Newsreel memories of ‘War Years’

Press, 4 August 1983, Page 16

Newsreel memories of ‘War Years’

“War Years,” which will begin at the Avon tomorrow, is not a war movie, according to Patrick McGuire, the New Zealand National Film Unit-director who created this feature film. It has drama and humour, yet it cannot be put in a category alongside other films which reach New Zealand cinemas. Whether the action is in the Western Desert, Italy or Bougainville; with a Home Guard unit making hand grenades from custard powder tins; or with rationing or women taking over men’s jobs, “War Years” is about people, their attitudes and their emotions. Most of all, “War Years” is about New Zealanders coping with crisis and with change. It isn’t a writer’s view or a director’s view of the period from 1939 to 1945, and it is the actual material which appeared in newsreels in New Zealand cinemas throughout the Second World War. With the addition of just a few lines of commentary

and one or two maps to link sequences, everything seen in “War Years” is as it was originally shown. With the benefit of 40 years of hindsight, parts of the film seem naive and chauvinistic but they show very clearly what New Zealanders were thinking at the time. Patrick McGuire says it was important for him to keep in mind that the Weekly Reviews from which the material is drawn were propaganda. “The Reviews were part of the Government’s programme designed to help people cope with unusual situations and to encourage them to do unaccustomed things, Mr McGuire said. But although it was propaganda I don’t think it would have worked if it had not been an accurate reflec-' tion of the way people felt. “What comes through is a story of a very close-knit group of people in which everybody can identify with everyone else’s concerns. There’s a neighbourliness

about the productions that makes them unique. “I don’t think the Americans, for instances, could have made these films because their country was too big and their community too diverse. The war-time Weekly Reviews have the flavour about them of home movies made for family viewing.” McGuire says that when he first started working with the material he found the nationalism attitudes so simple and so clear-cut that he believed that people today would never accept the same sort of thing. “Then the Falklands war came along, and now I’m not so sure,” he said. “Issues suddenly become very straightforward, particularly in the material coming to us from London and from Buenos Aires. “A lot of things we saw during the Falklands war were not too different from the film material of the early 1940 s that I was working on.” Thirty-year-old McGuire

says he was surprised by some of the attitudes to war expressed in the film. “The commentary which accompanies the sequence showing soldiers going to war is far from sabrerattling,” he said. “It’s very sensitive about what war would really mean. Yet this was propaganda. I think it’s really remarkable. “I had thought that my parents’ generation had been all for war. I suppose that’s the impression I had from what you might call R.S.A. nostalgia. “Because people of my generation were opposed to the Vietnam war, and were often in conflict with their parents because of that, they thought they were the first to acknowledge the horrors of war. “In going ’ through the hundreds of films which we viewed to select the material for “War Years” it was possible to detect the watersheds in the war. . “Once it was clear the war was going to be won the attitudes changed. The same sort of commentary lines were used but there was no more dread in the voice and the urgency slipped away. “It was interesting to see the attitude to women as well. It was obvious that women had to become part of the war effort but their move into industry was definitely not thought of as a

permanent thing. “Women were just helping to do the men’s jobs so the men could do something else, and the underlying feeling was that their real place was in the home and that they would want to be back there. “I’d like to think that people will be moved by ‘War Years.’ It’s easy to laugh at some of the attitudes and some of the commentaries, but throughout all that material of 40 years ago there is a real humanism and warmth. “The events of the day may have been momentous ones but the films were really about people,” Mr McGuire said.

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