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Distance Looks Our Way: Space, Place and Identity in New Zealand Cinema

Introduction

In 1941, in his poem ‘The Islands’, New Zealand poet Charles Brasch wrote:

Always, in these islands, meeting and parting

Shake us, making tremulous the salt-rimmed air;

Divided and perplexed the sea is waiting,

Birds and fishes visit and disappear.

[….]

The godwits vanish towards another summer.

Everywhere in light and calm murmuring

Shadow of departure; distance looks our way …

Brasch’s discussion of geography and isolation has, over time, become one of the dominant motifs by which New Zealanders are led to understand their place in the world. Key to this poem, and central to those interpretations that have sought to explore it, is the sense that be-yond the horizon lies only distance, that to stand on the shore in New Zealand and look out over the ocean is to stare into the face of geographical isolation and global insignificance. The mother country that founded New Zealand, Brasch is saying, is already – by 1941 – beginning to look elsewhere and that in her absence it is only that – absence, distance – which remains to consider us.

Yet what is overlooked in these interpretations is the sense that not only is distance active – ‘distance looks’ – but that, in order to attract the attention of distance, and whatever might come to inhabit that position, action must be taken. So far from functioning as a mournful threnody, Brasch might also be suggesting that if distance looks, then distance should be given something to look at, something that will, in effect, capture the gaze of distance, and the gaze that comes from a distance.

Here, then, are the ideas central to my discussion: the practices of looking that were imported to New Zealand during the processes of colonization and which, in their turn, enabled settlement; the manner with which these practices powerfully, if invisibly, inscribed modern European un-derstandings onto a non-European geography, and the ways in which these historically and cul-turally located ways of looking, representing and understanding remain powerfully present in contemporary New Zealand cultural production.

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The Eye of the Metropole

Before a land can be colonized and settled, it must be understood, made sense of in such a way as to enable utilization so as to foster growth, habitation, prosperity. Necessarily, the new land will be interpreted in ways that travel with, and work to the benefit of, those who are doing the observing and, as a consequence, the colonizing and settling. Therefore we must first explore the development of European and, specifically, British ways of conceptualizing the land as a landscape, as it is these ideas, rendered powerfully as orthodoxy, that will guide the early colonists in their attempts to report their encounters with a geography unfamiliar to their own, in a language that will be comprehensible to those who remain safely in the metropolitan centres.

The practices that would find their way into the colonial surveying traditions began with the great English landscape architects and the series of movements dedicated to transforming the land into landscape, themselves aligned with contemporary practices across the visual arts. By the time of the colonial expansion into the South Pacific, the orderly and precise formal gardens of such practitioners as André Le Nôtre (1613 – 1700) – themselves a response to the general movement towards secular rationalism that typified the Enlightenment – had given way to the re-visionist work of such masters as Charles Bridgeman (1680 – 1738), William Kent (1685 – 1748) and, perhaps most famously of all, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716 – 1783). This emerging work, which eschewed the strictly formalist geometric lines of the jardin à la française, sought to ensure that “the house, which before had dominated the estate, [would] become an integral part of a carefully composed landscape intended to be seen through the eye of a painter”i. Later landscape architects would come to criticize Brown’s “dressed scenery”ii and the push towards generating and constructing made landscapes that both resembled and improved upon nature would run though a number of iterations; what is important to note is the now orthodox notion of encountering nature and geography both as though one were painter, and to therefore consider that encounter as a scene that could be interpreted as though it were a painting, a scene that could therefore be considered as picturesque.

One of the earliest ways in which these ideas coalesced in a material practice beyond the im-mediate scope of landscape architecture was alongside the rise, in the United Kingdom at least, of tourism as both a pastime and a practice. Here, in the work of William Gilpin, amongst others, we see demonstrated the same kinds of ideas wherein he proposes, for the tourist or traveller in search of a particular kind of experience of nature,

a new object of pursuit; that of examining the face of a country by the rules of pic-turesque beauty: opening the sources of those pleasures which are derived from the comparison. Observations of this kind, through the vehicle of description, have the better chance of being founded in truth, as they are not the offspring of theory, but are taken immediately from the scenes of nature as they arise.iii

Thus the practices of the early 18th century landscape architects, refined through successive generations of practitioners, come to function not only as the dominant paradigm for the con-struction of landscapes that mimic nature as though it were a painting; they come also to guide viewers into a specific experience with nature – in the wild, as it were – as though it were already

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a landscape demonstrating those same characteristics. For these writers and architects, and then for those who engage with nature in these terms, nature in the wild offers a more compre-hensive experience than nature tamed, and the natural therefore is best appreciated by the ap-plication of viewing practices associated with painting.

What this means for our discussion is that there is no landscape outside of the viewing practices that construct it as such; there may be land or geography, yet the landscape is brought into be-ing with the application of a viewing practice which, as demonstrated, has a history, a genealogy and, therefore, a clear relationship with an articulation of power. We can say that this is the case because of the ways in which these ideas alter over time, across historical periods and cultural groups; for a viewing practice to become an invisible paradigm necessarily means power has been exercised. Is for exactly this reason that Giselle Byrnes comments that

A landscape is by definition a cultural construction, a particular perspective of land. On arriving in a ‘new land’, Europeans applied their own frames of reference to what they saw (60) …

precisely in order to generate images and representations of the ‘new land’ that a European au-dience would successfully understand.

Surveying an ‘Empty’ Land

Even a cursory glance through surveying materials of New Zealand’s colonial period reveals a curious fact; the land, rendered as landscape, is – for the most part – entirely empty. In 1899, then Surveyor-General James McKerrow (1834 – 1919) commented that

Unlike the surveys of old countries, where time-honoured landmarks and a settled popu-lation conserve boundaries, the surveys of a new country have no such aids, but, in-stead, have to create boundaries in the unoccupied wilderness …. (qtd in Byrnes, 62)

This comment, perfectly innocuous in its context, reveals something important for our discus-sion: for the colonial project to proceed, no prior claim to the land could be said to be in exis-tence and, if it just so happened that indigenous ways of constructing landscape differed so much from the European model that no visible boundaries of delineations could be seen, then so much the better. It is, perhaps, Lorenzo Veracini who best sums up this disposition when he comments that the colonial and

... settler gaze is characterized by a tendency to depopulate the country of indigenous peoples in representations and especially in recollections …. It borders on wishful think-ing, and it is a mode of perception that informs the whole history of settler colonial en-deavors.iv

Again, there is historical precedent for this surveying practice wherein, as John Barrell makes clear, the developing tradition of English landscape painting during the 17 th and 18th century sought to represent the rural scenery of England without having to allude to the material con-

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texts that both gave rise to, and profited from, that scenery. Thus, what became standard in the landscape painting of this period was to either treat the figure of the worker or laborer in the field as just another compositional aspect or, more simply, exclude figures altogether. When present as a figure or, on occasion, as the subject of the painting, the rural laborer was represented in-stead as the Arcadian Rustic, a practice that, like the practice of surveying it would go on to in-form, generated an image without recourse to the material conditions it purported to represent (Barrell: 16-23).

It is here, then, that the threads of my argument coalesce: The generation of an image that rep-resents a land, or a geography, is never an innocent process but is always linked to, and loaded with, ideological considerations that turn the generation of images, as acts of representation, into a discourse in their own right. The generation of an image is therefore linked not only to the history of that practice but to historically and culturally specific considerations of what consti-tutes what we might consider 'to-be-looked-at-ness'. This means that to encounter a land as a landscape has changed over time; different groups of people, different historical periods, have viewed land as landscape in markedly different ways. The development of methods of repre-senting the landscape is thus embedded in the practices of those who train during this period in the arts of representing landscape. Necessarily, the dominant modes of both representing, and actually interacting with, geography come to function as the ways in which new and unique geo-graphic encounters will be represented to those at a distance, so that they, too, will understand the unique in its relation to the familiar. For our exploration today, this means that by the late 19th century as, not coincidentally, cinema is invented, these same methods travel intact from painting and sketching, through to photography in the 1840s to arrive fully-formed and entirely familiar with the birth of the moving image.

The Screen, the Scene

Given the particular history I have just constructed, we should not be surprised to find the domi-nant motifs of English landscape representation occurring, with no small amount of force, on the larger screen of the moving image. Of course, by the time cinema arrived in New Zealand, the major movements of the colonial period had ended and settlement was well established. This means that cinema was, largely, exempted from the role surveying and landscape art had played in representing a landscape empty of prior inhabitants, ready and awaiting a firm colonial hand to exploit its bountiful resources. Yet, to return to the notions at play in Brasch ’s poem which began this discussion, the role of cinema remained linked to the construction of the land as a landscape fit to be seen by potential inhabitants who could, as with Gilpin’s tourists, demonstrate their painterly eye and insert themselves into the scene as players on a stage.

In both fiction and non-fiction, the early moments of New Zealand cinema serve this purpose: when an indigenous population occur in the frame, they are as that particularly South Pacific version of the Arcadian Rustic, here realized as the Noble Savage. Whilst very little footage of these early moments of film remain, documentary sources demonstrate that films such as

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Loved By a Maori Chieftess (Gaston Melies, 1913), How Chief Te Ponga Won His Bride (Gas-ton Melies, 1913) and Hinemoa (George Tarr, 1914), for example, all utilize their indigenous participants to construct New Zealand as a South Seas idyll. And while it would not be until the late 1970s that New Zealand could boast a film industry that enjoyed direct governmental sup-port, the non-fiction motion picture industry, here taking the form of news reels, travelogues and short pieces for the international market, replicated both the role and the form of the early sur-veyors, representing the land as a landscape fit to be interpreted and consumed as though it were a piece of artistic commodity. The New Zealand National Film Unit, formed in 1941 as a way of generating local propaganda for the war effort, emerged from the Department of Industry and Commerce, Tourism and Publicity, itself born in 1930 from a small publicity office attached to the Department of Internal Affairs. The productions of the NZFU were of such consistency that, as John Grierson noted in his visit to New Zealand in 1940, the films were “full of images of the land, sheep and butter and “of Maoris who stage shows for rich tourists” but never of the daily life of people”. (qtd in Brookes, 180).

The generation, or, perhaps more accurately, the continuous reiteration of a European An-tipodean landscape that would both conform to, and at the same time exceed, English pic-turesque traditions and expectations finds, as Sam Neill notes, its apotheosis with the

… three-screen saga called This is New Zealand. For the first time in my experience, au-diences queued for a New Zealand film. Audiences wept at the splendor of their own land and shed tears to think of how lucky they were.v

If anything was going to attract the gaze of distance, one would think, it would have to be a spectacle such as this. And, given the shifting balance of power in the South Pacific, the United Kingdom’s movement into the European Economic Union in 1973 which saw the immediate in-troduction of quotas to regulate New Zealand exports to Great Britain, and the move across the Commonwealth towards individual articulations of national identity, if not outright independence, one could be forgiven for assuming that the representational strategies outlined above were, in turn, superseded, replaced by ways of looking that would be more attuned to local, perhaps even indigenous, situations and conditions. Yet the history of New Zealand cinema demon-strates that these ways of constructing and representing the landscape remain as powerfully in place, with their attendant discursive and ideological values active and in force.

The screen in New Zealand, and the screening of New Zealand, is fully replete with examples; so much so that, as Harriet Margolis comments, while the New Zealand government might never have directly interfered with the generation of cinematic narrative, it has “subtly supported films expected to be commercially successful, along with films offering leverage for other sorts of commercial exploitation, especially tourism”.vi For continuous reviews of New Zealand films to claim that the landscape functions “as a character” – as so many have done and continue to do – means that, at some level, we see an acknowledgement that just as cinema constructs the frames which contain the characters, so too does it construct the characters who inhabit the frame, including the landscape itself. Thus when we move, finally, to examine those characters, what is revealed is not so much a return to – but the continuous presence of – those same dis-cursive characteristics that we saw emerge in the 17 th and 18th century: the empty or largely

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empty landscape, the land as a site of potential, the land constructed in ways that would not look out of place hung in oils in the great halls of England. Here the spectacular landscapes of Peter Jackson’s Tolkien films are perhaps the most straightforward examples but it would seem that any film which utilizes a non-urban outlook will, necessarily, refer to the land in exactly these tropes, even when its purpose might be to critique the discursive content of those tropes.

Taika Waititi’s Boy (2010) is just such an example, wherein the director’s at-times nostalgic criti-cal revisiting of 1980s rural New Zealand leads one reviewer to gush approvingly that the “… landscape is a character in the film, with it’s [sic] rugged coastline, cornfields and mountains of driftwood …”.vii Similarly, Harry Sinclair’s The Price of Milk (2000), which explores, as I’ve noted elsewhereviii, a particularly Pakeha uneasiness with the relationship between Maori and the land, opens its magical-realist narrative with loving shots of the landscape – settled and marked out this time, but with habitation inferred only by the presence of the sculpted fields and cows await-ing their milking. Finally, and perhaps most critically, the famous opening sequence of Once Were Warriors (1994, Lee Tamahori) knowingly attends to, and undoes, these colonial - per-haps Imperial - modes with its reveal offering us a move from the 'fantasy' or the ‘green and pleasant land’ to the 'reality' of this sequence as an advertising image on a billboard, set above a busy multilane highway. Of course, the 'reality' offered by Once Were Warriors is just another fantasy and the phantasmatic cityscape constructed by the opening sequence bears as much relationship to the real city of Auckland as any fantasy to reality. Tellingly, of course, whilst Once Were Warriors seeks to undo, or perhaps reveal as fantasy, the 'clean, green and empty' land, it does so by adhering to the same methods of generating the picturesque that Capability Brown, Uvedale Price and William Gilpin were codifying in the 18th and 19th century.

What this proves is the strength and resilience of these discourses and the manner with which they not only continues to dominate the field of landscape representation in New Zealand (and elsewhere) but that they also remain, still, intimately linked to the ways in which a nation might seek to represent itself, at least within mainstream media. Here we face what might best be con-sidered 'discursive determination' whereby the only discourses that can be successfully consid-ered will be those the makers, practitioners and funding bodies will be sure that their audiences will already have a working familiarity with, and the only discourses the audience will be familiar with are those that are continuously reproduced.

The way in which the nation is b(r)ought into being through the construction and commodifica-tion of the land into landscape is replicated and continuously circulated in the representation of the landscape in this fashion. What's fascinating is that The Lord of the Rings trilogy (Peter Jackson, 2001, 2002, 2003) and The Hobbit (Peter Jackson, 2012), Boy and The Price of Milk - even Once Were Warriors – continue to use this historically located mode and while some of these films might attempt a critical exploration of these discourses, what occurs is a recycling of a representational model that could have been superseded and yet which remains powerfully present. It would seem that while legal discourse, for example, about the relationship between peoples and land has necessarily altered over time, the modes of representing that relationship have not. The more spectacular - and internationally intended - the film is, the likelier that it will utilize ever more retrograde representational strategies. A local audience, attuned to the contex-tual struggles over these issues will be more conversant about the ways in which they play out

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on-screen and within the frame; an international audience will likelier be less informed. Never-theless, the genealogical through-line that links 18th and 19th century European art practice with 19th century colonization and 21st century cinema is present, visible and inexorably power-ful. For as long as these cycles of discourse play out in this fashion, we will not see a return of the repressed in way that might open the screen up to new and innovative discussions: we will only continue to see the empty space of landscape as a site for a spectacle that entertains ex-actly as it elides.

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i Colvin, H. A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600 – 1840. 3rd ed. “Brown, Lancelot”.ii Price, Uvedale. Essays on the Picturesque. vi.iiiGilpin, W. Observations on the River Wye London, Fifth edition 1800 (orig. pub 1782) iv Veracini, L. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. 82v Sam Neill: A Cinema of Uneasevi Harriet Margolis: The Western, etc. 88vii http://jumpingatshadows.wordpress.com/2012/04/02/boy-oh-boy/viii Remapping cinema, remaking history (pp …)