New Zealand has a relatively small population of four million. Thus, in the environment of a global village, successful filmmakers and actors often have been headhunted, or they otherwise have moved to the greener pastures of more lucrative and challenging projects elsewhere, from Australia to Hollywood. Sometimes they have returned with even more challenging projects. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (2000–2003) was one of the most ambitious projects in the history of filmmaking. Yet the film raises questions that require exploration, if not answers, in any discussion of New Zealand film.
In these days of globalized networks of studios, corporations, distribution chains, actors, crew, and so on, how does one define a New Zealand film? For the sake of this discussion, the Lord of the Rings trilogy is regarded as a single film, a justifiable claim since the three films are not sequels or prequels, but part of a single narrative. Director Peter Jackson is from New Zealand and established a reputation based on films made entirely in New Zealand. Screenwriter Frances Walsh was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and has collaborated with Jackson on other films. The film was shot in New Zealand, and most of the special effects were manufactured there by the New Zealand companies, Weta Digital, and Weta Workshop. Production companies were WingNut Films from New Zealand and New Line Cinema from the United States. Jackson stated that he was indebted to crew members from Australia, and stated that the film was really a coproduction. Some major cast members were Australian—Cate Blanchett (Galadriel), Hugo Weaving (Elrond) and David Wenham (Faramir)—and some of the cast and crew were New Zealanders—Sala Baker (Sauron) and Marton Csokas (Celeborn). According to these criteria, the film is a product of New Zealand.
Many other elements of the film are from outside New Zealand. The narrative is not located in any one country, but New Zealand has now assumed Middle Earth as its own. The story is not specific to a particular culture, nor are the characteristics of the narrative culturally located. The trappings of any particular culture are not apparent; that is, consumer items do not identify the culture as “Western consumer,” “New Zealand,” or anything else. In a general sense though, the film is obviously a product of United States–European culture, rather than Arabic or Asian. Hence, “global” and “international” here mean “Western.” In summary, the film is international in its narrative, made with an international cast and crew, garnering international recognition and audiences, but with New Zealand credits.
As a result of these kinds of circumstances, defining a New Zealand film is becoming increasingly more difficult, as the industry becomes more international and globalized. Hollywood stars are not only from the United States, but also from almost anywhere, including New Zealand. Local film stars may be also stars outside the country of their birth or adoption. Similar statements apply to the various members of the crew, and for production companies. On the other hand, although Hollywood genres are infiltrating every corner of the world where films are screened, so too are the local variations on those genres significant. Such local variations might include specific locations, specific themes peculiar to a country, narratives that are specific to the history and culture of a country, language nuances, habits, and different understandings of particular genres; for example, what is comic in one culture might not be in another.
Thus, when critics and others talk about it—the entity called New Zealand film—as though it were a given, they are speaking within an outmoded paradigm. The Lord of the Rings is an example of the problems of definition, but there are many others. This was not always the case. A New Zealand film was identifiable because it was made in New Zealand, with New Zealand cast and crew, with narratives that were identifiable as from New Zealand, and audiences that were generally limited to New Zealand. The case of Australia has shown that, even in the earliest days of filmmaking, such clear-cut definitions were sometimes problematic, and similar conclusions can be drawn in relation to the New Zealand industry, although to a lesser extent. Nowadays though, the globalization of the industry has led to a blurring of definitions about what comprises a New Zealand film.
As with its Australian counterpart, the 1978 Film Commission Act defined a New Zealand film, for the purpose of funding, as one with significant New Zealand content in terms of the film’s creators, production team, cast, financiers, copyright holder, equipment, and technical facilities. In its determinations, the Commission has regard for the subject of the film, the locations where the film would be made, the nationalities and places of residence of the production crew and the cast, as well as the owners of the companies investing in the film, and those who are to own the copyright. In addition, the sources of funding, the location of the production and postproduction facilities has to be considered. In reality, such classifications have become increasingly difficult.
Another element in the equation is that of international films that are made locally, drawing on the expertise of the local industry, with no elements that identify local settings being apparent. The Last Samurai (2003), for example, was made in New Zealand, but set in Asia. The currency exchange rate and available expertise make it possible for films to be made in New Zealand cheaper than elsewhere, without loss of quality.
New technologies have affected the making of films in New Zealand because these technologies make possible wider distribution of film. For example, in the days before television, New Zealand film was accessible only to those people who went to a screening. This meant a large proportion of the population. Outside New Zealand, such film was more difficult to screen simply because of the problems of printing new copies, distributing them, and generating an audience sufficient for a theater owner to make a profit. This changed slightly with the advent of television, and cable and satellite television, which opened up a new market for such films. Video and DVD sales and hire are now a significant element in the revenue calculations of film producers. Such sales and hire open new and international markets to New Zealand films.
Until recently, the history of the industry in New Zealand was one of boom and bust, to an even greater extent than Australia’s. New Zealanders embraced film from the first screening in 1895, and in 1906 began their love affair with United States films with America at Work, and permanent cinemas were built in 1908. People such as the Hayward family and Michael and Joe Moodabe dominated distribution and exhibition through theater chains that were susceptible to United States economic pressures to screen U.S. product. Thus in 1925, 95 percent of the films shown in New Zealand came from the United States and New Zealanders became avid fans of this imported fare. Nevertheless, the local industry began early when, in 1914, Frenchman Gaston Méliès drew on a Maori legend to make Hinemoa, New Zealand’s first feature film.
Paralleling the influx of American product was the emergence of the work of Rudall Hayward, who was to become one of the pioneers of an indigenous film industry. He completed his first feature, The Bloke from Freeman’s Bay, in 1921. He made a number of films, but Rewi’s Last Stand remains his best. Filmed in 1925, it was remade with sound and released in 1940. Another filmmaker, Edwin Coubray, pioneered the used of sound, but the expensive technology resulted in fewer films being made in New Zealand for the small local market. From the 1930s, non-New Zealand directors, using outside finance, made a small number of films for overseas audiences, which drew on the “exotic” elements of Maori culture (Simmons 1999: 39–49). Many of these films misrepresented that culture.
By 1945, New Zealanders were among the most frequent cinema attendees in the Western world, averaging 20 excursions each year. Their film diet was almost pure Hollywood in this pretelevision era, with some exotic dishes from Great Britain and Australia. Between 1940 and 1970, only three feature films were made in New Zealand for the New Zealand market. Outside of the film industry, the other strong cultural influence on New Zealand was Britain, as the center of the British Empire of which New Zealand was a distant outpost. Migration established a relationship that was cemented through wartime allegiances. The ANZAC (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) contributions at Gallipoli and the Western Front in World War I, and in the European and Asian theaters in World War II—where 20,000 New Zealanders died—strengthened the binary. The King/Queen of England was and is the King/Queen of New Zealand, and the Privy Council in Britain was the highest court of appeal for the nation. Economic ties were also strong. From the 1920s and following the development of refrigeration, a significant portion of New Zealand income came from the export of dairy products—mainly butter and cheese—and mutton to the United Kingdom. British culture was imported into New Zealand. The real/reel thing came from overseas.
However, New Zealanders were able to see themselves reflected—perhaps through a glass darkly—in the documentaries that were made by the National Film Unit, commencing in 1941, and the weekly newsreels that were made to accompany the screening of the one or two feature films that comprised a normal cinema program. Private companies, such as Pacific Films Ltd., were established to produce, primarily, documentaries for and about industry, but also for public screenings. In 1970, the National Film Unit made the documentary This is New Zealand, a film about the splendor of the country, which people queued to see.
The success of such a documentary—in the first year of the significant decade of the 1970s—suggests a new and emerging national consciousness, a focusing on New Zealand as a place of beauty in its own right, distinct from either the United States or the United Kingdom. The first television screening of a New Zealand feature film supports this argument. At the same time that This is New Zealand was released, Rudall Hayward’s Rewi’s Last Stand was broadcast on television. It is significant that this first film should address Maori issues. Other events attest to an emerging viewpoint that films, especially domestic productions, were a legitimate mode of storytelling, depicting and recycling issues, identities, and national culture set in familiar biospheres and semiospheres, with actors speaking a familiar language. For example, universities introduced film analysis courses and cities established film festivals. A further step in the legitimation of film culture was the establishment of the New Zealand Film Archive in 1981, designed to collect earliest examples of film of all types and to archive these as significant elements in the national history. Color television, introduced in 1970, reinvigorated the possibility of screen culture, through providing a new medium for the viewing of films.
Economic fissuring contributed to a reassessment of national consciousness of “New Zealand.” By the mid-1970s, economic changes in the United Kingdom confronted New Zealanders with the need to reassess the national economy. Up to this time, New Zealand had been content to supply the United Kingdom with all the dairy products, mutton, and other primary produce that her inhabitants could consume. In 1973, Great Britain joined the Common Market, the precursor to the European Economic Community and the European Community, which meant that most of the products New Zealand had supplied were now supplied by European countries, leaving New Zealand abandoned on the world market. More importantly, the idea that Great Britain was the spiritual and economic home was overturned. This sense of dislocation was profound, but the upside was that some New Zealanders began to explore and value their own stories and experiences, even though this work was often much less romantically ideal, and more socially realistic or suburban surreal, than the world of This is New Zealand. This dislocation, paralleling other changes mentioned above, resulted in a need to fill the vacuum, and in the realm of storytelling, was met in part through government recognition of the industry, manifesting in the establishment of grants to films that might develop and define national culture and identity. In 1978, the New Zealand Film Commission was formed to financially support and encourage New Zealand filmmaking. In addition, tax lawyers discovered that significant write-offs were available to companies investing in film production, meaning that funds became available to filmmakers that allowed them to make mistakes in their work; that is, companies would receive a tax benefit whether films were successful or not. The possibility was that some films would be successful on the international market. Roger Donaldson’s Sleeping Dogs was the first New Zealand film to be released in the United States, and while not spectacularly successful, showed that the quality of production was equivalent to that of Hollywood.
As a result of these economic and cultural changes, in the following decades feature film production blossomed, throwing up many forgettable films in the process of establishing the skills and filmmaking abilities of some fine actors, directors, and crew, resulting in films of stature that have won international critical acclaim. As a result, these people easily cross from the world of New Zealand filmmaking into that of international filmmaking. Although it is accurate to say that New Zealand filmmaking loses something in that process, it is just as accurate to say that international filmmaking is enriched. When international films are, in turn, created in New Zealand, the skill base within the country is both enhanced and showcased. As the Lord of the Rings trilogy has shown, the benefits for New Zealand can be enormous. It is not so much the case that Lord of the Rings has showcased New Zealand; rather, LOTR has created the Middle Earth identity for New Zealand. The film has created a persona for the country, on which that country has capitalized.
It is difficult to generalize about the narratives and themes of New Zealand film. In the documentary made for the British Film Institute’s Century of Cinema series, Sam Neill characterized New Zealand cinema as the “cinema of unease” (Neill 1995). It was the cinema of unease, not because of its self-consciousness, but because it explored the darker sides of New Zealand culture. He saw the road as a central signifier of New Zealand film, lonely, leading to isolated spaces, and evoking restlessness and darkness. One element of that unease was the relationship between Maori and pakeha, or non-Maori New Zealanders, at least in later films. That these relationships have been of significance for New Zealand filmmakers reflects the significance the relationships have for New Zealand culture in general. The first three films made in New Zealand—by Gaston Méliès in the second decade of the new century—focused on Maori. In the last decade, the most arresting and confronting film, because of its raw violence, was Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors (1994), which traces the dissolution of a dysfunctional Maori family. Whether consciously or not, filmmakers have used the medium to articulate the dynamics surrounding the juxtaposition of cultures. Yet, the unease Neill discusses is apparent not only in relations between Maori and pakeha, but in the examples thrown up by the new wave of filmmakers of the late 1970s. At the beginning of the decade, the National Film Unit’s This Is New Zealand had portrayed the countryside and its people in the best possible light, with shots of majestic landscapes and invigorated, positive inhabitants. However, the directors of the late 1970s imagined a different New Zealand. Geoff Murphy’s irreverent and illogical Wild Man (1977)—a New Zealand version of Barry Humphries—demonstrated the anarchic and roughly hewn attitudes and skills that marked the early work of these filmmakers. Rejecting classical Hollywood cause and effect relationships, new director Paul Maunder’s Landfall (1977) investigated the joys of communal living, in a somewhat self-conscious and now-dated fashion. Roger Donaldson’s Sleeping Dogs (1977) was a kind of transposition of Vietnam to New Zealand. These films proved that New Zealand audiences wanted to see their own diverse stories negotiated in a familiar language in familiar locations. However, Sleeping Dogs also showed that a market for New Zealand film existed in the United States; that New Zealand film had world-class potential. These early films proved that directors like Donaldson, Maunder, Murphy, John Laing, and others had the ability and filmic sense to weave stories in a way that was attractive for New Zealand and, sometimes, international audiences.
Although these films varied in subject, some filmmakers turned their attention to the darker sources of New Zealand history for their stories, creating a narrative space of unease. John Laing’s Beyond Reasonable Doubt (1980) revealed the police corruption and deceit in the true story of the investigation and trial of a farmer accused, tried, and convicted of murder, but who was later pardoned. Michael Black’s Pictures (1981) painted a chilling picture of documented pakeha violence and brutality, as does Utu (1983). People from other countries in the South Pacific populate New Zealand and their fate has often paralleled that of Maori. Martyn Sanderson’s Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree (1990) told a bitter story about the effects of colonization on Western Samoa, causing the eventual suicide of a despairing man who had lost his cultural identity. British Director Mike Newell’s Bad Blood (1982) retold a tragedy of violence in a rural community caused through ostracism, alienation, and paranoia in a west coast community of the South Island. Although these films were set in rural settings, the city was no enlightened site of “ease” either. Urban Auckland was the setting for John Laing’s Other Halves (1984), a reconstruction from Sue McCauley’s autobiographical novel, where class and race conflicts were promoted in part through a corrupt and racist police force, and where men were all potential womanizers. In his fourth film, Heavenly Creatures (1994), Peter Jackson recreated the famous Parker-Hulme story about two high school girls who cold-bloodedly plotted and then murdered one of their mothers with a brick in a Christchurch park in 1954.
Other films did not draw on real events, but were nevertheless evidence of Neill’s unease thesis. Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) was a bleak film about, on one level, suppressed sexuality as the cornerstone of Western civilization. Derided by some, the film has won critical acclaim around the world, manifesting in numerous awards. The film added another level to the corpus of international successes generated from the New Zealand industry. Campion’s earlier film, An Angel at My Table (1990), was more triumphant, although it told a bleak story. It was based on the autobiographies of the late Janet Frame, a writer and poet, who spent much of her life in institutions, wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic, and made to endure 200 instances of electric shock therapy. This film won many awards at home and internationally. Other women have become significant filmmakers since 1977. For example, Gaylene Preston was production designer for Middle Age Spread (1979), then director for Mr. Wrong (1985), Ruby and Rata (1990), Bread and Roses (1993), and the documentary about and by women in war, War Stories: Our Mother Never Told Us (1995). More recently, she produced and directed the strange Perfect Strangers (2003). Alison Maclean directed the award-winning Crush (1992), while more recently, Gillian Ashurst wrote and directed the uneven Snakeskin (2001) and Christine Jeffs wrote the screenplay and directed Rain (2001). She went on to direct the film about the life of Sylvia Plath, Sylvia (2003). Niki Caro wrote and directed the award-winning story about the transformation of Maori lore, Whale Rider (2002), while Merata Mita is a powerful directorial voice for Maori people.
Even in this brief discussion it is evident that every genre is present in New Zealand film, and while there are elements of unease, there are other and equally legitimate characteristics. Some examples of those genres point to the international stature of the industry. Geoff Murphy’s road movie comedy Goodbye Pork Pie (1980) was not one of those, but it is significant because it was a huge box office success and was the first film to cover costs purely from the domestic market, and which was a milestone and a turning point in the industry. It was evidence that New Zealand audiences enjoyed films about New Zealand life. Vincent Ward’s The Navigators: A Medieval Odyssey (1988) was a complex thriller with political overtones, juxtaposing medieval life with contemporary New Zealand urban existence. Of a similar genre was Murphy’s The Quiet Earth (1985), a science fiction film about the last survivors on Earth. The film met with enthusiastic reviews both in New Zealand and overseas. Although not set in medieval times or the future, Desperate Remedies (1993) was a 19th-century melodrama about love and passion, but also about liberation from the chains of convention. Peter Jackson’s early fantasy/comedies—Bad Taste (1986), Meet the Feebles (1990), and Braindead (1992)—have been dubbed “splatstick” for their excessive depiction of the act of murder, and have become cult films. Other comedy films include Ian Mune’s Came a Hot Friday (1984) and Harry Sinclair’s Topless Women Talk about Their Lives (1997).
Children’s films have been successful for New Zealand filmmakers, in part for their topicality. For example, The Whole of the Moon (1996) told the story of the highs and lows of children in a cancer ward, united—regardless of race or class—in their battle against cancer. Bonjour Timothy (1995) has the underdog winning the affection of the girl against all odds, in a film about coming-of-age anxieties of sex and love. Ian Mune’s The End of the Golden Weather (1991) retold the story of playwright Bruce Mason’s childhood, and was received enthusiastically by audiences in New Zealand. At the other end of the spectrum, war films are significant in the industry. John Reid’s The Last Tattoo (1994) explored the tensions that festered in the early 1940s when U.S. soldiers were rotated through Wellington on rest and recreation leave. John Laing’s Absent without Leave (1993) told the stories of young people, whose lives were interrupted and changed by war, learning about love, trust, and responsibility. Of course, the New Zealand film industry would be incomplete without a film about the previously all-conquering All Blacks Rugby Union team. Alan Clayton’s Old Scores (1991) provided that piece of the jigsaw.
If the road is still a central signifier of New Zealand film, then it is clear that the nature of the road has changed. Although still leading to new and interesting places, the road is both built by experts and traveled by people for whom the road is no longer uncertain. That it leads to new territories is clear; that those new territories can be explored with confidence is also clear. Thus the cinema of unease has given way to the cinema of confidence, the confidence that filmmakers need in order to undertake audacious projects like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the minimalist essay on the possibilities arising from boredom in Christine Jeff’s Rain (2001), or the understated lyricism of Whale Rider (2002).
Despite the success of the films of Aotearoa, such as The Lord of the Rings, some fragility still haunts the industry. Reasons for this fragility include the value of the dollar (which affects the profitability of filmmaking in New Zealand in comparison with other places), the interests of the public, and the loss of cast and crew to more ambitious projects that may be mounted overseas more successfully. On the other hand, many changes have occurred since 1977 that have provided a firm foundation for a thriving industry. Filmmakers, cast and crew have shown that they are equal to the world’s best in making films with international themes, while other films have shown that the world is interested in New Zealand narratives and settings. Additionally, the New Zealand government has seen the economic benefits of a viable film industry, and has broadened its support through the establishment of the Screen Council of New Zealand, whose aim is to double the size of the screen production industry in five years. Given this level of government encouragement of the already-proven ability of the industry, the future appears secure, and such support continues.
This dictionary has neglected any discussion of adult films. Little is known about their significance to the industry. Doubtless, their sale and viewing, if not their manufacture, are a significant and arguably legitimate element of the broader New Zealand film industry, but research is almost nonexistent.