Cinema in New Zealand

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A Necessary Fiction: the Ritualisation of Stakeholder Practices in New Zealand Cinema A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Philosophy at The University of Waikato by Megan Jane Davies _______________ University of Waikato 2011 ABSTRACT This thesis argues that stability of the concept ‘national cinema’ is located in the discursive positioning of individual films in such a way that they are connected to a national ‘common ground’, one which is ritually accessed via engagement with media such as cinema. This positioning, however, is not quantifiable and may not be identified as arising from any particular production practice, dimension of popularity, theme, style, characteristic of production personnel, and so on. By synthesising the work of several theorists and applying this synthesis to a selection of films, a framework of ideas (around the ritualised ‘flagging’ of the national via the expression of stakeholder interests) is applied to cinema in New Zealand. In particular, an ideoscape is ultimately mapped as a result of applying this framework of ideas. The normative assumptions of national cinema are examined in this way and found to be lacking despite the weight that the term ‘national cinema’ continues to have. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks go to: My supervisor Dr Craig Hight. Filmmakers Grant Lahood, Don Selwyn, Campbell Walker My family and friends, particularly my immediate family and the team at Men With Beards Childcare. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ....................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ................................................................................. iii Table of Contents ....................................................................................... iv Glossary of Acronyms ................................................................................. v Preface ....................................................................................................... 6 Introduction: The Concept of National Cinema .......................................... 8 Chapter One: Nation and Media - the Imagined and the Banal ............... 29 1.1 Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ ............................................ 30 1.2 Banal Nationalism ....................................................................... 34 1.3 The Global Imaginary: Appadurai’s ‘scapes’ ............................... 41 1.4 Couldry’s media rituals ................................................................ 46 1.5 National Cinema: A Framework of Inquiry .................................. 51 Chapter Two: Methodology ...................................................................... 53 2.1 Context and Direction of the Research ....................................... 54 2.2 Research Questions and Approaches ........................................ 57 2.3 A Variant of the Case Study Approach ....................................... 61 2.4 Overview ..................................................................................... 68 Chapter Three: Cinema in New Zealand .................................................. 70 3.1 Overview of Cinema in New Zealand - History ........................... 72 3.2 Cinema Production in New Zealand: Stakeholders ..................... 88 3.3 Stakeholder Practice and New Zealand Cinema ...................... 110 3.4 Conclusions ............................................................................... 120 Chapter Four: Examining the Case Study Films .................................... 124 4.1 Selection of Films ...................................................................... 126 4.2 Analysing the Films: The films and the ‘scapes’ ....................... 131 4.3 Discussion ................................................................................. 170 4.4 Conclusions ............................................................................... 174 Chapter Five: Re-Framing (New Zealand) National Cinema .................. 175 5.1 The Films: Stakeholder Practices and Ritual ............................ 178 5.2 Conclusions ............................................................................... 213 Chapter Six: Discussion and Conclusions .............................................. 216 Appendix A ............................................................................................. 221 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 222 v GLOSSARY OF ACRONYNMS CNZ Creative New Zealand FF2 Film Fund 2 FIWP Film Industry Working Party of the QEII Arts Council FPF Film Production Fund IFC New Zealand Interim Film Commission IRD Inland Revenue Department LBSPF Large Budget Screen Production Fund MCH Ministry for Culture and Heritage MED Ministry of Economic Development MIC Moving Image Centre NFU National Film Unit NZFC New Zealand Film Commission NZOA New Zealand On Air QEII Arts Council Queen Elizabeth the Second Arts Council SDGNZ Screen Directors’ Guild of New Zealand SPADA The Screen Production and Development Association SPIT Screen Production Industry Taskforce TMP Te Mangai Paho TVNZ Television New Zealand WIFT Women in Film and Television 6 PREFACE When I first embarked on this thesis, I was interested in why governments, or more particularly the New Zealand government, funded cinema. I was interested in this because during the 1980s and 1990s, successive New Zealand governments cut funding to many services that were once considered core. And yet, despite cuts to film funding, these governments continued to subside film production. I wanted to understand why this was. However, on my way to understanding this continued film funding I got waylaid, trying to understand what the relevant literature meant by the term ‘national cinema’. And so, this thesis is about national cinema. This work faces several dilemmas at the outset: Is national cinema an empirical reality that can be found in a body of films? Perhaps it exists because a body of films has a list of common characteristics that differ from those characterising some other body of films, deriving from some other national context(s)? Or is national cinema really just the product of some clever reading of a body of films – one which claims, or even results from claims of, a common rootedness in their national origins? Or again, is national cinema less to do with films themselves and more to do with geographically- bounded industries? Or is it predicated on government interest, either in cinema as a national economic activity, or as a form of cultural maintenance? And there is always the possibility that national cinema is only a product of language that has no real point of reference at all. By examining the national cinema literature, and then in turn applying the ideas found there to an investigation of first the New Zealand cinema production industry, and then five films made within that context, I have found that there is no straightforward formulation to be found in the literature as to the nature of national cinema. Faced with this absence, I have formulated a theoretical framework that accounts for the persistence of the idea of national cinema, one that provides a way of talking about the notion of national cinema that takes into account the resonance that certain films have with a national audience. And, in doing so, I think I have constituted a theoretical framework 7 that at least partially explains just why it is that governments continue to fund cinema production. 8 INTRODUCTION: THE CONCEPT OF NATIONAL CINEMA This thesis argues that the stability of the concept national cinema is not to be found in particular film texts, but rather resides in actions and processes. This argument is grounded in Nick Couldry’s formulation of media ritual (2003), which posits that media function as cultural touchstones, creating the sense of a cultural (here, national) centre.1 While, as I will show, the concept of national cinema is easily undermined by scrutiny, it nonetheless continues to hold meaning for the range of stakeholders who engage with it. And it is this engagement, or stakeholder practice, that gives the concept of national cinema its legitimacy. Despite widespread acceptance of the term national cinema in contexts as varied as academic literature, popular discourse, legislation and policy, the notion that a set of films or the practices of one nation’s cinema industry exhibit distinctive, stable national characteristics becomes problematic when examined more deeply, due largely to the way in which the global encroaches on the national and the subjective nature of the nation. The idea of national cinema persists none the less and has currency in, for

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