This lecture was delivered on 6 October 2026 on behalf of the Friends of The National Film & Sound Archive
Creating Communities - Archiving and Curating for Social Purpose
Good evening. Thank you for having me here - and for this opportunity to contribute to this series of lectures in honour of Rod Wallace.
 |
| Andrew Pike |
The story I want to tell you tonight actually starts with my contact with Rod Wallace himself. In 1975, I was offered a two-year contract to work in the Film Division of the National Library here in Canberra. My task was to help build up what was known as their Film Study Collection - specifically films suitable for use in secondary and tertiary education, as well as among community organisations and as a service to film societies. The work I was to be involved in was funded by a grant from the Myer Foundation, and the person I was ultimately answerable to was Rod Wallace, two or three levels up from me in the hierarchy.
At that time, I considered myself lucky to get the job – and wondered how it had happened. I was nearly 30 and had academic degrees but had never held a career-building position. I was working as a casual night manager in an independent cinema – the Center Cinema in Canberra – to support me while I was working unpaid on the completion of the book that I was co-authoring with Ross Cooper on Australian feature film history. So I was very glad of the job, and my involvement in film societies gave me confidence in what I was being asked to do. A decade earlier, at 20, I’d joined the committee of Canberra’s main film society known as the Canberra Film Centre, and had taken on the task of Assistant Secretary, helping with the nuts and bolts of booking films and writing program notes for the newsletter, and had gone on from there to co-found the ANU Film Group. So I knew how to talk with distributors and I was already researching and writing a lot about cinema history.
One of my strongest memories of working at the Film Division is of meeting Rod Wallace. He was an excellent manager, made me feel confident and gave me a pretty free hand in what I was required to do. In our conversations he occasionally mentioned John Grierson and obviously had great respect for the man. I had heard the name of Grierson but at that time knew little about him. Having an understanding of Grierson came much later for me.
At the time, I was struck by the way that many of the Film Division staff, working in a row of cubicles on either side of mine, seemed wonderfully motivated and energetic and enthusiastic about the work they were doing: Sue Terry handled all of my recommended acquisitions, Ray Edmondson was there, Mike Lynskey and Karen Foley were among others who seemed very engaged in their work.
No-one seemed bored or cranky or frustrated, and there was a strong sense of collaboration. And they all had respect for Rod Wallace.
I happily plunged in to develop plans to spend the Myer funds on documentaries and feature films that were important in film history, both Australian and in world cinema, and as the 16mm film prints arrived, I wrote program notes for the publication in newsletters and catalogue brochures. Jerzy Toeplitz, who was then the Director of the new Australian Film and Television School in Sydney, sent me a long list of European documentaries that he felt should be acquired, and that opened a whole new realm for me to explore. I was engaged in something that I felt was really worthwhile – building a collection that would service institutional and community education, and writing background histories that would help the users to get the best value out of the hundreds of films we were acquiring.
Little did I know then, and in fact it took me decades to understand, I was actually engaged in work that derived directly from the social philosophy of John Grierson, the charismatic Scottish film theorist. Grierson had visited Australia in 1940 and had spoken with politicians including Menzies, then in his first term as Prime Minister, and senior public servants including Harold White who was then the Parliamentary Librarian. Grierson was a passionate advocate for structures and funding precisely for what Rod Wallace and the Film Division later engaged in. It was work with a defined purpose, a social purpose, to provide resources for a wide audience to see and to benefit from.
 |
| John Grierson |
Grierson had a couple of credits as a documentary filmmaker but he was clearly at his most powerful when he was dealing with senior bureaucrats and politicians, inspiring them to work with the medium of films, including documentaries, to make them readily available to a broad community for the national good.
To take us into Grierson’s world, I’d like to let him do some of the talking, so we’ll watch this first short clip taken from a Canadian documentary about him.
Grierson’s ideas focussed mainly on the creation of documentary films that would deal with social realities and the common people, talk about their concerns and enable them to feel part of a wider, inclusive, national community. Especially in Britain in the 1930s, with the Depression and then the War, a sense of social cohesion and community were seen as priorities to keep everyone working together for the common good and for the coming war effort.
Grierson personally led documentary production units in the 1930s first with Britain’s Empire Marketing Board and then with the General Post Office Film Unit - and then handed over to other appointees to continue his work during the war itself and in the years of post-war reconstruction.
For his purpose, to achieve his vision, Grierson gathered around him people who could feel committed to what he argued was an urgent national need. He found many of these filmmakers among British upper-class men (and a few women) of left-wing persuasion who were rebelling against the structures of the class system, and were wanting to recognise the value of everyone at all social levels – an all-encompassing social inclusivity that could contribute constructively to Britain and to the wider Commonwealth.
So the Documentary Movement, as it became known, progressed through the 1930s, and many films were made which were inspired by this very conscious social purpose – early in the decade films like SHIPYARD by Paul Rotha and CHILDREN AT SCHOOL by Basil Wright (both of these filmmakers becoming familiar names to film buffs like me), and one of the most pivotal breakthroughs, a film called HOUSING PROBLEMS which actually allowed people living in unhygienic, unsafe slum housing to speak directly to audiences, at that time a radical achievement in film technology. Grierson’s sister Ruby Grierson was an important co-creator of HOUSING PROBLEMS but tragically her own career in film was cut short when she was killed during the early years of the war.
And now one more clip from the Canadian documentary about Grierson which will give you a sense of the urgency and radicalism of what the realist documentaries were striving to achieve.
Grierson left England for Canada in the late 1930s where he became a key figure in setting up of the National Film Board of Canada, which he personally ran for nearly a decade, constantly expanding its scope. And it’s still a strong force today in Canadian culture.
With Grierson away in Canada, leadership of the Documentary movement in the UK fell to Alberto Cavalcanti, a Brazilian-born filmmaker who had been a prominent figure in the artistic avant-garde in France in the 1920s. Under Cavalcanti, Grierson’s social philosophy remained intact as the guiding principle but there was greater experimentation in how best to express the social purpose. Many more well-known films emerged, including the work of Humphrey Jennings, and the classic NIGHT MAIL for which the poet W.H. Auden wrote a verse commentary, and Benjamin Britten composed an avant-garde score.
During the war, documentaries continued to be made, including many great films like LONDON CAN TAKE IT, which was nominated for an Oscar, and even more radically, experimental animated films by Len Lye and Lotte Reiniger, and feature-length films like TARGET FOR TONIGHT directed by Harry Watt, and the extraordinary WESTERN APPROACHES directed by one of Harry Watt’s colleagues, Pat Jackson. These dramatic films used a blend of documentary footage with meticulous re-creations both in studios and in open-air locations, usually with non-professional or non-celebrity actors – consciously aiming for an expansion of documentary language.
Years later, some academics were to criticise Grierson and the films from the Documentary realist Movement for romanticising the working class, and for being highbrow, patronising, and so on, but rather than get involved in that, what I’d like to do is to put the films aside for now and consider the process by which they reached the public. This is another vast dimension to the story which doesn’t get discussed very often, if at all, and it is what I’m wanting really to focus on this evening. It is the infrastructure with which Grierson and his followers set up to take the films to the nation that became a central focus of the work that Rod Wallace was deeply committed to and it is where I came into contact myself with the Grierson philosophy, although I didn’t realise that was happening at the time.
First, let’s look briefly at the process of distribution in Britain and see how it worked in the 1930s and the war years.
To take their films to the public, Grierson and his successors fed some of the films into the British cinema chains to screen as program fillers before feature films. That was a great step forward, but far more important in their strategy was what became known as non-theatrical distribution, outside the realm of the cinema trade.
One of Grierson’s most important filmmakers, Basil Wright, wrote about this aspect of the work of the Documentary movement. He said that “the real secret of documentary’s success was that it found and developed a new sort of distribution system. Without Grierson’s realization that there are more seats outside the public cinemas than in them, documentary would have got nowhere.” Films were circulated through libraries, for screenings in schools, churches, village halls and factory canteens, and reached enormous audiences. To quote Basil Wright again, “The scale of non-theatrical distribution may be demonstrated by the fact that during World War Two audience figures for social documentaries outside the public cinemas rose to an estimated 18 ½ million people per year.”
To assist further with non-theatrical film circulation, a fleet of over 100 mobile projector vans toured the country, showing films wherever they could, not unlike the cinema trains that criss-crossed the Soviet Union at this time. The Deputy Head of the program, one Lady Helen Forman, recalled that when the film LISTEN TO BRITAIN was shown, and I quote her: “audiences felt it to be a distillation and magnification of their own experiences. This was especially true of factory audiences.” She remembered that at “one screening in a factory in the Midlands, 800 workers clapped and stamped their feet in approval.”
The wartime films had their own urgency to build national morale, but they also continued the pre-war goal of documentaries in the Grierson mode, of focussing on the realities of the lives of ordinary people, and the use of film to build social cohesion and improvement, even as early as 1941 fore-shadowing the challenges of national reconstruction, and the need to build a better and fairer society for all after the war. One film called WORDS AND ACTIONS even discussed the meaning of the term “democracy,” and urged audiences to take an active interest in politics, at both local and national levels.
When Grierson went to Canada, he had become a close personal friend of the Prime Minister there, Mckenzie King – a friendship which facilitated the funding of the National Film Board. But he found a very different political response in Australia when he came here in 1940. In a private letter to Basil Wright, Grierson anticipated that the response from Australian politicians and departmental heads was destined to be “sectional, selfish, political, vulgar and dishonest. ... I shall not, of course talk documentary with them, for if I guess rightly, Australia is a generation away from any such concept. I shall talk instead about war information, the cohesion of the national effort, the contribution to be made to an Empire plan of the highest authority. I shall discuss with consummate ease the need for focusing the popular mind on the national purpose, and away from what it now may consider its immediate interest.”
 |
| Stanley Hawes |
It wasn’t until after the war, in 1946, that a Grierson colleague, Stanley Hawes, arrived from Canada with the task of building up Australia’s documentary production slate in the Grierson model. Hawes had worked with Grierson in Britain in the 1930s - and had followed him to Canada to work with the National Film Board there for the wartime years. But in Australia, problems remained with the attitude of senior public servants and politicians, and Hawes had a challenging time for many years to achieve anything like the full potential for what became known as the Commonwealth Film Unit and later as Film Australia.
In contrast, the story of non-theatrical film distribution in Australia was immediately a huge success. The Parliamentary Librarian and later National Librarian of Australia, Harold White, was a Grierson enthusiast and with like-minded National Library staff including Rod Wallace, funding was found to develop the Library’s Film Division into a resource in post-war years for 16mm films suitable for community screenings. This was, as in Britain, grass-roots non-theatrical distribution, that would not otherwise have happened if the service had been reliant on the commercial film trade. And it was there in 1975 that I came in.
The National Library’s Film Division developed resources that grew exponentially, boosted by the emergence of State Film Centres and Film Libraries around the country that facilitated programming and the physical handling of 16mm prints.
I’m grateful to Ray Edmondson for sharing his research on the scope of the National Library’s Film Lending service. Ray found that Collection loans peaked at 56,000 bookings in the financial year, 1981-82. Borrowers were obliged to fill in a screening report which included the estimated number of people at each screening. For this period, the average size of audiences, in Ray’s recollection, was 42. And 42 people attending 56,000 screenings gives us, for that year alone, well over 2 million viewings of individual films from the Collection. In addition, 8 state government film libraries boosted the reach of this service.
 |
| Mary Field |
But now, we need to be aware that Grierson was one prominent activist among several, and others achieved significant results in a quieter, more hands-on approach. During Grierson’s absence in Canada during the war, another powerful force emerged in Britain that I feel we need to discuss, as it is rarely acknowledged in film histories, if at all. This is the work of a remarkable woman named Mary Field, who pioneered the creation of film content specifically for children. Field had been a documentary maker in the 30s who Grierson often wrote about with admiration and respect. But her work developed in a radically different mode through a business association she formed with J. Arthur Rank, the owner of the vast Rank Cinema chain in Britain. The work may have been Grierson-inspired but if so it was taken in an entirely new direction through Mary Field’s company known as Children’s Entertainment Films. Later, after she retired and Rank pulled out, it became the Children’s Film Foundation. The work began in Britain during the war but soon spread internationally and had an impact here in Australia in the post-war decades.
When Mary Field came on the scene, Rank had already created a chain of 400 cinema clubs for children, screening G-rated films on Saturday mornings, and it was from this foundation that Mary Field developed her ideas.
She had access to Rank personally and argued that a G-rating meant that certain elements were absent from particular films but did not necessarily mean that the films were ideal for children to view. Rank was so inspired by her argument and her vision that he provided funding himself, and Field set out to make films specifically for children under 15 years of age, films that would engage children emotionally and be beneficial to their self-esteem and moral well-being. Again, the social purpose was paramount. First showing documentaries and short dramas and serials in the clubs, the enterprise soon extended into the production of carefully crafted one-hour narrative films that club members could regard as “their own”. In fact, as the Children’s Film Clubs developed across Britain, adults were not admitted unless accompanied by a child. And many children loved that reversal of control over what families chose to see in the cinema.
At their peak, the clubs showing these films, both within the commercial cinema chains and in the community, numbered over 2,000 across the UK.
Careful research was done by Field and her staff to identify what characters, what actions, what narrative techniques would best engage young audiences. Field and her colleagues produced the films, and out-sourced the actual making to closely supervised independent production teams. And we can be very proud of the fact that the very first of Field’s feature-length films for the British Children’s Cinema Clubs was made in Australia: it was the celebrated BUSH CHRISTMAS. This film had begun as a serial for the Clubs but during production morphed into a feature-length film. It carried the hallmarks of the style that became identified with Field and her successors: the protagonists of the story are a group of children incorporating both boys and girls and often including characters who were non-Anglo in origin, and often with disabilities. It was a basic inclusiveness that may look inadequate by today’s standards, but in the 1940s, it was well ahead of mainstream commercial cinema. Parents were stock figures in these films – providers of food, transport and moral guidance - but the children made their own informed decisions and faced up to consequences.
Long after Mary Field’s retirement, the Children’s Film Foundation continued to use her model for a stream of one-hour narratives through into the 1980s – usually adventures of some sort, and often including some amazing fantasy elements like a live-action talking steam-roller (I kid you not).
In Australia, similar Children’s Film Clubs were established not in commercial cinemas as in Britain, but in community venues. Here in Canberra, screenings were held once or twice a month on Fridays at 6pm at the old Institute of Anatomy Theatrette before it became the NFSA.
The screenings around Australia were supported and promoted through a network of Children’s Film Councils, and it was flourishing when I joined in Canberra as an occasional volunteer helping at screenings in the 60s and 70s. And these screenings could be a lot of fun: parents were encouraged to drop their children off and collect them after the screening, and kids could get very excited in anticipation of seeing one of “their” films.
So to illustrate the distinctive style and immediacy of Mary Field’s work, I’d love to show you a few scenes that I’ve compiled from BUSH CHRISTMAS (about 6 minutes in total) which gives you a clear example of what was distinctive about these films. (Click on the film title to see the whole film on YouTube). You’ll note for example that the narrator speaks directly to the children in the audience, breaking down the 4th wall, and there is a full and robust orchestral soundtrack which Field had already established was loved by children.
I love one comment that a viewer posted on iMDB in response to BUSH CHRISTMAS: “What a breath of open air and joyful hope this film from faraway Australia would have brought to British children, worn out from nearly six years of war, and continuing material shortages. The sunshine, the sights and sounds of the outdoors, the freedom to roam, all had a powerful emotional impact”. It is “a fine achievement by the Children's Film Foundation, which was itself an expression of optimism as Britain emerged from a hard-draining war.”
Some 60 or more of these Children’s feature films have recently been restored and issued on DVD and are available, when stock is not sold out, from the British Film Institute shop, on-line. I feel that the films are seriously due for revival here, to add a fresh dimension to children’s programming on streaming platforms and in cinemas. My own grandchildren love the films and get very excited, physically jumping up and down at the prospect of watching a new one. The fact that the films are in black and white and on a small screen doesn’t diminish the children’s pleasure and excitement.
During my two years working at the National Library, and with Grierson and Mary Field’s examples to engage with, I became an enthusiastic advocate of the social value of appropriate films and appropriate screenings. Later, when I’d completed my film history book with Ross Cooper, I worked with a business partner named Michael Walsh (not the TV Michael Walsh) in launching the Electric Shadows cinema in Canberra City – initially operating on one screen of a twin cinema, and eventually taking over the whole twin complex.
From the very first session on the very first night, when we showed a feature documentary of course, Electric Shadows was a great success and eventually I bought Michael Walsh out, as he wanted to leave Canberra, and the cinemas continued to run for 27 years before closing down.
With that cinema venture, we were actually joining another social movement – home-grown and powerful. This was an informal nation-wide circuit of independent owner-operated art house cinemas including the Longford in Melbourne and the Valhalla in Glebe, Sydney. “Owner– operated” is the crucial concept. We were all very consciously committed to differentiating ourselves from mainstream cinema chains with “alternative” programming, and our own idiosyncratic styles of presentation and publicity. And all of us in that circuit were, I believe, of like mind in seeing ourselves as serving a very worthwhile purpose in building up communities of well-informed enthusiasts around our cinemas. In preparation for this paper, I had a conversation with Chris Kiely who had run the Valhalla Glebe and he agreed immediately about this sense of purpose, and how it drove his commercial choices when selecting films to screen.
All of us with our art cinemas found it hard to access suitable films from the major distributors, most of which were branches of American entities, and eventually many of us in our group began importing our own films from overseas to share around our unofficial circuit, and we started picking up many Australian films as well. I had been dabbling in film distribution already, almost as a sort of hobby activity, and had a small collection of Japanese and European films that I distributed under the name of Ronin Films. My early business partner in Ronin was Geoff Gardner, who left to become Director of the Melbourne International Film Festival, after which I continued on my own as a family business. Our distribution activity and cinemas flourished and that combination dominated my life for the next 30 years until our circuit of cinemas gradually ceased to exist for a whole host of reasons.
After Electric Shadows closed in 2006, Ronin Films continued to trade, but shifted its focus increasingly to social documentaries for non-theatrical distribution, rather than doing expensive and high-risk cinema releases of feature films. Today we distribute a collection of over 500 documentaries, including both new releases and classics going back as far as the 1970s, providing DVDs and on-line access, as well as servicing screenings in museums, galleries, film festivals, film societies and public libraries, not only around Australia but now overseas as well.
 |
| National Film & Sound Archive, Canberra |
Over the years, I also found time to become involved in the work of the National Film and Sound Archive and served on various forms of its Board for some 10 years in total. It was a widely expressed concern that we needed to build up the scale and diversity of what the Archive tended to call stake-holder groups, or what we might also call communities around the Archive.
As far as I can see, neither Grierson nor Mary Field mentioned film archives in their writings. Perhaps when cinema was young in the 1930s and 40s it wasn’t such an issue, and they may well have assumed that appropriate archiving would simply happen as an integral part of film production.
Rod Wallace, as a dedicated Griersonite, worked hard to support the early stages of film archiving as an integral part of the work of the National Library’s Film Division, and he expressed no doubt about the importance of such archival work.
I am deeply impressed by the Archive staff that I meet these days – their responsible approach to their work, their enthusiasm, professionalism and helpfulness while I’m struggling to archive my own papers and film materials: they are great people to deal with and I regard many of them as friends. But what does concern me and should concern us all, is the total inadequacy of funding for the proper core work of the Archive and the inadequacy of staffing levels and facilities. If Grierson were here, I’m sure he’d be doing his best to mix with senior Federal politicians to convince them with that forceful voice and penetrating eyes of his, of the need for a plan to remedy this inadequacy. But without Grierson, we all need to be concerned and pro-active in supporting the Archive and the work of the Friends of the NFSA. It’s of fundamental importance to protect our national culture, and we need to be preserving not only physical artefacts and digital files but also the all-important context for the creation of these materials. Without context we will lose a lot of understanding of our history, especially our cultural history. For example, the NFSA needs funds to be able to develop its oral history program, to resume its research publications, and to have greater capacity to store and preserve documents. We have the core staff whose spirits are high - but we need the resources for them to expand the scope of the institution’s work. And that’s one of my prime social messages for this evening!
I also want to reflect on how the work and the words of John Grierson and Mary Field can be useful to us now. In a variety of ways, many documentary filmmakers today still follow in the footsteps of the British documentary realist films of the 30s and 40s. The styles may have evolved but the social purpose behind the work is often readily visible. But these days Australian documentary makers are struggling to finance their films. It has never been easy, but increasingly they are being forced to rely even more on philanthropic funding and self-financing.
It is also increasingly a real challenge to construct what the film agencies require as a condition of funding, and that is what they usually call “A Pathway to Audience” – a pathway that is in fact extremely hard to find if one looks for something that is financially viable and achievable. Our distribution and exhibition structures seem to be failing documentary makers, and many of our feature film makers too, and meaningful public discussion is needed about a practical way forward.
In the face of this current gloom in the documentary sector, I feel strongly that we need to re-engage with our history and seek inspiration in the work of our predecessors.
The British realist documentary makers of the 30s and 40s, and Mary Field’s organisation had to create new pathways-to-audience where none existed. They had to fight hard to challenge the dominance of Hollywood and the British media moguls - and they succeeded.
One of the most inspiring books from this period is Mary Field’s memoir, a wonderful book called Good Company, in which she discusses how she dealt with extraordinarily rigid distribution and exhibition structures in the UK, and how she dealt with the rigidity of the unions that represented film production crews. She managed to find her own space within and alongside these inflexible structures and she flourished – and the Griersonites did the same, not only in the UK but overseas. They found new ways of communicating their ideals and their needs to bureaucrats and to the film trade. Mary Field for example tackled the dominant power of the British cinema chains with the personal support of J. Arthur Rank himself. And the documentary realist movement was able to embed its work in the national culture by new and radical methods of non-theatrical distribution.
And now in closing, I want to share with you a very special 3 minute clip. In so doing, I want to draw your attention to another seriously under-acknowledged example of a high-achieving community-run organisation working with both documentary and narrative film for a clearly articulated social purpose.
I’m speaking about the work done from a base in Alice Springs by CAAMA– the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association.
CAAMA Productions was founded in 1988 with First Nations ownership, and became a professional film service dedicated to promoting culture and language.
One of CAAMA’s greatest successes was a long series of short documentaries made for Imparja Television, a Remote Area Broadcaster in the Northern Territory. I’m proud that Ronin distributes 50 of these CAAMA documentaries but there are many more of their films to discover when academia finally acknowledges the importance of CAAMA and begins to document it properly.
It is a fabulous body of work, involving prominent First Nations filmmakers such as Warwick Thornton, Ivan Sen, Dena Curtis, Danielle MacLean, Beck Cole, Trish Morton Thomas, Erica Glynn, Steve McGregor, Priscilla Collins, David Tranter, Allan Collins and many more – and we should all know their names.
Out of respect, I’d like to mention that a former member of the CAAMA team is actually now employed by the NFSA and is here in the audience with us today – Alice Taylor – whom we can thank for her contribution to the exciting film programming that is offered by this cinema.
In Alice Springs, CAAMA filmmakers often worked collaboratively, and they reached audiences that really needed to be able to hear their own voices, telling their own stories, in their own language, in their own time, on the screens that they watched. Film is especially a powerful means of knowledge transfer - recording the wisdom of Elders for the benefit of younger generations.
Over the years, CAAMA has achieved huge audiences both on local and national television, through festivals and cinemas and through grass roots non-theatrical distribution.
This 3 minute clip constitutes the closing moments of one of my favourite CAAMA films called BOOMERANG TODAY. In it you’ll get a glimpse of the delightful dialogue that occurs throughout the film via sign language, between one of the film’s characters as he repeatedly consults the director behind the camera. Also in this clip I’m leaving the credits intact, so that you can see who was involved, how they collaborated and how they were funded.
And with this, I want to say thank you for listening to me, and I ask you to stay for the Q&A - as I’d love to hear you speak and to hear your comments. Thank you!
Here is the clip from BOOMERANG TODAY
