The Shadowcatchers tells Australia's
film history through the experience of cinematographers including Dion Beebe,
seen here working on Memoirs of a Geisha.
Tom Ryan, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports
It
was on December 28, 1895, at the Grand Cafe in Paris, that a film was first
publicly projected on to a screen. Or was it December 22? In their
snapshot-style histories of the cinema, David Parkinson, in the very pedestrian
100 Ideas That Changed Film, and Jean-Baptiste Thoret, in the
less-than-orderly Talk about Cinema, give different dates for the
momentous occasion. They agree, however, that those responsible for it were the
Lumiere brothers, Louis and Auguste.
I'd
advise nobody to go to either Parkinson or Thoret if they're interested in
anything more than an approximate overview of 117 years of film history.
Or
should that be 116 years, six months and three weeks, give or take a day or
two?
In
place of the clearly demarcated, linear trajectories and attention to detail of
the usual textbook histories that you'll find recommended on film studies
courses around the world, the British-based Parkinson and the French Thoret
provide quick-bite glimpses of the route the cinema has taken from the distant
past to the present.
Both
of their books belong to ongoing series that aspire to offer insights into
various aspects of popular culture as we move through the second decade of the
21st century.
Among
the subjects that the Talk about editions have dealt with to date are
design, contemporary dance and contemporary architecture; the areas that the 100
Ideas collection has so far placed in the spotlight include fashion,
architecture and graphic design.
Each
of the books is designed to be dipped into rather than read from cover to
cover, although for the purpose of reviewing them I've had to take the latter
approach.
In
that context, Thoret's offering is much more rewarding and, while he clearly
prefers throwaway musings to systematic grapplings and the results he achieves
are generally sketchy, his writing is also occasionally concise and
thought-provoking (even if the print size is infuriatingly small).
He's
especially good on the TV series The Twilight Zone and The Prisoner
(films, TV, same difference!).
For
him, the former ''became a cruel and ironic vision of a phoney and antiseptic
1950s American society, whose dark side is slyly exposed in episode after
episode'', while the setting for the latter is ''the ancestor of the prison
village in The Truman Show, [resembling] a prophetic forerunner of what
is today called 'the global village'''.
At
the same time, his scatter-shot methods can be frustrating.
In
a section entitled ''Models and Innovation'', he writes about ''the children''
of John Ford, Jean-Pierre Melville and Luis Bunuel, introducing the last by
asking, ''What strange and unexpected link is there between Marco Ferreri's Max,
My Love (1985) and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(1973)?''
Setting
aside the fact that Max My Love was directed by Nagisa Oshima - anyone
can make a mistake! - I was still interested to see how he was going to develop
the ''link'' between the two films. But, bizarrely, he makes no further mention
of them or it, leaving us to draw our own conclusions.
If
Thoret's book, translated from French, is a bit all over the place - with
sections devoted to ''key dates'', questions of style, ''seminal'' films and
key filmmakers - Parkinson's treads a predictable and not especially
illuminating path from magic lanterns to computer-generated imagery.
And
whereas Thoret is much more circumspect - in his preface, he wisely notes that
''no one in their right mind (the author of the current volume included) would
seriously embark on a history of cinema in its 'totality''' - Parkinson takes
himself way too seriously, beginning with the grandiose claim that he's
providing an ''alternative history of cinema''.
Even
his title turns out to be a misnomer (although it might well be the vagaries of
publishing that have foisted it on him).
Instead
of 100 ''Eureka!'' moments, he conjures up only a few alongside others that
would be more accurately described as ''developments in the history of
film'', such as poetic realism, criticism, Free Cinema, teenpics and feminist
film theory.
In
a case of saving the best for last, cinematographer, documentary filmmaker and
film lecturer Martha Ansara's The Shadowcatchers is a much more
satisfying enterprise than the accounts of the past offered by Thoret and
Parkinson.
Filtering
Australia's film history through the hands-on experiences of the men (and very
occasional women) who've wielded cameras Down Under, it's an impressive
coffee-table volume that also features some handsome illustrations in both
black and white and colour of practitioners at work.
Industrial
and technical issues are to the fore rather than aesthetic ones, but Ansara
tells a compelling tale about a special bunch of Aussie battlers for whom work
has always been a struggle.
Featuring
profiles of major cinematographers - including Frank Hurley (1885-62), the
legendary war cameramen Damien Parer (1912-44) and Neil Davis (1934-85), John
Seale (born 1942) and Dion Beebe (born 1968) - along with anecdotes from a host
of others, she takes us from the birth of moving pictures in Australia in 1896
through the coming of sound to the internationalisation of the industry in more
recent times.
The
shadowcatchers' stories aren't just about hauling heavy equipment around,
improvising ways out of impossible situations and sometimes facing life-threatening
situations (both Parer and Davis tragically lost their lives on the job). They
are also about the problem of finding useful, ongoing employment, especially in
the light of the stranglehold of US studios on film exhibition in Australia
(and thus on film production) since the First World War.
Still,
in the years before the renaissance of the 1970s, cinematographers were more
fortunate than others in the business because, as Ansara points out, ''from
1913 through to the 1960s, almost all Australian cameramen had worked on
newsreels in one form or another, at one time or another, in their careers''.
Published
under the auspices of the Australian Cinematographers Society, Ansara's
accomplished book celebrates the endeavours of a group of unsung heroes,
drawing attention to the contribution they've made to the film business and
coherently evoking the big picture in ways that completely elude Talk about
Cinema and 100 Ideas.
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