It's been 25 years since Geoff Murphy released Never Say Die and jetted off to Hollywood to try his luck. 25 years, and the spotlight is back on him. Utu Redux, the restoration of Murphy’s 1983 Land Wars fever-dream, had its World Premiere at the New Zealand International Film Festival in July; the following month, Murphy received an Arts Foundation Icon Award alongside luminaries like Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Ian Athfield; this week, Murphy received the Moas’ inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award.
If you’re not familiar with Murphy’s work, now’s a good time to get acquainted with his phenomenal legacy. Filmmakers like Lee Tamahori and Oscar-nominated cinematographer Stuart Clayburgh got their start under him, and his tireless support of his contemporaries – Roger Donaldson, Gaylene Preston, Merata Mita, Sam Pillsbury – means that his fingerprints are all over most major landmarks of our cinema resurgence in the 1980s.
In a way, to understand the styles and preoccupations of New Zealand’s contemporary filmmakers, you need to have seen Utu, and you need to have seen The Quiet Earth.
More importantly, Murphy's attitude and thematic concerns have been a major influence on pretty much all of New Zealand cinema in the last 30 years. In a way, to understand the styles and preoccupations of New Zealand’s contemporary filmmakers, you need to have seen Utu, and you need to have seen The Quiet Earth. (You probably also need to have seen Goodbye Pork Pie, but mea culpa I’m a terrible film watcher, etc. etc.)
Utu is a shambling, often clumsy mess – some of the actors are stiff and can’t play Murphy’s idiosyncratic tonal shifts, while the score would be more suited to a rip-roaring 1930s action-adventure flick. But even with those faults, Murphy carves into the turmoil and pain of the Maori Land Wars a nightmarish tale of pointless bloodshed and gruesome vengeance. It's a disorienting, tonally unsettling mix of horror, chambara film and exploitation film, and the influence of its outsized, aggressive personality can be traced to films like Once Were Warriors, Out of the Blue and River Queen.
The Quiet Earth, on the other hand, is possibly the pinnacle of Murphy's career, a slow burn of a journey into the psyche of man as conveyed through Bruno Lawrence's increasingly crazed Zac Hobson. Traipsing down empty New Zealand streets (and Murphy makes them empty, rather than dead – life does not feel so much lost in Murphy’s apocalypse as it does absent, displaced to an invisible elsewhere), Hobson becomes drunk on the unlimited power he’s gained from the lack of it all. Hobson's not the 'man alone' Sam Neill described in his documentary A Cinema of Unease, though he is alone; where those men are alienated by the world and the landscape, Hobson's got nothing left to be alienated from. It's a fascinating, low-key psychological drama, a high watermark for New Zealand genre filmmaking.
Go down to the local video store this weekend and grab one of those films (or maybe wait until Utu Redux comes out; the current DVD transfer is godawful – murky as hell). Discover, or revisit, a man pivotal in the formulation of New Zealand’s cinematic identity.
