Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 13

John O’Shea and the Tradition of New Zealand Cinema

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manufacture and bottling of milk in Auckland; Rug Making (1929), whose contents
are self-explanatory; The Magic Collar Box (1927), which demonstrates how
celluloid shirt collars are made; Journeyfor Three (1949), which seeks to encourage
British citizens to migrate to New Zealand; Cowie Family Holiday (1953), a “how
to” film involving vacation preparation; Golden Shears (1961), a documentary
covering the 1961 Golden Shears sheep-shearing competition in Masterton; along
with innumerable issues of the carefully censored “newsreels” Pictorial Parade,
Maoriland Monologues, New Zealand Soundscenes and New Zealand Mirror, add
up to a rather bleak cinematic landscape of mind-numbing banality, punctuated
solely by narratives from Hollywood and the UK designed to please the greatest
number of viewers.
Issues of New Zealand national identity were discreetly swept under the rug,
and New Zealand audiences existed in a land of escapist visual imagery on all
fronts. Domestic production was purposefully bland; foreign films were simply
imports without local cultural significance. It was in this rather stultifying
atmosphere that John O ’Shea began his work in the cinema, first (ironically) as
assistant to the chief censor in 1950-51 (Churchman 60), and then, in what he
terms a gesture of “colossal impudence and profound ignorance” (Churchman 60),
as founder and head of Pacific Films, which was launched in 1952, and still exists
to this day. During his formative years as a filmmaker, O’Shea wrote film criticism
for the Wellington Film Society’s Monthly Film Bulletin, and he had some scathing
comments, worthy of a young Francois Truffaut, concerning the quality of
programming then being offered to New Zealanders, whether in public cinemas or
in private, film society, screening. Of Paul Rotha’s A City Speaks, O’Shea wrote in
part, in the Monthly Film Bulletin of April, 1950,

A City Speaks was, in our opinion, the dullest film that has ever been
presented by the Film Society. Its deficiencies were accentuated by
the poor print, bad recording, and the atrocious sound system of the
Public Library’s projector... [Rotha’s] vices are those of most run-ofthe-m ill B ritish (and New Zealand) docum entary filmmakers.
Concentrating on institutions, public affairs, and the working classes,
[he has] lost [his] sense of proportion and good cinema. [We] would
do well to prune our programmes of the drab footage that comes from
the dull wastes of documentary, (as cited in O’Shea 37)
It was in this cinematic atmosphere of Colonialist discourse and Hollywood narrative
dominance that O’Shea produced his first feature film, Broken Barrier, working
with co-director Roger Mirams (not to be confused with censor Gordon Mirams).
As O’Shea described the genesis of the film to me during our interview of August