Philip Matthews pays tribute to a film festival genius
“One other pattern: judging from this year’s programme, it appears that more and more women are having sex with boys.” That startling observation was made by the late and much-missed Bill Gosden, genius film festival programmer and occasional troublemaker, when he looked for themes in the line-up of the 2002 New Zealand International Film Festival. It was a year of Y Tu Mamá También, The Piano Teacher and Tadpole. It was also a year, one of several, in which Gosden was at war with the censors.
You can imagine Gosden smirking as he wrote that line for the 2002 souvenir programme, right on deadline as ever, thinking of how it would wind up David Lane from the Society for Promotion of Community Standards, which Gosden had started calling the Society for Promotion of Ignorance and Fear. Gosden knew exactly what he was doing: “David Lane has perhaps detected the appearance of the word ‘sex’ on the same page as the word ‘teenager’ in our programme and sprung into action.”
A year earlier, Lane had successfully challenged the screening of the Korean film Lies on the grounds that it promoted coprophilia. A farcical compromise was reached with the film’s director: if the offending scenes were cut, then detailed descriptions of the cut material must be provided to audiences. Gosden recounted that he took great pleasure in reading out summaries of the offending action to “small gatherings of the curious”.
It seems funny now, but it wasn’t. Those and other censorship battles were an expensive and time-consuming nuisance for Gosden and Ant Timpson, whose Incredibly Strange Film Festival was targeted by the same organisation.
Gosden was booed on opening night and was “widely considered a misogynist for some time to come”. It was a shameful episode
Another censorship battle, from a decade earlier, doesn’t even seem amusing in hindsight, but remains as chilling and depressing as it was at the time. Gosden programmed John McNaughton’s movie Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer for the 1992 festival. On that occasion, Gosden’s opponent wasn’t a letter-writing community organiser, but the country’s official censor, Jane Wrightson, who called it a “stalk and slash” movie, accused Gosden of finding women’s mutilated bodies “interesting” and banned the film in New Zealand (Wrightson went on to be the boss of NZ on Air and is now the Retirement Commissioner). It was one of those “which side are you on?” cultural battles that Wellington specialises in. Gosden was booed on opening night and was “widely considered a misogynist for some time to come”. It was a shameful episode.
These stories come up in The Gosden Years, a handsome and valuable book that collects nearly 40 years of introductions and capsule reviews, plus short recollections of every festival, compiled in the months before Gosden’s death in 2020, at the age of just 66. It is not a memoir, and it’s hard to imagine that Gosden would ever have written one, but it does give a strong sense of the person he was and what he accomplished.
Even the short summaries of his public wars against Wrightson and Lane say a lot about his personality. He was shy but opinionated. He was determined and combative when necessary. He was witty and sometimes scathing. He could be defensive if he thought he or the festival was being criticised, but he was generous with his time if you were a genuinely interested journalist or would-be filmmaker. He was probably the finest writer about cinema we have ever had in New Zealand and the greatest champion of serious cinema here. You could go even further and say that no one person had more influence on serious filmgoing in New Zealand than Gosden.
And not just serious filmgoing, either. Despite the festival’s highbrow reputation, he found space for The Evil Dead, Violent Cop and In Bed With Madonna. He joked that “there are some who mark the decline of the institution’s credibility” from his selection of the Madonna movie. He doesn’t mention it, but it was the Wellington festival screening of The Evil Dead that inspired a young Peter Jackson to make Bad Taste (of course, Jackson may well have done so without Gosden’s intervention). In a more formal way, he championed Jane Campion, Merata Mita, Barry Barclay, Brad McGann, Florian Habicht and many others.
But what about the combative Gosden? While it is true that the evolution of various festival committees is probably not that interesting to the wider public, it’s remarkable to read how quickly and decisively Gosden took charge and made the festival his own, after being hired as secretary/administrator at the New Zealand Federation of Film Societies in 1979. Lindsay Shelton, an ally, was the festival’s founding director, but he was often away on Film Commission business. A picture emerges of a takeover by Gosden, and a sidelined and outwitted committee. Gosden knew he had to be tough-minded to survive: he recalled his “power grab”, his “refusal to comply”, and when it came to securing films, his “dogged insistence amounting to gross insensitivity”. He was running things by the time he was 28. The Wellington festival became national after Gosden led a plot against the Auckland Film Festival. The lesson is that arts politics can be as ruthless as any other kind.
He persuaded us that our lives would not be complete if we missed that seven-hour movie from Hungary or that documentary about a Japanese fisherman
The Wellington festival had been launched in 1972 with a line-up of just nine films. It’s interesting to discover how the festival’s culture was shaped by that era, which has probably never occurred to contemporary film fans. Gosden’s zero-tolerance approach to censorship is one sign of it (they say that in the 1960s and 70s, it was the liberal left who opposed censorship; in the 2020s, it’s the right). A few other comments in this book make it clear. The Swedish film Together, about a 70s commune, is seen as “a comic tribute to the good intentions that spawned us”. The spirit of the 60s was evoked in the sex-mad Shortbus (David Lane must have been away that year). As late as 2008, Gosden pointed out that “a countercultural spirit still animates our programme”, even if it was becoming harder and harder to figure out what culture it was countering.
That might be another way of saying that the festival was starting to seem less essential. That’s unavoidable. If you didn’t see the new Fassbinder or Herzog at the festival in the 70s, then you probably weren’t going to see it at all, unless you joined the local film society and waited a while. But technology killed off the tyranny of distance, as well as the long wait. It’s incredible that Eraserhead didn’t have a New Zealand screening until 1981, when it was programmed by Gosden. And the claim that the good films always come back annoyed Gosden almost from the start (“Anyone seen Beau Pere, Aguirre, the Wrath of God or Mirror lately?” he asked in 1983).
The introductions also act as a kind of barometer of politics and social change across three decades, from feminism and anti-pornography activism in the early 1980s to homosexual law reform in the mid-80s, property developers pulling down cinemas in the late 80s and the “mean times” of the early 90s. The appearance of Fay, Richwhite as a festival sponsor was an unintended comment on the times. They and other sponsors were lavishly thanked, no matter what audiences might have thought. Gosden’s famous launch speeches mixed witty commentary about cinema with long but necessary acknowledgements of funders and backers. It’s not always fun to read the acknowledgements years later, although it is impressive that Gosden found so many different ways to credit the support of loyal festival employees Sandra Reid, Sharon Byrne and the tireless Lynn Smart, who ran everything in Auckland. You also notice the increasingly difficult task of identifying trends or connections as the programme grew and grew (“One might as well look for binding themes or recurrent motifs in the telephone directory”). At one point, he was reduced to noting that there were quite a few dogs in movies that year.
The cultural peak of the festival may have been some time in the 90s, or early 2000s. Gosden took a much-deserved year off in 2007, after more than two decades in charge. The rise of the internet meant that the souvenir programme was axed in the same year, and one result was that Gosden’s annual introductions became shorter and less personal. There was less opportunity for scene-setting in the pieces that covered 2008 to 2019. You also notice a new-found need to justify the festival’s existence, along with a nagging fear of becoming marginal, even when ticket sales were strong, which anticipates the festival’s current life-or-death struggle in a time of streaming, prestige television and Covid lockdowns. He left big shoes to fill and he could hardly have left them empty at a worse time.
But overall, the book is a celebration. One thing that The Gosden Years makes very clear is that the festival was shaped by his writing. It was writing that was accessible, amusing, confident and free of jargon and theory. His introductions acted as an annual stocktake of world cinema, while the capsule reviews he wrote, or the ones that were written by others in a style he established and controlled, persuaded us that our lives would not be complete if we missed that seven-hour movie from Hungary or that documentary about a Japanese fisherman. The gifted reviewer Tim Wong, who edited this book with Gosden’s friend Gaylene Preston, clearly learned from Gosden’s example. Gosden knew that, first and foremost, a review should be entertaining. It should always be good writing.
As an aside, Gosden also reviewed for Wellington’s short-lived, Metro-like City Magazine in the 1980s, and it would have been interesting to add a few of those lively pieces to The Gosden Years. Here he is reviewing a non-festival film, David Cronenberg’s The Fly: “There’s never likely to be a more penetrating study of the psychological and philosophical ramifications of becoming a giant blowfly than is provided by this highly entertaining film.” And here he is telling off the local critics after the festival wrapped in 1987: “The ethnocentricity of our so-called critics when regarding Asian material is staggering and the utterly inappropriate condescension displayed towards Yellow Earth and, to a lesser extent, Dim Sum is cause for embarrassment. The Evening Post’s Philip Wakefield was a conspicuous offender. (He was also fearless enough to dismiss Shoah after two hours of the nine.)”
Critics are never more fun than when they’re slagging something or someone off, and Gosden’s rare put downs in The Gosden Years are highly enjoyable. He called Paul Verhoeven’s The Fourth Man “a truly jaded piece of showing off”, which is a great line, and his opposition to 80s student favourite Betty Blue seems right in hindsight. If only there were more of these. But of course he wrote well when he felt exuberant. Here he is on Koyaanisqatsi: “The scale of Reggio’s visions recalls the Big Ones: Walt Disney’s Fantasia, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the explosions of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, the patterned multitudes of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, and the heroic aspirations of finance company advertising on television.” That brings the 80s back in a rush.
Other parts of the book act like portals straight into the 1990s or the 2000s. There were good years and bad years, and as anyone who has been involved in a festival will know, often these things are beyond the control of organisers and programmers. One of the very good years was 1996 (I remember it as the year of Fargo). Gosden’s excitement is contagious, even 25 years later: “It’s not just the presence of so many leaping dancers on this year’s programme that makes it seem an extraordinarily lively one. This year I’ve seen so many terrific movies I’m reeling. That so much of life can be channelled in and out of movies is certainly something to wonder at.” We didn’t know how good we had it.
The Gosden Years by Bill Gosden, edited by Gaylene Preston and Tim Wong (Victoria University Press, $50) is available in bookstores nationwide. (City Magazine is archived by the Wellington City Council at wellington.recollect.co.nz)
