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Tim Burstall Retrospective |
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When
Australian writer-director and industry pioneer Tim Burstall died in April 2004
at the age of 76, there was an inadvertent, uncanny homage to him already
playing in local cinemas. In the comedy Strange Bedfellows (2004) starring Paul Hogan,
nostalgia for a gentler, friendlier
I
am not sure how many members of the general filmgoing public would look back on
this particular movie as the beacon of Australian cinema in the ‘70s. But I
certainly do: it is the film which best captures the unique, passionate mix of
elements that Burstall brought to his métier.
On
the one hand, it is a tough, sturdy film, stepped in the conventions of the
action genre. Burstall was an entertainer, and he never shirked on his
obligation to provide narrative drive, thrills, pleasing reversals and
clinches. As someone who, in the ‘60s, had studied the craft of filmmaking
overseas, Burstall always kept an eye on international trends and the global
market.
On
the other hand, Knucklemen is, in its
own way, an art film with something serious to say about Australian society and
culture – and especially about masculinity. Like David Williamson, with whom he
worked on several occasions, Burstall embraced popular storytelling forms and
genres as a vehicle for making provocative comments on the ills of local
culture as he saw them.
Burstall’s
uneasy place between high and low culture in this country is what gave his
films their tension and richness. Sometimes his work erred more towards the
conventional, as in Attack Force Z (1982), and at other times more
towards the arthouse, as in his commercially disastrous feature debut Two Thousand Weeks (1969) or the most
visible achievement of his later career, Kangaroo (1987). But the in-between works are his best.
Burstall
embodied that peculiarly Australian contradiction: he was a sophisticated
intellectual who aligned himself with the rousing vitality of ‘the people’ and
mass culture. That is why he turned to the vulgar comedy of Stork (1971) and Alvin Purple (1973), and why he ramped up the spectacular,
confronting aspects of Eliza Fraser (1976) and Petersen (1974). Burstall
was proudly politically incorrect long before that term was coined.
As
was evident in a wide-ranging overview lecture he gave at ACMI not long before
his death, Burstall regarded himself as someone unacknowledged by critics. But
this was not quite so. His combination of pop culture and artistic modernism
struck a chord in an ‘80s generation of local
cinephiles (including myself) who increasingly came to lament Burstall as a
model never properly emulated by the Australian industry, a path not taken. His
finest works far outshine most of what Australian cinema serves up today.
MORE Burstall: Duet for Four, The Naked Country
© Adrian Martin October 2004 |
