Noel Bjorndahl (above with daughter Emma), who recently died, was one of Australia's great cinephiles, a walking encyclopaedia of film history and a man who devoted his life to watching, studying and writing about film. Way back in 2026 and 2017 I published a series of short essays written by Noel devoted to some of his favourite films and directors. It was heavily Hollywood oriented but that was by no means the extent of Noel's cinephilia.
Below are some links to just some of the posts. Just click on each name. If you want to read more just put "Bjorndahl" into the search engine box next to the orange B at the top left of any post.
Meanwhile Noel's long time friend Barrett Hodsdon has sent in this tribute:
NOEL BJORNDAHL EPITAPH
A PASSIONATE CINEPHILE FOR THE AGES
Noel had a long history of devotion to cinephilia, from his youth as a 1950s Saturday matinee kid (attending movies with his father) to developing a serious passion for the cinema and his engagement with Hollywood film history for his whole life.
Although his aesthetic tastes ranged far and wide, he retained the virtues of movie fandom. From the vibrancy of Doris Day to the vulnerability of Natalie Wood, from a lithe Cary Grant to the imperturbable Randolph Scott, and the implacable John Wayne, Noel immersed himself in the aura of screen performance.
Noel combined an unending enthusiasm for cinema that merged with many of his connotative values – stardom, auteur/director, genre refinement, dramaturgical power, stylistic enhancement, and biographical spin-offs. He was always eager to go deeper into Hollywood history in an era when film studies exploded on all fronts. This was transmitted through Noel’s infectious personality and his extrovert energy as a conduit for the impact and significance of cinema.
Noel’s energy and enthusiasm included his involvement and activity through the Queensland University Film Society, The Brisbane Cinema Group and as a local committee member of the National Film Theatre (NFTA) during the 1970s. Through his university days and beyond, Noel initiated one of the first Alfred Hitchcock retrospectives in Australia in 1966, and thence a Violence and Cinema season in 1968. Notably, but long forgotten, Noel proposed one of the first Douglas Sirk retrospectives in the world before the vogue for Sirk scholarship took off in the 1970s. This season occurred in Brisbane in August 1970, with the screening of 10 35MM prints of Sirk’s Universal features, practically all in pristine condition.
During the 1960s, Noel travelled back and forth between Brisbane and Sydney where he interacted with Sydney cinephiles through his association with Sydney University Film Group (SUFG) members, and contributed to programming and critical notes with his good friend Roger McNiven (who later went to New York and was extremely active in a frenzied film scene as scholar, programmer, film magazine contributor and exhibitor.
Noel was influenced by the auteurist critical movement, pushed along by my brother and myself through SUFG in the last half of the 1960s. This was a global critical trend. It was part of a wholesale critical revaluation of Classic American Cinema and the process of creative attribution. For Noel auteur criticism both added to and intensified his movie culture passions.
I personally was extremely appreciative of his constant interest and support in my own more formal work on film culture and aesthetics. We both displayed a concern for the cross-over and limited impact of cinephile knowledge as Australia charged ahead with its film industry development, often at the expense of the emerging depth of local film culture and the many people who devoted untold time and effort in this area for little reward.
From his youth, Noel was always intent on expanding his encyclopaedic film knowledge. Back in the early 1960s he had reached the final of Coles $50,000 TV quiz as a competitor on movie questions.
The passing of Noel has left a gap and the loss of dynamism. In particular, the 1960s was the ‘moment’ of cinephile obsession and expression, subsequently followed by the compulsive desire to collect an image bank as a systemic archival pursuit of discernment and recurring pleasure. Its nascent force is now but a distant fading memory. Today we face an over-determined digital world where the flood of imagery and its fragmented channels is relentlessly too much but not enough. The movie age and its past theatrical lures and fixations are swamped by today’s flurry of instant visuals and repetitious image machines that can barely be absorbed, ingested, or deliberated upon. The former was the source of Noel’s tireless cinephilia.
Vale Noel, after nearly 60 years of warm association and friendship your passion for cinema remains undimmed like the beam of light hitting the silver screen.
Barrett Hodsdon
January 2025
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| Mitchell Leisen |
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