Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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fooling around” and “a heart attack” – seems an attempt to distance himself from the
young art filmmaker he once was.
In its time, A State of Siege was the first unmistakeable example of art cinema in the
new wave of features in the 1970s. It served as a cause célèbre for those suspicious of
the ‘Hollywoodization’ of the new local film industry. There were, however, some
precedents. During the 1960s, Australian and New Zealand audiences were exposed to
the European “art films” of that period, often through film festivals. New Zealand
filmmakers were quick to imitate what they saw and the influence of the European art
film soon became evident in New Zealand films such as John O’Shea’s Runaway
(1964). Tony Williams, the film’s Director of Photography notes that he and John
O’Shea deliberately imitated the style of Antonioni’s L’Avventura, which they had seen
while shooting Runaway. 450 While other filmmakers had drawn on art film techniques,
they had combined them with mainstream American or British influences. A State of
Siege was more thorough-going. This mode would be further developed by Vigil and
continued by a number of other films, primarily by female directors (for example,
Christine Jeffs’ Rain, 2001). A State of Siege was the first New Zealand film to tell its
story primarily from a female perspective, and its storyline of a woman threatened by an
intruder set a precedent for several later films made by women directors – for example,
Melanie Read’s Trial Run (1984) and Gaylene Preston’s Mr Wrong (1985). As
McDonnell points out, the situation in Trial Run is also similar to A State of Siege since
the protagonist is an artist (a photographer) who needs space on her own to work, and
like Malfred Signal, moves to an isolated bach on the coast, where she feels threatened
by noises at night, by overhanging cliffs, by running footsteps and stones thrown
through windows. The main promotional image for the film was of the star Annie
Whittle seen through a shattered window, a very similar image to that of Malfred
towards the end of A State of Siege. The major difference between Trial Run and Mr
Wrong, and A State of Siege however, is that in the later films, both female protagonists
were able to fight back and escape from what threatened them (though both films end in
deaths). As McDonnell’s points out, this reflected the feminist view that a female
450 Susan Pointon, unpublished interview with Tony Williams, November 1999.