How Sam Neill’s 1990s documentary Cinema of Unease reckoned with New Zealand’s film history
Beloved for his roles in films from Dead Calm to Jurassic Park, Sam Neill – who has died aged 78 – was a vital figure in New Zealand cinema who, in 1995, made a documentary for the BFI offering thoughtful reflections on the unease and troubled political history permeating his nation’s filmmaking.
The laidback grace of actor Sam Neill – droll, unfussed by celebrity, and an advocate of the proverbial underdog – made him a national treasure for New Zealanders, who have always been deeply suspicious of the trappings of fame and of authorities that overstep. When he wrote, co-directed (with Judy Rymer) and walked us as narrator through 1995’s Cinema of Unease: A Personal Journey by Sam Neill – his vividly anecdotal, thoughtful attempt to reckon with the kind of national cinema that had just come into its own in Aotearoa – it registered to many Kiwis as a voice we could trust.
The hour-long documentary, which screened at Cannes and was New Zealand’s contribution to the BFI’s series of Century of Cinema documentaries (which also included films from Martin Scorsese, Nagisa Oshima, George Miller and others), was made at a moment of astonishing success for homegrown films on the global stage. Neill had just starred in Jane Campion’s The Piano two years earlier, and Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994) and Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors (1994) had also just come out, calming our cultural cringe with their brilliantly realised, singular but decidedly dark visions.
“If a national cinema is a reflection of ourselves, then ours is a troubled reflection indeed,” said Neill, summing up his thesis in Cinema of Unease. Born in Northern Ireland to an English mother and a Kiwi father, he sailed to New Zealand with his family in 1954, aged seven. His memories of childhood in a Christchurch suburb so dull and buttoned-down it was “virtually comatose” are related with typical dry humour. He contended that behind the conformism was fear – above all, a fear of madness, and he found no shortage of outbursts of gruesome violence and menacing landscapes in our small cinematic output to suggest profound alienation and cries for help from our gloomy, dislocated psychological interiors.
Neill revisits sequences of Geoff Murphy’s Utu (1983), in which Māori warrior Te Wheke (Anzac Wallace) wages an insurgency against British forces he had been collaborating with, after his village is massacred; and Roger Donaldson’s Sleeping Dogs (1977), the first homegrown feature to be widely screened abroad, in which Neill first gained recognition as a loner figure on the run in a futuristic, fascist New Zealand, after he is accused of being a resistance activist. Merata Mita’s Patu! (1983), documenting riot police beating protesters against apartheid during the ’81 Springbok rugby tour, revealed a nation in which dissent was often met with brute power.
Unease – from disquiet to all-out horror – continued to permeate the films of the 90s: Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table (1990), based on leading writer Janet Frame’s autobiographies, related her institutionalisation and electroshock treatment in psychiatric wards; and there’s The Piano (1993), a “romantic, Gothic, unique” and “extraordinary” production for which Neill took time out from Hollywood to play a Victorian-era frontiersman who is catastrophically ill-equipped to deal with his new wife’s stubbornness and silence. Peter Jackson took a fantastical, and even more gory, route, with zombie splatterfest Braindead (1992), and Heavenly Creatures (1994), on the real-life Parker-Hulme crime in which two teens bludgeoned one of their mothers to death in a Christchurch park. Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors (1994) shocked the country from complacency over domestic violence, and the brutality of cultural disenfranchisement, through a social realist lens.
To a degree, it’s hard to argue with Neill’s assessment, that “betrayal by Empire” seeded a particularly disturbed cinema of angst and isolation. Māori were subjected to the barbarity of the settler ‘civilising’ project, wars and a treaty that did not uphold their rights. Settlers, thanklessly tasked with producing cheap food for export ‘home’, felt out of sorts in a forbidding landscape on which were built an unusually high number, per capita, of British-style psychiatric institutions.
How does Cinema of Unease: A Personal Journey by Sam Neill hold up, over 30 years on? Heperi Mita, who charted his mother’s work as a pioneer of indigenous cinema in his debut feature-length documentary Merata, How Mum Decolonised the Screen (2018), reflects: “It’s no easy feat to articulate a nation’s entire cinematic legacy with a singular term, and that’s pretty much what Sam did. In 1986 my mother described film in New Zealand as the ‘white neurotic film industry’. When Sam coined the phrase ‘The Cinema of Unease’ in 1995 I think it was a more romantic (and marketable) description of a similar thing. Her perspective came from her political lens. Sam’s came from a place of soul searching of our young nation’s cinema history; a history that Sam himself played a pivotal role in on so many levels. My understanding and appreciation of our national cinema has been informed by those two perspectives.”
As time passes our ‘cinema of unease’ charts a growing, changing road, and Neill’s musings, laconic and so unmistakably his, remain a favoured stopping-off point for assessment and reassessment.