Vale Nigel Buesst - Independent Forever

I'm not the first to publish some remarks about the passing of Nigel Buesst. For an extensive report on a long friendship I recommend the  heartfelt tribute published by Peter Tammer on his blog Friends of the Armchair Traveller. 

Nigel's death is another reminder of that time now long ago when a few pioneers just went out and made movies. Nigel; chronicled the age himself in his documentary cum memoir Carlton + Godard = Cinema.  There you can find sympathetic and insightful reportage on the activity in the 50s and 60s of the likes of Giorgio Mangiamele, Brian Davies, Peter Elliott and Buesst himself among others.

By my count these days there are hundreds of people stashed away in Federal and State Government film offices with the power to dole out money or rebates to make movies, to decide which movies are made, which film-makers are supported and most importantly, ensure that proper procedures are followed in the writing, preparation, drafting, redrafting, re-redrafting, casting and more. 

When Nigel started making movies in the sixties there were no people who had such responsibilities. There is now also a tax law that allows investors to gather quite a rich reward and return for any money they toss at a film project. So now we make a lot of movies, most of them still destined to remain almost invisible. Which is ironic in a way because back in the day of making films with your own money about the only places that regularly showed films like Nigel’s were the tiny theatrettes of the Film Co-ops and the annual binge at the city's big film festival.

Nigel started making films in 1963 with his terrific short Fun Radio. From then through the The Twentieth (1966), The Rise and Fall of Squizzy Taylor (1969), Bonjour Balwyn (1970) and Dead Easy (1970) he did them all from his own resources using his own camera and no doubt paying the inflated (tariff protected) price for film stock. In 1973 he made Come Out Fighting with some finance from the Experimental Film Fund.

I was never close enough to Nigel to sit down and talk to him about the future of an Australian film industry nor about what it was that was the driving force in his mind to make movies where no one got paid, the films were hardly ever shown and the biggest payday was to win a prize at the Sydney or Melbourne Film Festivals. 

Those days were about labouring for love, for the sheer enjoyment of making a movie, getting the team together again. People wanted to be on board and usually accepted when Nigel asked. The mark of someone people admired whom people went out of their way to help.

Vale…a life in film well lived.