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| Issue 43: July 1999 |
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Creating a Liquid Space
Sculptor, cinematographer, director, Leon Narbey recently presented a series
of screenings at The Film Centre. Robyn Venables met New Zealand’s
illustrious filmmaker.
Picture this, a silhouette of a man, dark room, blue screen. He
speaks quietly to the audience, his hands gesturing against the
screen. The shadows emphasise Leon Narbey’s words. The programmes
he presents, ‘Early Experimental Work’, ‘Documentaries’
and ‘Narbey as Director of Photography’ reveal and enormous
body of work.
As a cinematographer Narbey has worked with Gaylene Preston, Merata Mita,
Peter Wells, Sima Urale, Vincent Ward and with Harry Sinclair on his latest
project, The Price of Milk.
Narbey, as feature film director, has made two distinctive works, The
Footstep Man and the multi-award winning Illustrious Energy. A
third is in the pipeline. Narbey has also passionately embraced documentary,
having worked among others on the powerful Bastion Point-Day 507 and
Annie Goldson’s Punitive Damage.
As a student of the Elam School of Fine Art in 1965, Narbey concentrated on
sculpture and installation which led to his first experimental film works, Room
One and Room Two. His sculptural approach to light has helped
define his works creating a style that can be described as rich with light and
shadow.
“It started out as an attempt to document a temporal event or structure
and then it became filmmaking. In Room One I was describing how, by
moving a light bulb in a darkened space, all the shadows move. It was something
to do with creating a liquid space because the illusion of the space changes
according to how we read the shadows.”
“To me what’s as interesting as the light on a face is the shadows
around, the shadows on the face, or the shadows on the walls behind it, or the
darkness. I think darkness can be part of it.”
Shadow play is a recurring motif in Narbey’s work as was seen in programme
extracts of Napier: Newest City on the Globe and the opulent bodice
ripper Desperate Remedies.
He says little about the forthcoming feature he is co-writing, but instead speaks
of the difficulty of stepping from one role to another in the film industry.
“Working on a feature film is such an enormous task, it’s peculiar
actually if you withdraw from being a cinematographer to do your own film. When
you come out the other end people are uncertain as to what you are. If you’re
a director, will they take you on as a cinematographer?”
When Narbey is not working he has a retreat to go to, north of Auckland where
his family has a property with 400 olive trees. This is a place for him to recharge
the batteries.
Full transcript of this interview available at the Film Archive.
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VACCESSremote Expands
The Film Archive is expanding its nation wide access points to the collections.
Following the opening of the new Auckland office by the Hon Marie Hasler,
the Minister of Cultural Affairs, Archive Chief Executive Frank Stark announced
that new VACCESSremote partnerships with the Manawatu Art Gallery and
the Waikato Museum of Art and History had been confirmed.
The new sites, located within existing museum facilities along the same lines
as those already operating in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the Govett-Brewster
Art Gallery, New Plymouth, are scheduled to open in July and August this year.
They will include a full installation of the Archive’s Public Access Database
and a specially selected range of film and television items transferred to VHS
video.
“The success of the first two sites in Dunedin and New Plymouth has led
to a very encouraging surge of interest from museums throughout the country,”
said Frank Stark. “We are hard at work preparing the material for the next
two installations and already two more sites are under negotiation.”
Until there are significant advances in internet technology which make it possible
to deliver on-line video at a reasonable quality and in sufficient quantity,
the Archive is expecting to use the VACCESS system to meet the needs of its
users around the country.
This work falls outside the Archive’s funding relation ship with the Government,
but as Marie Hasler commented in her speech at the Auckland office opening,
“at a time when there is considerable debate over the responsibilities
of the holders of national collections to make them truly accessible across
the country, the Film Archive is leading the way.”
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Auckland Office Popular
The new Auckland office of the Film Archive is already drawing considerable
interest from residents in the City of Sails.
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The film Archive’s Auckland
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The office based in Karangahape Road was officially opened on May
12 by the Hon Marie Hasler, Minister of Cultural Affairs.
Office Manager Michael Brook says “Auckland producers wanting to source
footage are using the office. Other visitors want to see themselves when they
were in films as children, to view their relatives in old newsreels, to conduct
specific research or just to spend the afternoon watching movies.”
Michael says visitors are also using the Public Access Database (PAD) which
provides information on the entire Film Archive collection in Wellington including
films, books, scripts, posters and audio tapes.
The office is a valuable contact point for Aucklanders wishing to deposit film
with the Film Archive and Michael is encouraging people who may have a piece
of New Zealand film history under their house, or bed, or in the shed to pay
a visit.
All the video equipment for on-site viewing at the Auckland office has been
generously sponsored by Philips.
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Aotearoa Television Collection
As part of its contract with NZ On Air the Film Archive is currently archiving
a significant part of the material produced during 1996 and 1997 by Aotearoa
Television Network.
The company’s assets, including its productions, were held by a liquidator
following its closure, but extended negotiations with Maori broadcasting funding
agency Te Mangai Paho led to the transfer of over 3,000 video tape items into
the care of the Archive late last year.
These programmes, almost entirely in Te Reo Maori, will be held by the Archive
and may be called upon for re-use by the emerging Maori television broadcaster
when it begins operations within the next 12 months.
Over 300 hours of the ATN material are being remastered and fully catalogued
into the NZ On Air-funded National Television Collection.
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Return to Germany
A major collection of German film, deposited with the New Zealand Film Archive,
has generated intense interest from archives in Germany.
The material, from the collections of the late Hans Carl Opfermann,
was deposited with the Archive in late 1997 by his daughter Monika
Smith. Resident in New Zealand since emigrating here in the early
80s, it is known that he worked in the German and Nazi film industry
during the 1930s and 40s and later under the Communist regime. During
his time in New Zealand he continued to work full time as a freelance
author of books on film, chess (especially computer chess) and history.
A filmmaker in his own right, as well as an avid collector, Opfermann’s
collection spans a wide range of genres and materials: snippets of over fifty
German features from 1930 to 1949; newsreels from the post war period; documentaries
and industrial and instructional films made for television; home movies; animated
films; a Spanish comedy dubbed into German; even a National Film Unit production,
a Pictorial Parade from 1963! In addition to the film material deposited
with the Archive a substantial collection of documents resides with the National
Library.
With the support of the Goethe-Institut, Wellington, Russell Campbell, senior
lecturer in film at Victoria University and local filmmaker Gerd Pohlmann were
contracted to undertake and initial study of the material. What started as an
exercise in sampling the collection quickly turned, thanks to the delightful
unpredictability of their discoveries, into a methodical working through of
the 41 cartons and over 90 individual cans of film. The ‘exploratory’
report grew into a comprehensive listing of the whole collection by title, along
with a physical description of each film.
For a collection allegedly containing no nitrate material (and if there was
Opfermann would have had difficulty in shipping his films into the country),
Russell and Gerd discovered that customs regulations had been circumvented.
Archive conservation staff then checked all the 35mm material, identifying and
isolating everything on nitrate stock – often small sequences slipped into
innocuous rolls of safety film. Careful examination also identified some items
of safety film affected by vinegar syndrome.
Individual highlights? Early on in their search Russell and Gerd identified
pristine fine-grain positive material of a tinted print of The Blue Angel:
then came footage of Adolf Hitler’s birthday celebrations, possibly from
1939 and an apparently unfinished documentary on the development of weaponry
and radar in World War II.
From a German perspective the most significant discovery, and the only film
dating from before the First World War, was a short three minute item entitled
1000-Jahrfeier Festzug. Shot around 1910, the film depicts a millennium
celebration parade held in Konigswinter, featuring surviving veterans of the
wars of 1864, 1866 and 1870-71.
A copy of Russell and Gerd’s report was sent to the Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv
in Berlin, alerting them to the existence of the Opfermann Collection and seeking
their assistance in repatriating the material to Germany. The Bundesarchiv has
recently responded with a list of items they would like to acquire including
not surprisingly the pre-War film, and selected materials from several of the
feature films to fill gaps in their collections. The Bundesarchiv has also expressed
an interest in learning more about Opfermann’s home movies from the 1930s.
The Archive has also received correspondence from the Siftung Deutsche Kinemathek
and the Deutsches Filminstitut wanting to more about this “mysterious personality
Opfermann.”
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Across the Ditch
A number of significant film items have come to light in Across The Ditch,
a search for New Zealand celluloid in Australia.
Across The Ditch, an extension of the Bank of New Zealand and Film
Archive Last Film Search, travelled to Canberra, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney
during May and June. Film Archive staff concentrated on collections held by
the Australian National Film and Sound Archive and the search also attracted
a good response from private film collectors.
Among the discoveries of New Zealand content on newsreel films was footage
of the Tangi of King Mahuta in 1933, the Napier earthquake (1931), visits by
British and Australian politicians to New Zealand, ANZAC parades, sports (lots
of rugby), Sir Edmund Hillary’s wedding in 1953 in Auckland and the Mt
Eden Prison riots in 1965. Another find was footage of the World’s
Biggest Egg Laying Contest held between New Zealand and Australia around
1930.
To highlight Across The Ditch the Film Archive presented two screenings
at the Sydney Film Festival that included Rudall Hayward’s community comedy
Daughter of Dunedin. Star of the film and former Miss New Zealand,
Dale Nicolsen (nee Austen) attended the screening. Last Film Search Co-ordinator
Jane Paul says the crowd “applauded her wildly and as she left someone
yelled out ‘give us a wink Dale!’ referring to her screen character.”
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News Clips
Pasifika Film Project
A collection of rare, pre-1950s Pacific Islands films has been preserved by
the Film Archive with funding assistance from UNESCO. Twenty-two films from
Samoa, The Cook Islands, Tonga, Fiji and the Solomon Islands are now available
to view at the Film Archive. Video copies are being returned to Pacific archives
and libraries.
SEAPAAVA
Film Archive representatives attended this year’s South East Asia and Pacific
Audio Visual Archives’ (SEAPAAVA) conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Representatives came from Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam,
Papua New Guinea. Factors such as tropical temperatures, humidity, lack of funds
and low government funding were discussed.
Southern Cross
Under the Southern Cross (1927) had a huge ‘welcome home’ when the
short feature film screened for the first in 70 years in the region in which
it was shot, Hawkes Bay. Both sessions at the Century Cinema, Napier in March
were packed out and a return season in May, again with pianist Margaret Olgilvie,
attracted enthusiastic capacity houses.
Return Screenings
The Bank of New Zealand and Film Archive Last Film Search Southland / Central
Otago Return Screenings in April screened to full houses in Invercargill and
Wanaka. Films shown included footage of a crib building in the 1950s and a mutton-birding
expedition in 1965.
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