Riding the new Wave: how Aussie Movies won The World
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When Australian New Wave films burst on to world cinema screens in the 1970s, sceptical audiences were at first baffled by the broad accents and strange colloquialisms.
Sunday Too Far Away, a renowned tale about male culture and loyalty in a 1950s shearing shed, was the first big hit of Australia's golden age of movie theater but Americans were especially mystified by it, manufacturer Matt Carroll remembers.
"They acknowledged that Sunday was a terrific movie but they didn't understand it," he says.
"It was quite incomprehensible to anybody who wasn't an Australian. At American screenings, you may too have had it in Dutch."
But French audiences were much more welcoming of the movie at Cannes Directors Fortnight, thanks to the better half of an Adelaide automobile dealership who had actually sold Carroll a Peugeot.
"She said, 'oh yes darling, I understand Parisian street slang, I'll equate all of it for you (into subtitles)'," Carroll continues.
"I keep in mind sitting in the movie theater and the first thing that turns up is somebody in the shearing shed says about the squatter, 'his shit does not stink'. When it was equated, the Parisian slang for that is 'he farts above his asshole'."
In the huge screening room, "the entire audience simply went nuts, definitely insane, and we got a huge sale to France", Carroll chuckles.
"It's the language of the bush," discusses legendary Australian star Jack Thompson, who depicted the hard-drinking gun shearer, Foley.
"There's a fantastic camaraderie expressed because movie. Sunday states something a lot more profound about the Australian character than a variety of other movies that examined our triumphes and failures."
Thompson, who left home at 14 to work as a jackaroo in the NT, says "it resembled a journal, it was just how people behaved - I remember, because as a teenager, I remained in those sheds.
"Sunday Too Far Away has a really vital part in my profession and in my memory; I 'd dealt with that wool press, I 'd gotten that wool. I understood how hard it was ... it was the world of working guys."
Thompson was a star of a variety of other New age movies, including Breaker Morant, Mad Dog Morgan, The Club and The Man From Snowy River.
Carroll recalls likewise feeling well qualified to be associated with Sunday Too Far, which was recorded at Carriewerloo Station, near Port Augusta, and Quorn.
"I matured on a sheep residential or commercial property so I discovered how to class wool. My honours thesis was in Australian shearing sheds. So when we needed to find a shearing shed, I understood precisely where they were," he says.
"And Jack and I were sharing a house together, and I understood that he was a shearer, and I was there when the director stated, 'I don't understand where we're going to find shearers from'. And I stated, 'Well, I understand'.
Thompson and Carroll just recently checked out Adelaide for a 50th of Sunday Too Far Away, staged by SA Film Corporation, which played a crucial function in the period.
"The SAFC was an essential beacon in the growth of the Australian film market," says Thompson.
"Tale after tale essential to our understanding of ourselves was informed and funded by that entity."
The New york city Times described Australian New age as "recording a minute of flexibility and abundance that was over almost before we understood it" and "possessing a vigor, a love of open space and a propensity for abrupt violence and languorous sexuality".
"That's me," says Thompson, now aged 84, deadpan.
"Used to be, mate," laughs Carroll, 80.
As a young star, it resembled "riding the crest of a wave, it was stunning", says Thompson.
"There was indeed a very focused vitality, an unique beauty, unlike anything else at the time."
Carroll, who likewise produced Breaker Morant and Storm Boy for SAFC, states the 1970s was an amazing duration for Australian movies.
"More than 220 films, that's more than 20 films a year. And when you read the titles, it's just shocking," he says.
"We never had another period like that, with the ingenuity and the creativity."
The SAFC's second feature, the enigmatic and enormous Picnic at Hanging Rock, which also turns 50 this year, ended up being an icon of Australian movie theater.
"The terrific thing that occurred after that is that Margaret Fink made My Brilliant Career, and the Americans understood it," states Carroll.
"And After That Breaker Morant came along and they clicked with it and it had substantial results, and after that the second Mad Max was a huge hit. So those three movies were essential to opening the American market."
Thompson keeps in mind that Australia made the world's first feature-length narrative movie, The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906, "and we had an essential Australian film industry in the silent age up to 1927".
"Hollywood and the American financial investment in theatre chains here had the ability to control the Australian film industry, and essentially, in between 1930 and the 70s, absolutely nothing much occurred in Australian cinema," he says.
While Sunday Too Far Away was New age's very first business success, 1971's Wake In Fright is extensively regarded as the age's opening movie.
It was Thompson's first film and the last for experienced character actor Chips Rafferty, who died of a heart attack before it was released.
It screened at Cannes and got favourable reactions in France and the UK however had a hard time at the Australian ticket office.
It's the story of a teacher waylaid in a mining town where a gambling spree leaves him broke. Amid a haze of alcohol, he gets involved in a gruesome kangaroo hunt and is likewise subjected to ethical deterioration.
It ran for just 10 days in Sydney, and 14 in Melbourne, Thompson remembers, "and people were stating 'that's not us', regardless of the fact the book was composed by an Australian".
"Because when we were seen on screen (previously), we were viewed as these enjoyable caricatures, we weren't used to seeing it and we didn't wish to see it," he states.
During an early Australian screening, when a guy stood, pointed at the screen and objected "that's not us!", Thompson notoriously yelled back "take a seat, mate. It is us".