Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 11
John O’Shea and the Tradition of New Zealand Cinema
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productions with significant technical and/or artistic defects; and, sadly, only a
few of these film survive today intact. For the rest, a few reels of footage, some
promotional materials and still photographs are all that remain. What materials
that do exist are housed in the New Zealand Film Archive; in the Summer of 1999,
I was able to visit the Archive and view the remaining fragments of these films
firsthand, and I was struck at once by their raw intensity, fierce determination, and
their desire to succeed against all odds, and indeed commercial indifference, in the
creation of a viable industry for the production of feature films in early 20th century
New Zealand.
However, all of these films also had to deal with the difficulties imposed by
censorship in New Zealand, which began as early as 1909 with the censorship of
boxing films (Churchman 33), and soon D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), along
with other films, were coming under attack from various church and civic groups.
In January, 1921, a G. J. Anderson, the newly appointed Minister of Internal Affairs,
tried to force through legislation that would outlaw any film that “featured theft,
robbery, murder or suicide” (Churchman 35). Although this directive was not
followed, by 1930,3.9 percent o f 2,626 films submitted to the censor (or a total of
102 films) were rejected outright as being unfit for exhibition in New Zealand in
whole or in part, including Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930),
which the chief censor of that period, W. A. Tanner, dismissed as “anti-war
propaganda” (Churchman 35). After several appeals, the film was passed with one
alteration, but the stringent censorship imposed upon films imported into New
Zealand surely hampered domestic production as well. Laslo Benedek’s The Wild
One (1954) was rejected by the government censorship board, then chaired by
former film critic Gordon Mirams, three times (1954, 1955 and 1959), and this
ban remained intact until 1977, long after the international production of such
films as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), a much more violently
graphic film by any standard of judgment (Churchman 40). In fact, New Zealand
censorship remained remarkably stringent and inflexible throughout the 1960s and
70s, banning outright such films as Richard Lester’s The Knack, and How to Get It
(1965), Lester’s Petulia (1968), and Lewis Gilbert’s Alfie (1966), all of which
were shown to nearly universal critical acclaim throughout the rest of the world
(Watson and Shuker 50).
The chief censor during this period, Doug McIntosh, was “a career civil servant
whose previous connections with the cinema had been limited to the administration
o f film licenses for the Department of Internal Affairs” (Watson and Shuker 46).
McIntosh’s regime, which lasted from 1960 until his death in 1976, was perhaps
the most repressive creative atmosphere in which a filmmaker could possibly
function. McIntosh was enamored of such films as Robert Stevenson’s Mary
Poppins (1964), Robert Wise’s The Sound o f Music (1965), Blake Edwards’ The