagonist who thus reverts to what he had always in a sense been, an insubstantial image in a three-sided mirror. Mangiamele’s love for leaves swirling in the wind, everywhere apparent in Clay, as in previous films, might have originally been triggered by one of the final images of Epstein’s film (Figure 16) where the car’s passage lifts a whirlwind of leaves into the air just before failing to make the curve and slamming into a tree.[34]

Figures 14-16 Jean Epstein: The Three Sided Mirror (1927).

And yet there was at least one modernist director whose spell Mangiamele could not evade, even in Clay. The proof is in the brief episode featuring the young priest who seems to come to the colony in order to collect some form of tithe. Now, Mangiamele’s atheism and his consequent hostility to the clergy are well known and amply documented. In a late interview with Raffaele Lampugnani, Mangiamele explained the priest’s appearance in the film as an image of how the clergy exploit the populace and literally “scrounge” from them.[36] If so, the implied allusion might be thought to point in the direction of Germaine Dulac’s fiercely anti-clerical The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928). It’s significant, however, that this is one of the few scenes in the film which is absent from the original Italian treatment so that, clearly, Mangiamele must have thought of adding it, in all probability, during filming.

Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963) opened at The Lido in Sydney in February 1964. After doing what the trade journal, Film Weekly, called “record business”, it moved to Melbourne.[37] It was also screened—albeit only once—at the Melbourne Film Festival on May 30 that year.[38]

Given Mangiamele’s declared love of Fellini, there can be little doubt that he must have made the effort to see 8 ½ in one venue or another, and in the very period when he was already rehearsing, if not actually filming, Clay. No doubt delighted at the comic portrayal of the clergy, especially in the Saraghina sequence where the priests chase Guido along the beach in order to castigate him, Mangiamele seems to have appropriated and slightly changed the image to a gawky young priest on a bicycle chasing his hat. In spite of what Mangiamele said about his inclusion of the priest to Lampugnani, the comic touches and the upbeat music in the sequence are distinctly Felliniesque and are clearly reminiscent of 8 ½ (Figures 17 and 18).

 Figure 17:
Federico Fellini: 8 ½ (1963)

Figure 18:
Clay: the priest
(Courtesy Rosemary Mangiamele)

Pace Mangiamele, to note such a layering in the imagery of the sequence is, of course, in no way to impugn its artistic originality but rather to begin to glimpse the textual density of the film and the depth that lies beneath—or within—what has always been blithely indicated as the beauty of its photography.But, in any case, something more complex is happening here than mere appropriation. Or rather what Mangiamele is appropriating is not just the Felliniesque image of the priest but rather the entire self-reflexive dimension of Fellini’s most autobiographical work to that date. For if Guido chased by priests in 8 ½ stands in for a young Fellini, Nick menaced by the shadow of the priest and rejecting his offer of spiritual comfort (and adapting a version of Diogenes’ famous reply to Alexander for his purpose) stands in for Mangiamele himself (Figures 19-20).

Figures 19-20: Clay Nick to priest: “You can take away your shadow” Courtesy: Rosemary Mangiamele

And a further confirmation that the allusion here is indeed to 8 ½ is provided by the way in which the priest’s departure is matched with Margot’s animated entrance, her graceful run onto the scene echoing the charming dance-like entrance of Claudia Cardinale in Fellini’s film (Figures 21-22). But clearly there’s even more here. Given the gradient of the hill, so strongly emphasised by the low camera angle, the other memory that is evoked here is that of the armed priest on the bicycle going off with the husband in Visconti’s Ossessione (1943) (Figure 23).

Figure 21: Clay
Margot’s entrance as the priest departs
Courtesy Rosemary Mangiamele

Figure 22: 8 ½
Claudia’s entrance

Figure 23: Luchino Visconti, Ossessione (1943)
Gino watches Bragana and the priest leave

It’s a depth and density of imagery that emerges, for example, from a closer consideration of an earlier sequence of the film when an exhausted Nick is first brought into the potter’s workshop. Margot asks his name in order to introduce him to the group. Having been introduced and having acknowledged the others, Nick looks down with an air of helplessness. The camera pans slowly down his muddied trousers and arrives at his feet, closing in on the sight of gaping shoes with feet showing through (Figure 24). Despite the superficial realism, here, this is an intensely poetic representation of the travails of the traveller, and of the miles he’s trudged through the harsh countryside. Moreover it’s surely impossible for these “shoe-feet” not to evoke at least one of René Magritte’s series of hybrid representations known as The Red Model (Figure 25). Furthermore, given the universal wretchedness and human suffering strongly connoted by the image, what comes to be invoked in the same gesture is probably nothing less than a memory of Vincent Van Gogh’s Boots and Laces (Figure 26).[39]

Figure 24:
Clay: Nick’s shoes
(Courtesy Rosemary Mangiamele)

Figure 25: Magritte, The Red Model (1947)	Figure 26: Vincent Van Gogh: Boots and Laces (1886)

Nick’s near faint at this point leads to his being seated on a stool while the two women (one of whom is called Mary) now proceed to wash his feet. In spite of Mangiamele’s aversion to Catholicism it’s difficult for such a gesture to avoid some Christological implications (significantly, even in the original Italian script the feet are referred to as “piedi piagati”[wounded feet]). One might think that it’s precisely in order to neutralise these inevitable Christological connotations that the camera, in the sequence immediately following, is made to pan horizontally alongside Nick’s sleeping body rather than looking up from the feet, studiously avoiding any representation that might bring to mind an iconic pietistic image like Mantegna’s Dead Christ (c.1490) (Figures 27-28). As the camera closes in on Nick’s face he awakens to find that Margot is fashioning a clay bust of him.

Figure 27 :
Clay: Nick sleeping
(Courtesy Rosemary Mangiamele)

Figure 28:
Mantegna, Lamentation Over the Dead Christ (c.1480)

Once again, then, what emerges from such a close examination is the remarkable imagistic and allusive density of Mangiamele’s film, a poetic depth and richness that is either overlooked or misconstrued by a gaze attentive only to its presumed realism and its putative “beautiful photography”.

It’s impossible to go much further in a close analysis of the film’s poetic stratagems within the limits of a journal article. Nevertheless, perhaps even the brief and fragmentary observations offered above may help to suggest the tenor and complexity of Mangiamele’s cinematic artistry in the film and the way in which his aspirations to a poetic cinema come to be successfully realised in Clay. And as tentative as such observations may themselves need to remain, they should nevertheless serve to offer strong confirmation to Tom O’Regan’s unnecessarily hesitant suggestion that art cinema in Australia begins “perhaps” with Clay.[40]