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9063 results in Film

Page 182 of 454

  • 10 - Confronting Domestic Violence and Familial Abuse: Once Were Warriors (Lee Tamahori, 1994)

  • from PART 3 - THE SECOND WAVE OF THE 1990s
  • Alistair Fox
  • Book:
    Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 June 2018
    Print publication:
    08 September 2017, pp 121-134

  • Summary

    At first sight, it might seem strange to include Once Were Warriors (Lee Tamahori, 1994) in a book on coming-of-age films when it so clearly belongs to the genres of the family melodrama and the social problem film in its graphic portrayal of domestic violence in a context of poverty and social abjection. Although the fact is seldom mentioned, however, there are three coming-of-age narratives interwoven into the main story that play a crucial role in generating the film's meaning, and for that reason I have chosen to examine those elements here.

    THE NATIONAL IMPORTANCE OF ONCE WERE WARRIORS

    When Once Were Warriors exploded onto the nation's screens in 1994, it attracted audiences on a scale that had never before been seen in New Zealand. With an estimated 1,054,100 admissions, attendance at this film surpassed that for all foreign films released during the previous year, including American blockbusters like Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, which until then had been the most successful film shown in New Zealand. Even though the box office take for Once Were Warriors ($6,795,000) has since been exceeded by those for Taika Waititi's two smash hits, Boy (2010) with $9,322,000, and Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) with $11,809,372, when these figures are related to the cost of a ticket at the time (in 1993, a ticket cost $8.76), the number of admissions remains commensurate. What these figures show is that all three films were national phenomena, which prompts one to speculate on why this was so.

    In the case of Once Were Warriors, one does not need to look far for the answer; as Rena Owen, who played Beth in the movie, puts it, the film ‘had the courage to explore things that no other movie has had the courage to explore.’ Lee Tamahori, the film's director, ventures his own explanation for the film's success:

    Everybody saw this film. Maori, who usually ignore things like this in their culture: rape, incest, matricide … they don't read a lot, since they're not a culture who had a written language. If you're poor and you're rural, you have an oral history and you watch TV and go to the movies. They went to this film in unbelievable numbers, even though it was a bad rap on themselves.

  • 2 - New Zealand Coming-of-age Films: Distinctive Characteristics and Thematic Preoccupations

  • from PART 1 - THE COMING-OF-AGE GENRE AND NATIONAL CINEMA
  • Alistair Fox
  • Book:
    Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 June 2018
    Print publication:
    08 September 2017, pp 16-28

  • Summary

    Vincent Ward, speaking of his coming-of-age film Vigil (1984), observed that ‘Childhood is a common theme in New Zealand writing.’ He ascribed the omnipresence of this theme – rightly, in my opinion – to the youth of the country itself, which was only systematically colonized from Europe after 1840, and did not gain full independence until the adoption of the Statute of Winchester in 1947: ‘Perhaps this is due to the relative newness of the national identity, and “rites of passage” stories reflect this coming of age.’ Given the importance of the coming-of-age theme in New Zealand literature and its critical role in registering an emerging cultural identity as the country sought to define itself, it is not surprising to find that coming-of-age films occupy an equally prominent place in the rapidly growing canon of New Zealand feature films, nor that their preoccupations reflect issues of concern in each subsequent decade as the emerging identity of the nation has evolved. It is almost as if creative minds in the country, aware of momentous changes taking place in the nation's sense of its own emerging identity, chose the cinematic coming- of-age genre as a vehicle through which to work through the complex emotional reactions that were elicited by this phenomenon. In the rest of this book, I will trace the shifts that have occurred in these preoccupations, relating them to the social, cultural, and political contexts that motivated them.

    THE ADVENT OF THE COMING-OF-AGE FILM

    Even though fiction films began to be made in New Zealand as early as 1913, with three romances on Māori subjects directed by Gaston Méliès – Loved by a Maori Chieftess, Hinemoa, and How Chief Te Ponga Won His Bride – coming-of-age films did not begin to be made until the mid-1970s, with the possible exception of Runaway (John O'Shea, 1964), which can be regarded as a post-adolescence exercise in the genre. The first true coming-of-age film was The God Boy (Murray Reece, 1976), a television-feature made for the newly created national broadcasting channel, Television One. Shortly afterwards, there occurred a remarkable flowering of New Zealand feature-filmmaking following the commercial success of the next coming-of-age film, Roger Donaldson's Sleeping Dogs (1977) – a flourishing that occurred partly as a result of a tax loophole that aspiring filmmakers suddenly realized they could exploit.

  • 4 - An Angry Young Man Seeks to Justify Himself: Sleeping Dogs (Ian Donaldson, 1977)

  • from PART 2 - THE NEW ZEALAND NEW WAVE: 1976–89
  • Alistair Fox
  • Book:
    Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 June 2018
    Print publication:
    08 September 2017, pp 42-54

  • Summary

    One year after The God Boy was screened on New Zealand television, the next major movie to be locally produced, Sleeping Dogs (Roger Donaldson, 1977), was launched in cinemas around the country and instantly became a box office hit. As Jonathan Dowling, a New Zealand producer, has observed, the film ‘almost single-handedly created a climate of acceptance within the country for a Kiwi film industry.’ Even in the USA, where the film was released in 1982, it was critically acclaimed. The reviewer for the weekly American entertainment trade magazine Variety, for example, wrote: ‘Sleeping Dogs has sharp directional flair evident, particularly in the action segments, taut performances by the large cast and a handsome technical gloss in all departments.’ New Zealand feature-filmmaking had thus arrived, and Sleeping Dogs – the success of which encouraged the formation of the New Zealand Film Commission in 1978, which has provided funding for most of the local films made since – can justifiably be regarded as inaugurating the New Zealand New Wave.

    More importantly for the purposes of this study, it announces the advent of a new mode of filmmaking – one that would characterize many of the coming- of-age films that would be made in the years to come. First, it exemplifies a new approach to the adaptation of a literary source. Rather than functioning simply as a metteur-en-scène, as Murray Reece had done with The God Boy, Roger Donaldson seized upon his literary source, C. K. Stead's novel Smith's Dream (1971, revised 1973), for its potential to be rewrought in ways that transformed it into a vehicle for personal expression, self-discovery, and even self-justification. He thus approaches the material from the perspective of an auteur who has selected it because of its latent capacity to be converted into a vehicle for personal cinema. Second, it displays the incursion of a globalized American youth culture into the experience of young Antipodeans, along with the influence of the American New Wave that flourished briefly between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. Thus, whereas Reece's The God Boy shows the influence of the French New Wave and European directors like François Truffaut and Ingmar Bergman directly, Sleeping Dogs exemplifies that influence as refracted through the New Hollywood, especially in the forms in which it was hybridized with American genres.

  • 3 - The Formation of a Budding Man Alone: The God Boy (Murray Reece, 1976)

  • from PART 2 - THE NEW ZEALAND NEW WAVE: 1976–89
  • Alistair Fox
  • Book:
    Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 June 2018
    Print publication:
    08 September 2017, pp 31-41

  • Summary

    Murray Reece's adaptation of Ian Cross’ critically acclaimed novel The God Boy (1957) appeared on New Zealand screens in 1976, and is the first genuine coming-of-age film made in this country. Even though it did not achieve a theatrical release – it was the first television feature of the newly formed national network Television One, and is now no longer readily accessible other than online at the internet site, NZ On Screen – it is historically important for a number of reasons. First, it showed a new generation of New Zealanders that their own stories could not only be entertaining when dramatized on the screen, but also that they were capable of bringing to light, and addressing, the most complex and challenging aspects of their existence in a distinctive, evolving culture. Second, The God Boy exemplifies the ongoing legacy of some of the major themes that had dominated New Zealand literary fiction since the 1930s.

    These themes have been meticulously detailed by the literary scholar Lawrence Jones, and by social historians, such as Jock Phillips: the dominance of ‘puritan’ moral values, whether religiously imposed or imposed in a displaced secular form; a form of Stoicism manifest in a valorization of the necessity for steadfastness, self-reliance, and self-improvement (which were reinforced by the need to settle a new country); and an inculcated fear of worldly temptations, such as sex and other expressions of the senses or emotions that could make a man ‘soft’ or a ‘sissy’ – and hence unworthy of assuming the status of an effective provider or protector in the circumstances of the infant nation, separated from its mother country by the greatest geographical (but not cultural) distance it was possible to imagine.

    In the literature of the inter-war period and the first two decades of the post- Second World War period, issues of this sort were reflected in a preoccupation with the family as the locus of the discontent and destructive psychological consequences that they generated.

  • 4 - John Barrymore's Introspective Performance in Beau Brummel

    • By Martin Shingler, Senior Lecturer in Radio & Film Studies at the University of Sunderland, UK.
  • Edited by Murray Pomerance, Steven Rybin, Minnesota State University, Mankato
  • Book:
    Hamlet Lives in Hollywood
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 June 2018
    Print publication:
    08 September 2017, pp 47-58

  • Summary

    In her essay “The Great Profile: How Do We Know the Actor from the Acting?” Marian Keane analyzes a scene in Harry Beaumont's Beau Brummel (1924) in which John Barrymore performs before a full-length mirror, employing a set of gestures to announce “his thought and the fact of his thinking” (187). This is the moment that Barrymore's character George Brummel practices his poses and gestures in order to acquire a more charming and elegant persona which, in turn, marks the beginnings of his public persona: that is, his “Beau” identity.

    Gazing at his reflection, Barrymore realizes he can make anything of his appearance. Part of him is always on display, while part of him, his inner self, remains concealed. He gazes here upon his reflection with eyes of an author or a creator, or an actor, who examines the unmolded stuff of a character. (Keane 193)

    Here Keane describes not Brummel's realization that he can make anything of his appearance but rather Barrymore's. This (perhaps unintentional) slippage between character and actor/star suggests that the image of Barrymore and the character of Brummel are fused here (that is, Brummel is Barrymore and Barrymore is Brummel). It suggests further that, in this instance, Barrymore was able to disclose to his audience the processes of image-making central to stardom: namely, the revelation of some parts of his self and the concealment of others, as well as the transformation of a personality into a persona capable of circulating publicly to enhance the value of the actor. It is the way in whichBeau Brummel provided John Barrymore with an opportunity both to reflect upon and disclose to his audience some key aspects of image-making and star construction that I shall pursue here, building chiefly upon Marian Keane's work as well as Gaylyn Studlar's chapter on Barrymore in her book This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age. I shall also consider how Beau Brummel functioned as the perfect star vehicle for Barrymore in 1924, capitalizing on his fame and achievements at that time. Furthermore, taking my cue from Keane, I shall explore more precisely what John Barrymore appears to be thinking during a critical moment of introspection.

  • Traditions in World Cinema

  • Alistair Fox
  • Book:
    Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 June 2018
    Print publication:
    08 September 2017, pp xi-xii

  • Summary

    General editors: Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer

    Founding editor: Steven Jay Schneider

    Traditions in World Cinema is a series of textbooks and monographs devoted to the analysis of currently popular and previously underexamined or undervalued film movements from around the globe. Also intended for general interest readers, the textbooks in this series offer undergraduate- and graduate-level film students accessible and comprehensive introductions to diverse traditions in world cinema. The monographs open up for advanced academic study more specialised groups of films, including those that require theoretically oriented approaches. Both textbooks and monographs provide thorough examinations of the industrial, cultural, and socio-historical conditions of production and reception.

    The flagship textbook for the series includes chapters by noted scholars on traditions of acknowledged importance (the French New Wave, German Expressionism), recent and emergent traditions (New Iranian, post-Cinema Novo), and those whose rightful claim to recognition has yet to be established (the Israeli persecution film, global found footage cinema). Other volumes concentrate on individual national, regional, or global cinema traditions. As the introductory chapter to each volume makes clear, the films under discussion form a coherent group on the basis of substantive and relatively transparent, if not always obvious, commonalities. These commonalities may be formal, stylistic, or thematic, and the groupings may, although they need not, be popularly identified as genres, cycles, or movements (Japanese horror, Chinese martial arts cinema, Italian Neorealism). Indeed, in cases in which a group of films is not already commonly identified as a tradition, one purpose of the volume is to establish its claim to importance and make it visible (East Central European Magical Realist cinema, Palestinian cinema).

    Textbooks and monographs include:

  • • An introduction that clarifies the rationale for the grouping of films under examination

  • • A concise history of the regional, national, or transnational cinema in question

  • • A summary of previous published work on the tradition

  • • Contextual analysis of industrial, cultural, and socio-historical conditions of production and reception

  • • Textual analysis of specific and notable films, with clear and judicious application of relevant film theoretical approaches

  • • Bibliograph(ies)/filmograph(ies)

  • 10 - Handling Time: The Passing of Tradition in A Bill of Divorcement

  • Edited by Murray Pomerance, Steven Rybin, Minnesota State University, Mankato
  • Book:
    Hamlet Lives in Hollywood
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 June 2018
    Print publication:
    08 September 2017, pp 123-134

  • Summary

    Certainly I believe that ghosts communicate with those who stay on earth. And when I come back, don't stand and gape. Be hospitable to my shade.

    John Barrymore

    Setting down words to explain Jack Barrymore,” his brother Lionel pointed out, “is like seeking the mystery of Hamlet himself in the monosyllables of basic English” (Kobler, x). Erik Erikson sees the temptation to solve the riddle of Hamlet's “inscrutable nature” as a pointless endeavor if for no other reason than because Hamlet's inscrutability is his nature. Far from explaining his “condition,” Erikson stages the riddle of identity crisis in the play as one that hinges on Hamlet's always being “on the verge of slipping into the state [of madness] he pretends” (Identity 236–7). Unlike the foolish critic, an actor would never attempt to “explain.” Rather, there is, writes Steven Berkoff, a sense that every actor who plays him must take the conundrum of Hamlet “within his own breast,” where “to touch these words is to set alight a small flame within himself,” such that “when you play Hamlet, you play yourself and play the instrument which is you” (vii–viii).

    As an “instrument,” John “Jack” Barrymore communicated something vital in his Hamlet. While most contemporary reviews were positive, the overwhelming feeling was that—irrespective of the shortcomings of these nascent performances—his was not just a Hamlet for the new generation but one heralding a historic “turn” in theatrical performance. As Ludwig Lewisohn noted in 1922, Barrymore spoke to his generation in a way they had not been spoken to before. “His bearing and gestures have the restrained but intense expres-siveness of the bearing of modern men who live with their nerves and woes in narrow rooms” (Mills 190). Barrymore, Stark Young remarked (also about the 1922 performance), “seemed to gather together in himself all the Hamlets of his generation, to simplify and direct everyone's theory of the part. To me his Hamlet was the most satisfying that I have ever seen, not yet as a finished creation, but a foundation, a continuous outline.” At its best, Young said, it was like “a fundamental pattern so simple and so revealing that it appeared to be mystical; and so direct and strong that it restored to the dramatic scene its primary truth and magnificence” (Wells 195, 200).

  • 8 - Creativity as a Haven: An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion, 1990)

  • from PART 3 - THE SECOND WAVE OF THE 1990s
  • Alistair Fox
  • Book:
    Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 June 2018
    Print publication:
    08 September 2017, pp 95-107

  • Summary

    Just as Merata Mita's Mauri (1988) is unique within the corpus of New Zealand coming-of-age films, Jane Campion's An Angel at My Table is similarly unique, but for very different reasons. Astonishingly, with the exception of Vincent Ward's Vigil (1984), it is the first feature film to focus on the maturational experience of a New Zealand Pākehā girl, and it is also the first coming- of-age film to be made by a woman. Additionally, it is the first film to blend the coming-of-age genre with that of the biopic, adapting its screenplay from the celebrated autobiography of the New Zealand writer Janet Frame. Finally, it is the only coming-of-age film to depict all three of the main maturational phases of the genre: childhood; adolescence; and post-adolescence. On top of that, An Angel at My Table was recognized as attaining a level of excellence that led to its being the first New Zealand film to be screened in competition at the Venice Film Festival.

    The most striking aspect of An Angel at My Table is how, while outwardly maintaining an extreme fidelity in the representation of episodes described by Frame in her Autobiography, the film converts the subjective self-portrait of the original into a vehicle for a complex dual projection on the part of Campion herself. This conversion is made possible by the shift from Frame's first-person narration, which takes the reader deep into the reflections and insights of the author, to a plurimedial filmic narration that places the spectator at an observer's distance from the cinematic version of ‘Janet.’ Such a shift of perspective indicates a subtle change in the nature and function of the coming-of-age experience.

    ‘MY SAY’: JANET FRAME's AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

    In a radio interview of 1983, Janet Frame made it clear that her purpose in writing the three volumes of her autobiography – To the Is-Land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984), and The Envoy from Mirror City (1984), published together in 1989 – was to have ‘my say,’ that is, to give her account of her experience and correct the myth of herself as a ‘mad writer.’

  • 12 - Asserting Feminist Claims within Māori Culture: Whale Rider (Nicki Caro, 2002)

  • from PART 4 - PREOCCUPATIONS OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM
  • Alistair Fox
  • Book:
    Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 June 2018
    Print publication:
    08 September 2017, pp 148-160

  • Summary

    The most important New Zealand movie of 2003, Niki Caro's Whale Rider, first shown at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2002, where it was voted People's Choice, and released elsewhere the following year, was one of the most successful fiction films made in this country, winning twenty-nine international awards. Apart from being highly successful in New Zealand, with ticket sales of 752,941, making it the fourth most popular locally made movie to date, even more significantly, it was a huge hit internationally, with foreign box office earnings of $20,662,227. In addition, it was the first feature- length film to be adapted from a novel by Witi Ihimaera, the most prominent Māori writer of fiction, inaugurating several other adaptations based on his works, including Nights in the Gardens of Spain (Katie Wolfe, 2010), a coming-out drama, and Mahana (Lee Tamahori, 2016), based on the novel Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies, with further plans under way to film his major novel The Matriarch.

    Despite Whale Rider's popularity with audiences, however, within New Zealand its reception was mixed. In particular, some Māori found the film culturally offensive, and objected to the fact that a Pākehā director had presumed to make it. The scholar Brendan Hokowhitu, for example, saw Whale Rider as ‘a problematic and even dangerous film for the project of Māori decolonization,’ on the grounds that ‘Pākehā have embraced this movie because it promotes a conscious paternalistic narrative of nurturing a savage culture while repressing the role of Pākehā in the oppression of Māori.’ In similar vein, Tania Ka'ai denounced the film as misrepresenting various tribal traditions, arguing that ‘the patriarchy/feminism division operates very differently in the Ngāti Porou tribe, where Whale Rider is based, than it does either in the film or in Eurocentric feminisms.’

    What such criticisms point towards is the fact that Caro and her producer, John Barnett of South Pacific Pictures, deliberately reworked the source story of Whale Rider for the sake of making the film appeal to an international audience.

  • 13 - Family Secrets and their Destructive Consequences: In My Father's Den (Brad McGann, 2004)

  • from PART 4 - PREOCCUPATIONS OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM
  • Alistair Fox
  • Book:
    Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 June 2018
    Print publication:
    08 September 2017, pp 161-174

  • Summary

    Following the outstanding international success of Whale Rider, the next New Zealand coming-of-age film to attract critical acclaim and attention, both nationally and abroad, was Brad McGann's adaptation of an iconic novel by Maurice Gee, In My Father's Den, originally published in 1972. Hailed as being one of the best films to come out of the Antipodes, this film won a host of awards at international film festivals, including the prestigious International Critics’ Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, with praise given for the emotional maturity, striking performances, and visual grace displayed in its story of a damaged young man who returns from overseas to his family in New Zealand and gradually comes to terms with the traumatic aspects of his childhood experience that he has repressed, having sought to evade them by retreating physically overseas, and emotionally into a self-imposed form of detachment. In terms of its status as a coming-of-age film, In My Father's Den constitutes a post-adolescence coming of age on the part of the main character, Paul (Matthew Mcfadyen), that has been forestalled and delayed by earlier trauma, while also containing a second coming of age on the part of a teenage girl, Celia (Emily Barclay), that in certain respects mirrors the first, but has a tragic outcome.

    Apart from being one of the most accomplished of all New Zealand films, McGann's In My Father's Den (2004) reveals more clearly than any other the two main functions of the coming-of-age genre in the context of a national cinema. At one level, it accomplishes a radical updating of the cultural perspective of its literary source, thus serving to register shifts that had occurred in New Zealand society between the period in which Gee wrote (the 1960s and 1970s) and that in which McGann made his film (the 2000s). Whereas for Gee the cause of the tragedy at the heart of the story – the murder of an innocent seventeen-year-old girl – lay in the damaging effects on two brothers of a repressive upbringing under the influence of a harshly repressive Presbyterian mother, for McGann, it arose from ‘the harbouring of family secrets’ and the effects of lack of communication and of miscommunication.

  • 17 - Delinquency and Bicultural Relations: Hunt for the Wilderpeople (Taika Waititi, 2016)

  • from PART 5 - PERSPECTIVES ON MĀORI CULTURE SINCE 2010
  • Alistair Fox
  • Book:
    Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 June 2018
    Print publication:
    08 September 2017, pp 216-230

  • Summary

    Shortly after Mahana, a second major coming-of-age film was released in the same year, Taika Waititi's Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), and, like Waititi's earlier exercise in the genre, Boy (2010), quickly smashed all previous box office records. Not only has Hunt for the Wilderpeople become New Zealand's highest-grossing film to date, but it has also been universally well received by critics, both in New Zealand and abroad, where it has played on the international film festival circuit. Within the context of New Zealand coming-of-age films, it marks a new phase in the evolution of the genre in that a version of the generic model is used as a symbolic paradigm for exploring the dynamics of race-relations between Māori and Pākehā as they advance into the twenty-first century under the influence of biculturalism, which has been sponsored as a state ideology by successive governments since the 1980s.

    Hunt for the Wilderpeople tackles much the same theme as Boy – the longing of a young teenage Māori boy to find love and acceptance – and adopts the same expressive mode, which is to take material that is intrinsically dark and disturbing and to overlay it with surface humor and a comedic treatment. Waititi also draws heavily on popular youth culture, presenting his adolescent hero as a devotee of hip hop, just as Boy in Boy is a fan of Michael Jackson, and includes frequent allusions to popular films, especially New Zealand hits from the late 1970s and 1980s such as Sleeping Dogs (1977), Smash Palace (Roger Donaldson, 1981), and Came a Hot Friday (1985), as well as international hits like Scarface (Brian De Palma, 1983), Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), and Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001–3). There is a major difference between Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, however, in that, unlike Boy, the later film is an adaptation. That in itself would not be exceptional were it not for the fact that Waititi treats the source in such a way as fundamentally to change its nature, and in so doing to reshape it in order to make it serve an entirely new purpose.

  • 15 - Barrymore Does Barrymore: The Performing Self Triumphant in The Great Profile

  • Edited by Murray Pomerance, Steven Rybin, Minnesota State University, Mankato
  • Book:
    Hamlet Lives in Hollywood
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 June 2018
    Print publication:
    08 September 2017, pp 183-194

  • Summary

    Produced by Twentieth Century-Fox, The Great Profile (1940) showcases the last significant screen performance of John Barrymore who, for comic effect, plays a thinly disguised John Barrymore bearing the very theatrical name of Evans Garrick. Yet the intriguing way in which he here constructs a version of his older and in-decline self has never drawn the critical attention it well deserves. This is both understandable and regrettable. The Great Profile takes for its title a sobriquet that Barrymore had enthusiastically adopted earlier in his career, marking it as autobiographical, which must have been a calculated marketing decision on the part of the studio. And the film refers more or less directly to recent events in his life as he slipped from stage and screen eminence into what some of his admirers regarded as alcoholic degradation and embarrassing incompetence in handling his personal affairs.

    Yet Barrymore does more in this film than register on celluloid all of the warts of his currently failing self—career in jeopardy, latest marriage on the rocks, bankruptcy threatening because of huge sums of money owed to creditors, and his health on a downward spiral as a result of constant overindulgence in drink, leading to “benders,” memory blackouts, and the DTs. A one-dimensional autobiographical approach to The Great Profile of course reflects the most fundamental of category errors, confusing art and life, while failing to acknowledge that Barrymore here constructs a slanted fictional version of what he had become even while (as an actor with not just one but two bodies like any other) he remains legible as “himself,” that is, as a presence in full control of what he shows to moviegoers. Acting out marital discord is very different from enduring and participating in it, as Barrymore would have been able to point out. In other words, the film dramatizes, even as it exemplifies, Barrymore's performing self, imaged here triumphant over unpromising circumstances in a vehicle that was confected for him by a major studio. Evans Garrick offered a strong contrast to the less than worthy roles he had recently been offered by Hollywood in productions such as Hold That Co-ed (1938).

  • 6 - Art-cinema, Cultural Dislocation, and the Entry into Puberty: Vigil (Vincent Ward, 1984)

  • from PART 2 - THE NEW ZEALAND NEW WAVE: 1976–89
  • Alistair Fox
  • Book:
    Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 June 2018
    Print publication:
    08 September 2017, pp 68-79

  • Summary

    The three films examined so far show two divergent stylistic tendencies that can be observed in the New Zealand coming-of-age film. Whereas The God Boy and The Scarecrow employ a fairly austere, conventional style to attain a degree of realism, leavened by occasional art-cinema flourishes (such as the surrealistic montage sequence in the former and several intrusions of expressionistic lighting in the latter), Sleeping Dogs deployed such devices as fast cutting, handheld camera sequences, and aerial shots to achieve the kind of heightened effects found in American action movies. In contradistinction, Vincent Ward's Vigil (1984) moves in a completely different direction, eschewing both realism and the style of Hollywood action movies in order to exploit to the fullest possible extent the stylistic devices and narrative strategies of European art-cinema. It is also the first major coming-of-age full-length feature film made during the New Zealand New Wave to be based on an original screenplay, rather than on a pre-existing literary source.

    In terms of its plot, in fact, very little happens in Vigil: on a remote farm surrounded by the New Zealand bush, a farmer, Justin Peers (Gordon Shields), dies while trying to rescue one of his sheep off a cliff face, to the horror of his eleven-year-old daughter, Lisa, nicknamed ‘Toss,’ who witnesses the tragedy; a poacher, Ethan Ruir (Frank Whitten), comes on the scene and is hired as a farmhand, incurring the deep resentment of Toss when she sees him taking the place of her dead father and becoming an object of sexual interest to her mother, Elizabeth (Penelope Kay). At the end of the movie, the three of them, together with Toss’ grandfather, Birdie (Bill Kerr), leave the farm to begin a new life elsewhere, with Ethan heading off in a separate direction. In addition to this paucity of action, the film adopts a minimalist style that has remarkably little dialogue, and unexplained temporal gaps between the various sequences. All of this means that the whole burden of the film is placed on its expression of the emotions the characters feel at finding themselves in this situation – especially the emotions of Toss, through whose eyes we see most of the action. The choice of an art-cinema style, with its elliptical narrative, subjective framing of the shots, and symbolic landscapes and evocative objects, was functional to this end.

  • 9 - Desperation Turned Outwards: Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994)

  • from PART 3 - THE SECOND WAVE OF THE 1990s
  • Alistair Fox
  • Book:
    Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 June 2018
    Print publication:
    08 September 2017, pp 108-120

  • Summary

    Heavenly Creatures (1994), the film that launched Peter Jackson's international career, was based on a true story. On 22 June 1954, two teenage girls, Pauline Parker and her friend Juliet Hulme, lured Pauline's mother, Honorah Parker (also known as Rieper), on a walk down a secluded pathway in Victoria Park, on the hills of Banks Peninsula near Christchurch, where they bludgeoned her to death by striking her repeatedly on the head with a brick enclosed in a stocking. This horrific matricide, compounded by lurid reports of a lesbian relationship between the girls, left the nation in a state of deep shock. New Zealand at this time prided itself on being ‘God's Own Country,’ a godly society imbued with a laudable Christian morality that had been rewarded by peace, material prosperity, and a conviction of its ethical superiority to the rest of the world. It was a time when the ‘best’ qualities of England were believed to have been imported into the British Empire's most recent colony, where they had produced an impeccable respectability – not to mention a genteel sense of class divisions that had taken deepest root in Christchurch, the most Anglican settlement in the country. This was a period when audiences in the cinemas still stood to attention for a clip of Queen Elizabeth, accompanied by ‘God Save the Queen,’ before the screening of every film, and parents in households still referred to Great Britain as ‘home,’ even if they were third-generation New Zealanders and had never been to the Old Country.

    The reason why the Parker/Hulme murder delivered such a shock to the national psyche was because it blew the lid off New Zealand society's idealized view of itself. Instead of a genteel paradise of moral probity and genteel respectability, what it exposed was the enormous gap between outward appearances and the actual reality they concealed. Decorum in mid- twentieth-century New Zealand dictated that those things should never be talked about: homosexuality, marital infidelity, and a depth of puritan repression that was producing dysfunctional relationships and a range of psychological disorders – even to the extent of breaking out into explosions of homicidal violence when the emotional pressures it generated became too unbearable.

  • 5 - An Immigrant Filmmaker Substitutes an Alternative Vision of Adolescence: The Scarecrow (Sam Pillsbury, 1982)

  • from PART 2 - THE NEW ZEALAND NEW WAVE: 1976–89
  • Alistair Fox
  • Book:
    Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 June 2018
    Print publication:
    08 September 2017, pp 55-67

  • Summary

    Whereas The God Boy exemplified the type of adaptation that maintains an extreme fidelity to its source, and Sleeping Dogs represented a second type that seeks to rewrite the original, chiefly by importing elements from other cinematic genres in order to transform it into a vehicle for personal expression, the next New Zealand coming-of-age film, Sam Pillsbury's The Scarecrow (1982), demonstrates a third type – the kind of adaptation that suppresses key elements in the source text for the sake of substituting a new vision, or mythos, for that which had informed the original work.

    The cinematic version of The Scarecrow was based on the ‘subfusc’ novel of the same name written by Ronald Hugh Morrieson, which was published in 1963. As far as the external events of the fable are concerned, Pillsbury's film adheres closely to Morrieson's novel – at least to outward appearance. The story revolves around a fourteen-year-old boy, Neddy Poindexter (Ned in the film), who lives in a small rural town called Klynham (closely based on Hawera, in the North Island of New Zealand), and the action commences when the hens that Ned and his friend Les are raising get stolen – on the same day, as it turns out, that a serial necrophiliac murderer cuts the throat of a theater usherette in the big city to the south (alias Wellington, in real life). Shortly afterwards, while driving with his father, Ned sees a sinister-looking man at a crossroads, and encounters him again on a train that takes them back to Klynham, his father's jalopy having broken down. This stranger, we learn, is Hubert Salter, the ‘scarecrow’ of the title (on account of his great height, gauntness, and general appearance), who rapidly inveigles his way into the circle of drunks frequented by Ned's Uncle Athol and Charlie Dabney, the undertaker, and eventually into the Poindexter family itself. Thereafter, the story alternates between Ned's trials and tribulations regarding a loutish gang of youths led by Victor Lynch, and Salter's murderous predations in the town, culminating in his pursuit of Prudence, Ned's beautiful sixteen-year-old sister, who, in an outburst of adolescent sexuality, is attracting the attention of a range of men and boys.

Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand
  • Genre, Gender and Adaptation
  • Alistair Fox
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 June 2018
    Print publication:
    08 September 2017
  • This is the first book to investigate the coming-of-age genre as a significant phenomenon in New Zealand's national cinema, tracing its development and elucidating its role in cultural change.

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