Raffaele Caputo and Geoff Burton,
Second Take: Australian Film-makers Talk.
St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1999.
ISBN 1 86448 765 8
342 pp
A$24.95 (paper)
(Review copy supplied by Allen & Unwin)

Uploaded 12 November 1999

It is a worrisome time for Australian film culture, what with real and foreshadowed cuts to infrastructure groups, funding and support bodies, and university programs and research; the loss of specialist film publications; a very real production crisis in Victoria; the contention that Sydney’s Fox Studios may well be a force of globalisation detrimental to our domestic industry; and so on, seemingly wherever one looks. In this context, Raffaele Caputo and Geoff Burton’s Second Takeis most welcome as a positive gesture of confidence and celebration.

Second Take is an anthology modelled on John Boorman and Walter Donahue’s Projections series; both are centred on filmmakers speaking/writing about their work, intentions, and experiences, and that of their colleagues. While Projections is international (usually Northern Hemispheric) in scope, Second Take is devoted to the Australian cinema past and present. Caputo is an outstanding specialist editor of film books, journals, and reference works; Burton has thirty-six years experience as a filmmaker and teacher. They share a broad vision of Australian film culture’s nature and achievements and a commitment to the need for a vigorous national film culture which they express in pointed and quietly elegant writing.

Their editorial work is extremely good: the book covers many different topics and positions, but is always (for me, compulsively) readable. The editors have selected and ordered their material around several nodal themes, not particularly linked. John Duigan ruminates on his life and filmmaking, then is deeply interviewed by Caputo on the thematic inter-relations of his films. George Miller provides a definitive position paper detailing his vision of myth and storytelling. Opening the anthology with this material sets the overall focus on witness, testimony, the first-person, and the self: no less the individual self than the allegorical, national self.

The next three sections show the creative editorial work behind this anthology: a sustained European voice on Australian cinema; a suite of Australian voices on Hollywood; and an elaborate sound mix on the crossovers of British and Australian filmmaking. First, nearly fifty pages of articles and interviews devoted to Jane Campion, all written for the French journal Positif by Michel Ciment, spanning the period from the first appearance of her short films through The Piano (Australia 1993) and documenting, step by step, the development of a European perception of Australian filmmaking. Providing this material for the first time in English makes Second Take a valuable resource indeed. Second, “What price Hollywood”, a group of memoirs of Hollywood experiences: Bruce Beresford (rueful) on how repeated enthusiastic “yesses” mean no; Gillian Armstrong (pragmatic) on both the strategy and the tactics of assessing and executing a Hollywood project with one’s eyes open (Little Women USA 1994); and Richard Franklin (splenetic) on the stupidity of studio management. Third, “The Empire strikes: the British in Australia”, a strange collection: Martin Scorsese on what British films mean to him; Philip Kemp’s account of the colourful Harry Watt and his misadventures as Ealing’s point man in Australia for an unsuccessful local production program; and finally, Richard Combs conversation with Nicholas Roeg on Walkabout (USA 1971). These last two are useful not least for making deeper and more complex our received ideas about cultural colonialism.

The anthology then moves back to, roughly, the present tense and practical issues. One section presents cases for the continuing and changing importance of documentary filmmaking. Tom Zubrycki writes very candidly about his method and about the complications which arise from close relations between the documentarist and the subjects of his films. Interviewed by Geoff Burton, Mike Rubbo relates his Canadian experience to his more recent work as documentary producer for the ABC, including Race Around the World (Australia 1997–), and the development of personalist documentary filmmaking and its relation to technological developments. Another section provides long, detailed and very illuminating production histories: Chris Noonan on the making of Babe (USA 1995), Bill Bennett on Kiss or Kill (Australia, 1997). The final section moves away from the act of filmmaking itself to the arena of deal-making, funding seeking, flogging it around, and stitching up the distribution. Richard Lowenstein provides a diaristic account of his life as he finished Strikebound (Australia, 1984) and began marketing it, simultaneously trying to develop other projects, do the film festival circuit, get Dogs in Space (Australia,1988) up and running, script and direct White City – sounds more dramatic than the films themselves. Scott Hicks provides an account of the marketing of Shine (Australia 1997) to the US market, a mixture of shrewdness and luck beginning at the Sundance Festival.

This sort of anthology, by its nature, does not have a tightly focussed centre or argument: its value is in the range and freshness of its material, and its strategies for contexting that material. Second Takeis extremely well edited and many of its articles will find their way into reading lists and curriculum of various sorts, and into the larger currency of quotation and citation. Allen & Unwin are to be congratulated on their sponsorship of this project, and we can only hope for Third Take, Fourth Take, etc.

R.J. Thompson