Remembering JACK HIBBERD - John Timlin recalls the life of his long time friend - Doctor, Poet, Novelist, Playwright and Carlton Supporter

Editor's Note: Jack Hibberd died in November. This tribute was delivered by his friend and agent John Timlin at Jack's funeral and, with updates and revisions, at the memorial service for Jack held at La Mama on 19 December.

Jack Hibberd & Dimboola  - a tribute 

I first met Jack in, would you believe, a pub near the university called the Mayfair. It was a student mecca but also a watering hole for the inimitable down and outs who frequented Carlton like Bill the Slaught (aka Bill Collins) who claimed to have deflowered Germaine Greer.  His sidekick, Danny Kramer, was a sometime lethal streetfighter. He maintained a glowering presence on a street bench near the Albion Hotel from whose patrons he would cadge money for booze. 

I was introduced to Jack by academic, Dinny O’Hearn, who knew that Laurie Clancy and I planned a new journal called The Melbourne Partisan.  I had few literary credentials except for writing the vaguely satirical Student Worker Alliance column for Farrago which Laurie edited. 

But there were other more useful qualifications.  I was employed testing scales on the waterfront for the Customs Department and my security clearance enabled me to acquire banned books from a few wharfie collaborators for review in Farrago.   

I was finally stopped in my tracks when Customs officials searched my ute and confiscated the then banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Capricorn, Portnoy’s Complaint and, amazingly, my birthday present edition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.  I particularly objected to that confiscation and pointed to the Cambridge University colophon on the cover.  “Mate”, the officer said almost conspiratorially, “We know you can’t tell a book by its cover.”    I guessed they were right about that but I kept pursuing return of the books. Three months later the Tractatus arrived accompanied by a letter saying that the other books would be retained as evidence of a possible offence against the Commonwealth.

Anyway, Jack gave us a sheaf of his latest poetry and Laurie said later he was knocked out by the sophistication and intricacy of his language given that his undergraduate degree had been medicine.  We became regulars at the Mayfair spending some time drinking and a fair bit thinking, particularly about football.  

Jack’s job in Kensington as a locum for Dr. Jagoda enabled regular visits to my factory, somewhat grandiosely titled International Weighing but it did have a billiard table for our diversion. By then, his career as a playwright was well under way and I recall seeing White With Wire Wheels at Melbourne University and meeting his collaborators Graham Blundell, Kerry Dwyer and David Kendall. 

Betty Burstall had started La Mama in Carlton and originally used this old shirt factory for dinners with the arts community. She had seen La Mama In New York and decided to convert the space to a theatre.  The first production was Jack’s Three Old Friends and he had three old friends playing and directing, Graham Blundell, David Kendall and Bruce Knappett,

Of course, Dimboola is probably Jack’s best-known play and derived partly from his reading of a Chekhov play, The Wedding about a wedding reception in which the guests become active participants in the event.  Jack wrote Dimboola  in Ireland in1969 and posted the script from London to Graham Blundell in two separate envelopes.  At that time, Graham was also working with ideas of audience involvement. This script was quite fortuitous. He premiered Dimboola at La Mama in 1969 treating the audience, including many Carlton footballers, as guests at a real wedding.    

 Jack persuaded me in that year to lease and go guarantor for the rent of a much larger venue, the Pram Factory in Drummond Street, Carlton. Both he and Graham Blundell had been rejected by the Trustee Company administering the property as poor credit risks.  It was hard to see how a doctor could be a worse credit risk than an itinerant company director. I suppose it was poetic justice three years later when the CEO of that Trustee Company was jailed for embezzling millions of dollars from depositors.

Evelyn Krape, Bruce Spence, APG Production of
Dimboola

The APG’s professional production of Dimboola directed by David Williamson was filmed on 16mm by Ross Dimsey and is probably the best record of an entire Pram Factory production. Everybody here should have a look at that film if only to see Evelyn’s hilarious tap dance routine to the music of Animal Crackers in my Soup.    All the performances were memorable and very funny and often punctuated by Bruce Spence as Morry the bridegroom saying a variety of ‘No worries” to every disaster threatening the ceremony.

The play took off after that and was produced in Melbourne at Eddie and Jack Kornhauser’s Chevron Hotel and then at the Bonaparte Theatre Restaurant in Sydney’s King’s Cross   I negotiated the terms of the contract with a very sharply dressed John Hartigan and his offsider, Jimmy Ryan whose slightly twisted left arm was left over from his reputedly victorious confrontations with Sydney standover men. 

The play was directed by the brilliant Brian Syron, an indigenous graduate of the New York Stella Adler school and co-founder of the Australian Playwrights’ Conference.  He had the imagination, prestige and stamina to keep the show running continuously for nearly two and half years.  Every 3 months or so the royalties would go into serious arrears, and I would threaten legal action to remove the performing rights.  A cheque would arrive usually shaved by some hundreds and off we would go again.  

Meanwhile the show had attracted international interest, and we licensed a London production at the Aer Lingus reception rooms.  The producers had agreed not to alter the script without the writer’s permission.  The first inkling we had of gross rewrites was that a friend said it featured a lot of UK slang and was being presented as a version of the Carry-On movies loaded with ‘cor blimeys’.  Jack saw red about this and I flew to London to close it down and seek damages.  The threat of an injunction was enough, and it petered out a few weeks later though we were financially well ahead.

By this time a feature film was mooted and the show was attracting investor interest. We were invited to attend a meeting at one of those ancient Collins Street city legal firms named not unlike Barry Oakley’s play Scanlan in which Blaxland, Lawson & Wentworth are described as a firm of solicitors.  ‘This is the big time I said to Jack.  Better smarten up your bag of fruit for the meeting.”  

To say Jack dressed flamboyantly for that meeting would be gross understatement.  From memory, he wore an orange jacket covering something like a Beatles T-Shirt, a pair of vermillion flares and carried a brief case full of his poetry and plays. All topped by a bright blue Beanie We were sent to the heavily marbled 31^st. floor to await the presence of our legal luminary who dispatched a secretary to usher us in.  She had meanwhile done a forensic on my colourful companion, offered a cup of tea and asked when we could expect Doctor Hibberd.

Eventually we were ushered into the presence and shown graphs of currency movements and tax rates in various jurisdictions.  He unfolded a plan whereby I as the literary agent would grant performance rights to a company in Amsterdam who would transfer funds to the non-taxable Netherlands Antilles and then to Hong Kong where we could collect the proceeds tax free from a blind trust.   Seemed incredibly complicated so I asked what this arrangement would cost.  Nearly nothing he said compared to the tax we would otherwise have to pay but he estimated we would up for $2000.00 to cover his costs of travelling to Sydney to settle the deal with his Dutch counterpart’s solicitor.  He offered to round up a set of documents in the next office and off he went.  

Jack had not exactly warmed to the proposed shenanigans and, as the lawyer left, Jack, quick as a flash, said, “He’s been taking heaps of notes.  Have a geek at his diary.” I leant over and reading backwards could see immediately we were not the only party being billed for the Sydney trip and the other three clients were also to be slugged two grand each.  We made a polite exit.

There were seemingly genuine inquiries from Europe and the US and soon there were also pirated productions in Zurich, Munich and Dresden all under the banner of Werner Schmidt who denied any debt to Dimboola although there were a few reviews suggesting an antipodean origin.  Another surfaced in America but always the argument was that they were plays about weddings and that’s not copyright.

Back in Australia we were experiencing a more than usual delay in payment of royalties, so I decided to front Hartigan and Ryan and flew to Sydney.  Surprise, surprise they were no longer around and the cast had been given a week’s notice.  I met with our solicitor who said they had left town and were now holed up in Bali, the proud owners of a couple of bars.

However, we did have a shaky guarantee of performance by the owners of the building who were ostensibly leasing it to the producers.  Our Pram Factory solicitor, Phil Molan, had moved to Sydney and thought we should issue summonses for the $4000 we were owed.  The papers had to be served in person on the two brothers who owned the building and Phil said his professional process servers could not get near them. He thought they were living in the Mandarin Club.  Phil, ever the joker, suggested I sign in to the Club using my Chinese name, Lin Tim, instead of the Irish original.  I wasn’t happy with this and rang my showbiz friend Leon to seek his advice. It was succinct:  If you go into the Mandarin with legal documents, you’ll be used as shark bait by the morning.

So, we never received our $4000 but a few years later the two brothers were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment after their toy importing business was proven to have a white substance in many of their offerings.  Their mother was also found guilty of conspiracy and, when sentenced to 3 years jail, immediately dropped dead in the dock. Dimboola had been used as a money laundering front by the family.

I still get requests for the rights to perform Dimboola and over 1.4 million people have seen the play in Australia.  Though I have only talked today about Dimboola, there were many other adventures.  I have just finished revising and updating his website which shows the depth and breadth of Jack’s achievement across the whole spectrum of the arts.

Jack has enriched my life through his genius and the warmth of our friendship.  I went to see him at Boorangarra to make sure the TV was set up properly to watch the Carlton game. I reminded Jack we had attended the 1970 Grand Final which Carlton won miraculously and changed the game forever. It was so crowded we had to stand on our beer cans to see action.  I said “Do you remember Jesaulenko’s mark fifty metres from us?” When he heard the name “Jesaulenko” his face lit up and he smiled and signalled one bright moment  had shone through his dementia.

On November 5^th. we have Guy Fawkes Day, the American election and the Melbourne Cup.  This will be the first Tuesday in 50 years that Jack won’t be ringing me to put his $50 bet on the Melbourne Cup.

Valė Jack

John Charles Hibberd    1940 - 2024

Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - Phases in East Central Europe 1949-80. 6 (38) Hungary Part 2 : Jancsó “Hungary's greatest film-maker'

Miklos Jancsó

Although there was no “Hungarian school” of filmmaking there was a common commitment taken up initially in a rigorously singular way by Miklos Jancsó (1921-2014), to a more grounded portrayal especially of the violence, always a part of Hungarian history.  Jancsó, who had been making mainly short films since the early 50s, later at the Bela Balázs Studio established as a centre for low budget experimentation. He was the first to benefit from the new freer cinema policy from 1963. The real beginning of Jancsó’s film career was his second feature Oldás és kötés / Cantata (1963) centred on a young doctor attempting to reestablish a relationship with his peasant father “told of the general influence of what was happening in 60s European cinema – Bergman, Wajda, Godard - but in a de-dramatised form inspired by Antonioni, specifically for Jancsó, by La Notte.  His  “transition from the private to the panoramic, from psychology to history,” can be traced in Igy jottem / My Way Home (1964), the semi-autobiograhical story of a strange friendship between a young Hungarian prisoner and his Russian guard in the last months of the war, the beginning of Janscó's collaboration with writer Gyula Hernádi.  In the 'New Hungarian Quarterly' (Winter 1968 issue) Gyula Maar places My Way Home at the crossroads of Janscó's career “balancing one foot on individual psychology and the other in history; The Round-up is virtually in its entirety about history.” 

Cantata

Jancsó's films marked the new Hungarian cinema's break with the literary tradition of the older generation of director : that adaptation from a classical novel was a necessary requirement for a great film. Hungarian literary historian, Lóránt Czigány, related that Janscó  admitted to toying with such literary adaptation when planning The Round-up, the first fully realised “Jancsó film,” instead deciding to stick with his scriptwriter, Hernádi, whose role in the development of Jancsó's cinema, by general agreement, was immeasurable..                                                                                                                                                                         

The Round-up

In Szegén,ylegények/ The Round-up (1965) Jancsó takes up a situation of imprisonment and interrogation, confining and claustrophobic on the open Hungarian plain 20 years after the Kossuth revolution of 1848 which was crushed with the aid of the Russian army. In conflict is the 'oppressor' -   -agents of the Austro-Hungarian Empire - and the 'oppressed' - clusters of former revolutionaries including the legendary hero of the struggle for freedom, Sandor Rozsa, and peasant rebels many reduced to banditry carrying the epithet of “the hopeless ones” (the approximate translation of the Hungarian title of the film).  Destruction of solidarity between the prisoners is not by the systematic use of physical torture (although violence is used} but drawn-out destruction of trust setting the former revolutionaries against the peasants. The characters representing violence are faceless in releasing a chain of action and reaction in a realignment by a method that is both reductive and additive: effect without cause, the dismissal of dialogue and psychologising, character conflict and emotion-inducing close-ups, no sudden edits, a lack of resolution.  A controlling, frequently moving camera is distanced from the action in sustained 'what happens next' tension, in composed choreographed patterns of figures in the sparse landscape.

The Red and the White

What becomes apparent in The Round-up is a formal strategy to expose the inner mechanism of oppression - the 'how' rather than the 'why' - drawing on situations in modern Hungarian history.  Csillagosok katonák / The Red and the White(1967) although filmed largely in long shot, is less subtle and more schematic in the deployment of long takes in patterning in Tamas Soniló's “crystal clear” images of the anti-heroic conflict between the detachments of “Reds” and “Whites” in the Russian civil war in 1919 as power shifts back and forth between the opposing sides in the 'dance of death', Janscó's form becoming even more concise. The fact that the “Reds” happen to be Hungarian irregulars speaking Hungarian while  the “Whites” speak Russian in this Hungarian-Russian co-production, meant that it was never screened in Russia (Liehm 395).  “Janscó invites us to study the mechanisms of power almost abstractly (as suggested by the Stendhalian ring of the title), with a cold eroticism that may glancingly suggest some of the subsequent work of Stanley Kubrick. But this shouldn't mislead one into concluding that Janscó is in any way detached from either politics or emotions” (Jonathan Rosenbaum '1001 Films You Must See..., 2003 ed. 482).  

Silence and Cry

In the period after the crushing of the 1919 Hungarian revolution, in Csend és kiáltás / Silence and Cry (1968), the aftermath from the conflict is set within the walls of a single home where one of the pursued finds refuge setting off a desperate struggle for survival as the family's world gradually disintegrates. “As in The Round-up, the chief mechanism of oppression is treachery; in Silence and Cry, it is compounded by the complicity of a demoralised peasantry“ (Kuttna), filmed with almost constant camera movement. The strong impression of formal control in the framing of shots in the enclosed space is maintained more than in the adjoining films (Petrie 86). Petrie describes how in the The Round-up Janscó begins to use the moving camera in an almost dialectical way i.e. setting up conflicts and oppositions, and then resolving them within the context of the one shot. In Silence and Cry he extends the process further using the closed, restricted environment from which none of the oppressed can escape, greatly increasing the length of the shots with the camera continually circling accompanying the oppressors as they prowl around the victims assessing their vulnerability, the moving camera altering spatial relationships visually mirroring the ambiguity of their emotional patterns (93-4)

The Confrontation

By way of contrast in Fenyes szelek / The Confrontation (1968) set in Hungary in 1947, the movement of the of the camera reaches a peak of stylisation in long takes perfectly in union with the movement  of the characters conceived as a ballet,” almost “a musical,” with a group of young Hungarian Communists confronting those who do not share their faith. Colour is used here by Janscó for the first time as “another symbolic language, refined and pared down to express exactly what [Janscó] wants to say” (Petrie 88). The integration of songs, music and dancing from a variety of sources in the structure of the film – all have revolutionary, anti-clerical, or socialist connotations - is adopted by Janscó in following films. They are used both as a means of expressing and establishing connotations and are a means of expressing and establishing solidarity, an indication of defiance and challenge to opponents” (ibid 88). In the Confrontation, Jancsó brings his founding concept to its logical conclusion: “affirming that power can only be used for its own ends, to maintain itself” (Liehm 395), posing the question : 'what is the role of the individual in history' ?  “More than anything else, such a confrontation involves hatred. Intolerance, and the quest for power. Parallel conflicts arise within the revolutionary group itself” (Liehm 396). The revolution is shown for the first time devouring its own children” (ibid). Sirokkó / Winter Wind (1969) continues Jancsó's increasingly austere stylisation of the moral deterioration taking place in the thirties within a group of Croatian nationalists being trained on the Hungarian-Yugoslav border to assassinate King Alexander of Yugoslavia. “Here once again, another reality emerged, in parallel with the reality of the story itself, to make another metaphorical point about the basic methods of a totalitarian society. Relationships between individuals are characterised by aggressiveness - threats, blackmail, denunciation -  with no room left for trust. And again one who is to be liquidated could just as easily be a false hero or a false traitor.” (ibid).

Agnus Dei

Dina Iodonova raises the question of the “unabashed formalism” of Jancsó’s distinctive film style, formalism being “one of the named offences that state socialist censorship was supposed to harness.” By the end of the 1960s the director’s preoccupation with form appeared to have become so pervasive that critics like [Graham] Petrie have questioned “whether his scrupulously worked out compositions exist largely for their own sake, or whether they contribute to be fused with the political and humanistic concerns the director is ultimately known for ?” (70).  Acceptance of this mode of filmmaking, with its focus on group behaviour rather than individualisation, combined with Janscó’s choosing to give priority to the geometry of his screen compositions, would seem to effectively undermine any sustained emotional approach to historical material in an assertion of a more distanced view of the past. David Paul suggests “the time settings are inter-changeable” between the historical events in Hungary’s difficult modern history. Jancsó’s shift to an allegorical approach continued “to build in subtle ways on his early aesthetics while further expressing insistent concerns with questions of power, oppression, and the morality of revolution” (182).

Assuming “a ritualistic and enigmatic quality”Égi bárány / Agnus Dei (1971) described by Roy Armes as Jansco's most impenetrable film to this time, “unlike his others demanding a knowledge of Hungarian history” (149). A series of clashes takes place on the Hungarian Plain in 1919 between brave but motley and ill-equipped revolutionary units of the Left and the followers of a fanatical religious leader in alliance with the forces of the oligarchy, ending in the triumph of the latter.  In Még kér a nép / Red Psalm (1972) “Jancsó created a stratified structure with an even more further-reaching conception than ever before, choreographing the uprising of landless Hungarian agricultural workers, c1900, “as much an allegory about Hungary’s timeless geopolitical dilemma” (Paul 182).  Here Janscó “perfected a method of crystallising political and personal tensions and conflicts, and of suggesting complex and ambiguous motives and emotions within a cluster of images united by a constantly moving camera ” (Petrie 96). As Petrie further points out, “Red Psalm takes the process a stage further by pushing the images more clearly toward symbolism : Janscó's method is by now the antithesis of the classical Hollywood style of invisible camerawork, editing and music” - classical cinema's illusion of unmediated reality. Janscó's stylistic devices cannot be ignored; they call attention to themselves requiring active attention rather than passive absorption (ibid). “With Red Psalm Janscó has made a film that translates abstract ideas into complex but clearly comprehensible images […] Janscó's style here is totally integrated into the nature of the material : in a very real sense, the form itself is the narrative” (ibid 100).

Red Psalm

All Janscó's historical films were researched by Gyula Harnadi.  Red Psalm draws on historical studies by Dezso Nagy who stressed the importance of music and song in 19th century insurrections. The film is structured around this music (cantatas, psalms and popular folklore). “Red Psalm was Jancsó's least ambiguous statement of socialist faith and his most widely praised film since The Round-up […] As Jansco's films became more stylised, moving from epic story-telling to choreographed ritual, his films became more poetic” (Kuttna). His aim, Kuttna suggests, surveying his career up to the end of the 70s (when he had completed 18 of more than 30 features from 1958 to 2010), “remained to fuse political ideas with emotionally meaningful forms of myth, fable and ritual,” is not without irony. Given their increasing ambiguity which is recognised as a constituent element of poetry, the effect of Janscó's films, working on several levels at once, can seem contradictory.

Mari Kuttna describes a Janscó film as “an analysis of oppression, revolution, counter revolution and even the contentious idea of permanent revolution.” While acknowledging these cannot be separated “their juxtaposition causes dramatic conflict in historic situations which trigger off each film. Oppression is frequently shown as the outcome of counter revolution” (76). David Bordwell acknowledged  Jancsó's work in the sixties as “constituting a steady critique of centralised power within actually existing  socialism” ( 'Narration in the Fiction Film ' 272).

Elektreia

In his reinvention of the Elektra myth as a fable of permanent revolution in Szerelmem Elektra / Elektreia (1975) told in 12 shots, Janscó moves even more fully into choreographed ritual than in Red Psalm, the rhapsody of song and dance replacing conventional dramaturgy leaving Janscó free to explore the dialectical cross-currents of his subject while operating “totally within the structure of symbolic and visual motifs established in previous films.'  Doing so, as Petrie notes, “becomes one of the most successful renditions of the of the spirit of Greek myth in modern times,” (100).  “Grounding the political fable in the story of Elektra and Orestes' revenge on their father's murderer, Aegisthus, gives it an implicit psychoanalytical dimension of a kind new in Janscó's work” (Tony Rayns 'Time Out'). Several of the 12 shots “demonstrate particularly well Janscó's ability to create a world distanced from us by the elaborate formality with which it is organised and filmed, and yet shockingly close to the immediacy and barbarity of the emotions represented” ( Petrie 101).

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On film title changes from the original Hungarian to English for international release. 

John Edmond in a review of The Confrontation in 'Senses of Cinema' 76 notes the translation change from “The Hopeless Ones” to The Round-Up which is noted above. The original title for The Confrontation,  “Fenyes szelk,” translates as “Sparkling Winds” which is a lyric for one of the folk songs in the film. The radical change is also made for The Red and the White from “Csillagoso katonak” translating as “Star Spangled Soldiers” also a folk lyric. Edmond wonders how much the severe English titles used have shaped the perception of Jansco's career. He suggests that this might be viewed as “a form of  'containment'  given the attention paid to the “sharp modernist films of the Sixties rather than the gloriously decadent works that followed [circulating] as VHS ghost dubs waiting to be confronted.”

 

Readers are also referred to a review by Hamish Ford of The Round-Up in the same issue of Senses of Cinema.

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David Paul “Hungary:The Magyar on the Bridge” essay in Post New Wave Cinema  D. Goulding ed.   

Mira & Antonin Liehm  The Most Important Art  East European Film After 1945  1977.   

Dina Iordanova  Cinema of the Other Europe  2003.   

David Robinson “Quite Apart from Miklos Jansco...Some Notes on the New Hungarian Cinema” Sight and Sound Spring 1970;  “Hungary Revisited”  ibid Autumn 1971.  

Graham Petrie History Must Answer to Man: The Contemporary Hungarian Cinema 1978.  

Marek Hendrykowski  “Changing States in East Central Europe”  Oxford History of World Cinema  ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith 1996.  

Mari Kuttna “Miklos  Jancsó – Hungarian Rhapsodies”  Movies of the Sixties  ed. Ann Lloyd  1983.  

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

 

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

 

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

 

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke  

Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms

Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE

Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry

Part 6(7) Altman

6(8) Great Britain - Joseph Losey, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Barney Platts-Mills

6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group

6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent

6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard

6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel

6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice

6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson 

6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati

 6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer

6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti

6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One

6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism

6(20) - Rossellini in Australia

6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni

6 (22) - Italy - Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi

6 (23) - Italy - Pasolini, Rosi

6 (24) - Interregnum - Director/Auteur/Autoren

6 (25) West Germany

6 (26) - Alexander Kluge Part One

6 (27) - Alexander Kluge Part Two

6 (28) - The Young German Cinema: Reitz, Schlondorff, von Trotta

6(29 ) West German Cinema - Fassbinder

6 (30) West German Cinema - Straub & Huillet

6(31) - New Spanish Cinema

6 (32) - Bunuel in the 60s

6 (33) Nordic Cinemas - Bergman and Widerberg

6 (34) - Scandinavia - Sjoman, Zetterling, Troell

6 (35) - East Germany - Konrad Wolf, Frank Beyer

6 (36) - East Central Europe - Poland

6(37) - East Central Europe - Hungary Part One

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.

Noel Bjorndahl's Cinephilia on Display - A tribute by Barrett Hodsdon and Links to some of his key pieces an

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

Mitchell Leisen

Mitchell Leisen 

Anthony Mann 

Jean Gabin 

Jerry Lewis 

Deanna Durbin

Alice Faye and Fox Musicals

Jacques Tourneur

Rio Bravo 

Alfred Hitchcock 

Sam Wood and King's Row