I have met some fine film people over in New Zealand. They're generous, warm, and far less cagey about discussing meat and potato money issues than their Australian counterparts. When I've been there, trying to get a Japanese production into NZ, they've been so helpful, it made the arduous considerably more bearable.
Yet, it seems their Film Commission struggles from the very same problems our funding bodies suffer from, as evinced by this article here.
(Dr. Ruth) Harley also gave a departing gift of about $40,000 to something called Project Ell, about which no one seems to know much.
Eight years ago, the Film Fund Production Trust was established. As John Barnett passionately argued in his On Film piece this month, those who run this fund, including Harley, have spent $20m without accounting for a cent.
If you look at just about every New Zealand movie which has proved to be a commercial success, the Film Commission has either snubbed it, or given token funding. On the other hand, its big budget films have invariably turned out to be productions few people want to watch.
But they're so cute, these commission bureaucrats.
If a film's a commercial failure, they quickly call it "art", as if the two cancel each other out. Well I've got two words in response: Whale Rider.
Everywhere you look, a disgrace can be found. A little-known documentary, Trouble is my Business, was funded by the commission and made by a staff member.
If this were an iwi-based organisation, tossing out taxpayers' money to whanau, heads would roll. Where's investigative journalist Phil Kitchin when you need him most?
Before you accuse me of putting the boot into Harley now she's gone, go back and find I've been criticising the commission's behaviour for years.
For its secrecy, its unaccountability, for playing favourites. Those who sucked up to Harley were the chosen ones; there was a cosiness between Harley, Labour's associate arts minister, Judith Tizard, and to a lesser extent, her boss Helen Clark.
On some level, there's money that has to be spent on obscure productions in both countries. There's a place in the world for these films that appeal to 16,000 people on th entire planet. The problem is that there's a delusion in these development bodies that those 'worthy films' should comprise the corpus of the entire film industry. In the mean time, the films they snub are most likely the films with a wider audience.
It gives me no satisfaction or encouragement whatsoever to find Dr. Ruth Harley is going to be the new head of the Screen Australia organ. It's a typical case where the credentials fit, but only because the credentials are so incongruous to the real task at hand. Dr Harley is not going to be able to help the Australian Film Industry revive itself. Then again, the structural and contextual problems the Australian Film Industry is up against, are not problems she or Screen Australia can solve.
A Depression By Any Other Name Is A Depression
This link came in from Pleiades, who has a sharp eye for these things.
Few prominent economists will say it, but to me it looks and feels like we are in another Great Depression or a reasonable facsimile.
The current meltdown is dubbed a "financial crisis." But a rose by any other name would still inflict the same hardship and suffering on most people and businesses.
Clearly, the lessons have not been learned from the Herbert Hoover era. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, a columnist for The New York Times, says the current banking crisis is "functionally similar to that of the Great Depression."
"Many of the symptoms" are the same, including the impotence of monetary policy -- like cuts in interest rates -- that has not halted the economic downturn.
Typically, the current Republican administration has acted first to bail out the collapsed financial industry, with few strings attached. Belatedly, the government now has come up with an $800 billion program for hard-pressed average Americans to make it easier to get loans for homes, cars and education or borrow through credit cards.
The moves evoke the old quip on Capitol Hill: "A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you are talking about real money."
I'm not seeing the effects of this thing just yet. I can't explain it, but the company for which I do a lot of stuff, is going gangbusters in this festive season. And to show it is not an isolated phenomenon, Macquarie Bank threw a $750k Christmas Party - and we weren't invited, but who cares? There's work out there. It just doesn't feel like a depression yet.
Of course it could all go belly-up in the new year, in which case, we'll all starve and be on the dole queue, but it really doesn't feel like it here.
No comments:
Post a Comment