Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 9

John O’Shea and the Tradition of
New Zealand Cinema

Although his work is universally revered in his home country, the films
of John O ’Shea are almost entirely unknown outside his native New Zealand.
O’Shea was bom on June 20th, 1920 in New Plymouth, New Zealand, educated in
Wanganui, and then to Canterbury Teacher’s College in 1941. He received his MA
from Victoria University in 1947, and eventually a Ph.D. in literature from the
same institution in 1978 (see Churchman 60). But in between these two dates,
John O’Shea conducted a single-handed campaign to bring feature filmmaking to
New Zealand, a country which astonishingly produced only five feature-length
sound films between 1936 and 1970, while the rest of the world was engaged in a
veritable avalanche of cinematic production. Along with fellow countryman Rudall
Hayward (1901-1974), John O’Shea and his production company, Pacific Films,
were nearly the sole creators of all filmmaking within New Zealand, and both
created their films with only the most sporadic government support. Worse still,
despite the numerous recent successes of New Zealand cinema, including Jane
Campion’s An Angel at My Table (1990), and The Piano (1993), Alison Maclean’s
Crush (1992), Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors (1995), Peter Jackson’s Heav
enly Creatures (1994) and numerous other films, John O’Shea’s work is unavail
able for viewing outside the New Zealand Film Archive in Wellington, even though,
as most contemporary New Zealand filmmakers will readily admit, his trailblazing
work set an example for all of the younger generation to follow. Indeed, the actor
Sam Neill got his first professional job working in one of O’Shea’s productions, as
did Jane Campion, who even lived with the O ’Shea family for a brief period early
in her career. At long last, O ’Shea’s autobiography, Don’t Let It Get You, has
finally been published by Victoria University Press (in 1999), and while O ’Shea is
semi-retired from the business, he still takes an active interest in events in the
world of cinema. But why is O ’Shea’s work so marginalized? Why has there been
so little feature filmmaking in New Zealand for the first three-quarters of the 20th
century? To answer these questions, one must look at both the cinematic and the
political history of New Zealand, and the resulting conclusions that one draws are
both powerful and disturbing.
Cinema in New Zealand got off to a promising start with the work of A. H.
Whitehouse, a barnstorming professional showman who purchased a camera abroad,
and began filming Lum ieresque actualities in December, 1898, when he
photographed The Opening o f the Auckland Exhibition (Churchman 49). By late