Pictures

The reassessment of history is never an easy task, especially a history as clouded with noble self-deception as that of the colonisation of New Zealand. All credit, then, to Pictures for tackling the subject

Pictures, New Zealand, 1981

Director: Michael Black
Producer: John O'Shea
Screenplay: Robert Lord, John O'Shea
From an idea by: Michael Black
Director of photography: Rory O'Shea
Camera operator: Michael Hardcastle
Production manager: Dorthe Scheffmann
Editor: John Kiley
Art director: Russell Collins
Costumes: Gwen Kaiser
Music: Jan Preston
Sound editors: Geoff Shepherd, david Newton
Studio manager: Eric Anderson
Special effects: Kevin Chisnall

With: Kevin J Wilson (Alfred Burton), Peter Vere-Jones (Walter Burton), Helen Moulder (Lydia Burton), Elizabeth Coulter (Helen Burton), Terence Bayler (John Rochfort), Matiu Mareikuira (Ngatai), Ken Blackburn (James Gilchrist)

35mm, 87 minutes, G certificate

Watch the Pictures trailer (6.44MB; 1.49 minutes)

The story of Walter and Alfred Burton, brothers and rivals, both photographers of colonial New Zealand. Walter takes pictures of rebel Maori taken prisoner by colonial soldiers. Public exhibition of the photos is forbidden. Bitter and disenchanted, Walter can only find work in the tame world of the studio. Alfred, a recent immigrant, is insensitive to Walter's plight. More opportunistic than Walter, his photographs obscure and romanticise the plight of the Maori and win public approval.

“The most intriguing feature, to date, to come out of the New Zealand ‘new wave’ is Pictures. Its director, Michael Black teamed up, in Pictures, with John O’Shea who also co-wrote the script (with Robert Lord). Together – theory and practise – they have produced a film of surprisingly seasoned vintage, a thoughtful film, one of a particular style. Pictures is also the first New Zealand film, I feel, to forge a coherent and powerful social statement. The feuding of the Burton brothers is one of the focuses of the film. Walter and Alfred were two 19th-century photographers who moved around New Zealand about the time of the land wars. Walter was an introspective artist. Early on in the land wars, he took photographs of Maoris. Through the lens of his camera, as it were, he experienced the ghastly process of alienation which was set in motion. Worse still, he was meant to be taking photos for the Railways. The last thing they wanted was evidence of the damage European contact was wreaking. Walter’s career went into a downward slide just as the career of Alfred began to take off. In the film Alfred is pragmatic, politic. He never raises his voice, never asks difficult questions. He does society photographs, and beautiful views. He teams up with John Rochfort, an early surveyor. Together, photographer and land measurer, they begin to map the contours of a conquered Aotearoa. However, Pictures says, the process of colonization is not straightforward. One of the things I liked a lot about this film was its honesty in stating what is involved in a colonizing process. On one hand, for the conquered race, a loss of land, a threat to identity – even life. But for the conquerors, a loss is involved too, as well as a slow and painful process of realization… For Walter Burton, the loss is more personal. He witnesses what European contact is leading to here. Among his own peers, this makes him a false witness. Nobody wants to know. He hits the bottle. Deeply alienated, cut off from a supporting society, he turns into a drunk. For Alfred, the loss is one of false consciousness. He sets out to ‘discover’ the land he lives in, and which exercises a curious power over him. What he discovers, however, is the same truth which sends his brother on a one-way road to oblivion. The film’s conclusion is stark: its analysis of New Zealand’s making is almost daunting. Yet for me, this absence of a ‘happy end’, or even a neatly tied ending, is a strength. It has the power of a strong gaze directed to a matter. I think some people will find Pictures hard going at first. I know I resisted it at the beginning because its pace is restrained and European rather than the fast dash we are used to from American film. Pictures also uses a film style which is quite theatrical, even stilted in its presentation of character, setting and emotion. I found this disconcerting at first, because it seemed like a kind of failure to achieve ‘realism’. More and more as the film went on, however, I realized this theatricality was, in fact, part of its economy: part of its sharp way of making a statement. Concentrating realism into theatricality is like compacting a long statement into one short sentence. It works. Because of this, the images Pictures offers of New Zealand have an unusually concentrated power. I felt the few explosions in Pictures were more effective than the plethora of bangs in Utu. These two films will inevitably be compared: they are the first modern film treatments of our turbulent history. But whereas Utu was a shaggy film, a bit unkempt, half cowboy-and-injin, half didactic tract, Picutres gains the benefit of being one particular style and thing. (You may like it, as I did; you may hate it: you wont be indifferent to it.) The theatricality builds up an excellent sense of European staginess – of just how unreal, in a way, British civilization must have been, planted out here. The magnificent shot of Dunedin Railway Station is the same: on film it become the statement it originally was – of power, endurance, economic assertion. It spells out in words of granite: We Are Here to Stay. It is in this sense of carefully chosen images that Pictures succeeds. It manages to build up a coherent sense of a society, and uses the framework of photography to ask questions about early New Zealand. The city scenes with their tinkly front parlours and hideous mud on the streets give way to the exquisitely ‘lost world’ quality of the Wanganui River. The Wanganui River scenes rightly mark the peak of the film. It is the period when Alfred penetrates the mysteries which have so tormented his brother. In a way it marks his coming to consciousness. He is accompanied up the river by a ‘friendly Maori’ as well as the evil John Rochfort. Rochfort is the kind of villain seen in silent films. He is played well by Terrence Bayler, part of the expatriate contingent who played a strong role in the professional quality of this film. (Bayler played Macduff in Polanski’s Macbeth. Elizabeth Coulter, who plays Walter’s wife, has had roles in Annie Hall, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Jan Preston, who provides the quietly period music, is of course well known. Black and director of photography Rory O’Shea portray Alfred’s confrontation with Aotearoa’s mysteries sensitively and symbolically. There are flaws in Pictures – some sequences could have been shortened – but overall it is an extremely impressive, articulate and imaginative film.” — Peter Wells, Listener, 18 June 1983

“The reassessment of history is never an easy task, especially a history as clouded with noble self-deception as that of the colonisation of New Zealand. All credit, then, to Pictures for tackling the subject, and for bringing to its reassessment a remarkable clarity and a considerable complexity of perspective. The most impressive thing about Robert Lord and John O’Shea’s screenplay, a fictionalized biography of founding fathers of New Zealand photography, is that it indulges neither in liberal breast-beating nor in retrospective self-justification. The Maori case is put in simple and direct fashion by Ngatai, who has accepted the settlers’ money in order to survive. ‘They took away my people’s land’, he says with a misleading smile. ‘But you do all right, don’t you?’ asks Alfred. ‘Oh, yes’, replies Ngatai ironically, ‘Plenty of money. But no home’. In the end, the double standard is clearly indicated by the fact that, for Rochfort’s rescue, Alfred receives a gold medal and Ngatai a jail sentence. The other side of the story – the colonists’ quite genuine belief that they were fulfilling their manifest destiny of bringing civilization to the benighted savages – is more open to parody, but is none the less exemplified by Alfred, who blinds himself to the true intentions of the Railways Department in his quest for ‘artistic’ pictures. His task is to record a way of life before it is destroyed, so that future generations may marvel at the ‘improvements’. The film’s main structural weakness lies in its portrayal of Rochfort as a sneering buffoon. Of all the characters, his is the one most suited to demonstrating the colonist’s belief in the nobility of his undertaking. Like all true colonials, he ‘knows the natives’ (as Fanon said, of course he knows them: the colonised are the colonist’s creation), and can ‘handle’ them better than the conscience-stricken Alfred. This weakness apart, however, Pictures charts with great accuracy the clash of two cultures and its inevitable aftermath for both. It is the record of Alfred’s coming to terms with the conflict between his own class allegiance and the reality of a history into which he finds himself thrust. The film is by no means flawless. It frequently slows to a snail’s pace, contains one or two very tentative performances (notably from Elizabeth Coulter as Helen Burton), and has some strangely abrupt transitions. On the other hand, Rory O’Shea’s cinematography is not only magnificent, it clearly points to an irony which underlies the whole film. ‘We need photographs’, a railways executive tells Alfred, ‘to show people back home what an exciting and beautiful country this is’. Pictures itself does just that, but it does so in the context of a story which records the beginning of the process whereby the beauty has been appropriated for economic use, and made the smokescreen for many of the practices which that appropriation necessitated. ‘That’s exactly what it was’, insists Walter when his photographs are rejected. ‘Good God!’ exclaims the man from the railways, ‘Who wants to know that?’ The morality of Alfred’s own record of ‘how it was’ is also neatly questioned when he angrily asks a beach photographer who snaps him with Helen whether it occurred to him to ask whether they wanted to be photographed – a question which Alfred would never dream of asking his Maori subjects. Pictures deserves to be seen, not only for its very real qualities, but for the way in which it faces up to the realities of New Zealand’s – and, by extension, Britain’s – colonial past.” — Nick Roddick, Monthly Film Bulletin, October 1982

Screenings: Pictures screened on 1 March 2006 supporting the exhibition Innocents Abroad – Touring the Pacific through a colonial lens at Museum of Wellington City & Sea