What: Our Own Image: Documented by Barry Barclay
Where and when: Academy Cinema, from today until July 26, see nzff.co.nz for the 11 screening times
What: The Camera on the Shore has its world premiere at the Academy today at 6pm
It wasn't meant to be this way. Barry Barclay - film-maker, writer, philosopher, as he's called in the end credits of the film about him - should have been there for the premiere screening tonight.
He would have grumbled about all the attention, but he would have been chuffed about the film, The Camera on the Shore, because it (his words) "speaks up for a whole stream of cinema that has not been spoken for in Big Media". And the rest of us would have had a chance to thank him for giving us - in films as diverse as Ngati and The Kaipara Affair - a new perspective on the islands that we call home.
But Baz is dead, and tonight we will watch the film without him.
Barclay's death, in February 2008, was a double blow for Graeme Tuckett. The Wellington film-maker lost a mate, but he also found himself in the middle of cutting a documentary whose subject has just died.
"It became another film," Tuckett remembers. "I had to make it twice. But [principal funder] Maori TV granted me the incredible luxury of topping up the budget, telling me to take another six months and not to worry about running time."
His documentary introduces a nine-film retrospective - the first time the festival has accorded the honour to a local film-maker - including all six parts of Tangata Whenua, the groundbreaking 1974 television series he made with a young journalist-turned-historian by the name of Michael King. The retrospective also includes the chillingly prescient The Neglected Miracle, the film Barclay made about ownership of genetic plant resources long before anyone was talking publicly about seed patenting and Roundup-ready corn.
Tuckett's film takes its title from a concept Barclay developed of what he called "Fourth Cinema". Distinct from the first three - Hollywood, arthouse and Third World - it was a name for an indigenous cinema in which first peoples controlled the camera, rather than being the subject of its gaze.
This was no arcane film-school theorising, but a typically striking image: what, he asks, if the camera were in native hands, "not looking at the natives, but looking out at the drongo in the ship - and maybe not even taking a picture of the drongo"?
Tuckett says he first heard of Barclay when he saw Ngati, the director's deceptively gentle 1987 feature, the first directed by a Maori and indeed the first in the world made by an indigenous film-maker operating within a dominant white culture.
"It was the film that turned my appreciation of New Zealand upside down," Tuckett says, and as he followed the film-maker's career, he struck up a friendship with him.
He conceived of the film after the death in 2001 of John O'Shea - the pioneering Pacific Films producer of much of Barclay's early work - and as Barclay got older and frailer, the urgency mounted.
"I was aware that he was fading and that he was somebody who deserved to be remembered and acknowledged. He is a seminal New Zealand film director - and he was my mate."
What Tuckett has captured shows many of the signs of its painful and problematic creation. The interviews precisely evoke the nature of conversations with Baz, in which long silences and abrupt changes of direction were par for the course. But as Tuckett observes in a splendid confessional piece in the June issue of the industry magazine Onfilm, "Baz is uncomfortable. His infected eye gives him hell. His bones give him hell. He is weary." It is as if he knows that the film has to be done and that he owes its subject - which is so much larger than himself - the duty of participating.
It's tempting to wonder bitterly how far we have come - or gone backwards - since King and Barclay made Tangata Whenua. That was primetime television in the days before a choice of channels; in the 21st century, Florian Habicht's must-see piece of Kiwiana, Kaikohe Demolition, played at 1am.
Certainly Tuckett sees the TV series as the key to the film-maker Barclay became; generous chunks of it stud The Camera on the Shore. "I was a long way into the new edit when I suddenly realised that it was wrong to treat Tangata Whenua as just another film project. This man made films but this was the film that made him."
The extracts showcased Barclay's early use of a trademark style, in which the camera retreated so far that it was several, and sometimes dozens, of metres from the subject. Thus it became an quiet observer, rather than an obtrusive interrogator.
Reminded of that, Tuckett recalls the opening paragraphs of Barclay's 1990 book Our Own Image which asked: "How do we take that maverick yet fond friend of ours - the camera - into the Maori community and be confident it will act with dignity?"
"Barry taught the camera manners," says Tuckett. "He taught it how to shut up and listen."
