Sam Neill is a sad and sudden loss; a grounded, empathetic performer, softspoken until he needs to stand up and champion something – and then willing to put his neck on the block. That might be painted as a sad end to an era: “They don’t make them like that anymore.” But in one of his few directing credits, Cinema of Unease, through his retracing of his own cinematic and social sensibilities, Neill provides a hopeful example that he needn’t be the last of his kind.
Some of my earliest cinematic memories are tied to Sam Neill. But the most enduring is not Merlin, or The Magic Pudding, but something which in hindsight seems far less age-appropriate – and which I’m heartily grateful the adults in the room ignored the warnings for at the time.
I was no older than four years old, and remember the hum of the cathode-ray TV at my uncle’s house, as the video player churned through the VHS of Jurassic Park. That movie is so rich with imagery to capture the imagination of a little boy obsessed with dinosaurs; but the scene that stuck with me above all others was the raptor feeding scene – where a conscious, live cow is lowered into the dense foliage of the paddock, for the voracious predators to tear to shreds.
The park’s owner – a billionaire imbecile, smiling and joking, trying to do everything he can to distract his guests from the horror that is about to unfold – can do nothing to prevent Neill’s sceptical palaeontologist Alan Grant from watching. Jurassic Park is supposed to be an empty, frivolous attraction; a place to sell merchandise and send people on their way without having to think too much about the brutality it is founded upon. But Neill’s insistent, furrowed brow tells us what we are seeing through him now – the exploitation, the bloodshed, the darkness – is an essential part of the real experience. If you are going to understand any aspect of the world, draw your own conclusions of it, and maybe change it, there can be no other way.
Neill’s filmography tells the story of an artist keen not to fall into the trap of becoming the ‘successful entertainer’; and instead, to continuously risk his reputation on odd, dark – sometimes humorous and others upsetting – projects that could provoke important introspection in his audience. The Hunter, In Her Skin, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Daybreakers – these were among a list of projects you don’t take on if you’re just interested in cashing in your Spielberg cheques until retirement. They were projects which pushed buttons, and asked questions – not always successfully, but always earnestly – about the way we see the world.
Added to this, having seen and thought on things, he was willing to put his name to a cause. Most recently, he campaigned against the opening of a gold mine in New Zealand – leading possibly the world’s most famous Kiwi actor to be labelled “anti-Kiwi” by the country’s incumbent government of bigots and thieves. That is rare in a profession where (unofficially) it remains very easy to blacklist someone. And with the sudden and unexpected passing of Neill – who had recently overcome a battle with cancer last several years – it feels even rarer. For someone whose career was so closely associated with the bygone marvels of natural history (from the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, to the illusive thylacine in The Hunter), it might be tempting to herald him as the last of a dying breed himself.
That would be something of an indulgent take, though, one which would paint him simply as a remarkable individual – while excusing the rest of us from having to live up to such standards. It’s a point which Neill himself dismantles by way of his poignant movie-essay.
Cinema of Unease
Released in 1995 as New Zealand’s contribution to the British Film Institute’s Century of Cinema series, Cinema of Unease: A Personal Journey by Sam Neill is a documentary spanning the history of New Zealand’s cinematic scene in the space of just 56 minutes. As you might expect, then, there is not much time for the more leisurely, Zizekian approach of discussing each movie at length, delving into their psychological profile in intense and obscene detail. But while usually I might advocate for more of that approach, here, I think the light-touch works better.
Because Neill – who co-wrote and directed the film with Judy Rymer – does not seem especially interested in telling you what to think or feel about these individual films. Instead, with the help of the brilliant editing of Michael J. Horton (who would later be nominated for an Academy Award for his work on The Two Towers), he looks to take shards of each project, and spin them into a single narrative about the identity of New Zealand – but also of how the phenomenon of cinema can help us reflect on, and inspire us to change, our world.
There is no Žižek or Koolhoven-style attempt to directly insert himself into the scrapbook of films assembled here, but he does still weave himself into that narrative. In part, thanks to the breathless imagery of cinematographer Alun Bollinger (later the second unit director of photography for The Lord of the Rings) – and the soundtrack’s mesmerising, lackadaisical guitar riffs from The Mutton Birds – Neill embarks on a physical and metaphorical journey to retrace his own formative years.
Strolling down endless, deserted roads, spiking up through the vacant mountains, the scenery initially reflects a ‘blank slate’ – and this initially arresting, but undeniably barren landscape accompanies tales of Neill’s family’s arrival in New Zealand from Britain, to the realisation that in this colonial outpost, brutally established to provide an empire with cheap lamb, didn’t have much for its colonists to do, besides “escape into madness”. In those early years, while small movies from New Zealand existed, they were marginalised – laughed at or buried by imports from the imperial mothership.
The suppression of these early attempts to make distinct Kiwi culture – a blend of different displaced and marginalised people – is reminiscent of the censorship and scorn directed at Afrikaans ‘boerenmuziek’ under South Africa’s apartheid government; which instead artificially promoted what one expert described in The Voice Behind the Wall as “that schlager shit” from the supposedly higher cultures of the Netherlands and Germany. On some level, the authorities and businesses promoting British and American movies over the potential of some kind of original Kiwi cinema perhaps understood, the moment that door opened, their ability to maintain this land stolen and controlled by Britain as a ‘blank slate’ would fade.
Indeed, as Neill continues on his journey, and as New Zealand’s own filmmakers – including Maori and women artists – begin to create their own art, the opportunity to peer into the darkness at the heart of the colonial project, and the real meanings behind the arbitrary Britishness of the resulting architecture copied and pasted into the stolen land. Meanwhile, the roads and the bleak mountains in Cinema of Unease vanish – replaced by sites of urban churn, poverty, abuse, hope and synthesis.
Neill does not shy away from the history which led to the creation of New Zealand, but he also assures us that there is still room for something new, and better to come out of those ashes. And refusing to look away from the horror in the shadows, along with the determination to build that darkness into cinematic culture, can serve as a jumping off point for it. And surrounded by sculptures in traditional Maori styles, while also flanked by huge “hideous” concrete buildings, the final segment of his return home celebrates the note of optimism that the new cinema has – in spite of its introspective tone about the contradictions and inequalities that remain in modern New Zealand.
It is a unique filmmaking language, which he later encapsulates as “strange, dark… necessarily vulnerable”.
Speaking about the films Bread and Roses and An Angel at My Table, he notes despite the grim social realism they deploy, and the darkness they examine, their ability to do so still “allows for the possibility of love.”
That’s where the most important lesson lies in all this. The longer you can keep someone from looking at themselves in the mirror, the longer you can keep them from introspection, the longer you can maintain the sense of stasis, of everyone keeping their head down and not asking questions, however maddening the world they live in. But cinema was – and still is – a powerful tool for challenging that; and Sam Neill’s legacy, for me at least, is that he will not be the last of his kind. Not as long as humans remember the importance of being open to shared experiences, and to not to look away, however dark things get.
