Tired of watching films? A 1990 Bill Gosden speech

I was recently reading an interview with the new director of the Sydney Film Festival where he was asked the question anyone in a similar position can expect to be asked about 1000 times a year.

Don't you get tired of watching films?

Not at all, he replied. What could be more fun? I watch four or five films in a day and I find it exhilarating. Wow, I thought, you can spot the new ones.

Confronted by an interviewer asking the same question I might attempt a similarly ingenious response, but I know that here I can go into much more detail. And because so many people have expressed an interest over the years in this enthralling subject, I've decided to fill my allotted space tonight by telling you how I see movies – and whether or not I get tired of them.

The first thing to point out is that I became used to being paid rather than paying to watch movies at an impressionable age. As a first-year university student I received $20 a fortnight to preview the movies coming to Dunedin and to write the occasional precocious, brilliant review. There can be little doubt I considered myself an arbiter of taste. Of course one of the tragedies of youth is that so much of what strikes you as fresh, bold, original, daring, even precocious and brilliant is actually being recycled by cynical hacks for the thirty-sixth time.

What I saw in movies twenty years ago was probably a good deal more than you'd know from reading what I wrote back then. Movies were mere pretexts for trying poses. “Attitude” wasn't such a recognised phenomenon back then, but a movie column in the student newspaper was the perfect vehicle for lots of it. The cool and lofty heights from which I admired Joseph Losey's The Go-Between (1971) and deplored Mel Brooks's farty Blazing Saddles (1974) collapsed beneath me when I came to consider the films that really moved me, like Cabaret (1972) or the great movies made in the early '70s by Sam Peckinpah. Writing about these I could only rave like a besotted fool or rail against those who couldn't recognise self-evident genius.

Early cinema of Jane Campion (1990) by Bill Gosden

Bill Gosden was, for almost 40 years, director of the New Zealand International Film Festival.  Upon the one-year anniversary of his death The Gosden Years was released by Victoria University Press.  It is a beautifully produced collection of his writing about cinema and the art of the film festival.  His huge contribution to Aotearoa cinema culture as an exhibitor and curator is widely appreciated.  This book acknowledges his contribution to writing about film and the innovative poster art that he often collaborated with designers and artists to create.  Below is an article not included in the book that he wrote in 1990.

Early cinema of Jane Campion (1990)

A tragic tale of suffocation by family, shot through with bizarre, black comedy, Sweetie is a daring, original and, I think, marvellous movie. It parodies neurotic behaviour while exhibiting an intense commitment to the neurotic point of view. It's a potent blend. Comedy heightens tragedy, tragedy heightens comedy until you can't tell one from the other.

In competition at Cannes, Sweetie's emptied-out performances and full-on visual style earned the contempt of French experts who recognised contrivance but lacked any understanding of the verbally inarticulate world Campion was contriving to express. Closer to home there have been plenty, equally uncomprehending, who found Sweetie equally infuriating. “The work of an enthusiastic amateur,” sniffed one New Zealand critic.

Sweetie, it seems, is a film you love or hate. There have been as many accolades as insults; the film has even won prizes in France. Because her work has such a distinctively Australian/New Zealand inflection (or twang, if you prefer), it's a relief to us hometown cheerleaders that Sweetie has accumulated admirers throughout the English-speaking world.

For if Jane Campion is an amateur then she is so only in the sense that not one of her films contains a hint of professional assignment. In ten years she has expressed a rich, strikingly individual view of the world in a remarkably varied, utterly coherent body of work.