The Lockdown Film Festival: A refusenik recommends
(this was written for the Lockdown Film Festival, curated by Jane Ross of Film Talks. The brief was to suggest five New Zealand films that were freely available online to be watched from home. These selections made up day seven of the festival, Easter Sunday, 12/1/2020. A shorter version of this essay appears there, this is the complete version)
NZ film: A refusenik recommends
Campbell Walker
Call me a grinch, but I don’t actually think New Zealand has an especially interesting film culture. Compared to the complex and nuanced set of musical and sound communities that encompass and encourage a wide array of different approaches in New Zealand, film-making is conservative, underfunded, primarily interested in commercial forms, and dominated by narrow entrenched interests. We have a small number of good film makers, both inside and outside the industrial frameworks, but as a culture we don’t have much appreciation for the form. Neither do we have funding or exhibition systems that promote diverse, complex or challenging work: instead we have self-protective one stop shops like the Film Festival and the Film Commission that think the narrow range of good work they sometimes do at the centre forgives an almost complete disinterest verging on hostility towards the peripheries.
I now live in a kind of voluntary exile in Melbourne, where the difference is clear to me. Despite Australia currently having a government that is actively destructive towards the arts in general, there’s a breadth of engagement with different kinds of cinema here that I’ve never experienced in New Zealand. Instead, what we have in New Zealand are individuals and small groups that make interesting work about New Zealand, and about cinema, away from the dominant systems. I identify personally as a critical film-maker (and I was a critic before I ever became a maker), and something of a naysayer rather than a booster, and I’m most interested in other people’s ideas of HOW and WHY to make films, especially if we go beyond dominant entertainment forms. New Zealand artists have always been good at solving technical challenges, but sometimes I feel the energy put into solving these technical challenges could have been more fruitfully put to work on understanding the reasons we make art in the first place.
This list focuses on film-makers who I think come up with compelling work that transcends the limitations of NZ film. I live and work in this community, and most of these people are or have been friends, some of them I’ve worked with myself. The New Zealand film world is small, especially the critical corners, so we all know each other beyond national boundaries, and many of us live in different countries now. This sense of community despite global dispersion is a feature, not a bug.
1. Shifter, 2001, Colin Hodson
Disclaimers apply for Shifter more than any of the other films here: I co-produced, shot, and performed in this film. But I’m also really proud of it, and find it fascinating: a small, jittery, bleakly funny, and utterly singular take on urban alienation set in the streets and houses of Wellington. Watching it now, I feel like it captures physical spaces of the city in specific but unusual ways that we don’t often find in New Zealand films: the city is messy and disrupted, but there are small notes of grace and beauty. Life in Shifter seems arbitrary and uncontrollable, and the main character has little way out of their tight, strange, closed world.
2. Sleepwalk, 2009, Kim Pieters
Kim Pieters is currently best known as a painter, but she also has a conceptually fascinating and rich film-making practice. Her films are slow and beautiful, often featuring parallel collaborations with musicians and sound artists, based around abstracted images and movements built into new lateral forms. Sleepwalk is something of a favourite for me, combining sound from Pieters’ “free noise” improvisational band, Flies Inside the Sun (c. 2000s), with a series of black and white images of a house party to create a psychodrama of suggestion: nothing happens, and while nothing is happening, a thousand possibilities pass us by, a series of questions with no answers, ideas that can roam freely through us.
3. Sweetness, 1992, Rachel Davies
To the best of my knowledge Rachel doesn’t make films anymore, but Sweetness is one of the gems of the glut of short films made in New Zealand in the 1980s and 1990s. The film is located in the challenging open terrain between drama, documentary and performance art, but completely (and distressingly) emotionally compelling, and made with a physical simplicity that reveals a strikingly coherent process. It’s not like anything else I’ve seen from New Zealand. Content will probably disturb somewhat though!
4. The Hollow Men, 2008, Alister Barry
Alister Barry and other film-makers associated with Wellington’s Vanguard Films cooperative have spent the almost 50 years making critical, accurate, impassioned and essential films that look at power from a left wing perspective. Barry specifically found his metier in opposing the rise of neoliberalism in New Zealand with a series of films that carefully and unpeel propaganda from actuality, without ostentation, to get into the detail of the damage that neoliberal capitalism has done to New Zealand society. This is one of the things that cinema can and should do. In New Zealand, our documentary makers have often flinched from this engagement, especially for television.
5. The Clean, Getting Older music video, 1982, Ronnie Van Hout
Dunedin band The Clean played a critical role in the early 1980s New Zealand’s distinctively lo-fi post-punk music underground, combining the joys of pop songs, rock energies, and non-permission seeking independence. Equally renowned NZ conceptual artist Ronnie van Hout collaborated with the band for their 1982 single Getting Older to make a witty, funny, stylish and acute pastiche of Samuel Beckett’s Film (1965), starring Clean bass player Bob Scott. It’s one of the best of a sustained burst of creative energy that came out of 80s music video activity in the New Zealand underground, headlined by artists like Stu Page and Chris Knox, combining pop culture irreverence and experimental techniques, to produce work that largely trumps the better funded official film-making activity in New Zealand at the time. When supposedly specialist film-makers started dominating music video production in the 90s, the videos got much less interesting very quickly.
Little Bits of Light
Little Bits of Light is my third feature film from 2005. I’m putting it here at the bottom for a couple reasons. First, because Lockdown Film Festival curator Jane Ross asked me to include one of my films. Secondly, so that if anyone objects to the above and feels I should put my money where my mouth is, they can see that I’ve already done this. Thirdly, because this work has clicked into new focus for me around the pandemic. I realised the other day that it is a kind of isolation film: A couple leave the world behind and see no-one for an extended period of time, and it goes very badly indeed. It’s somewhere between cabin fever and grand romantic tragedy. If you haven’t seen it and this appeals, now might be the time.
Seal in the sea 
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