Our love affair with movies film by film, page by page

Aotearoa has always had a soft spot for the silver screen. Moving pictures were first screened here in 1896 to a curious and captivated audience and we’ve loved watching them, and making them, ever since.

Now for the first time the full story of this country’s history with film is recorded in a book that all New Zealanders would like to get their hands on.
New Zealand Film: An Illustrated History, edited by Diane Pivac, Frank Stark and Lawrence McDonald and published by Te Papa Press, goes on sale from July 1 in all good bookstores.

It is published in association with the New Zealand Film Archive Ngā Kaitiaki O Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua which marks its 30th anniversary this year.

New Zealand’s love affair with movies and movie making is brought into sharp focus by New Zealand Film: An Illustrated History.

It sets a course through New Zealand’s history in film, starting when Professors Hausmann and Gow introduced “Edison's latest marvel, the Kinematograph” as part of a vaudeville programme of short films; through the hokey-pokey era of gritty kiwiana classics like Goodbye Pork Pie and Smash Palace; and into the flash modern era when Wellington has become synonymous with cutting edge digital cinema technology.

Featuring many previously unseen images and unheard anecdotes, the book chronicles the journey through 11 chapters, featuring 25 essays penned by some of our most respected writers, film makers, industry insiders and fans - including a foreword by one of the biggest fans of New Zealand cinema, Sir Ian McKellen.

It is a comprehensive celebration of more than a century’s worth of local film ranging from the first cinema screenings and magic lantern shows of the 19th century through the determined development of an industry infrastructure and the establishment of the Film Societies and Film Festivals in the mid-20th century, to the many ingenious technical innovations and the post-Jackson effect professionalism of the present day.

New Zealand Film: An Illustrated History comes with a DVD of some of the most noteworthy films in our history. It is being launched at events in Auckland and Wellington in early July and is available from bookstores nationwide or online at www.tepapastore.co.nz.

New Zealand Film: An Illustrated History edited by Diane Pivac, with Frank Stark and Lawrence McDonald, Te Papa Press, July 2011

RRP NZ$85.00

ISBN: 978-1-877385-66-7

About the publisher: Te Papa Press is New Zealand’s unique museum publisher, creating popular non-fiction books about New Zealand’s art, culture, and natural world for museum visitors and readers everywhere. To see our other books visit www.tepapapress.co.nz

Contributors to the book include: Bruce Babington, Virginia Callanan, Bruce Connew, Sarah Davy, Kathy Dudding, Sir David Gascoigne, Matthew Grainger, Ann Hardy, Roger Horrocks, Geoff Lealand, Aaron Lister, Lawrence McDonald, Jane Paul, Geraldene Peters, Diane Pivac, Christopher Pugsley, Dame Anne Salmond, Lindsay Shelton, Waihoroi Shortland, Monty Soutar, Clive Sowry, Frank Stark, Tainui Stephens, Lawrence Wharerau.

Chapter headings:

1. The Magic Of Moving Pictures: Film Making 1895–1918

2. The Rise Of Fiction: Between The Wars

3. Non-Fiction Films: Between The Wars

4. Political And Alternative Film Making: From The Second World War To 1950

5. From Holland To Holyoake: Film In The 1950s And 1960s

6. Waking From A Fretful Sleep: Film In The 1970s

7. Boom Times: The Early 1980s

8. After The Boom: The Second Half Of The 1980s

9. New Currents In The Mainstream: The 1990s

10. The ‘Jackson Effect’: The Late 1990s To 2005

11. Into The Blue: Film Making In The Early Twenty-First Century

Editors’ note:

New Zealanders saw their first films in 1896 and were making their own short films by 1900
Gordon Mirams noted that in 1945 there was one movie theatre for every 3,000 people in New Zealand (compared with one for every 8,700 in the USA)
Among its other duties, the National Film Unit made the Pictorial Parade short-film news magazine every month for nineteen years, from 1952 to 1971
Director Geoff Murphy has observed that “most film-making countries can produce around one [35mm feature] film per year for every million of population… it takes a large talent pool to sustain an industry.” In general that statistic holds for New Zealand with a few exceptions, notably the last two years of the tax break, 1983-4, when 26 films were made
Critic Roger Horrocks has identified three “waves” of generations of New Zealand film makers, and four key themes in our features: landscape, unease, rite of passage, and Kiwi male culture
Filmmaker Merata Mita saw her work as “an extension of our oral tradition. Its similar to the way whaikōrero helps keep history alive, it maintains that contact with the past.”
Kiwi features that have been warmly received on the international art house circuit include: Rain, Vigil, The Navigator, Illustrious Energy, Feathers of Peace, Crush, Desperate Remedies, Woodenhead, and The Price of Milk. More lists of popular hits can be found on page 23.


Sample extract:

Ki te whai ao, ki te ao mārama.

This whakataukī talks about enlightenment – moving from the dark into the bright of day – but sometimes enlightenment can shine the other way. For more than a century, people have had some of their most moving and exciting experiences sitting in the dark.

In 1896, New Zealanders were among the first audiences in the world to see motion pictures; less than three years later they were creating their own. Ever since, far from Hollywood and Cannes, in the face of apathy, scepticism and even outright hostility, New Zealanders have revelled in the sheer excitement of making movies. Covering a 115-year span and with contributions from twenty-four writers, this book is the most ambitious attempt yet to celebrate the story of New Zealand film.

The New Zealand Film Archive, Ngā Kaitiaki O Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua, celebrates its thirtieth birthday in 2011.

Looked at in one way, those three packed decades contain a huge portion of our film heritage: Goodbye Pork Pie was released in 1981 and Smash Palace a year later, and more than 90 per cent of all the New Zealand feature films ever made have been produced since then. But it has always been an essential part of the Film Archive’s mission to shine a light on the eighty-five crowded years of film making that went before: first by rescuing the surviving material from neglect and decay, and then by spreading the word about its rich and remarkable history.

New Zealand Film: An Illustrated History has called on the extraordinary skills of researchers, writers, text and illustration editors, conservators, photographers, designers, proofreaders and others, who have combined their individual talents like a movie crew. You can watch the credits roll in the acknowledgements. But so much of the work would not have been worth doing – or even possible – if the films had disappeared. The trustees and staff of the Film Archive are intensely proud of this publication, but justifiably prouder still of the collection that it reflects – a collection that owes its existence to thirty years of determination, evangelism, scholarship and painstaking work.

It is a reflection of the commitment to the films themselves that New Zealand Film: An Illustrated History includes a DVD of selections from the Film Archive – ninety moving minutes drawn from the thousands of hours in the vaults. The book’s final chapter takes us to the threshold of a new era for film making and watching, a digital revolution drawing on the same technology that has generated new tools to rescue endangered films from extinction. As the DVD shows, the new technology can also move these films out of the cinema and onto the desktop.

Television, we were once told, would render film obsolete.

When that didn’t happen, the prophecy was updated – digital media would do it. This hasn’t happened yet, and readers of this book might understand why. Digital or analogue, in a fleapit or a multiplex, there’s still no experience to match the moment when the house lights dim and the beam of the projector shines out over our heads, transporting us into the world of light and shade.

(this extract is taken from the book’s preface)