Landmarks from headlong years

By PETER CALDER

In someone else's country, Alister Barry would be a household name. In his own, he's famous only among people who remember what television documentaries were like before the sleek, ratings-driven TVNZ came along.

Credit where credit's due: the Saturday evening series of films, grouped under the "NZ Festival" rubric has been a treat. But we've never seen the best of Alister Barry on television. Until now.

A cynic might suggest that scheduling the Waikanae-based film-maker's two documentaries, Someone Else's Country and In a Land of Plenty, on a long weekend, one at noon and one after 10pm, amounts to only a token broadcast.

But token screenings are better than no screening at all. And Barry's films are landmark social documents which historians of the future will fall on with glee.

Someone Else's Country, released in 1996 but made over more than three years on an Arts Council grant of $26,000, is a history of the revolution we now call Rogernomics and, as Barry puts it, a depiction of "the capture of the democratic process by a very small group of people".

The title bespeaks the maker's underlying attitude, but Someone Else's Country is actually remarkably even-handed.

What it does is assemble all the footage from those remarkable headlong years and allow us - and some judiciously chosen and unobtrusively interviewed observers - to take a measured view of it.

"I don't think the story is old hat," Barry said when the film screened at the 1996 festivals.

"If you want to understand what we are and where we are today you have to look at where we came from. It's the essence of culture."

Anyone who struggles with the notion of a political culture would do well to reflect on the second of the two Barry films showing this weekend. The title, In a Land of Plenty, is bitterly ironical since the film focuses on the story of unemployment and how it has become embedded in our social landscape.

The economic policy of successive governments, the film points out, makes the control of inflation a holy grail.

But, as the film explains, the policy corollary is that more than 100,000 New Zealanders have to be out of work.

It is reminiscent of the Tom Scott cartoon which depicted former National Finance Minister Ruth Richardson walking along the dole queue as the record low inflation figure is disclosed.

She is shaking hands with each jobless person in turn and declaring to each that "we couldn't have done it without you".

On screen

*What: Someone Else's Country

*Where and when: TV One, Sunday noon

*What: In a Land of Plenty

*Where and when: TV One, Monday Labour Day 10.05pm