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There It Was: |
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“Here
it is”. Since February 1981, David Stratton concluded his introductions to the Movie of the Week on SBS with these
humble but tantalising words. But, over a thousand movies later, the “here it
is” has suddenly become a “there it was”. Late in September 2003, Stratton
farewelled his regular viewers with his final introduction, accompanying the
aptly named Japanese film Departure.
Stratton
is not leaving SBS. He will still be presenting film classics late on Sunday
nights, and his position as co-host of the popular The Movie Show continues, for now. But there has been much talk
lately of a change to a more mainstream programming policy across the board on
SBS. In this context, Stratton’s final Movie
of the Week felt ominously like the end of an era.
And
what an era it has been. It is impossible to overestimate the contribution that
SBS has made to Australian film culture over the past two and half decades. In
many respects, SBS did the work that other organisations such as the Australian
Film Institute failed to do in the years since the once-indispensable National
Film Theatre collapsed.
Australia
has some excellent resources, such as the National Library film collection now
administered by ACMI and the touring Cinematheque program that makes extensive use of that collection. But, on the downside, the
once vital art house circuit which provided the crucial link between specialist
film societies and the commercial cinemas has become progressively more
conservative and safe in its tastes.
For
many cinephiles, SBS has provided an almost complete
education in cinema past and present. Where else could one easily catch the
neo-realist classics of Roberto Rossellini, action-filled masterpieces by Akira
Kurosawa, the sensuous meditations of Andrei Tarkovsky or the austerely spiritual dramas of Robert Bresson?
From
Jean-Luc Godard to Michelangelo Antonioni, Glauber Rocha to Dusan Makavejev, Sergei Parajanov to Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Carl
Dreyer to Theo Angelopoulos, Victor Eríce to Werner
Herzog, SBS went far beyond the ‘sexy exotica’ image it likes to portray in its
promotional spots – and to which, today, it is in danger of reducing itself.
Stratton,
in his Movie of the Week farewell,
rightfully boasted of making “quite a few discoveries”. SBS has indeed been
especially good at finding and presenting special, unusual items. I wonder how
many people who are currently enjoying the intense Chinese romance Springtime in a Small Town saw the
radically superior 1948 original on SBS? How many literature buffs caught the
remarkable series of films titled Tales
of Borges with its brilliant episodes by Benoît Jacquot and Alex Cox? How many fans of the Chilean-French
filmmaker Raúl Ruiz watched Our Marriage, the unnervingly surrealist parable he wrote for his
wife, Valeria Sarmiento, to direct in 1984?
SBS
was often, in its selections, ahead of the taste of our major film festivals as
well. For instance, one sometimes looked in vain at such events for the latest
works by remarkable Taiwanese filmmakers such as Hou Hsiao-hsien or Edward Yang. But SBS rolled these
magnificent bodies of work out in succession – even when the pedestrian
reviewers in the nation’s television guides did not know enough to even mention
them, let alone trumpet their vast cultural significance.
Did
some of us end up taking this constant stream of gifts offered by SBS for
granted? It is my experience that, in other countries, SBS is regarded with awe
and envy. Cinephiles all over the globe eagerly trade
home-use-only copies of rare Abbas Kiarostami, Vitali Kanevsky or Youssef Chahine films taped from
SBS. The respected American magazine Video
Watchdog regularly compares the awful English subtitles on prints of
foreign films to the pristine, definitive job performed by SBS subtitlers. And to viewers in other lands the useful,
informative introductions provided down the years by Stratton or Margaret Pomeranz are regarded with admiration as the sign of our
enlightened culture. Amazing!
Of
course, back at home, every film lover has had his own, private bone of
contention with the prevalent tastes of SBS programmers. For example, I would
liked to have seen a focus on the post Nouvelle Vague generation of French and
Belgian filmmakers, such as Jean Eustache, Jacques Rozier,
Philippe Garrel and Chantal Akerman.
I would have appreciated much more of Portugal’s great and prolific Manoel de Oliveira, a retrospective of India’s Ritwik Ghatak, or a glimpse into
the work of Hungary’s Béla Tarr.
And I would have applauded the appearance of some feature-length experimental
films, not just the snappy shorts buried late night on Eat Carpet.
Yet
what SBS has managed to show far outweighs in significance what it has not
shown. When I look over my notebooks of jottings on all the wonderful films I
have viewed on SBS, I find myself poised between two rivers – that is, Jean
Renoir’s The River (1951) and Tsai
Ming-liang’s The River (1997).
The
former is the kind of European, humanist classic once beloved of our film festival
programmers and art house distributors in the 1950s and ‘60s. The latter is an
example of Asian queer cinema so confronting that it seemed to turn Stratton’s
hair a little whiter as he nervously introduced it on air.
But
SBS, to its eternal credit, was able to accommodate both these extremes, as
well as so much that fell between them. Let’s hope this vision continues to
inform the channel’s programming into the future.
Postscript 2012:
After Stratton’s definitive departure from the organisation in 2004, SBS – and
its cable spin-off World Movies – fell into a film-programming slump from which
it has yet to recover. Just goes to show the difference that a cinephile’s touch can make …
© Adrian Martin October 2003 |
