VISIONS OF WAR.(war and Australia portrayed through film)(Critical Essay)

With Australians at War on ABC television David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai released on DVD, "the war" is alive well on the small screen. For The Bridge on the River Kwai this is a mixed blessing. The DVD does reproduce an approximation of the proportions of the Cinemascope frame but for those of us without wide-screen television you lose that total involvement in the world of the film which just about all the wide-screen formats give you in a theatre. Still, we can appreciate the intricacies of Lean's mise-en-scene better by watching it letterboxed on our monitors than was possible on the big screen. Also the DVD is based on the restoration, which now includes the credits of blacklisted screenwriters Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson (perhaps someone at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences might give them the Academy Awards they were cheated of in 1958; in Foreman's case the award would have to be posthumous).

With Australians at War there are of course no such problems. Designed for television, the series works splendidly on the small screen. Here I must declare an interest and make a disclaimer: I have a handsome credit on Episode Four as consultant film historian and indeed not only was I consulted but the director/writers actually took my advice--sometimes. Consequently there are sequences in Australians at War of which I am very proud. Naturally Tim Clark and Geoffrey Burton, the director/writers who used most of my contributions, made the material their own; but placing the extract from Damien Parer's diary with the sequence showing the funeral of the NCOs after the Timbered Knoll engagement in 1943 was based on the "Artist and Photographer" chapter in Peter Brune's and my 200 Shots (Allen & Unwin, 1988), as was the comparison between Ivor Hele's paintings and Parer's photography of the same events. Similarly, placing Chester Wilmot's description of the fighting withdrawal to Eora Creek as a voice-over to accompany Parer's footage of stretcher-bearers carrying wounded soldiers further down the Track emerged from discussions between researcher Sarah Hicks, Tim Clark and myself; only I wanted to use the sound of the actual broadcast (according to Michael Caulfield, the producer-in-chief, it was too crackly).

I am, however, definitely not responsible for the use of Parer's re-enactment of the 2nd/5th Independent Company's Salamaua raid and the footage of the 2nd/3rd Independent Company's attack on the Timbered Knoll to represent action on the Kokoda Track. Had I been asked, I would have counselled against it. Indeed I was so worried about the use of Jock Erskine's death in 1943 to accompany the description of the passing of Butch Bisset by his brother Stan, that I emailed Michael Caulfield and urged him to cut the sequence before the episode went to air.

In fairness to Michael, this use of roughly approximate or analogous footage to represent events that were not filmed but are required for the narrative has a long history. With the Kokoda material it begins when Parer brought his film back from New Guinea to Cinesound in September 1942. Cinesound boss Ken G. Hall was concerned about the lack of action in Parer's footage of the withdrawal. Acting on a suggestion from his editor Terry Banks, Hall included Parer's film of staged action in which members of the 2nd/5th Independent Company re-enacted events that had occurred during a raid on Salamaua. These scenes include mortars being fired, an exploding hut and a shot of a big soldier firing a Bren gun from the hip. As Hall and Banks were well aware, these were labelled as re-enactments by Parer on his dope sheet or shot list, and were clearly identifiable as such in the unedited footage. At the end of one shot the big soldier turns to the camera, about to say, "Is that what you want, Damien?" We even know who he was: John Tilbrook, remembered as being as tough as he looks, who was also a fine tenor--after the war he sang the Count in Rigoletto for J.C. Williamson.

In his last letter to me, written a few weeks before his death, Hall described how he persuaded Damien that the staged footage was needed to represent the actual fighting. Judging from some notes I found in one of his diaries, Damien remained unconvinced and when he and Chester Wilmot worked on The Sons of the Anzacs for the Australian War Memorial, this material was not included in the Kokoda sequence.

Michael Caulfield's justification for using this and other similar footage is very much the same as Ken Hall's. Nowhere, he argues, does the material give people the wrong impression. Nor is it inappropriate to what is being discussed. Even though specialists might know that a particular shot was taken a few weeks later or is not of the right battalion, it is still true to the spirit of the experience. As for the death of Butch Bisset, Caulfield expects viewers will realise that the man on the stretcher is not Bisset and that, taken together, the image and the narrative represent how when mates died in the jungle, there was nothing you could do, you just had to go on.

Indeed this representational quality existed in much of the original material from the outset. During the siege of Tobruk, Damien Parer went down to the harbour every day for about a week to film the air battle. The footage, when cut together, was intended to portray the duel between the anti-aircraft gunners and the German fighters and dive bombers. It was never meant to represent a specific engagement.