Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 14

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Popular Culture Review

5, 1999, Roger Mirams originally came to O ’Shea and proposed yet another
“documentary” on Maori life and customs. O’Shea instantly responded that the
idea was “boring beyond belief,” and counter-proposed a feature narrative film
about an interracial relationship between a Pakeha (white) man and a Maori woman,
an extremely daring topic for the time. O ’Shea was becoming fed up with “studying”
films, and wanted to try something groundbreaking and ambitious. Broken Barrier
seemed to fit the bill, and the two men began their collaboration on the project.
They had almost nothing to work with. O ’Shea told me that they used two
35mm silent Arriflex cameras with six 200’ (or 2-minute running time) magazines
to shoot the film, which was produced entirely on location, without sets of any
kind. Sync sound (lip-synchronized) shooting was out of the question, so O’Shea
and Mirams had to rely on music, sound effects, and a series of character “voice
overs” to tell their story. The plot was simple: “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy
gets girl back,” as O ’Shea described it to me. The script, such as it was, was made
up as shooting progressed, but O ’Shea told me that he felt “as long as we stuck to
the basic narrative format, and kept the running time down, we couldn’t go far
wrong” (Dixon interview). At 69 minutes in length, the film is a compact revelation,
and apart from Rudall Hayward’s Rewi s Last Stand (1940), which documented a
furious battle between Colonial settlers and Maori natives, it offered the first fairly
honest view of a problem that underlies and informs the very fabric of New Zealand
society, even to this day: the relationship between Maoris and the Colonists who
appropriated their native land. As O ’Shea recalls the production of Broken Barrier
in his autobiography,
Having suffered the boredom of some recent British documentaries, I
agreed to write the Maori film for Roger [Mirams] only if it was to be
a feature drama and I could co-direct it with him. He agreed. I took
long-term leave from my job and we started. We had little money
between us, but we did have two mute 35mm 200-foot-load Arriflex
cameras. One camera was on loan from Movietone News, for whom
Roger was the New Zealand correspondent. The other was picked up,
allegedly, from a dead German in the Western Desert and sold to us for
£200. Roger had a rickety camera dolly and some lights cobbled
together from scrap metal. We set off in Roger’s Vauxhall with as much
film stock and gear as we could load into it. (O’Shea 39)
As post-production proceeded, new problems emerged. O ’Shea remembers:
The laboratory facilities of the National Film Unit were closed to us
— we were, perish the thought, ‘private enterprise. ’ Though the Labour