An Isolated Example? Trisha Dunleavy and Hester Joyce's New Zealand Film and Television: Institution, Industry and Cultural Change

Book review

An Isolated Example? Trisha Dunleavy and Hester Joyce's New Zealand Film and Television: Institution, Industry and Cultural Change

New Zealand Film and Television: Institution, Industry and Cultural Change by Trisha Dunleavy and Hester Joyce has been described as a book "Powered by expert knowledge and brilliant research...". It is the sort of claim you would expect from a back-cover pull-quote. It also happens to be an almost accurate assessment of the study's strengths insofar as the authors have fashioned a coherent, almost intelligible narrative from the convoluted political and institutional operations that guided New Zealand film- and television- making between the 1970s and the present. The book does stop short of being brilliant, though, an outcome partly and paradoxically attributable to the very same institutional analysis that lends it its scholarly might. With the tight focus of its analytical dimensions rarely straying beyond national borders, that is, the writers pass up the opportunity to imbue readers with a sense that the patterns of change they observe are part of a bigger picture informed by an increasingly globalised political economy.

The book follows a conventional structure, with the New Zealand film and television industry proper finding its origins in McLuhan's media age. As might be expected, many films were made before the 1960s but, aside from a smattering of educational and documentary films, these were isolated and very much a product of independent and individual endeavour. In the single-channel era of television (1960-1974), something almost impossible to imagine when there are now several free-to-air channels in addition to the gazillion cable channels that can be accessed, news was the major platform for the growth of local content with dramas, documentaries, sitcoms and serials being imported largely from Britain and the United States.

From the outset, the relationship between film and television was neither natural nor easy. As an entity largely funded by the state and with the potential to be watched by every household, television content was bounded by different parameters, both economic and social, than those guiding film production. The complicated mechanisms governing the allocation of funds and contracts at an institutional level also ensured a certain degree of animosity between these fledgling media industries; with skills that could have been untilised in the production of local content, film-makers of the 1970s were frustrated by the fact that they were largely cut-off from the chance to hone their proficiencies and earn income from the work that television could have provided. Fortunately for New Zealanders, these film-makers did not immediately abandon ship to pursue a livelihood in a more supportive economy. Instead, a number of them went out on a limb to acquire funding and train up their own personnel, making what would come to be seen as iconic New Zealand films, like Sleeping Dogs (1977). It has been in ways like this that the New Zealand film industry formed an identity for itself as something extra- ,even anti-, institutional despite the fact that key figures such as Roger Donaldson and Sam Neill contributed greatly to the founding of institutional bodies designed to foster the industry.

Over the three decades that have followed, the film and television industry in New Zealand has at times flourished and at others wilted. Within the limits set by such a small industry, the releases of An Angel At My Table (Jane Campion, 1990), Once Were Warriors (Lee Tamihore, 1994) and Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson,