By Tracy Sorensen
Every now and then, a documentary film sparks controversy and action. It happened when ABC TV showed Cop it Sweet recently; it has happened many times over the 30-year history of Four Corners; and John Pilger had the Australian's feature writers in a lather for weeks with The Last Dream, his irreverent contribution to the bicentennial celebrations.
Unfortunately, a strong source of political documentary — films made independently, outside the big film and television studios — is in danger of drying up.
According to film maker Gil Scrine, whose credits include Home on the Range (about Pine Gap) and Buried Alive (East Timor), money-starved independent documentary makers are increasingly using video tape rather than film because it is cheaper.
That means they have to rely on television stations to screen their work, rather than the cinemas. This, says Scrine, minimises the political impact of their work, and is endangering their very existence.
Why? More people spend more time in front of the box than they do going to cinemas. If independent film makers can get their work shown on television, isn't that a good thing?
One problem is that television stations don't publicise the independent films in the same way they promote their in-house productions. "This inhibits any comment on the film, because on any given night on television there are 20 different programs critics can write about", said Scrine.
Scrine's most recent film, A Thousand Miles from Care, a "character-driven rather than issue-driven" film set in the Sydney beach-side suburb of Manly during a circulation war between two local newspapers, was aired on the ABC on March 8. Unlike a film released in the cinemas, the screening was a matter of here today, gone tomorrow.
"After the initial high of seeing your work going out nationally, there's nothing. The ABC publicist said to me, don't worry, we are going to get some coverage of this, and in two weeks' time I'll send you all the coverage we've got.
"Now, I haven't seen that. The Sydney Morning Herald television guide described the film in a very bad way, saying 'this film looks at the global empire of Rupert Murdoch through the Manly Daily'. It doesn't. Whose responsible for that? It's just appalling.
"The ABC bought it for two screenings, but God knows when they'll show it again. And the only other point of access the public might have had to this film — and so many others — would be home video stores. But you walk into a home video store and there's just all this splatter, porn and violence, and lame comedy about babies and stuff."
Meanwhile, the discussion of controversial or unsettling issues raised by television documentaries is hardly helped by the "cringe factor" in the mainstream press. A Thousand Miles from Care got the cringe treatment from the Murdoch-owned Manly Daily within days of its screening.
Manly Daily photographer Joe Murphy, whose rebellious, eccentric attitudes and behaviour in the film were considered inappropriate by his employers, was removed to another Murdoch paper — in Parramatta — after the film was aired. The paper ran an apology to its readers for Murphy's "bad language".
Apparently, said Scrine, the paper's initial response to the film had been to run a profile on Murphy: "the wacky photographer who works for the Daily". In other words, to use a puzzling Murdoch empire phrase, the paper was going to do a "reverse ferret", which is to turn a seeming disadvantage into an advantage.
"They were going to do this reverse ferret, and I thought, good on them, it's the logical thing to do, beat up the story a little bit, make people see this guy the way the paper sees him. And then later on in the afternoon, I got another phone call; they'd canned the story, but not only that, Joe was being sent out to Parramatta, he was being punished and there was an apology going in the paper."
For Scrine, the rapid move from "reverse ferret" to big cringe was yet another playing out of themes which emerged during the filming and in the film itself. "When this is a fact of life at the editorial level of the press, then I think you've got real problems with your democracy, your freedom of information, your flow of information to the people."
In the meantime, individuals like Joe Murphy cop it. "He's got to drive an hour to work each day. When he worked on the Daily, he'd stroll down to work. He's really pissed off. These things are worth thinking more deeply about, because I think they plague lots of people."
The problem of maintaining a profile for independent documentaries was discussed at a meeting of the Australian Screen Directors Association in Sydney on April 1.
ASDA resolved to approach the Australian Film Institute to seek ways to promote Australian documentary, and proposed a seminar on the subject at the coming Sydney Film Festival. It also decided to encourage ABC TV to give independent documentaries a fighting chance.
"We don't want to see independent documentary producers becoming a kind of a dying breed. There are certainly fewer of us around now", said Scrine.
Gil Scrine is now working on a film about Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer.