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World Film Locations: Melbourne
By Neil Mitchell Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2012 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-640-1
CHAPTER 1
MELBOURNE
UPFRONT
City of the Imagination
MELBOURNE HAS BEEN a relatively ubiquitous presence in the cinema since the very first films shot by a Lumière cameraman in Australia in late 1896. These initial Australian films feature iconic (Derby Day, part of the Melbourne Cup Carnival) and relatively indistinct images of the city that set up a paradigm for Melbourne's representation that continues to this day. This combination of iconic identifiability - determined by such elements as Melbourne's seeming obsession with sport and the 'marvellous' Victorian-era architecture that defines the city's popular identity - and indistinctiveness, is reflective of the city's geography, history, cultural identity, and insistent competitive relationship to the more obviously spectacular and picturesque Sydney. Melbourne, arguably defined as a 'second city' in contradistinction to its northern counterpart, is often considered more cultured, more literary, more livable (the 'world's most' according to various highly publicized polls), more structured (it served as Australia's administrative capital and parliament in the early years after Federation), less brash, and as a place that you must spend time in to truly experience. Melbourne-set films, complete with the difficulties they encounter in introducing the city and finding easy markers of identification, are defined by a dispersed and piecemeal psycho-geography of the city. For example, it takes someone intimately versed in the byways and microscopic detail of Melbourne to know the precise locations used in such important films as Animal Kingdom (2010), Noise (2007) and Romper Stomper (1992). This group of films suggests the importance of down-at-heel, gritty realism, and the crime genre to the labyrinthine, low-key imagination of Melbourne-set cinema. Although fleeting images of the skyline and muddy Yarra River feature in numerous films, it is the horizontality of such inner-city suburbs as St Kilda, Richmond, Carlton and Footscray, as well as fractured glimpses of the urban grid, that characterize 'Melbourne cinema'. As a result, Melbourne's cinema is often iconically and representationally heterogeneous; temporally and spatially indistinct.
At most points in Australian film history its cinema has largely been centred and/ or focused elsewhere (even if the money was often found in Melbourne). There is a reason this book offers only a few examples from the vast period leading up to the late 1960s and the emergence of what is called the 'Carlton School' and the feature film 'revival' spurred by such varied films as The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), Alvin Purple (1973) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). The cinema of these earlier periods is generally preoccupied by either the immensity of the non-urban landscape or (much less often) the inner urban terrain of Sydney. There are few dominant or defining images of Melbourne in these early films, and one needs to look towards documentary to find a denser thicket of representation. It is also quite revealing that although what is now commonly claimed as the first feature film made anywhere in the world, Charles Tait's The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), was shot in Melbourne but is not actually set there. This stands in contrast to such a remarkable artefact as Charles Cozens Spencer's Marvellous Melbourne: Queen City of the South (1910), a short documentary celebrating the majestic inner-city thoroughfares and civic icons of Victorian- era Melbourne, the legacy of its massive boom in the Gold Rush led-era of the 1860s,1870s and 1880s. Although made around the time of the completion of one of the city's most identifiable buildings, the majestic Flinders Street Station originally destined for Mumbai, and full of images taken from the front of the city's ubiquitous trams, it is really a nostalgic marker of an earlier, more buoyant moment.
The opening moments of Stanley Kramer's American produced but Melbourne shot On the Beach (1959), probably the defining 'Melbourne' film, are emblematic of this representational indistinctness and slipperiness. As an American submarine enters the heads of Port Phillip Bay there are no identifying landmarks, nothing that marks what we see (except for the local spectator, perhaps) as identifiably Melbourne. There is no shot of the skyline, no title-card, nor a montage of explicit views, attractions or identifying features. This is part-and-parcel of a general difficulty of conceiving of Melbourne as a 'landmark' city or as a city of landmarks. In his 1997 book Twms, Chris Gregory addresses some of these issues by conceptualizing Melbourne as a city of doubles, twins and copies; where each recognizable building apes the facades, features and memories of other more desirable, exotic and cosmopolitan cities. In keeping with this, Melbourne is often used as a cinematic stand-in for any number of other places: the light, sensibility and actuality of Europe in various Paul Cox films; for Victorian London in the TV-movie The Ripper (1997); for the Boston area in Knowing (2009); and to evoke the architectural and municipal memory of an older, and now dead Europe and America in On the Beach. This is an approach to the malleability and imagination of Melbourne that is also reflected in the touristic, liberal practices of the Melbourne Film Office in promoting the city as a de facto film set, and the construction and operations of the Docklands Studios where such fantastical movies as Where the Wild Things Are (2009) and Ghost Rider (2007) were produced.
Probably the most widely circulated statement about Melbourne is that apocryphally credited to Ava Gardner as she left the city after the production of On the Beach: 'I'm here to make a film about the end of the world ... and this seems to be exactly the right place for it.' Although Gardner's negative comment reflects lingering doubts about the geography and worldliness of Melbourne, and certainly skewers the muted sensibility of the desiccated On the Beach itself, it does little to account for the dynamic and often varied uses to which the city has been put in the movies of the last 45 years. The Melbourne cinema of this era is, as I have remarked, still characterized by the city's transformability, but is also memorable for the stream of visiting Bollywood productions that highlight the more photogenic and breezy elements of the city, the endless number of crime films and television programmes emphasizing the dispersed and centrifugal qualities of the sprawling suburban metropolis, the combinatory action choreography of the Jackie Chan vehicle (1997), and the series of Carlton-based films of the 1960s and 1970s that redefine ideas of the city and its cultural and cinematic markers (more Italian neo-realism and Godard than Hollywood or British cinema). In these and other films across more than a century, Melbourne emerges as truly a city to be (re) imagined.
THE STORY OF THE KELLY GANG (1906)
LOCATION
The former Chartersville Estate, now part of Heidelberg, VIC 3084
THE STORY OF THE KELLY GANG was a bold undertaking. At the turn of the twentieth century, films were generally at most ten minutes in length. The Story originally ran for an hour, and is thought to be the world's first narrative feature-length film. The film is classically Aussie in how it 'bats for the underdog'. The Kelly gang are good blokes with a bit of cheek, protecting decent citizens from corrupt police, 'larrikins' who take the time to remove their hats for ladies. The film advertised itself as being shot on location at the 'real' Glenrowan Inn, where the 'real' Kelly gang had been overpowered and seized. In actual fact, most of the film was shot on a property owned by the Tait family, known as the Chartersville estate, now part of the suburb of Heidelberg. A replica of the inside of the Glenrowan Inn was built for the film's iconic showdown. In this scene, the police set the pub alight to smoke out the Kelly brothers hiding within. As the pub cinders the film is dyed a violent pink. Inside, two of the gang accept their fate. Outside, Ned, dressed in homemade armour, is shot and seized. Over the past century, Melbourne's expansion has consumed the leafy Chartersville estate and pushed rural life in general to the outskirts of the city. The film is a relic from some of our enterprising ancestors, the energy of whom made Melbourne the dynamic metropolis it is today. ->Emtna Jane McNicol
MARVELLOUS MELBOURNE: QUEEN CITY OF THE SOUTH (1010)
LOCATION
Flinders Street Station, corner of Flinders and Swanston Street, VIC 3000
FLINDERS STREET STATION is undoubtedly one of Melbourne's most iconic buildings. Posed on one of the city's busiest intersections it has a wonderful baroque grandeur that seems to rise above the bustle beneath. The front steps, topped with clocks announcing the next departing trains, remain a popular meeting place for tourists, estranged friends and suburban teens. Yet the story goes that Flinders Street Station is not very Melbourne at all. Rumours suggest the plans for the building – built between 1905 and 1910 – were actually intended for Mumbai. A mix-up when the plans were posted from London resulted in a piece of East Indian architecture becoming the principal landmark in Australia's cultural capital. Even if Melbourne's true train station did wind up thousands of miles away, it is understandable that Marvellous Melbourne would feature the Flinders Street landmark. Filmed the year the building was created, the short documentary is keen to show off the city's wealth, with footage lingering over rooftops and admiring such structures as the Royal Exhibition Building – built three decades earlier – which here seems to rival the grandest European palace. Part of a journey that takes us along St Kilda Road and up onto the Swanston Street shopping strip, our glimpse of Flinders Street Station is, however, decidedly fleeting. Indeed a jump in the film ensures that we leap from an approach to a departure, but here the building's domed roof seems to guard the city gates. Gliding up this enviously-empty, tree-lined avenue, we recognize exactly where Melbourne proper begins. ->Myke Bartlett
HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS (1932)
LOCATION
Her Majesty's Theatre, 219 Exhibition Street, VIC 3000
POPULAR VAUDEVILLE PERFORMER George Wallace brings his knockabout, working-class persona to the screen as Tommy Dodds, a stage hand transported to the mythical kingdom of Betonia, courtesy of a wallop to the back of the head. Fittingly, His Royal Highness (released in the United Kingdom as His Loyal Highness) was filmed on the stage of Her Majesty's Theatre, which was used by Frank Thring Snr's company Efftee Productions as a film studio while the auditorium was closed for several years due to fire damage. The palace sets lend an airy grandeur to the action, which, while never losing the sense of a stage act transplanted somewhat clumsily to film, captures Wallace's slapstick style. Mistaken as the heir to the throne, Tommy is presented to the court, where he is momentarily floored by the formality and pomp of proceedings, executing his trademark pratfall onto his left ear, and sending his crown flying. Quickly adapting to his new role, Tommy joins in with the courtiers and sing a chorus of 'I am the king of Betonia'. Tommy organizes a 'poncy' uniform and knighthood for his mate Jim (John Dobbie), and sacks the Prime Minister. Upsetting the plans of an evil courtier, Tommy discovers the identity of the true heir only to be bundled - via another knock to the head - all the way back to the wings in Melbourne. Opened in 1886 as the Alexandria, Her Majesty's was heritage listed in 1986 and remains in use theatrical venue. ->Fiona Trigg
THOROUGHBRED (1936)
LOCATION
Flemington Racecourse, 400 Epsom Road, Flemington, VIC 3031
THE AUSTRALIAN FEATURE FILM of the 1930s and 1940s is lacking in representative images of Melbourne. With the curtailment of activity at Frank Thring's Melbourne-based Efftee Studios in the mid-1930s, Ken G. Hall fully emerged as the central figure of the Australian feature film industry, introducing various technologies, synergies and economies of scale. Thoroughbred was the first Australian film to use the relatively new technique of rear-projection: a key technology of cinematic modernity that allowed streamlined production and an unprecedented control of the filmed environment. The film itself tells the fairly hackneyed tale of an emaciated and neglected thoroughbred, Stormalong, who battles against adversity to win the Melbourne Cup before dying at the finish line, after being shot by a sniper. The extended Cup Day sequence is a delirious combination of stock footage, garish and sometimes ill-matched rear-projections, location shooting, studio composition, rapid montage, and the 'actuality' of Melbourne and the rarefied realm of Hall's Sydney (Bondi Junction) studio. Resonating loosely with the legend of Phar Lap's fate (poisoned) in America, Hall's excitingly staged sequence offers a piecemeal representation of one of Melbourne's most iconic events - the film is both there and also somewhere else. This achieves its most head-spinning articulation in the swiftly edited moments when the sniper first battles against the protagonist and then aims his rifle towards the patently 'projected' images of the race. Thoroughbred is remarkable for its transformation of an actual event into a sub-Hitchcockian spectacle of action and intrigue. ->Adrian Danks
ON THE BEACH (1959)
LOCATION
Williamstown Naval Dockyard, Williamstown, VIC 3016
NEVIL SHUTE'S PRE-APOCALYPTIC NOVEL placed Melbourne as the last habitable place on Earth and director Stanley Kramer assembled a Hollywood A-list cast, including Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins, to be present at the world's end. It was an uncomfortable shoot for the stars, with temperatures topping 110 °F. Ava Gardner's first appearance sees her striding coolly along the wharf at Williamstown Naval Dockyard with HMAS Melbourne berthed behind her, in order to board the Royal Navy submarine HMS Andrew. The dockyard dates back to 1858 when the first slipway was built, followed fifteen years later by the completion of the Albert Graving Dock. Shipbuilding at Williamstown began in 1913 and its output saw action in both world wars. For Gardner's scene on the pier, it is said that so many sailors hung over the side of the Melbourne that the ship developed a five degree list to starboard. The actress blanked their cheers and applause as she made her way between vessels, remaining focused even after trapping the heel of one of her stilettos between two planks. Slipping her foot out of the shoe she continued on her way as the cheers from the disregarded ratings turned to boos. Adding insult to injury Gardner, in an interview for the Sydney Morning Herald, was quoted as suggesting that Melbourne in the summer was an ideal place to make a film about the end of the world, although much later journalist Neil Jillett admitted concocting the line because Gardner had refused to be interviewed. ->Jez Conolly
(Continues...)
Excerpted from World Film Locations: Melbourne by Neil Mitchell. Copyright © 2012 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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