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Gosden’s accidental history of politics

A book about NZ Film Festival director Bill Gosden’s life and career is finally being released. Glenn McConnell talks to the woman who persuaded him to write it.

One thing to know about Bill Gosden is that he always worked right up until the deadline. Dame Gaylene Preston recalls walking past his office on Wellington’s Courtney Place, the night before his New Zealand International Film Festival booklet was due at the printers. The lights would be on late into the night. ‘‘And I knew what he was doing, up there writing his introduction for the year,’’ she says.

‘‘Every year he worked right up to the deadline and, I must say, he delivered this book to the deadline. When he was going through the last paragraph with me, he was very sick – just a week from his passing.’’

Gosden, the director of the NZIFF for 40 years, died in November last year. He was five days away from his 67th birthday, and died after sustained bowel cancer, which he had lived with for many years.

During those years, renowned filmmaker Preston says people kept asking Gosden to write a memoir. They wanted to hear the account of the festival director, a man who turned his love of cinema into a career.

He was remembered as one of the most influential people in New Zealand cinema.

But he kept putting it off, until the last possible moment. When Gosden did want to do something, however, he put everything into it.

Preston had started to lose hope that Gosden would ever record his memories in a memoir of his own, so she brought in the cameras to try to record his recollections. Even that didn’t work.

‘‘I’d sort of given up, sadly but reluctantly,’’ she recalls. Then one day, they were down at Capitol in Wellington, having breakfast together as they often would.

‘‘And Bill told me the concept for this book, so I said, ‘Bill stop eating and go home right now. Get cracking!’ By that time, he had a brain tumour – he really did work to the deadline.’’

His idea for the book was to reprint selections from New Zealand International Film Festival publications. Those selections, detailing his favourite films across 40 years as festival director, show the development of cinema in New Zealand.

Preston says the finished product, titled

The Gosden Years, is an ‘‘accidental history of New Zealand’’.

It starts in 1980. Gosden writes, ‘‘What? Suddenly the Wellington Film Festival has a codirector and it’s me, self-proclaimed on the title page of the souvenir programme. Twenty-eight years old, already tasked with most of the festival’s programming and all its delivery.’’

Accompanying photography and posters from each year of the festival is Gosden’s recollections. He explains his feelings of the time, and the many people whose work ensured the festival stayed in operation.

In 2017, for instance, the poster for NZIFF depicted crowds walking into the light of the cinema from a foggy, dark world.

Gosden explains, ‘‘A neon glow on a sodden city night was intended as fitting, as the world grappled with the meaning of Trump.’’

In 2003, Gosden dedicated his introduction to combatting censorship. He took direct aim at Parliament, whose select committee had taken umbrage at the Film and Classifications Office (AKA the censor) waiving NZIFF’s censorship fee.

His writing paints a picture where legislators had their backs turned to the incoming tsunami of the internet to instead focus on the comparatively quaint and proper film festivals.

He wrote, ‘‘What with the internet and with hardcore on tap in every household with a Sky dish, the fuss – pro and con – regarding the picturesque perving over bruised angel flesh in Ken Park has been another rearguard skirmish lost by those who have already lost the war.

‘‘Will they ever concede defeat? Maybe when one of our desperate universities establishes a paper in porn studies they’ll finally see that it’s all over.’’

He seemed to truly despise censors.

New Zealand’s chief censors regularly got a mention in his editorials and throughout the book.

He remembers being accused of ‘‘finding women’s mutilated bodies interesting’’, after Jane Wrightson, film censor in 1992, raised the alarm about one of the NZIFF’s inclusions that year – Henry: Portrait of A Serial Killer.

Despite the headlines those more controversial films brought, the NZIFF was probably better remembered for fostering homegrown talent.

It saw the premieres of groundbreaking films from legendary Ma¯ ori film-makers Barry Barclay, with Nga¯ ti, and Merata Mita, with Mauri.

Nga¯ ti was the first narrative feature film from a Ma¯ ori director to launch at the NZIFF when it arrived in 1987.

‘‘And as the first local film since Patu! to engage with contemporary political issues, it packs quite a wallop,’’ Gosden wrote at the time.

His verdicts on local films, and the inclusion of them in the festival lineup, was invaluable to local film-makers, says Preston.

He wasn’t a pushover, however. She and Gosden first met in 1980 and she wasn’t happy. Her documentary, Learning Fast, had been rejected from the NZIFF lineup, and she stormed into Gosden’s office to confront him.

‘‘I was in an absolute rage,’’ she recalls. ‘‘Bill was sitting in his office and I said, ‘you’d screen my film if I spent a year and a half in Paris making it’. I was standing up, he was sitting there and eventually he got a word in; ‘Gaylene, it has already been on television’, he said. ‘So we can’t screen your film’.’’

His work establishing the festival gave rise to global possibilities for Kiwi film-makers. Preston says international distributors often wanted to see proof that the local drama had some local traction before they would commit to it. New Zealand had a unique issue, ‘‘cultural cringe’’.

‘‘It was a catch 22,’’ says Preston. Kiwi audiences gravitated towards films that had attracted some global acclaim, but local films couldn’t make it to the world stage unless they could prove it worked locally. Gosden’s film festival gave them that step up.

‘‘I said, ‘Bill stop eating and go home right now. Get cracking!’ ’’ Dame Gaylene Preston, above

Since their first meeting, Gosden and Preston became very good friends. After he stepped down from the festival in 2019, they would catch up for brunch, and eventually he entrusted her and his former colleague Tim Wong with his own story.

Wong, who had worked as publications editor at the NZIFF, got a call from Gosden three weeks before his death. He was in hospice care at the time and had decided to ask Preston and Wong to get his book over the line.

‘‘I spent as much time as I could with him, talking over the book and getting his feelings – trying to extract as much information and feeling as I could.

‘‘Once he passed away, we worked on it from there to stay as true to his vision for it as we could,’’ Wong says.

The result, a look back at 40 years of New Zealand cinema, told mostly through Gosden’s own words, proves to be a wealth of nostalgic memorabilia and insightful reckonings from behind the curtain of the festival.

For Wong, it tells the story of the creation of an alternative culture in New Zealand – one that broke away from the blockbusters from Hollywood.

It also tells the political history of New Zealand, from the perspective of the screen industry.

And of course, it is Gosden’s story. A man who, when oncologists told him to spend his remaining time doing ‘‘the things you want’’, replied: ‘‘I’ve spent most of my life doing exactly that.’’

Entertainment

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2021-10-29T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-10-29T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/282089164984867

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