Something to watch tonight: Thursday 5 February

Utu Redux (Murphy, 1984/2013)

Tomorrow is a pub­lic hol­i­day here in Aotearoa New Zealand — Waitangi Day — so there won’t be a news­let­ter sent out.

I thought this week­end would be a good time for people to revis­it a Kiwi classic.

Geoff Murphy’s Utu was first released in cinemas in 1984 and it got an excel­lent restoration/reconfiguration is 2013. Three years later, I wrote about the even­tu­al home video release for RNZ:

In 2013, largely as a res­ult of Utu cine­ma­to­graph­er Graeme Cowley’s tire­less search for the ori­gin­al mater­i­als as well as the fund­ing to reas­semble them, film fest­iv­al audi­ences got to see a new ver­sion of Murphy’s Kiwi clas­sic (now known as Utu Redux and destined to be the only ver­sion our chil­dren and grand­chil­dren will know). Murphy (with Cowley, ori­gin­al edit­or Mike “Chopper” Horton and young gun Jonno Woodford-Robinson) spent weeks reas­sembling the film, cor­rect­ing a few ori­gin­al choices he since regret­ted, revers­ing Blakeney’s inter­ven­tions and gen­er­ally giv­ing the whole thing a bit of 21^st cen­tury spit and polish.

The res­ult was a rev­el­a­tion and received a jus­ti­fied stand­ing ova­tion at the Embassy Theatre unveil­ing. Murphy’s vis­ion of colo­ni­al New Zealand may have made emo­tion­al rather than his­tor­ic­al sense but with the bene­fit of hind­sight audi­ences can see that Utu says almost as much about New Zealand in the 1980s as the 1860s.

The recent hand­some home video release of this new ver­sion – through the new Aro Video imprint – con­firms what I thought at the time: Utu Redux is that rare thing – an utterly essen­tial New Zealand film. Some of us may have oth­er favour­ites (you could argue that Goodbye Pork Pie is more fun) but Utu jus­ti­fies own­er­ship because of the rich­ness of its cross-cultural com­bat as well as the flam­boy­ance of its hand­made filmmaking.

My ini­tial thought for today’s news­let­ter was Hugh Macdonald’s ground-breaking three-screen 21-minute epic This Is New Zealand from the 1970 Osaka World Expo but my first search only revealed this:

All is not lost, how­ever, as Archives New Zealand has a 720p ver­sion of the 2007 res­tor­a­tion (paid for by Peter Jackson, as I recall) up on YouTube.

I have a beau­ti­ful Blu-ray copy bought dir­ect from Hugh Macdonald him­self and I dis­cov­er today — from NZ On Screen — that Hugh passed away in May 2024 at the age of 80.

Where to watch Utu Redux

Aotearoa: Digital rent­al from AroVision or NZ Film On Demand

Rest of the world: Not cur­rently avail­able online