WAKE IN FRIGHT

WAKE IN FRIGHT

It’s the Australian classic that no-one’s seen.

And probably never would have, bar a staggering stroke of luck.

Wake in Fright made a big splash when it came out in 1971, debuting at the Cannes Film Festival to rapturous acclaim abroad – if less so on home shores. Starring Gary Bond and Donald Pleasence, it marked the final film appearance of larrikin Chips Rafferty and the first of a very young Jack Thompson. It ran for five months in France – under the title Outback – and was widely hailed as an “almost uniquely unsettling” (The Oxford Companion to Australian Film) example of new Australian cinema.  After a few re-hashes on TV, the print went walkabout. Missing, presumed lost forever. Until 2004, in what was a dream come true for archivists, film buffs and treasure-hunters alike. All 60 cans of film turned up in a shipping container marked ‘For destruction’ in Pittsburgh, USA. “There was great excitement when the negative was found,” agrees Senior Curator at the National Film and Sound Archives, Graham Shirley. Till then, “all we’d had was an incredibly beaten up print, a relic, a mess.  To find it was a major coup.” Anthony Buckley, the original editor of Wake in Fright and the one charged with the painstaking ten-year hunt, no doubt agreed. “You’ve probably got three generations of people that haven’t seen it … it’s a miracle that we managed to catch it in time,” he told The Age in 2004.

Based on a fiercely dark 1961 novel by Kenneth Cook, Wake in Fright follows the fortunes – and otherwise – of bonded teacher John Grant. Stationed in the achingly remote Tiboonda, he travels to nearby mining town Bundanyabba (‘The Yabba’) to depart for Sydney, where his girlfriend awaits.  But trapped in The Yabba’s world of hard-drinking and hard-gambling, that’s as far as he ever gets. With two-up, beer, brawls and misogyny galore, plus a real-life kangaroo cull, this “warts and all” representation of Australia was too uncomfortably close to home for some. “It nailed aspects of the national character that were seen as ugly,” says Graham Shirley, NFSA. Like the hit of the same year, Walkabout (coincidentally also edited by Anthony Buckley), it captures a “fish out of water, a city-bred person trying to adjust to the harsh life of the outback – both attitudinal and environmental.” But Wake in Fright was, according to Graham, “less palatable, the central character [the teacher] loses his sense of self. He is initially intrigued and seduced by the mateship, but it ultimately becomes claustrophobic.” Is Australia ready for this now – and has that much changed? Graham hopes that audiences will now appreciate its filmcraft, and will see an Australia, “locked off in time.” Like the 1919 movie Sentimental Bloke, he believes it has, “endured as a classic.”

Audiences can soon decide for themselves, with Wake in Fright making its second film premiere this year at the Sydney Film Festival on June 13, hot on the heels of its Cannes Classics World Premiere. Now digitally restored, it will also enjoy a DVD release later in the year. But not all such stories have happy endings. “Ninety per cent of Australia’s silent film heritage has been lost,” speculates Graham. “Films like Ginger Mick by Raymond Longford, Two Minutes Silence by the McDonagh sisters … once a film’s commercial viability was exhausted, filmmakers didn’t care what happened to it. After the speed of film increased from 18 frames per second to 24 at the introduction of sound, silent films were demolished worldwide. They were put in a barge and dumped into the ocean ” It might be hard to imagine now in the age of backups, file recovery and YouTube, but holding onto key examples of moving image is still incredibly difficult. It’s the work of bodies like the NFSA, plus a few rogue, dedicated cinema aficionados, to, “remind people that while you assume everything’s going to be kept, they’re not.” And even fewer film stocks will come back from beyond – unless, as was the case with Wake in Fright, luck and a slow-moving disposal system is on your side.

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