English, Cinema Studies and Digital Humanities

Sam Neill has celebrated the development of a national cinema in New Zealand as a movement from “the B picture to the A feature.” Cinema of Unease casts New Zealand’s political, cultural and cinematic independence as a coming-of-age story. The cultural value assigned to the concept of national cinema presupposes an organic model of growth from immaturity to maturity. B films, on the other hand, are generally coded as juvenile in content and delinquent in form.  They are often regarded as stylistically impure, unformed, improper, amateur.  The films of Ritchie Venus could be said to fall into this category.  Ritchie has been making incredible films, filtered through the conventions of American B Movies, first with his father, then with his son, since the mid sixties.

Neill’s take on New Zealand film betrays an unease about cinema itself, and bad cinema in particular.  I wish to invert his thesis: the pleasures of the B picture return to haunt the desire for a national cinema.  From this angle, Ritchie Venus assumes the role of Sam Neill’s double.  Both, by the by, had their formative encounters with film in Christchurch, a city which features prominently in Cinema of Unease.  I explore Ritchie’s corpus, which includes such titles as Jaws of Death, Vigilante Fury, The Saga of Billy Byrne, Off on a Comet, for clues to the Oedipal deadlock that marks the difference between good and bad cinema.  The public investment and official interest in national cinema mirrors the private indulgence and illicit appreciation of the B grade movie.  But, ultimately, neither really break with the master discourses of Family or State.

The essay is an extensive revision of the original paper that I presented at the B for Bad Cinema conference.  I was especially struck by Ernest Mathijs’ ideas about the manner in which time and place are directly experienced through bad cinema, and have attempted to translate his insights into a critical reflection upon the strange resemblance between the cult status ascribed to bad cinema and the cultural standing attributed to national cinema, especially in the local context of New Zealand.

The relentless flow of images in Vertigo Sea plunges the viewer into a dizzying vortex of time. The film, a three channel HD video installation by John Akomfrah, is exhibited as a continuous loop in the darkened space of an art gallery. One enters the room at any point during its running time and is immediately immersed in an audiovisual environment of majesty and dread. Beautiful images of oceans, forests, storms, mountains, ice floes, waves, whales, swarms, shoals, flocks of teeming swimming diving flying whirling writhing seabirds and other creatures of the deep are projected upon the three screens alongside archival footage and reconstructed scenes of recent horrors and atrocities, mostly committed at sea: the Zong massacre of 183 African slaves, whose murder was justified as part of an insurance claim for the lost "cargo," the industrialised slaughter of polar bears and whales, the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the perilous voyage of the Vietnamese boatpeople, the disappeared of Argentina's Dirty War whose bodies were dumped from helicopters at sea, and, of course,