New book focuses on filming the NZ Wars

Posted: Friday Dec 07, 2018

The New Zealand Wars were defining events in the nation’s history. Filming the Colonial Past by Annabel Cooper tells the story of filmmakers’ fascination with these conflicts over the past 90 years.

From silent screen to smartphone, and from Pākehā adventurers to young Māori songwriters, filmmakers have made and remade the stories of our troubling past.

In the late 1980s and 90s, screen industry deregulation brought a new set of challenges. Filming the Colonial Past shows how documentaries – notably the New Zealand Wars series of 1998 – and feature films – Vincent Ward’s River Queen and Rain of the Children – negotiated these hurdles. Meanwhile, Māori working on Pākehā-led productions honed their skills.

Today, the growth of Māori creative control, enabled by the diminishing cost of digital media and the expansion of platforms, signals a new era. From these sources come documentaries from Māori perspectives and new ways of exploring the past, from music videos to online histories.

Author Annabel Cooper undertook 50 interviews with filmmakers and tangata whenua as well as research on archival sources. The result is a story of many negotiations, sometimes mistrust, misunderstandings and hard feelings, but also a story of deep commitments and the efforts of people to find new ways of working towards mutual recognition.

Historian Vincent O’Malley said: ‘As someone who has watched most of the movies and programmes discussed in this work, often with a critical historian’s gaze, I found Filming the Colonial Past a fascinating read. It is a significant contribution to our understanding of how the New Zealand Wars have been portrayed on screen and how this has changed over time.’

Each of the productions discussed in Screening the Colonial Past is a snapshot of a complex cultural moment. In examining this history, Annabel Cooper illuminates a fascinating path of cultural change through successive generations of filmmakers.

The author

Annabel Cooper is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Gender and Social Work at the University of Otago. Her research covers a range of subjects in New Zealand cultural history. Her edition of Mary Lee’s The Not So Poor and her contributions to Sites of Gender: Women, men and modernity in southern Dunedin explored gender, place and poverty in nineteenth-century New Zealand, and she has written further about place in articles on films, suburbs and settler masculinity.

Filming the Colonial Past: The New Zealand Wars on Screen By Annabel Cooper
Release Date: November 2018
ISBN 978-1-98-853108-3
$49.95
www.otago.ac.nz/press