DVDs
Blyth spirit
by Diana Wichtel
Thirty years ago, they were asking questions in Parliament about __Angel Mine__, now it's part of a series of New Zealand cinema classics.
In 1978, David Blyth’s first feature film, Angel Mine, took to local cinemas with the subtlety of a youthful, wildly aimed kick to the New Zealand psyche. This full-frontal assault on suburban neurosis, materialism and taboos about nudity still places highly on lists of the worst New Zealand film ever made. “A subversive and erotic trip into the emotional jungle of suburbia,” said the film’s female lead, Jennifer Redford. “About as erotic as a belch,” said a critic. Questions were asked in Parliament. Morals campaigner Patricia Bartlett blew a gasket. Words like “hullabaloo”, “ballyhoo” and “hoo-ha” were used.
“I came out of Angel Mine reeling from all the negativity,” recalls Blyth, at his beach house in now quite suburban Whangaparaoa. “I was well and truly categorised. I was the enfant terrible. And a lot of people didn’t change their mind on that for another 20 years.”
Well, he was almost an enfant – only 21 – when he made Angel Mine. And many thought it was terrible. “All of my movies have been put in the worst-ever-made category. Even Grampire, which I think is delightful.”
He remains unbowed. “I don’t want to be immodest, but I honestly believe I’m way ahead of my time, every time.”
Ahead of your time: the cry of the genius and the oddball. With Blyth, you get a bit of each. “What happened,” he says, of how it began, “was I went to Auckland University and was exposed to the film society, film festival and Dr Roger Horrocks’ film classes.”
An early work was called Other Lives. “It was two lesbians on Waiheke Island. One of them had built a house single-handedly and wanted her tits to be chopped off. The other claimed to be an extra in Fellini’s 8½.” Here is the genesis of various on-going Blyth preoccupations: sexuality, the influence of European cinema, weirdness.
Ahead of his time? Evidence exists. “My only claim to fame is that I managed to pip Peter Jackson by making the first horror film.” That was Blyth’s 1984 vampire film, Death Warmed Up. It wasn’t released, someone wrote, it escaped.
Another first, and last: Angel Mine carried the hilarious censor’s warning, “Contains punk cult material”.
Blyth also anticipated Viagra. “Angel Mine” is an “adult strength preparation” for “marital problems”. And years before Jane Campion plunked a piano on a wild West Coast beach as an image of colonial dislocation, the film opened with a naked woman perched on a toilet on the sands of Piha.
This turns out to be perhaps the most tasteful scene. Set in the raw subdivisions of Pakuranga, the film circles like a demented buzzard around a couple as they fail to communicate, eat chips while watching pornography and run amok as black leather-clad projections of their own repressed libidos.
Hamish Keith stood up for this “joker in the pack” of a generation of New Zealand films that included Sleeping Dogs. Here you will find such moments as Death from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal turning up to mow the lawn. Angel Mine was chosen for a retrospective of New Zealand films screened last year in Poland, and was one of the first wave of Kiwi classic movies being reissued on DVD this year (Death Warmed Up is now available in the second wave). Any film that can still alarm you 30 years later has something going for it.
It’s a miracle Angel Mine was ever made. Blyth used a new kind of newsreel stock. “I shot the whole film blind, never saw rushes and then had to take this whole box of film out to the airport and it went to Belgium to be processed.”
He inveigled his way into the first meeting of the interim New Zealand Film Commission. “I took the best 10 minutes, which was a lot of stuff of Jennifer looking fabulous. All those men were over 50. When they saw Jennifer and a bit of art and a bit of black sand, they were blown away.” He got $20,000 for postproduction. “Yes, it was calculated. But from naivety. I was being opportunist. I was young.”
How does he view the film now? “It’s much funnier than I remember. I love the forensic quality, meaning the Jif bottles, all the 70s consumerism, the car … The leather punk suits were designed by Liz Mitchell, the designer. At the time, that Lockwood home was like a tombstone on a newly created graveyard.”
For Derek Ward, Angel Mine’s male lead, watching the film again was a mixed experience. “After not seeing it for a long time, I thought it was a very interesting film … I didn’t think we’d gone that far. We’d gone too far for comfort now.”
Yes, he got a lot of “What were you thinking?” reactions at the time. “I remember my father saying, ‘Well, there goes your acting career’.”
On balance, though, he’s glad to have been a part of this arresting moment in film history. “They were quite modern ideas – the influence by different levels of media on their lives. Those sorts of ideas weren’t being explored anywhere else at the time.”
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