I Screen Studies

I need to write about these more, with a great deal more thought.

In my negotiation of television this evening I was struck first by that crazy advertisement where a woman pushes a red ball of wall around Melbourne.

It’s the latest in a small festival of short commercials for lovely enigmatic Melbourne which put me more to mind of ads from the 1970s for top French grog like Pernod and Imperial Leather soap (examples at the end of the post) than the film styles and genres they are, perhaps, reaching for. I don’t know yet if this makes me think any differently of Melbourne

and then, with far greater force, by the magnificent achievement that is First Australians. Even after one episode it is clear that this is landmark television.

This is television as history in the making. So much to mention from Rachel Perkins on around. The rostrum camera was superbly marshalled across so many exquisite and oddly unfamiliar illustrations and drawings from the time. These were expertly edited into the stories; lovely cuts from paintings of ocean to film of the ocean break at the same spot. Sound editing, especially early in the introductory, welcome to country fly through where scene setting shots of this diverse continent were timed to the rhythm of the clap sticks. And the research – of stills and film, and especially of the archives of the nation and the memories and commentaries of so many powerful voices. The bold head and shoulders close up for all the descendents and historians, Marcia Langton measured in tone and phrase and locked in intense eye contact with the unseen interviewer to my right. Inga Clendinning elegantly damning and giving insight particularly into the minds of the British of the time, making clear how tragic the failed possibility of the relationship between British and First Australians: “For a while it looked like that something was possible here that hadn’t happened anywhere else, that something remarkable might have been achieved. And that door closed catastrophically and quickly within a few years”. And the many instances of negotiation in the sense that I think Ghassan Hage is using it (in the Melbourne University podcast series) between First and later Australians which should not hide but sit aside those of confrontations so brutal and tragic.  Bennelong. Windradyne. William Suttor.

All of the agencies that made the film are to be applauded, and I hope they exhale proudly the breath they have held until tonight. There were so many supporters of this majestic, memorable series who deserve credit and congratulations for supporting landmark television:SBS most of all, then in reverse order of how they appear in the end credits, Screen Australia (politically, if technically correct as would have been carried by Film Australia and AFC perhaps too in earlier institutional guises. Either that, or they made the show since 1 July this year), NSW FTO, ITVS International (through the ITVS International Fund, supported by Ford Foundation, William and Flora Hewilett Foundation, John D and Catherine D Macarthur Foundation), South Australian film Corporation, Screen West, Lottery West, and SBS.

For the moment at least the video can be watched via SBS HERE

Here’s the Pernod ad. At least the French are honest about the weather.