A version of this article appeared in The Age, July 16, 2011.
“I used to feel I could just happily sit on a street corner and watch things happen,” says the filmmaker and artist John Dunkley-Smith. That's one place cinema can begin, with the simple desire to observe and document the world around you: the layout of an intersection, the ebb and flow of traffic.
There's a thrill, even now, to the opening shot of Marvellous Melbourne: Queen City of the South, a silent travelogue made around 1910. The camera is mounted on the front of a tram as it moves along the broad, empty expanse of St Kilda Road; looming up on the left is the dome of Flinders Street Station, then the very newest and latest thing.
This year, the Melbourne International Film Festival marks its sixtieth anniversary with a retrospective of short films that chronicle changes in the urban landscape, from earnest government documentaries to sharply critical personal essays.
A few minutes spent talking to some of the filmmakers showcased in the season is enough to make clear that they have little time for nostalgia. “I was absolutely horrified at Melbourne,” says the architect Peter McIntyre, who collaborated with the late Robin Boyd on the seminal architecture documentary Your House and Mine (1954). “The sprawl of Melbourne, the illogical way in which we were building.”
McIntyre, like Boyd, was a true believer in the cause of modernism, using every means at hand to fight against the decorative and the dully suburban – the same targets Boyd would attack in his savagely funny 1960 polemic The Australian Ugliness, the most famous book on Australian architecture ever written. Championing simple forms and natural light, Your House and Mine pans sarcastically across wrought-iron lace-work, mocks the “lively imagination” of the average scatterbrained Melbourne housewife, and treats the do-it-yourself building craze as an occasion for slapstick. Men topple off planks and into ditches; a woman yammering to her friend splashes paint across her husband's face.
While McIntyre and Boyd were regular filmgoers, McIntyre says they “didn't set out to make a film that would be an artistic piece in itself.” Modestly, he plays down the formal qualities of Your House and Mine – the rapid, free-associative editing, and the multiple voices on the soundtrack competing for attention as in a radio play.
Artistically the film lives on, whereas as propaganda it proved ineffective. McIntyre says that many of the worrying trends he and Boyd identified back then have only got worse – the plague of neo-Georgian houses, the urban sprawl. Often he wonders how Boyd, who died in 1971, would feel about the city of today; he might be disappointed at the slow pace of change, though he would certainly admit there have been improvements.
Gil Brealey's verdict on the Melbourne of the 1950s is gentler but just as unequivocal. “I felt sorry for it,” he says. “I felt it was sad to see a city that was so dead.”
Brealey, like McIntyre, started making films as a student at Melbourne University. Unlike McIntyre, he went on to a career in the resurgent Australian film industry, most famously as the director of Annie's Coming Out (1984). His early works now look like efforts to find the pulse of Melbourne, bring the city back to life. Late Winter to Early Spring (1957) is a quaint, wordless idyll set in Brealey's beloved Fitzroy Gardens: a small boy scampers among the houses of the Model Tudor Village, while lovers stroll under the trees.
His follow-up project was a considerably more ambitious “city symphony”. Sunday in Melbourne (1958) might be the first film to treat the city as a non-place defined by its absences – a year before On the Beach (1959) gave rise to the famous quip attributed to Ava Gardner about Melbourne as the ideal place to picture the end of the world.
Brealey says the parameters of the film were arrived partly for practical reasons – Sunday was when he and his collaborator Paul Olsen both had time off. “There were no films, there were no shops. The only thing I think that was open was the National Art Gallery, and there was a little ferry down on the river. So it was interesting to look at it all.”
Ponderous yet tongue-in-cheek, Sunday in Melbourne frames a day in the life of the city in a style that suggests an Australian equivalent to the immortal Peter Sellers sketch "Balham – Gateway to the South". “For many it has been a day of unutterable boredom,” the narrator intones, as the camera roams the empty streets in search of something – anything – that might catch its eye. It's Melbourne as an outpost of the Waste Land. “A shuttered city, with shuttered men.” At the time, Brealey says, he regretted having to shoot on Kodachrome colour film stock; he would have preferred something less vivid.
Still, the city shown here is oddly liberating in its blankness, giving citizens implicit permission to find their own sources of amusement. There are scattered signs of activity: Italians in shiny shoes celebrating outside the Exhibition Buildings, an underground jazz club patronised by a small mob of glum-faced youngsters.
Both Brealey and McIntyre stress that the city they remember from sixty years ago was vastly more “primitive” than the Melbourne of the 21st century. “I think there were only about three restaurants,” Brealey says; McIntyre recalls that in 1950, few houses had telephones. In an era when “Australian cinema” was very nearly an oxymoron, making a film at all put you on the side of progress, of the future.
For viewers today, the films in the MIFF retrospective are valuable partly as documentary record. Yet even in the government-sponsored propaganda pieces there are elements of fantasy and wistful thinking, as if the filmmakers were recording not only the real Melbourne but also an imaginary city coloured by their hopes and fears.
Many betray an anxiety about the class divisions built into the geography of the city. Planning for Melbourne's Future (1954) congratulates the city fathers on the grid plan for the central business district, while warning of difficulties faced by families in the newly built, inadequately resourced outer suburbs – housewives making their way to the shops over sodden fields, ragged children playing in the street.
Shot in black-and-white with a Mozart soundtrack, The Cleaners (1969) finds genteel poetry in the daily battle against dirt and decay, waged by a humble army of largely invisible workers. It's an apolitical vision echoed in The Melbourne Concert Hall (1982) with its high-minded hope that Melburnians from all walks of life – architects, builders, musicians – might unite around a common goal.
Life in Australia – Melbourne (1966) is the city symphony as tourist brochure, similarly offering something for everyone. At the close of an average day, a young couple stop off at a church to discuss their impending nuptials, then pause at the window of a furniture store to admire an orange lounge suite; they end the evening at a suburban nightclub, boogying to surf rock on reel-to-reel tape.
The most cringeworthy film on the MIFF program is undoubtedly The City Speaks (1965) an ode to the Housing Commission high-rise blocks that were erected throughout inner Melbourne during the 1960s as a solution to the blight of the slums. Done up in “laboratory-developed paint” with high mould resistance, the flats are trumpeted as harbingers of a better tomorrow: “It will be a proud moment in our history when the city speaks with one voice.”
In taking their cameras onto the streets of Melbourne, most of these filmmakers set out to convey a “message” more or less determined in advance. The exception is Dunkley-Smith's Flinders Street (1980), which very simply records cars, trams and pedestrians moving past one another, near the Swanston St entrance to the station.
Influenced by the “structural film” movement of the 1970s, Dunkley-Smith had no political barrow to push and certainly no urban planning agenda. Having started making films in London earlier in the 1970s, he didn't find much difference between one setting and another: what attracted him, he says, was simply the “dynamism” of any busy urban area.
While his multi-screen “cityscapes” may not have been originally intended as documentaries, he acknowledges that they've come to serve that function over time. If they chart moment-by-moment patterns of flux and stasis, they also let us see – on a different temporal level – what has changed in the city and what has stayed put. Indeed, Dunkley-Smith has toyed with the idea of making new films or videos in the same locations. “But in a way the thought of doing it is sufficient for me.”
Having abandoned cinema shortly after completing Flinders Street, he now says that he's entirely retired from the visual arts. These days, he goes in for cycling: another, more direct way to appreciate the city, and the state of being in transit.
