Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 16 July

Hot Air (Barry, 2014)

Looking through the archives for some­thing pro­duced in any July, I was delighted to be reminded of this inter­view that I did with Wellington film­maker Alister Barry for FishHead Magazine ten years ago.

Al is a nation­al treas­ure for his work with pro­gress­ive doc­u­ment­ary col­lect­ive Vanguard Films. For dec­ades they slaved away at their Sydney Street build­ing, a stone’s throw from the New Zealand Parliament.

(I’ve added a pic­ture below as it is now. It was an amaz­ing place to vis­it, a hive of non-conformity in the heart of the Wellington estab­lish­ment and I’m reminded of when New Zealand could con­tain these mul­ti­tudes cheek-by-jowl. I think the ground floor is an elec­tri­city sub­sta­tion. Sydney Street is now known as Kate Sheppard Place.)

In 2014, Al was pro­mot­ing his latest doc­u­ment­ary, Hot Air, about the long fail­ure of New Zealand gov­ern­ments to grapple with the estab­lished sci­ence of cli­mate change and the inev­it­able impacts that will have to be reckoned with:

In 1988, Al released the first in what would become his life’s work — a series of films mak­ing up a com­pre­hens­ive his­tory of New Right polit­ics in New Zealand and the steady destruc­tion of the wel­fare state and the post-war lib­er­al con­sensus. Someone Else’s Country cost only $40,000 to make and was a sur­pris­ing suc­cess, prompt­ing him to fol­low up with In a Land of Plenty (2002), A Civilised Society (2007) and then an adapt­a­tion of Nicky Hager’s invest­ig­a­tion into polit­ic­al cor­rup­tion, The Hollow Men in 2008.

His latest film, Hot Air (co-directed with Abi King-Jones), is about the polit­ics of cli­mate change — what he describes as “the mundane nature of this cata­strophe and the glob­al response to it… you know, just ordin­ary folks like you and I who happened to be in pos­i­tions of power and for very ordin­ary human reas­ons didn’t do any­thing or do enough”. It takes much the same film­mak­ing approach as his pre­vi­ous pic­tures: assembly of a case through a painstak­ing trawl through years of tele­vi­sion archives in order to find evid­ence of the key play­ers essen­tially con­vict­ing them­selves with their own testimony.

At least this part of the job is get­ting easi­er, thanks to tech­no­logy. The Auckland University Chapman Archive of all tele­vi­sion news and cur­rent affairs broad­casts since 1984 has long been a treas­ure trove of New Zealand his­tory and is now avail­able for review by the gen­er­al pub­lic at the Film Archive.

Refer a friend

Alister test­i­fies: “The Film Archive and the New Zealand Television Archive have been won­der­ful resources right through the dif­fer­ent stages of the pro­cess, from look­ing at it on paper using the TVNZ data­base through to going down to the base­ment at the archive and spend­ing hours and hours and hours look­ing at their record­ings of every news pro­gramme over the last ten years or so, which now can be viewed there for free. You can go and look at his­tory unfold­ing as each day goes by in the six o’clock news.”

A few years ago – maybe even ten to coin­cide with this release – the Film Archive (now Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision) ran a short fest­iv­al of Vanguard films where I got to see the 1981 filmWildcat: The struggle for demo­cracy in the New Zealand Timberworkers’ Union and its 1982 com­pan­ion piece, Kinleith ’80, about the even­tu­al bit­ter strike at the pulp and paper mill which humi­li­ated Muldoon’s National gov­ern­ment, and the epic Islands of the Empire (1985), made at the height of New Zealand’s nuc­le­ar free cam­paign and a sav­age denun­ci­ation of this country’s long mil­it­ary rela­tion­ship with the United States.

Vanguard were a col­lect­ive and so pro­du­cing and dir­ect­ing cred­its were shared among them: Rod Prosser, Russell Campbell and Al.

I dis­cov­er today that all three of those films are avail­able on the Vanguard YouTube chan­nel so I sus­pect we’ll be com­ing back to them in future edi­tions of this news­let­ter. Al’s mantle has been taken up by Abi King-Jones and Errol Wright whose import­ant recent films, The Fifth Eye and Operation 8 can be found there.

Where to watch Hot Air

Worldwide: Streaming on NZ On Screen* or digit­al pur­chase from NZ Film On Demand

* I can’t tell from here wheth­er either of those options is geo-blocked or not. NZ On Screen often is because of del­ic­ate rights issues relat­ing to free con­tent but you would think the NZ Film Commission would be happy to take anyone’s money for a pur­chase. It’s not on the Vanguard YouTube chan­nel but oth­er essen­tial films like, Someone Else’s Country and The Hollow Men are.