Helen Martin and Sam Edwards
New Zealand Film 1912-1996
Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1997
ISBN: 019 558336 1
NZ$49.95 (pb)
215 pp

Without question, New Zealand Film 1912-1996 goes far towards filling the gap in reference material on the cinema of Aotearoa New Zealand. Page by page, along with plot summary, some critical analysis, and even a bit of cultural context, it provides fairly complete information on personnel, budget, distribution, running times, festival awards, and television screenings (primarily within New Zealand) for individual feature films during the comprehensive time period indicated by its title.

The authors (Martin is a freelance writer with years of experience dealing with the subject and Edwards is “founding chairperson of the Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of Waikato”) explain that they have included titles that might not seem immediately appropriate for inclusion on the basis that these films “are important in setting the context in which the feature film industry has developed”. (p. 2) Such films include some early works that are just short of feature length as well as a number of films that would not seem to be part of the national oeuvre: “Examples include The Devil’s Pit [Lewis D. Collins, 1929] and The Piano [Jane Campion, 1993], which were financed from overseas but set and shot in New Zealand; A Soldier’s Tale [Larry Parr, 1989] and Leave All Fair [John Reid, 1985], which were shot overseas but financed and produced from New Zealand; and Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence [Nagisa Ōshima, 1983], which, although not a New Zealand story, had input from New Zealand money and personnel and was partly shot in New Zealand”. (p. 3)

New Zealand Film 1912-1996, not surprisingly, is organized chronologically, and it includes a useful bibliography and an appendix containing pertinent information from the New Zealand Film Commission Act 1978 on the Commission’s mandate. In such a reference work, of course, the index is crucial, and here there are a few oddities worth noting.

For example, the text on The Birth of New Zealand (Harrington Reynolds, 1922) mentions that “Rudall Hayward, arguably the father of New Zealand film, participated in the crewing”; (p. 29) however, this credit does not appear in the index entry for Hayward. Similarly, some early credits for people like Alun Bollinger, Stuart Dryburgh, Robin Laing, and Lee Tamahori are omitted from the index (where, in fact, Bollinger’s first name is misspelled).

The most curious omission from the index, though, is the name of Larry Parr, one of the country’s more prolific and enduring producers (as well as a writer and director), despite the fact that he is listed in the Acknowledgments for his assistance to the authors. For the record, the missing information for Parr should be pages 67, 78, 97, 100, 103, 117, 121, 122, 125, 131, 152.

Although it would be difficult to distinguish between entries by the two authors, they have by and large divided the task by chronology. Sam Edwards has done most of the entries up until The God Boy (Murray Reece), a telefeature from 1976, meaning that Helen Martin has taken responsibility for most of the contemporary films by which New Zealand cinema is generally known internationally. One point that the volume as a whole inevitably makes, though, is that the body of feature films produced in this country is far larger than almost anyone realizes.

Somewhat surprisingly, given the reference work character of New Zealand Film 1912-1996 and its emphasis on the individual films, it nonetheless manages to develop a running commentary on the development of the film industry as well as the nature of national cinema specific to Aotearoa New Zealand. For example, Edwards tells us that John O’Shea’s Broken Barrier (1952) “was a training ground for the newly revived industry and a site for an examination of cultural difference and interracial intolerance. Under the auspices of Pacific Films Ltd [O’Shea’s production company], many New Zealand filmmakers were able to gain practical experience”. (p. 52) The government-funded National Film Unit, of course, was also a training ground, as Edwards observes in his commentary on coverage of the Commonwealth Games (Games ’74): “The liveliness and originality of so much of the film is no coincidence. The crew is composed of many of the film-makers who would be prominent in New Zealand film-making in the next couple of decades. Sam Pillsbury, Paul Maunder, Arthur Everard, David Fowler, and many others in the full crew – even a newcomer listed as a location assistant, Sam Neill – are part of a growing cadre of successful new Zealand screen professionals”. (p. 58)

Writing somewhat disparagingly about Nutcase (Roger Donaldson, 1980), Edwards says that “it is included here as it helps to identify the cadre of film-makers who were to be responsible for the development of mainstream New Zealand cinema. Despite the development throughout the previous few years, there was still only a small group of relatively experienced working film-makers. Balancing the need for funds, the need to produce viable and cost-effective film, and the need to provide experience for greater numbers of employees in the budding screen industry . . ., members of this group (including [producer John] Barnett, [assistant director Michael] Firth, [gaffer and future leading cinematographer Alun] Bollinger, [special effects and future Hollywood director Geoff] Murphy, [grip and future international cinematographer Stuart] Dryburgh, [writers and actors Keith] Aberdein and [Ian] Mune, and comics like [Jon] Gadsby and [Ian] Watkin]) were at the centre of most major developments”. (p. 73) Many of the same people were involved in Murphy’s Goodbye Pork Pie, released later that same year (1980). This was the breakthrough film, “the first New Zealand film to recover its costs from the domestic market alone”, the one that “altered New Zealanders’ reluctance to watch locally made movies”, the one that, with Paul Maunder’s Sons for the Return Home(1979), was the first New Zealand feature “to screen in the market at Cannes”. (p. 76) It also involved so many of Murphy’s family and friends that they “became known as ‘The Murphia'”. (ibid.)

With regard to New Zealand cinema as a national cinema, Edwards correctly observes that O’Shea’s Runaway (1964) “is archetypal New Zealand cinema. Its elements, Man Alone, Man on the Run, Man against Man and Landscape, Man Against the Odds, its sea, bush, and mountain settings and the full range of iconographic images, make it quintessential Kiwi myth”. (p. 54) The rural/urban divide that increasingly distinguishes contemporary New Zealand cinema from that of the past is an issue that merits Edwards’ attention when he discusses Rangi’s Catch (1973), a relatively obscure UK-funded telefeature by former National Film Unit director Michael Forlong starring the young Temuera Morrison (of Once Were Warriors [Lee Tamahori, 1994] fame) as well as other local mainstays such as Don Selwyn, Peter Vere-Jones, and Ian Mune.

Geoff Murphy’s first feature, Wild Man (1977), prompts Edwards to note other thematic characteristics: “The con man-as-comedy theme, later picked up in films like Came a Hot Friday [Ian Mune, 1984], is dear to the New Zealand psyche. . . . The posturer pricked, authority as a kind of divinely inspired comedy, tall poppies felled, self-importance as a constance source of laughter, set in or against a backdrop of the dramatic New Zealand landscape, have provided essential material for post-war film-makers from Murphy to Peter Jackson”. (p. 61)

Yet on the next page Edwards observes the existence of an alternative tradition of filmmaking, represented in this instance by Paul Maunder’s Landfall (1977), produced by the National Film Unit for the Broadcasting Corporation of New Zealand (the country’s government-funded television unit). “The nascent industry was to be given direction not merely from eventual commercial viability, although that was to be a major influence, but from a peculiarly New Zealand willingness to experiment, to ask questions of the establishment, to construct narratives outside traditional frameworks and to use what appeared to work best rather than what custom or convention dictated. . . . Such a climate allowed for the development of the new vision of Vincent Ward and Peter Jackson, as well as the erratically entertaining action comedies of Geoff Murphy and Roger Donaldson”. (p. 62)

Of course the best-known analysis of New Zealand’s national cinema occurs in Sam Neill’s Cinema of Unease (1995), which forms part of the BFI-sponsored centenary series. As Helen Martin points out, in Neill’s film “there are many films, themes and genres not mentioned at all (the shaggy dog tale, the pot-boiler co-production, the film reflecting Pacific Island culture, the urban comedy, the feminist thriller, the Hollywood clone . . . [sic])”. (p. 184) Fortunately, they are all there in Martin and Edwards’ New Zealand Film 1912-1996. It is an instant classic and is likely to remain the standard in its field for some time to come.