By subtly contrasting opposing points of view PICTURES raises
a number of very important questions. Official art - or
individual art? Indigenous culture - or 'civilised' culture? Land
for national development or national heritage? Native people as
ignorant savages to be subdued for their own good and kept in
their place, or as responsible people to be treated as equals?
These are major issues central to our history and New Zealand
identity.
The film may be set in the colonial days of late 19th century
but no one could fail to recognise the fact that its subject
matter is highly relevant in our own day and age. In fact,
PICTURES is really asking if things have changed all that much.
The Burton brothers' photographs were shamefully treated then,
but they are not much better off today - 'decomposing', as an end
title reminds us, in the care of the National Museum in
Wellington.
New Zealand films, almost without exception, have exploited the
majestic grandeur and rugged beauty of the country's natural
backgrounds. Few have done so with such complete justification as
PICTURES. By its very nature the film is bound to present
mountain, fiord, bush and river, plain and coastline as an
essential part of its texture. The two Burtons, Alfred and
Walter, set out to make a pictorial record of the country and the
people as they saw them. Walter's view was uncompromising. The
country was being vandalised in the name of colonial progress,
its people were being ill-treated and subjugated in the name of
colonial justice. For his pains, he was given an official flea in
his ear and left to drink himself to despair and suicide. Alfred,
more conventional, more 'commercial', more flexible in his
attitude to authority, went out to take pictures which earned him
a medal for the Royal Geographic Society.
PICTURES sets the two men at odds, leaving us in no doubt which
of them was probably the true artist but making a more ambiguous
statement about which might have been the weaker man. Walter's
gesture of defiance, alcoholically stimulated, is to put his
banned pictures on display - to a reaction of hostility and stern
disapproval. Alfred, less provocative, chooses to remain silent
when he is expected to make a speech glorifying the colony's
expansionist programme. But it is Alfred who deals the most
telling blow to the Government's funding of only those artists
whose work it finds acceptable. After Walter's death he abandons
photography, devoting himself instead to the teaching of
elocution. The deliberate perpetuation of English speech patterns
among the people already acquiring a classless 'colonial' accent
may sem to have been a supremely quixotic act.
In PICTURES the Government is symbolised by New Zealand Railway
officials. That is entirely appropriate, since trains - the
juggernauts of the 19th century - rushed headlong on their way
along a fixed and rigid track. Here, the Government is shown as
being intent on influenceing the sort of image they wish to see
projected overseas. It must conform to a policy that will
encourage immigration, investment and admiration. Hence, Alfred's
spacious landscrapes are preferable to Walter's harsh personal
vision. Incidently, the film makes a sardonic comment on
fashionable representational art when it shows a society lady
exclaiming over the quality of a painting she has ordered to be
copied from one of Alfred's landscapes.
The people are symbolised by a crowd of unsmiling, formally
dressed Dunedin citizens. Their attitude is expressed by dour
head-shaking and glum rejection when they are confronted with
evidence that their unsullied 'Britain of the South' might be a
place of violence, degradation and racial disharmony. This is
exactly the sort of 'God's Own Country" self-delusion that it
took a Springbok tour to shatter.
If it is possible to admire the film's intention and much of its
technical excellence (in particular the virtuoso photography of
Rory O'Shea) it is less easy to comment some of its other
aspects. For all the vividness of its images, PICTURES has an
oddly disjointed an elliptical narrative style. That results in
some awkward connections between one sequence and another, and
(for me anyway) a sense of alienation. It is also guilty of
showing almost to a standstill and indulging in some self-
consciously beautiful camerawork at times - notably in the
Wanganui River sequence.
The greatest weakness in PICTURES, however, is a fault it shares
with nearly all New Zealand films. That is a lack of passion. The
scenes are all played in a sort of low-key, undemonstrative style
which suggests that director and players are holding back from
any display of emotion. I am forced to wonder if this is not some
local variation of the old, much-sbused 'British restraint'
technique, which used to be admired as underplaying but now seems
more likely to have been some kind of inhibition. Its
consequence, unhappily, as fare as we are concerned, is an
absence of climax and conflict, a steady forward movement
unbroken by radpids, falls, whirlpools, and cataracts. Only in
Roger Donaldson's SLEEPING DOGS and SMASH PALACE was there any
outbeak of emotional fireworks. Time and again in other films the
director and the editor (and perhaps the writers too) have chosen
to cut away when emotion looks like getting too out of hand. If
it is true that our films reflect our way of life, it may well be
that we are a fairly stolid lot. But I doubt it.
Michael Black as diector must be seen as mainly responsible for
the story's slow and fairly muted treatment, but his eye for
framing, compositon and detail cannot be faulted. In that, he is
translating Robert Lord and John O'Shea's screenplay into visual
terms with skill and sympathy - a process aided considerably by
Jan Preston's unobtrusive score. The actors, almost without
exception, give good accounts of themselves and of roles that are
largely symbolic. Coarse, crude materialism is represneted by the
surveyor Rochfort (Terence Bayler, almost larger than life);
official pomposity and philistinism by the Railway managers (Ken
Blackburn, Ron Lynn); the native who has come to terms with
colonisation by becoming a Maori guide (Matgiu Mateikura); Engish
snobbery by Alfred's wife (Helen Moulder); honest art by Walter
Burton (Peter Vere-Jones); popular art by Alfred Burton (Kevin J.
Watson).
What UTU declares in bold rhetoric, PICTURES says in tones that
are level and more quietly spoken. Between them they tell us much
about ourselves that may be uncomfortable but nevertheless is
salutary.
