New N.Z. movie gets mixed reviews in London

Press, 27 September 1982, Page 18

New N.Z. movie gets mixed reviews in London

NZPA staff correspondent London The New Zealand film. “Pictures." being billed in London by its distributors as the "first New Zealand motion picture." is getting mixed reviews in the British press.

“Pictures." directed by Michael Black and produced by "the father figure of the New l Zealand cinema." John O'Shea, tells the true story of two brothers who are photographers in the second half of the nineteenth century. Walter Burton (Peter Vere-Jones) falls foul of the authorities by taking .realistic pictures of the Maoris in the aftermath of the land wars while Alfred Burton (Kevin J. Wilson) a former London society photographer who went out to assist his brother, shoots the dressedup ideal, the noble savage amenable to civilisation.

The “Daily Express,” says: "Directed with sincerity by Michael Blake, the factuallybased story refreshes the parts that other more starstudded, films can’t reach. Like the mind and the heart." Patrick Gibbs in the “Daily Telegraph" says: " ‘Pictures' is small-scale and unstarry, unless the New Zealand landscape, superbly photographed by Rory O’Shea, can be considered a star, which I think it can." Gibbs continues: “What emerges ... add up to subtle comment on some aspects of colonisation, and also on attitudes to the art of photo-' graphy, one brother seeing it as propaganda for a point of view, the other as an historical record. “This comment is completely absorbed with great skill in the character drawing and incident, and with the acting from Kevin J. Wilson, Peter Vere-Jones. Helen Moulder and Elizabeth Coulter as their disparate wives equal to all demands.

we are left with a very satisfying and thought-pro-yoking little film, constructed with an effective economy." he concludes. Philip French in Sunday's "Observer," begins his review of "Pictures" with some comments on the New Zealand film industry. He says New Zealand film makers have “learnt from the errors of the Australian new wave and wisely restrict themselves to movies with modest budgets and indigenous subjects made by local talent. “If a masterpiece has yet to appear, there is now a commendable body of lively, thoughtful, and individual New Zealand movies."

“Pictures” raises important questions about the responsibility of artists to their consciences, their patrons, their society and to history, and it can be read as a reflection on what kinds of movies an emerging cinema like the one in New Zealand should be making." French says. ■

“Pictures” is sometimes clumsy, stilted and simplistic, and tends to wear a liberal heart a little prominently on a tweedy sleeve. But the firm is consistently honest and the central relationship have considerable moral and psychological complexity."

French concludes: “Michael Black's meditative, humane film concludes on an odd note, tempering tragedy with irony, and we’re told that the vast collection of Burton brothers’ photographs has been steadily decomposing for years in the National Museum in Wellington.” .

The film critic of the “Standard” suggests: “If this is so, then the shame associated with the treatment of the Burtons has still to be reckoned with in New Zealand." Not all the critics are so enthusiastic. ■ Geoff Brown- of "The

Times” calls it “frustrating" because "we see an interesting factual subject thwarted by inadequate treatment."

"For all the controversy that whirls round the Burtons' photographs; we see disappointingly little of them, and the director. Michael Black, skirts the subject's various implications (social, political aesthetic) with flat-footed dialogue and a bland visual stvle."

Brown says: “One is left with passing pleasures: the location photography, the absurd flashes of genteel society, of silver teapots and German lieder, struggling to maintain standards in raw land.”

The "Financial Times" critic, John Pym, says: “We are given information, the chronology is sketched in. but we never really get beneath the skin of the Burtons. In the end, Michael Black’s Burtons are figures from an underwritten history book: one believes in their existence, grasps a small part of their achievement (and what they were made the subject of a film) but fails to be angered by their fate."

But he tempers this with: “This is in several ways a fastidious undertaking. It is an old-fashioned biopic. handsomely dressed and art directed which on the whole avoids the tableau vivant and tends to cut away on the telling moment.” "Pictures," which has been shown on cable television in America and at ; both the Cannes and Moscow film festivals, winning a press prize at the latter, is showing at the Gate Cinema in central London.

A spokesperson for the cinema said attendance was good. Last year the New Zealand film. "Goodbye Pork Pie." closed at a West End cinema earlier than scheduled because of poor atttendance.