Australian Post-war Documentary Film

An Arc of Mirrors

Deane Williams

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781841502106
• eBook ISBN: 9781841502595
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The post-war period in Australian history was rife with critical debate over notions of nation-building, multiculturalism and internationalization. Australian Post-War Documentary Film tackles these issues in a considered, wide-ranging analysis of three types of documentaries: governmental, institutional and radical. Charting the rise of progressive film culture, this volume critiques key films of the era, including The Back of Beyond, and retells film history by placing these documentaries in an international context.

 

1

A REALIST FILM UNIT AND ASSOCIATION IN AUSTRALIA

Melbourne’s Realist Film Unit was formed in late 1945, initially as a film production unit. Over time the Unit evolved into the Realist Film Association which played a key role in the promulgation of the film society movement in Victoria. The Unit, and later the Association, were loosely affiliated with the Australian Communist Party, in so far as many members of the Unit belonged to the Party and the Realists had associations with various unions and pursued the importation, exhibition and production of film for agitational purposes.¹ To position the Realists in relation to similar international left political organizations it is useful to go back to the 1930s.

Charles Merewether points out the interconnectedness of the Realists with other similar organizations:

The Communist Party had already promoted screenings and discussion of a film Friends of the Soviet Union, the Workers’ Art Club magazine carrying an article on the subject. English political filmmaker and a founder of the Workers’ Film Societies (1929), Ralph Bond wrote of the need for a workers’ film movement, whatever the limited financial resources, and briefly discussed the work of the English Workers’ Film Movement.

Also publications such as the American New Masses and New Theatre Review carried articles on the Film and Photo League and NyKino. It is also likely that through people like Jean Devaney’s work as the Australian national secretary of the Workers’ International Relief German film and photo movements were known. The WIR played a key role in developing such organisations. (Merewether 1982: 59–60)

One of the earliest models for left-wing film movements, the German Internationale Arbeiterhilfe (IAH), was known in English as the Workers International Relief (WIR). This organization was initiated in 1921 by Vladimir Lenin who, John Willett writes ‘called in Willi Muenzenberg, recently appointed head of the Communist Youth International, whom he commissioned to found a new organization of International Workers aid’ (Willett 1978: 71). This organization had its headquarters in Berlin, reported directly to the Comintern and initiated a cultural dialogue between Russia and Germany based on propaganda which Willett writes was ‘a fundamental part of the organization’s job’ (Willett 1978: 71). In Deadly Parallels, Bert Hogenkamp writes that the WIR ‘mobilised the latest propaganda methods at its disposal, such as the illustrated press and the cinema’. The propaganda networks that the WIR began are pertinent to this discussion in that they saw the ‘introduction of Soviet films into Western Europe and the United States’ (Hogenkamp 1986: 21). The WIR also began commissioning Soviet film-makers to ‘produce documentaries on living conditions in Russia’ (Murray 1990: 52). These films were included in German WIR screenings which Murray writes ‘were so successful that the AIH [an organizational arm of the WIR] decided to expand its program to, include featured [sic] films and to open its own theatre’ (Murray 1990: 52). Murray asserts that the success of the film program ultimately meant that ‘communists gradually developed long-term political and cultural strategies that included a proletarian film program’ (Murray 1990: 53). Murray also describes how the IAH, ‘established formats for film events that facilitated their use for influencing public opinion on specific issues’. They ‘scheduled a film tour and distributed circulars outlining eighteen specific steps to be taken in preparing local film events’ (Murray 1990: 119).

Merewether’s comments about the importance of organizations such as the WIR and attendant publications suggests the way that the Realists were, from the outset, imbedded in a larger left intellectual and cultural milieu. Out of this milieu emerged organizations such as the Workers’ Art Clubs in Melbourne and Sydney that, Merewether writes, had been established by 1932 (Merewether 1977: 70). Again, these Clubs are understood by Merewether to have had international antecedents.

Although the founding of these Clubs was a direct response by a group of creative artists to the prevailing conditions [the Depression], it did take its inspiration from the Clubs set up in Russia, Germany and America, most of which were communist organized or aligned. (Merewether 1977: 70)

These Clubs provided a strong model for the Realists. Although their focus seems to have been mainly literary,

[t]he activities of the Clubs were various, offering to a predominantly unemployed membership literature readings and classes, art and drama classes, film and lecture evenings, and social functions. These events were rostered almost every evening of the week, occasionally collaborating with the Friends of the Soviet Union in theatrical performances and art exhibitions, but more especially soviet film screenings. (Merewether 1977: 70)

As an extension of these activities the Workers’ Theatre Group was formed in Melbourne with Betty Rolland as its leader (O’Brien 1989: 3). A young lead actor named Catherine Duncan was in the group; she was to join John Heyer at the National Film Board in 1945 (O’Brien 1989: 3). O’Brien provides a different reading of the beginnings of these clubs. She notes that the Worker’s Voice announced in February 1935 that ‘F.O.S.U. [Friends of the Soviet Union] Plans Worker’s Club in New Hall’ indicating that the Group was actually an initiative of the F.O.S.U rather than ‘a direct response’ to the Depression by ‘creative artists’ as Merewether describes.

It is planned to make the premises a real club for workers. We have written to various working class papers throughout the world for copies to make an attractive and extensive reading room. We will have chess, draughts, cards, table tennis, and a wireless capable of receiving Russian stations. (Worker’s Voice, quoted in O’Brien 1989: 3)

Initially located in Brunswick, Melbourne, the Group produced plays at 104 Queensberry Street, Carlton and at other venues including the Brunswick Town Hall, Kelvin Hall, and Central Hall on Collins Street in Melbourne (O’Brien 1989: 4–6). By 1937 the Worker’s Theatre Group had become the Melbourne New Theatre Club, a name eventually shortened to New Theatre (O’Brien 1989: 8). In the United States by 1934, according to Stuart Cosgrove, the New York publication Workers Theatre, represented 400 Worker’s Theatre groups.

The original Worker’s Theatre magazine was re-named New Theatre and, having dropped its ‘class war’ ideology, assumed a Popular Front stance ‘dedicated to the struggle against war, Fascism and censorship’. (Cosgrove 1985: 268)

New Theatre was one of the ‘working class papers’ O’Brien refers to.

Bob Mathews and Ken Coldicutt are generally credited with the establishment of the Realist Film Unit in 1945 while two others, Gerry Harant and Betty Lacy joined soon after this. Their work was an extension of what the New Theatre had set out to do, and it paralleled similar activities throughout the world.

Bob Mathews drifted into the progressive movement through the literature available from the Brunswick office of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement. In a personal interview with the author, Mathews told how, in the early 1930s, the plight of working-class families in the Western and Northern inner suburbs of Melbourne as well as publications like Proletariat, Stream and War What For? that were made available through the Workers’ Club, provided him with a sense of the possibility of political action through ‘the progressive movement’. Mathews recalled the obvious need for change in Australian society and glowing reports of the achievements of the Soviet Union led him to the Workers’ Club, the Workers’ Theatre Group and later the Communist Party of Australia of which he became a member in the late 1930s. The Theatre Group, through its connections with London’s Unity Theatre, imported and produced many one-act plays, such as Clifford Odets’ Till the Day I Die and Waiting for Lefty, and Mathews saw his work with the Theatre as political action. In the late 1930s, as the Group evolved into the New Theatre, Mathews moved from acting to producing and directing. Mathews recalls that towards 1945 he ‘wasn’t satisfied with theatre production, and wanted to get closer to reality’. Film seemed a logical medium for this so he bought a 16mm camera.

Ken Coldicutt began his political film activity ‘in 1935 by helping the Friends of the Soviet Union with screenings in the suburbs and country of Modern Russia, a compilation based on Soviet newsreels and footage shot by visiting delegates’ (Coldicutt 1982: 62). Later Coldicutt became film manager for the FOSU through which he would have had first-hand experience of the left milieu that included the Workers’ Clubs and the ways that the left were connected to an international network.

Merewether writes that the Workers’ Clubs ‘took as their slogan Lenin’s phrase “Art is a weapon”’. Merewether quotes an early Workers’ Club art catalogue explanation of this phrase: ‘In a class-society … the artist finally served as an organizer of his social class. That is the meaning of the Workers’ Art Club slogan … Only in a classless society, under socialism, will art cease to be a weapon and become purely a tool’ (Merewether 1977: 70). Similarly Coldicutt writes ‘I had a dream – to use this powerful medium [cinema] as a weapon against the capitalist system’ (Coldicutt 1982: 62). In the case of the Realist Film Unit and Association there are many forces which shaped this small organization just as they shaped similar organizations in the United States, Europe and Britain. One of these was Soviet film itself.

In Film on the Left, William Alexander examines the influence of Sergei Eisenstein on the New York Workers’ Film and Photo League productions. The early Soviet films, in particular those of Eisenstein, became during the 1930s and 1940s the benchmark for left film production. Alexander points out how the Soviet social and cultural experiments such as film were brought to bear on Depression-era America by young, politically committed American film-makers.

Their desire to make films, their anger over the Depression, and their contempt for Hollywood spurred them on. And always informing and inspiring them were the successes of the Soviet Union: the October Revolution, full employment and the revolutionary content and techniques of the Soviet cinema. In the United States, as everywhere in the world, their first screenings of Soviet films came as revelations to aspiring filmmakers. (Alexander 1981: 21)

The influence of Soviet films was extended by the likes of Harry Allan Potamkin in New York and subsequently Coldicutt in Australia to include the film theories of Soviet film-makers such as Eisenstein and V.I. Pudovkin. Unlike Coldicutt, Potamkin was not a Party member but had met Eisenstein and, according to Alexander, ‘although his interest in Soviet film was purely artistic in the beginning, its influence gradually turned him toward social and political considerations in his film criticism in the late twenties’ (Alexander 1981: 22). While Potamkin could speak and read Russian, Coldicutt relied on the translations into English of Soviet film theory that had been translated and addressed in secondary publications.

Coldicutt’s earliest encounters with film criticism were through film journals of the 1930s such as Experimental Cinema, Close Up, Film, Film Art, Cinema, Cinema Quarterly, Sight and Sound and New Theatre and Film. These journals enabled Coldicutt to obtain reviews, details of film titles, names of distributors and access to the burgeoning world of writings on film and formed the basis of a large personal library of film theory and criticism. For a while Coldicutt seems to have acquired anything written about film. As a way of displaying the interconnectedness of the English-speaking left through these kinds of publications it is useful to closely examine two articles written by Coldicutt, ‘Turksib: Building a railroad’ and ‘Cinema and capitalism’.

Coldicutt’s ideas about cinema, as displayed in these two articles, emanate from the debates about the role of cinema in the early Soviet State and the international left’s embracing of the new Soviet cinema. In translating these ideas to the Australian setting, Coldicutt and the Realist Film Unit/Association brought to the production, screening, distribution and criticism of cinema a theoretical background built on a participation in this international left film culture.

‘Turksib: Building a railroad’ by Coldicutt is one example of the literally thousands of reviews, discussions and criticisms that Coldicutt and his international counterparts wrote for left-wing publications. In Australia publications such as The Guardian and New Theatre Review, as well as the various newsletters, circulars and bulletins produced under the banner of the Realist Film Unit and Association, carried these writings. Coldicutt’s article is the only Australian representation in Lewis Jacobs’ seminal collection of essays The Documentary Tradition (1971). It is unclear how a copy of this article was obtained except for Jacobs’ own statement in his Preface to the original collection.

In assembling this collection, I drew almost entirely on material which appeared in newspapers and magazines. Much of it was scattered and difficult to find. Some pieces originated in fugitive, obscure journals, and little magazines long out of print. A few came from privately published pamphlets and from program notes no longer available.²

Coldicutt’s writing is an early example (probably the earliest) of film comment by an Australian on a Soviet production.

The article has its theoretical underpinnings in standard formalist ideas as understood by most Anglophone readers through what they had read of Soviet film theory. Turksib is discussed in terms of ‘the control of tempo’ and it is claimed that ‘each part deals with a separate and clearly defined aspect of the subject’, notions which were part and parcel of Soviet and other formalist film theories. Coldicutt’s analysis is broadly structural. He organizes his article according to the film’s five parts and describes what occurs in these parts in interpretive sentences modelled on descriptive accounts such as Eisenstein’s analyses of his own films and Pudovkin’s accounts of many of the films he ‘analyses’ in ‘On film technique’. The notes on Turksib also display a tension within Coldicutt’s approach to documentary. He attends to Grierson’s criticism of Turksib which initially appeared in ‘Summary and survey: 1935’ in The Arts Today: ‘Turksib gave every impression of building a railway, but the approach was again too detached to appreciate just how precisely or humanly it was built’. Grierson’s criticism, reprinted in Grierson on Documentary, belongs to a general criticism of Soviet film-makers:

There was the brighter cinematic style; there was the important creation of crowd character; but the whole effect was hectic and, in the last resort, romantic. In the first period of revolution the artists had not yet got down, like their neighbours, to themes of honest work; and it is remarkable how, after the first flush of exciting cinema, the Russian talent faded.… Altogether, the Russian directors have been slow in coming to earth. Great artists they are, but alien for the most part to the material they are set. (Grierson 1966: 182)

Coldicutt responds by drawing attention to the importance of the film’s form in relation to the practical demands of the recently formed Soviet State. That is, Coldicutt, ignoring what Grierson calls ‘melodrama’, sees the film’s importance as propaganda in relation to its revolutionary value. For Coldicutt the capitalist system is anathema to artistic endeavour and it is only in the service of revolution that the cinematic artist is able to produce worthwhile works of art. Grierson’s ideals for cinema were seen by many people on the left to be in the service of the capitalist state and it may be for this reason that Grierson became the particular target of Coldicutt’s criticism. Coldicutt seems to object to Grierson’s designation of the film’s parts in the English release as ‘acts’ probably because of what he understands to be theatrical (again relying on Eisenstein) rather than cinematic associations. Later Coldicutt describes Grierson’s titling for the English release (performed in consultation with the director) as ‘over-praised’, writing that they ‘are self-consciously literary in tone, and usually redundant – they interrupt the flow of pictorial images and rarely contribute any facts or emotional overtones which are not already evoked by the images’ (Coldicutt 1979: 48).

‘Cinema and capitalism’ written in 1935, the same year the Worker’s Club was founded (and possibly the Turksib review), for the Melbourne University Labour Club’s magazine Proletariat of which he became editor, was his first published article on cinema, providing a useful indication of his primary interests and, in turn, the eventual concerns of the Unit/Association.

‘Cinema and capitalism’ addresses exactly the same issues that, according to Jonathan Buchsbaum, were the principal concerns of left-wing political film organizations in Germany, France, the United States and the United Kingdom during the 1920s and 30s: film distribution, censorship and the criticism of capitalist cinema (Coldicutt 1935: 127). In this article it is also possible to see the importance of H.G. Wells for British left theorists. His writings are melded with English reworkings of the writings and films of Eisenstein and Pudovkin as they were articulated by Close Up contributors Winifred Bryher, Kenneth MacPherson, Ralph Bond and Ivor Montagu.

H.G. Wells, Rachel Low tells us, was one of the founder members of The [London] Film Society alongside Julian Huxley, George Bernard Shaw, Ben Webster and G.S. Atkinson (Low 1971: 34). The Society was initiated in 1925 in part by Ivor Montagu, for whom Wells wrote some original stories, which in 1928 became three short film comedies, Blue Bottles, The Cure and Daydreams. The following year Wells wrote a film synopsis/novel The King Who Was a King which contained an essay ‘The film, the art form of the future’. Coldicutt explicitly draws on this essa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: Grierson Diminished
• Chapter 1: A Realist Film Unit and Association in Australia
• Chapter 2: Cecil Holmes’s Folk Politics: The Intertextuality of Three in One
• Chapter 3: John Heyer’s International Perspective: The Overlanders, The Valley is Ours, The Back of Beyond
• Chapter 4: The Neo-Realism of Mike and Stefani
• Chapter 5: Settler Journeys
• Filmography
• References