An Archive of Our Own: Contested Histories at Reciprocal 2025

“Reciprocal 2025” explores the links between a carefully selected group of 14 feature films held in two key archives: The National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) of Australia situated in Canberra and The Asian Film Archive (AFA) housed in Singapore. Both archives aim to collect, store and restore films from across cinema history with a particular focus on their national and closely aligned regional cinemas. In other respects, they are a study in contrast with the precursor of the NFSA being formed (initially as part of the National Library) in December 1935 – making it one of the oldest film archives in the world – and the AFA only coming into being in January 2005.

Both sets of seven films highlight the inevitable importance of restoration to archives and the wider film ecology, though this “requirement” and its legacy fully dominates the Australian selections, with all of the work chosen appearing in new analogue to digital renovations created over the last ten years, mostly as part of their flagship “NFSA Restores” program. Although this shows off these chosen films and the program itself to great advantage, it also restricts the scope and variety of these selections and doesn’t adequately highlight the need for the urgent restoration of and increased accessibility to a large percentage of the vast, diverse and varied history of Australian cinema stored by the archive. All these collected films and restorations highlight the importance of archiving and representing a wide and pointed selection of titles from across the 130-year history of cinema, and recognise that this work needs to be continually reassessed and made available in relation to the shifting needs and priorities of restoration and the wider society. This can take in films made on nitrate over 100 years ago – represented here by the latest of numerous restorations of the NFSA’s “star” silent-era film, The Sentimental Bloke (Raymond Longford, 1919) – or digitally only 20 years ago such as Eric Khoo’s landmark Singaporean feature, Be With Me (2005). The former stands in for the legacy and unrealised potential of Australian cinema in the 1900s and 1910s – when dozens of features were made, including one widely claimed to be the world’s first, The Story of the Kelly Gang (Charles Tait, 1906) – while the latter is a key film of the Singaporean film revival gaining steam in the late 1990s, mixing together fiction and a form of documentary (centred around the remarkable Theresa Poh Lin Chan), screening at the Cannes Film Festival, presenting a gritty and sometimes bleak portrait of an alienated modern Singapore, and featuring one of the first representations of a queer/lesbian relationship in the country’s cinema. These diverse works demonstrate that the ongoing needs of restoration, curation and collection are vast, urgent and often reiterative. Both sets of films represent the clarity and disparity of these tasks as well as the changing tastes, needs and values of societies and their institutions. For instance, this program would have looked very different if put together 30 years ago, though I’m sure The Sentimental Bloke would have still found a place.

The films selected for this 14-feature program reflect these disparate cinema and archival histories, but only tell part of the story. The works curated by the AFA are heavily weighted towards the last decade or so, reflecting a rise or resurgence in feature filmmaking in places like Singapore, the Philippines and Malaysia since the late 1990s. They also respond to the ongoing curation of this series over the last three years in collaboration with a number of other archives around the world. The NFSA’s selections are more canonical, nation specific and heavily weighted towards the resurgence or “revival” of feature filmmaking in Australia from the 1970s, with six of the seven selections coming from the important two-decade period between 1976 and 1998. There is also an emphasis on films directed by women or that focus on female characters and experiences such as the globally celebrated and highly influential Muriel’s Wedding (P. J. Hogan, 1994). In many respects, the NFSA’s selections are deliberately designed to counter the male-centred history of Australian cinema. For example, not a single feature was directed by a woman in Australia between the early 1930s and Turkish migrant Ayten Kuyululu’s The Golden Cage in 1975. The selection in this season of Gillian Armstrong’s lively second feature, Starstruck (1982), represents the emergence of female-centred and instigated filmmaking in this era in the wake of the critically celebrated and commercially successful, My Brilliant Career (1979). That said, still only around ten percent of all feature films were directed by women across the 1980s.

The program’s isolated choice from an earlier boom period of Australian cinema – between 1906 and the early 1920s and before the almost 50-year stretch of very sparse feature filmmaking from the late 1920s to the early 1970s – also draws attention to an important female pioneer. The much-loved and often-revived The Sentimental Bloke highlights the extraordinary multi-faceted collaboration between Raymond Longford and Lottie Lyell, widely considered to be the most important filmmaking team of Australia’s silent era (though, unfortunately, only a very small selection of their fairly extensive output survives). Although somewhat blighted by the new score and spoken titles of the otherwise stellar recent restoration, this adaptation of the stories of C. J. Dennis highlights the technical and aesthetic capacities and qualities of Australian cinema at this moment in time as well as its more colloquial characteristics (some aspects of which were translated for the intertitles accompanying the film’s US release). I would have been fascinated to see and hear the reaction of Singaporean audiences to the copious reams of Australian slang in The Sentimental Bloke – much of it now mysterious to even most local audiences – as well as its very precise renderings of place and space despite controversially shifting the popular source’s setting from Melbourne to Sydney. But with the countries’ shared heritages of British colonialism and adaptations of English to specific local variants – for example, the Singaporean films of the 1990s revival are partly defined and differentiated by their conscious use and celebration of Singlish – I imagine that audiences would have warmed to this explicit and implicit localism and its associated colloquial humour. The earliest film included in the AFA selection, Chuchu datuk merah (M. Amin, 1963), represents an earlier flourishing of Singaporean feature production in the 1950s and 1960s that was strongly aligned with its immediate regional audience and stories focusing on the challenges faced by traditional cultures.

The NFSA selections also emphasise the importance of First Nations and multicultural perspectives, both of which became more prevalent from the 1970s onward and significantly impacted 1990s Australian cinema. With its evident stage bound origins, Rachel Perkins’ Radiance (1998) represents only the third feature to have been directed by an Aboriginal filmmaker and the first to receive a significant cinema release. Like many of the films across the selections made by both archives, it focuses upon the bonds of family, kinship and ethnic and racial identity, as well as the traumas of the past. In this respect, it forges an interesting comparison with the more recent Malaysian-Japanese co-production, Malu (Edmund Yeo, 2022), in its shared focus on the gathering together of sisters after the death of their mother. The “monstrous” mother figure in both films represents the conflicted and traumatic legacies of the past and the impossibility of ever fully loosening the tangled bonds of family and inherited identity. In Radiance, the mother is never shown, with the film favouring a more straightforward and claustrophobic rendering of its haunted past. Much of the film is confined to the conflicted space of the mother’s North Queensland home to which the daughters return when attending her funeral and solemnly – and, as often, comically – spreading her ashes. The film is a showcase for several of Australia’s most significant First Nations actors – Deborah Mailman and Rachael Maza, in particular – and is the first major work by the talismanic Perkins, daughter of prominent Aboriginal rights activist Charlie Perkins, co-director of the important production company Blackfella Films, and key creative figure behind such works as the landmark TV series First Australians (2008) and The Australian Wars (2022), the highly contrastive musicals One Night the Moon (2001) and Bran Nue Dae (2009), and a range of other significant projects such as the biopic of land rights activist Eddie Koiki Mabo, Mabo (2012), Black Panther Woman (2014) and Jasper Jones (2017).

Radiance sits alongside another film in the program, Henri Safran’s much-loved children’s film Storm Boy (1976), as a relatively “early” and highly sympathetic representation of Aboriginal experience and identity. But whereas Storm Boy uses the iconic presence of David Gulpilil as a potent symbol of Indigenous respect for and knowledge of the land and nature – and something of a match for the wide-eyed perspective of the titular character – it isolates Gulpilil’s character as a figure banished from his tribal culture and land who makes a hesitant friendship with a young boy and his father who have also dropped out of “mainstream” culture. Radiance is a fuller and more consciously varied portrayal of a more “modern” and even mainstream Aboriginal identity that leads the way for the extraordinary blooming of First Nations filmmaking in Australia in the 21^st century. Yeo’s Malu is a more complex, schizophrenic and disparate experience – moving from Malaysia to Japan and backwards and forwards in time – as it weaves together images from the past and present while highlighting the characters’ often confronting and containable memories of their psychologically unstable and abusive mother.

Although this isn’t particularly reflective of the contrast between the cinemas represented in this program, the NFSA selections definitely tend to favour a more positive, celebratory or generally communal sense of identity. Although they often focus on conflict, subcultures or somewhat isolated communities, the selected films reinforce the bonds of these communities. In some respects, the most ambitious film represented in the whole program is Clara Law’s Floating Life (1996). It is also the film that most directly speaks to the notions of diaspora, transnationalism and the bonds of ethnic and racial communities across national borders (from Australia to Hong Kong and Germany). Law’s first feature after leaving Hong Kong prior to the 1997 “handover”, Floating Life is representative of another important element of Australian cinema, the significant contribution of migrant and overseas filmmakers. It also represents the increasing international focus of Australian cinema during this period and is equally remarkable for its multilingual dialogue and its striking rendering of landscape. By situating its newly arrived migrants in a somewhat nationally and even culturally indistinct modern Sydney suburb, it counters a common way in which the Australian landscape has been used to differentiate and “nativise” its national cinema.

The films selected in this program – possibly to highlight an affinity with the largely urban Singapore – generally run counter to this common thematic and geographic focus, emphasising inner city and suburban environments and the day-to-day realities of the overwhelming majority of the Australian and Singaporean populations. The self-conscious referencing of the dangers of the Australian climate and its fauna – along with the incongruous appearance of a kangaroo during one of the jaunts of the family into the wild terrain of suburbia – in Floating Life highlight an equal understanding of the stereotypes of national and ethnic identity, even if a little clumsily overstated and staged. This highlights a battle with the notions of “essentialism” that run through many of the films on both “sides” of this program.

Although I don’t know how conscious this choice was – the program was broadly tasked with exploring “the intricate web of human connections across time and space through cinema” as well as the “creative intersections and juxtapositions” between the two cinemas and archives – many of the films on each side of the program manage to speak to each other. This is an inevitable outcome of placing these and perhaps any two groups of films side by side, with many of these connections purely serendipitous. For example, although they are, in many ways, studies in contrast, there are interesting correspondences between the critical treatment of marriage in Muriel’s Wedding and the most recent and sombre film in the season, Maryam pagi ke malam (Badrul Hisham Ismail, 2023). But the strongest parallels are between two revealing documentaries, Australia Daze (Pat Fiske, 1988) and Sementara (Shao Min Chew Chia and Joant Úbeda, 2000), released over 30 years apart, and the more directly aligned Forever Fever (Glen Goei, 1998) and Muriel’s Wedding.

Forever Fever and Muriel’s Wedding share a love for 1970s American and European disco and how it can be used and appropriated by particular individuals and marginalised communities to help forge and express their own identities. One of the things that brings together the cinemas of Singapore and Australia are the difficulties they face in finding an audience or place regionally and internationally. There have been moments where films have reached a substantial international or regional audience – such as the productions of Cathay-Keris and Shaw Brothers in Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s or the “glitter” cycle in Australian cinema in the mid-1990s – but overall, their productions have been largely consumed locally. The films themselves reflect this. Although it was not a large success internationally, Forever Fever was the first Singaporean film to be purchased by a major international distributor, Miramax. This reflects both its more idiosyncratic and local elements, as well as its conscious choice to appeal to a wider international audience through its use of language and nostalgic references to the increasingly global pop culture of the 1970s. It predominantly achieves this through its dialogue with the cross-cultural figure of Bruce Lee and, more extensively, the global phenomenon of Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977). Although I don’t know whether this has been consciously recognised – and this group of films obviously had a major impact on LGTBQi+ cinema in the years following – there appears to be a clear influence of the Australian “glitter” cycle on Goei’s film (and Armstong’s truly eccentric pop musical Starstruck, needs to be recognised as an important precursor to this cycle as well).

Forever Fever’s emphasis on the blurring of racial, sexual, cultural and gendered identities and categories enabled and expressed by the appropriation of specific examples of an “imported” popular culture is plainly in alignment with the key films of this slightly earlier cycle: Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrmann, 1992), Muriel’s Wedding and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994, Stephan Elliot). All of these films self-consciously and even nostalgically reference common stereotypes of national identity – highlighted, for example, by the pointed and satiric use of one of the icons of the “revival”, Bill Hunter (the father in Muriel’s Wedding), in the three Australian films – while forging new configurations and opportunities. Both Muriel’s Wedding and Forever Fever also highlight the bleaker dimensions beneath this glossy surface. This is best embodied by the final, blunt almost non-communicable action of the truly sad figure of the mother (Betty played by Jeanie Drynan, who career stretches back to Michael Powell’s They’re a Weird Mob in 1966) in Muriel’s Wedding – who scorches the family backyard (a potent symbol of the limited horizons suggested by the “Australian dream”) before committing suicide – and the attempted suicide of the protagonist’s transgender sibling in Forever Fever. Featuring moments of considerable pathos, both films still, characteristically, end in triumph with Muriel (Toni Collette) and her paraplegic friend (Rachel Griffiths) fleeing the aptly named Porpoise Spit and Hock (Adrian Pang) finally expressing his love for Mei (Medaline Tan) as an imagined “John Travolta” looks on in approval and a cover of the Bee Gees’ “How Deep is Your Love” is heard on the soundtrack. Both films show the important influence of global popular culture on local identity, but also demonstrate how such largely “import” cultures translate and “make do” with these objects of obsession.

A far darker portrayal of the devastating impact of imperialism was exhibited in Khavn de la Cruz’s Balangiga: Howling Wilderness (2017). A truly singular work that had no Australian “equivalent” in this program, it could and, perhaps, should have been paired with such questioning, anti-colonial and incendiary works of recent Australian cinema as Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country (2017) or Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale (2018). Balangiga’s bracing look at the devastating impact of the 1899-1901 American invasion of the Philippines centres on the journey of a young boy through a blighted and treacherous landscape swollen with dead bodies (which often appear on display in the foreground of the shot). Reminiscent of a film like Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985), it presents the truly dark heart of the colonial project.

A final point of comparison or reciprocity. Possibly the most obvious pairing in this program are the two documentaries that essay important and contested anniversaries of national culture: the 200 years of colonial occupation marked by the 1988 Bicentenary in Australia Daze and the 50^th anniversary of Singapore’s independence in Sementara. Both films aim to present a range of perspectives, and neither is uncritically celebratory. They each attest to the legacies of colonialism, multiculturalism, a kind of democracy, the sad fate of the original inhabitants and owners of the land, and the state engineering of national identity. The latter centres around the documentation of the official markers of these anniversaries. In Sementara, this is largely represented by the official ceremonies carried out on a large outdoor stage where various figures travel by segway, representatives of Singapore’s air force fly over and numerous statements about Singapore’s state policy of integration and multiculturalism are congratulated and announced. This is heightened by video footage of the “founding father” of modern Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, who died in March of the same year. Much of the rest of the film aims to explore and even counter this official “story” of an unquestioningly shared identity – however that is configured – asking a range of Singaporeans of different identities and backgrounds to express their opinions about other ethnicities, religion, mortality, shared national identity, gender and sexuality, and other areas. Although many of those interviewed are not particularly articulate or even coherent in their views – which certainly has its own resonance and purpose – these conversations plainly question the explicit and confected nationalism of the official celebrations. The underlying multi-ethnicity of Singapore is also emphasised. One of the most potent moments in the film features a speaker addressing the unequal “ethnicity” or “racialism” of Singaporean culture, comparing the limiting essentialism often attributed to the expressible identity of those of Malay and Tamil heritage, with a dominant ethnic Chinese population who don’t suffer such stereotyping (even if that is precisely what some figures in the film actually do).

Australia Daze presents an even more contested viewpoint, one appropriate to the events marked by the Bicentenary. This was a collective film gathered together from footage shot on January 26, 1988, across many parts of Australia and by a variety of filmmakers, many of whom were obviously critical and a little ashamed of the outward and chauvinistic displays of patriotism on the day. It shows a range of celebrations, incorporates television footage and copious radio broadcasts, features various figures speaking to the filmmakers who were gathering the footage, and gives significant space to counter demonstrations that question the legitimacy and appropriateness of such a celebration. Looking back on this film after almost 40 years, it is remarkable to see how much Australia has changed and also remained the same. Although there have been significant advances in both multiculturalism and the sovereignty and recognition of Aboriginal people, Australia still holds celebrations on this widely contested day – which marks the anniversary of the arrival of Britain’s “First Fleet” in Sydney and the invasion of the lands of its traditional owners – have failed to grant its First Nations people a “voice” to Parliament and proper recognition in the Constitution, and continue to foster and allow racist viewpoints under the excuse of the “freedom of expression”. What these two films also do is highlight the continued importance of the archive in expressing and questioning notions of identity and nation. “Reciprocal 2025” provided a rich encounter with these ongoing questions and problems.

About the Writer

Adrian Danks is Associate Professor, Cinema Studies and Media, in the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University. He is also co-curator and president of the Melbourne Cinémathèque and was an editor of Senses of Cinema from 2000 to 2014. He is the author of the edited collections A Companion to Robert Altman (Wiley, 2015) and American-Australian Cinema (Palgrave, 2018, with Stephen Gaunson and Peter Kunze), and the monograph Australian International Pictures, 1946-1975 (Edinburgh University Press, 2023, with Con Verevis).