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Fun Radio (1963) and
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 Fun Radio |
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I write these notes on two early shorts marking
independent film history in Australia because their maker, Nigel Buesst, has
recently turned 80. A prodigious figure, Buesst has not only created an
impressive ledger of films, but also helped innumerable other projects and
artists in official and unofficial ways. He has also been a cultural figure,
never afraid to speak up for the feisty cause of free-thinking and
rule-breaking via cinema.
I well remember the blast of excitement I felt when,
in Arthur Cantrill’s 1970s classes at Melbourne State College on avant-garde
cinema, I first saw Nigel’s Fun Radio (1963), made in his 20s. Not that Buesst’s cinema has ever been avant-garde,
particularly – his preferred mode tends to move between relatively conventional
documentary (sometimes with a TV touch, as in The Twentieth [1966]) and a species of lyrical montage/collage that
is very characteristic of independent filmmakers the world over.
But Nigel’s work, whatever its mode, has always
carried the clear trace of his personal passions and obsessions – whether that
be for musical styles, political issues, or the fitfully documented history of
the Australian film scene itself (as in his lively Carlton + Godard = Cinema [2003]). And in Australia, especially, such personal work has
always dovetailed, in a precious cultural sense, with the more out-there
efforts of experimentalists. It’s a life-raft situation, and all the outcasts
have to band together to survive, however fragilely.
Fun Radio more-or-less conjures (in
black-and-white) a narrative line – pop acts arrive at the airport, a commercial
radio station organises a “surf carnival” to which young listeners flock, a
concert with multiple acts unfolds at night – but it also exhibits a
free-associative liberty in its rapid, mosaic-style editing. Buesst wants to
show what the new world of pop-consumerism is like, and feels like. So, high in
its festival of affects is the almost non-stop blaring (and sometimes
multi-layering) of a radio DJ’s live patter, with its lame puns (including
anti-TV propaganda!), punched-in laugh track, and endless advertising jingles
and pitches.
Buesst gives us here the sights and sounds of a new,
Australian suburbia, with its streets, beach roads, and media spectacles. A
disquieting poignancy attaches itself to the images of teenage girls
desperately trying to keep pace, on foot, with a radio-sponsored vehicle on
some congested roundabout, soon to run out of gas … upon which event, the
driver will hand over the key to the winning contestant. Not too far removed
from the grotesque dreamers-inside-windblown-money-capsules of later TV quiz
show extravaganzas, but here with a homely, daggy, early ‘60s touch.
If independent filmmakers have always been drawn to
the bustling cinéma-vérité carnival
of planes, crowds, cars and concerts, they have also been fixated on the
somewhat morbid underside of all this capitalistic progress: abandoned shops,
pre-trading market stalls, urban centres ruined or just on the cusp of their
devastation. We can frequently sense an ambivalence of attitude on the part of the
filmmakers who record these sights and sounds: consumerism, like destruction,
can be decried or lamented but, at the same time, it makes for good cinema.
Buesst’s The
Destruction of St. Patrick’s College is a
document of devastation from 1971 – held up by the film as a symbol of the
wholesale obliteration of the Australian past, and of its people’s lack of a
sense of national history. The trippy, booming soundtrack (psychedelic cousin
to the pop music that fills Fun Radio,
but far from the jazz milieux that Buesst has frequently covered) is comprised
of slowed-down rock – a little in the manner that Carmelo Bene cranked down
Bizet recordings for the mix of his contemporaneous Don Giovanni in Italy.
In the non-musical intervals of the soundtrack, Prof. C.
Hartley Grattan (1902-1980, misspelt “Gratten” in the opening credits), of
University of Texas, offers an odd semantic congestion just via his speaking
voice (there are no images of him in the film). The author of that unjustly
forgotten 1966 essay “Railroads as an Analogy to the Space Effort”, and noted
as “one of the leading American authorities on 20th century
Australian history”, Grattan gives us a lumpy mish-mash of politics, history
and philosophy. He conjures the need for Australian nationalism as a
“metaphysics” of “being” and “possibility” – and as a way of Australia avoiding
becoming just another province of America or … Japan! (Flashback to the days
when this was a felt social fear.) And all this delivered in a deep, drawling,
US accent. Where did Buesst find this guy?
In a nice, sardonic touch, The Destruction of St. Patrick’s College is dedicated to “Whelan
the Wrecker who made it all possible”. It’s hard not to reach, at this point,
for Walter Benjamin’s solemn phrases on the perpetually “destructive character”
of supposedly forward-looking Western societies. But, for
any Aussie viewer who was actually around in the 1960s and ‘70s (such as
myself), the evocation of Whelan the Wrecker (its still functioning website
reads: “With a
history of service extending more than 100 years, Whelan the Wrecker leads in
the provision of quality domestic and light commercial demolition and complete
excavation works”) carries, in this viewing
context, almost as much of a nostalgic aura as the Volkswagens, radio jingles,
Coke bottles or pop bands that swamp Fun
Radio. Those were the days, my friend, I thought they would never end …
© Adrian Martin March 2018 |
