Cinema

A confession: I was a child actor. Never a child star, although certainly that was the intention. For years I endured the three-hour drive from Canberra to Sydney, preparing for my five-minute meeting with some Surry Hills casting director, whose first question would inevitably be ‘How’s your American accent?’ The zenith of my career was a thirty-second commercial for the orange-flavoured soft drink Mirinda, a merchandising tie-in with the release of Spider-Man 2, shot at Fox Studios on a full-sized replica of a New York subway carriage. On the soundstage next door, Baz Luhrmann was directing Nicole Kidman in their famously extravagant campaign for Chanel No. 5. There we all were: Australians in Australia, pretending to be Americans for America. Even at that early age, I sensed that Australian cinema existed in the long shadow of Hollywood, and that there has always been, as Sam Twyford-Moore expertly describes in his new book, ‘some kind of psychic gangway between Sydney and Los Angeles’. 

Narrative and Media provides a lengthy and extensively researched overview of one of the central features of contemporary popular culture. The four authors (all of whom have been scholars at Sydney University) discuss the roles that narrative has played in mediums such as television, cinema and radio. In the introductory chapter, the authors explain the importance of their topic: ‘In a world dominated by print and electronic media, our sense of reality is increasingly structured by narrative.’ Later chapters address issues such as ‘narrative time’, ‘print news as narrative’, and the impact upon narrative conventions of postmodern and post-structuralist thought. In doing this, the authors also provide a ‘consideration of industry-related issues that affect the production and consumption of media texts’.

Robert Murphy, in his contribution to this collection of essays on The Cinema of Britain and Ireland, focuses on a little-seen example of the ‘British noir tradition’, Robert Hamer’s The Long Memory (1952). Murphy makes a convincing case for The Long Memory, placing it in the frame with other, better-known contributions to the genre such as John Boulting’s Brighton Rock (1947), Hamer’s own, earlier It Never Rains on Sundays (1947) and, best known of all, Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949). The Long Memory, Murphy concludes, is ‘a good example of the invisibility of British cinema’, and in that striking phrase he seems to imply that the fate of forgotten or neglected British films such as The Long Memory is to be doubly invisible, relegated to an also-ran position within a national cinema that has itself been unfairly relegated over the years.

Judi Farr – one of the fourteen interviewees who appear in Terence Crawford’s Trade Secrets: Australian Actors and Their Craft – reflects on the unpredictable nature of performance, and on the way in which an actor can become so immersed in a role and so apparently truthful to the emotion of the moment that, contrary to what we might expect, the connection with the audience is broken rather than reinforced. ‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘you can do a play where tears will be pouring down your face, but you haven’t really affected anyone.’ Wendy Hughes makes a similar point: she recalls having to cry for a scene in a Paul Cox film, and how she prepared herself by getting deeply into the mood beforehand. During the first take, the tears flowed, and everything ‘felt so real’. Then she went through the scene again, but this time she ‘didn’t feel it the same and didn’t cry as much’. When the takes were compared afterwards, Hughes was struck by the fact that the one in which it all felt ‘really real’ was not the best. ‘The other one where I was in control was better.’

In the movie The Producers (now a musical), Gene Wilder accuses Zero Mostel of treating actors like animals. ‘Have you ever seen an actor eat?’ is Mostel’s pithy reply. There is a truth buried in this joke: eating can be important to actors in a profession where much time can be spent between jobs, ‘resting’, as it is euphemistically called.

The title of this book suggests that it will be less concerned with industrial aspects of Australian cinema than with ideological, but, as if this might limit its scope and resonance, Peter Malone’s subtitle suggests that other lines of inquiry and response might be accommodated as well. This proves to be the case.