Posts by Joe Wylie
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Thank you very much Russell, Paul from NZ On Screen, and everyone who's taken the trouble to express how Te Rerenga touched them in some way.
Although that film dominated a distant but significant chunk of my life I've never really been able to relate to it as being 'my' work. While the wish to make a film based on the Te Rerenga story came from producer Susan Wilson, it wasn't accompanied by any specific vision. Nor has anyone ever really articulated why they so much wanted to make a film based on that story. Once we'd assembled a production team we had three younger artists, each with their own vision, so my task as director was to establish a framework which could accommodate that. Within that I was able to indulge myself to much the same degree as they did, so there are bits that are stylistically 'mine'. As for the story, apart from the contemporary elements that I was keen to include, it was already largely there.
When I first became involved with the project Susan Wilson was attempting to gain the support of influential figures in the arts and film biz, as their written endorsement would be vital to secure funding. After receiving an extremely hostile response from artist and occasional filmmaker Selwyn Muru she was prepared to drop the idea. If we hadn't met with the late Don Selwyn that would probably have been as far as it went.
Unlike Muru, Don Selwyn didn't threaten supernatural consequences. He listened patiently, perhaps indulgently to my claim that the Te Rerenga story was something that I and most NZers had grown up with, albeit in storybook form, and pretty much said go for it, I'll give whatever help I can. During the scriptwriting stage we met with various other Maori. Most were supportive, a couple were skeptical, but all were encouraging to some degree.
During production there were occasional suggestions from non-Maori that we were trespassing onto or plundering a culture that wasn't ours. It was always presented as a rigidly held belief that didn't allow for discussion. Once the film was finished there was a small but intensely hostile reaction from some quarters, but never from Maori. I remember being offered the right of reply to a letter to Alternative Cinema, where the writer protested on behalf of those "shocked and distressed" Maori and polynesian people who she'd witnessed leaving a screening of Te Rerenga. She didn't reply to my offer to convene a meeting where we might discuss the hurt caused. Perhaps the authentic voice of the 19th Century missionary can still be heard today. It certainly seemed to be around in the 1980s.
Selwyn Muru's initial hostility was the only time that we encountered an overtly negative response from a Maori quarter. It was at Don Selwyn's suggestion that the karakia or lamentation be included in the early part of the film's soundtrack, and it was he who put us in touch with the performer and those who could provide the necessary protocols for recording. A kind, generous and patient man.
Don Selwyn and a number of others both older and wiser than me hinted that the Te Rerenga story wouldn't be an easy subject to tackle, and there were times where I rather wished that I hadn't signed on. Every time something went wrong, such as the master soundtrack suddenly appearing to mysteriously wipe itself, you wondered if you hadn't invoked the threatened curse.
Every film has to have a director, and although my name is there I've never shaken the feeling that the film somehow directed itself. I don't mean that in any mystical sense, unless an attempt to understand the workings of fate is somehow inherently mystical, in which case guilty as charged. It's a little film about a very big story, and after all these years I feel privileged to have been involved.
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License to Grow Tobacco, c. 1937.
Snapped today by Gudrun Gisela at the Christchurch Philatelic Society Stamp & Coin Show, Addington Raceway. -
Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Chris Waugh,
. . . she flips through the pages feeling (and sometimes even kissing or tasting) the pages, pictures and words.
My earliest memories of books are of illustrations so beautiful that licking seemed the only way to take in their colours and textures. Kathleen Hale's Orlando the Marmalade Cat was damn near irresistible. Here's one of him actually getting licky.
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to 3410,
Algies’ castle
I remember from back in the early 90s the occupant, or whatever their title was, complaining of people turning up unannounced and expecting a guided tour.
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
The feeling (and explanation) of that painting . . .
Albert Tucker's skull-beneath-the-skin sensibility was shaped by his being assigned by the army to document before-and-after reconstructive surgery of war wounds. At the time of his Images of Modern Evil series he'd been discharged and was plainly not a happy man, though the uncompromisingly gothic element never left his work.
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Capture: Cats Love Cameras, in reply to bmk,
part-siamese
Looks like my brother's, here doing snow for the first time last July.
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
I imagine that your average GI was a more interesting and exotic creature for many NZ women than your average Kiwi bloke, in these times.
That's certainly the folklore I recall from my youth. Americans troops were stereotyped as pampered (canned xmas pudding, ffs) and inept - much was made of supposed 'friendly fire' incidents. Their largesse towards local females was legendary, from the 'fine dining' available to guests at their officers' club in Parnell (baked Alaska!) to their apparently endless supply of nylons. Did they issue them with nylons?
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Ugh, I find the painting in that link really quite abhorrent.
One person's art and all. Tucker's 1947 pen & ink from Hiroshima is almost the kind of thing that wouldn't frighten the chooks in a corporate corridor, provided they didn't know what it was about.
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Funny how that "keep your filthy foreign hands off our women" attitude pops up in so many different cultures.
". . . Victory girls. All these schoolgirls from fourteen to fifteen would rush home after school and put on short skirts made out of flags - red, white and blue - and go tarting along St Kilda Road with the GIs and, of course, diggers . . ."
Artist Albert Tucker, in On the Home Front: Melbourne in Wartime: 1939-1945 -
Capture: Cats Love Cameras, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Great-grandma Isabel Inwood
Urk. G-granny's name was Angelina, not Isabel. I think it had something to do with her being born a Christadelphian. Does Christadelphianism involve cats, or was that only the ancient Egyptians?
