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Australian Jews and Film

by Don Perlgut

The Australian Jewish community has not made nearly the same impact on film and media as have Jews in the USA for a host of cultural, institutional, social, historical and demographic factors. Despite an historical lack of involvement in film-making, the Australian Jewish community is acutely film-conscious. Increasingly, Australian Jewish film-makers have been telling their stories through documentaries, although some dramatic features and animations are appearing.


- Australian Jews and Film -

Jews comprise about one-half of one percent of the population of Australia – officially numbering some 100,000 people located in Melbourne (45,000), Sydney (40,000), Perth (5,000) and other capital cities (1).  Jews have a long history of settlement in Australia:  it is estimated that between eight and fourteen of the original convict settlers of the “First Fleet” in 1788 were Jewish, and Jews comprised one percent of the non-Indigenous population by the end of that year.  As a relatively peaceful country, Jews have lived relatively quiet and untroubled lives in Australia.  Marianne Dacy describes the experience of Jews in Australian society as being “rather different from that of Jews in other parts of the world, for one of its most outstanding features has been the relative normalness of Jewish life”.  By the turn of the twentieth century, “most Jews were either English-speaking convicts or migrants from Britain or their Australian-born descendants ... apart from religion, they were indistinguishable from the general population” (Dacy 2008).

Despite this “normalness”, the Australian Jewish community has not made nearly the same impact on film and media as have Jews in the USA, and has often been notable by the absence of influence, for a host of cultural, institutional, social, historical and demographic factors.  Although there are many similarities with the USA, the relationship between Australian Jews and popular film are quite different (2). In part this was a result of the background of Australian Jews; traditionally the British Jews did not participate in cultural life in the same way that large numbers of eastern European Jewish migrants to the USA did.  There were simply no parallels to the American phenomenon described in detail by Neal Gabler in his book An Empire of Their Own:  How the Jews Invented Hollywood (Gabler 1988).  Put simply, there were no equivalents to the iconic early Jewish film moguls Louis B. Mayer, Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, William Fox, Samuel Goldwyn and the Warner brothers.  Nor did Australian cities have – like many American cities did - economically significant pockets of Jews that supported substantial Jewish cultural institutions and were a market for Jewish-themed films even in the silent era.  

Prior to 1996, there were only fourteen Australian feature films that included Jewish characters or themes.  Six of those were made prior to 1935, and all of those six were produced by non-Jews (Epstein 1999, p. 237).  Freda Freiberg details a number of reasons for historical absence of Jews in Australian films, including a reluctance “to represent Jews and Jewish issues, because of the sensitivity of the Jewish community” and the lack of an “established body of Australian Jewish literature or drama to adapt to the screen”.  She also notes that the large output of Jewish characters appearing in American film and television (and widely distributed in Australia) means that the absence of Australian Jewish stories on screen is hardly noticed.  And there is also the nature of defining the Australian Jewish identity in a community “fractured and divided by internal differences”, united only by “sensitivity to antisemitism - symbolised archetypically by the Nazi Holocaust – and ... attachment to the land of Israel”.  (Freiberg 1994).

In addition to the well-documented uneven and often fragile state of the Australian film production industry (see Australian Film Commission 2005), since the late 1940s the Australian Jewish community has had a larger percentage per capita of Holocaust survivors and their descendants than any other country, with the psychological dysfunction which that brings (Fagenblat et al 2006, p. 11; Bagnall 2004; Epstein 1999, p. 238).

Nevertheless, the Australian Jewish community is also acutely film-conscious and film literate, as well as boasting one of the world’s most successful Jewish film festivals, operating in both Melbourne and Sydney since 1991, along with an Israeli film festival since 2004 presented by the Australia-Israel Cultural Exchange (see Perlgut 2003, Perlgut 2009).

Australia also has an institution unique in the English-speaking world:  SBS Television, Australia's national (government-owned) "multicultural" broadcaster.  SBS has co-produced and co-funded a large number of films of Australian Jewish interest, and frequently broadcasts Israeli movies in Hebrew and even occasionally in Yiddish.  This probably makes Australia the only country outside of Israel where Hebrew can be heard reasonably frequently on free-to-air (not “pay” or subscription) television broadcasts.

But what of Australian Jewish film, film-making which reflects the Australian-Jewish experience?  Traditionally there has been very little:  Australia simply has not had the films about growing up Jewish in Carlton, a Melbourne suburb, or Sydney’s famous Bondi Beach, which is also in the heart of Jewish Sydney (Freiberg 1994).  Partly this due to the small size of the Australian Jewish population – only 100,000 Jews out of a population of about 22 million--but the perennially fragile state of the Australian film industry also plays a part.  Popular Australian films have either played on iconic Australian bush myths such as Crocodile Dundee (1986) and its sequels (1988 and 2001), The Man From Snowy River (1982) and, more recently, Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008), or promoted eccentric images, such as the Mad Max trilogy (3) and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994).  The large number of American Jewish films (as well as from other countries) that are released in Australia and television series screened also appear to have “crowded out” Australian Jewish stories, at least in part.  In the same way that Woody Allen has staked out so much of the territory of intellectual American Jewish men in film - making almost any intellectual Jewish guy appearing to be derivative in some way – the impact is felt in Australia, along the lines of “haven’t we seen that before, and better?”

The most notable early Jewish character to appear in popular Australian film were Roy Rene (known widely as “Mo”) as a vulgar and highly stereotyped comic character in the 1934 film Strike Me Lucky directed by Ken G. Hall – and was the only major "non-Anglo" film character which appeared in an Australian film between the wars.  Rene played his character of "Mo" with the same bawdy humour as he had on stage:  as a gross, loud-mouthed, heavily caricatured Jew.  Although Rene was enormously popular on stage and radio, Strike Me Lucky failed at the box office, the only one of Ken Hall's 1930s pictures to do so.

Certainly the most well-known Australian Jewish character was played by Geoffrey Rush, who portrayed the living psychologically disturbed pianist David Helfgott in Shine (1996), directed by Scott Hicks – for which Rush received an Academy Award.  Through visual images of barbed wire, the film suggested that Helfgott’s mental illness was in part due to his family being Holocaust survivors, which in fact is not the case.

During Australia’s great boom time of “new” film-making in the 1970s and 1980s, only Henri Safran’s Norman Loves Rose (1982) included significant Jewish characters, in a suburban domestic comedy.  Two Brothers Running (1988), directed by Ted Robinson, stars American actor Tom Conti as one of two Jewish brothers living in Sydney, but was barely released in cinemas and remains virtually unseen.  Rivka Hartman’s autobiographical Bachelor Girl (1987) was screened widely on television.

The most widely seen screen images of Australian Jewish characters are still two 1985 television mini-series:   The Dunera Boys directed by Ben Lewin; and Palace of Dreams, produced by Sandra Levy (4).  Although not particularly successful in the box office, the film Hey, Hey, It's Esther Blueburger (written and directed by Cathy Randall) was released in 2008, about which a controversy erupted in the Jewish community.

Increasingly, Australian Jewish film-makers have been keen to tell their stories, and the documentary form has proved much easier and cheaper to utilise for this.  Good examples include Aviva Ziegler’s What is a Jew to You? (broadcast nationally on prime time television), Monique Schwartz’s Bitter Herbs and Honey (about Jewish life in Melbourne in the early twentieth century), Rivka Hartman’s biographical portrait of her mother The Mini-Skirted Dynamo (1996), Marc Radomsky’s Choosing Exile (2002) story of his family’s migration from South Africa, and Uncle Chatzkel (2000), Rod Freedman’s investigation of immigration and family disassociation between three continents:  Europe, Africa and Australia.

Another recent Australian “Jewish” film is the low-budget Russian Doll (2001), written by Russian migrant Alanah Zitserman.  Zitserman is indicative of a new wave of young Australian-Jewish film-makers, many of them under 40, who are starting to make their mark on the industry, and who will eventually be telling their own stories – or other Jewish stories.  These young film-makers include Mark Lazarus and Paul Goldman, producer and director of Australian Rules (2002), which is widely regarded as one of the best Australian films of that year (5); Jonathon Green, producer of the youth feature Angst; and Jonathan Shteinman and Emile Sherman, executive producers of the acclaimed Rabbit Proof Fence (also 2002).  Shteinman was instrumental in negotiating Australia’s official co-production treaty with Israel – which allows co-productions to access government assistance in both countries.  The first time this was used was in the stop-motion animation film $9.99, released in 2009 and co-produced by Sherman and directed by Israeli Tatia Rosenthal from a script based on the short stories of Israeli writer Etgar Keret.  Although the film does not contain any Jewish themes, its production design is a fascinating mixture of Tel Aviv “Bauhaus modern” meeting contemporary suburban Australia.

Another 2009 Australian animated feature film included a very odd Jewish character:  Oscar-winning Adam Elliott (Harvie Krumpet), who is not Jewish and is best known for a distinctive “claymation” style, featured a Jewish man with Asperger’s Syndrome in his first full-length feature, Mary and Max.  Max Jerry Horowitz, an overweight, wildly anxiety-prone Jewish bachelor living in a New York City high rise apartment, is befriended by an eight year old girl named Mary, the daughter of two depressed suburban Melbourne parents.  Max is surely the strangest Jewish character to appear in an Australian film since David Helfgott, to whom he bears a passing emotional resemblance.

A number of institutions are encouraging the development of Australian Jewish stories.  Since 1998, the Jewish Museum of Australia (located in Melbourne) has provided a home for the ongoing successful Jewish film competition "Celluloid Soup" (6), and boasts an Academy Award-winning film-maker – Eva Orner – amongst its graduates.  A one-off Sydney Jewish film competition was organised by the NSW Friends of the Hebrew University in 1999, with sponsorship from Fox Studios Australia.  Sydney’s Hakoah Club, Jewish Arts and Culture Council and Jewish Museum have all sponsored and organised film events in recent years. 

Other Australian Jewish directors include Steve Jacobs (Disgrace, 2009 (7)) and Mark Joffe (Spotswood, 1992), retired children’s television pioneer Yoram Gross (8) and documentary directors Frank Heimans and Judy Menczel.  Other Jewish producers include Margaret Fink (the iconic My Brilliant Career, 1979), Brian Rosen (former CEO of the Australian Film Finance Corporation), Daniel Sharf (Romper Stomper) and Jonathan Shiff.  Jews have also been prominent in Australian film distribution and exhibition, including Jonathan Chissick, who has worked for United Artists, UIP, Dreamworks and Hoyts; Peter Ivany, Managing Director of Hoyts Cinemas from 1988 to 1999; Joel Pearlman, Roadshow Films Managing Director; Mike Selwyn, Australian Managing Director of United International Pictures and then Paramount International; and Natalie Miller, art-house cinema pioneer and the first independent female movie distributor in Australia.

It is interesting to note that a significant number of the Australian Jews involved in film are immigrants to Australia (Selwyn from the UK, Gross and Chissick from Israel, Lazarus from the USA, Zitserman from Russia, Freedman and Radomsky from South Africa, Safran from France, and Heimans from Holland) or the children of immigrants.  The Australian Jewish community is one of the few in the world outside of Israel which is still growing in numbers primarily due to immigration, particularly from South Africa and the former Soviet Union.

Although the Australian Jewish community does not participate in the film industry or make Jewish films like the Americans, it is acutely film conscious and aware of Jewish screen images, as indicated by the attention paid to the 2008 film Hey, Hey, It’s Esther Blueburger.  The lead character in that film is Jewish and preparing for her Bat Mitzvah.  With well-known key actors Keisha Castle-Hughes and international Australian star Toni Collette in key roles, the film reportedly had a mid-level Australian production budget of Aus$5 million and had a moderate opening in Australia at 134 screens (9).  A number of major Australian film critics gave the film reasonably positive reviews:  it earned three stars (out of five) from Evan Williams in the national paper The Australian, Sandra Hall in The Sydney Morning Herald, and three and a half stars (out of five) from both David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s film review TV program At the Movies  (10).  Stratton and Pomeranz are described by film distributor Troy Lum to be “the most influential film reviewers in Australia”, not just because they are on TV, but because “they are seen as having integrity, whereas many other critics review films ‘ironically’ – responding perversely to the film’s reception overseas” (quoted in Barber 2004, p. 23) (11).

By contrast, Leigh Paatsch of the Herald Sun (Melbourne) gave the film no stars (Paatsch 2008) and Jim Schembri of The Age (also Melbourne) called it “embarrassing (and) comprehensively abysmal”.  In his blog, Schembri went on comment that it “is morally wrong” to “put the interests of film-makers in front of film-goers” by “giving local films an easier ride to ‘support’ them” (Schembri 2008).  Commenting a couple of weeks later in the Herald Sun, Andrew Bolt used the opportunity to contrast Paatsch and Schembri with Stratton and Pomeranz, pointing out that the latter two were more typical of Australian reviewers in openly writing soft reviews of Australian films (Bolt 2008).  

In a peculiar twist for this film, the reviewer for The Australian Jewish News – Adam Kamien (12) wrote a very negative review (Kamien 2008a), calling the Jewish content “tokenistic and at times offensive” and called the film “disturbing” – particularly because of an oral sex scene (13).  In response to Kamien’s review, the film’s writer/director Cathy Randall and a number of others wrote strongly worded responses back to the paper, generating the most debate of any topic in the paper that year (Kamien 2008b).  Eva Orner, the US-based Australian documentary producer who won an Academy Award in 2008 (for her film Taxi to the Dark Side) wrote that “negative, unwarranted reviews have an immediate and profound impact on a film’s box office success” and encouraged readers to pay attention to the positive reviews by David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz (Orner 2008).  Randall wrote that she was “startled” by the review and said that it had been warmly received by Jewish audiences around the world (Randall 2008).  Jewish Film producer Jonathon Green and screenwriter Boaz Stark also wrote in praise of the film (Green 2008, Stark 2008).  

The strength and number of those disagreeing with Kamien’s review and challenging his credentials (including a phone call from the film’s producer as well) caused Darren Levin, then the Arts Editor of The Australian Jewish News to take the unprecedented step of defending the review in print.  In Levin’s article, entitled “In defence of the critic”, he wrote that “Just because a film is locally made and loaded with Jewish content doesn’t make it immune from censure – our responsibility is not to the film-maker’s bottom line, but to our readers” (Levin 2008).

Hey, Hey, It’s Esther Blueburger did receive three Australian Film Institute award nominations in 2008 - for best original screenplay, best sound, and best costume design - although it did not win in those categories.  Fourteen year old Danielle Catanzariti won a special “best young actor” award for her role as Esther.

Did the reviews have any effect on the film’s box office?   Short of undertaking an extended attitudinal and behavioural survey, it is not really possible to ascertain the box office impact, but the film grossed a reasonably mediocre $843,029 (14) in three weeks of release (it extended beyond three weeks in a few cinemas).  It is likely that there was some impact, but the amount is simply unquantifiable:  anecdotal evidence indicates that some parents were put off sending their children to the film because of the oral sex scene (15), but this may have been countered by those wanting to see the film to find out what the fuss was all about.  The interesting thing to note is that the film-makers clearly believed that reviews would have an impact on the film’s box office success.  In many ways, that belief is a self-fulfilling one:  film distributors and others act as if critics will make a difference.  

Controversies in the Australian Jewish community are not unusual, although the community usually is uncomfortable about “airing its dirty linen” in front of non-Jews.  It is particularly significant that the Australian Jewish community leadership did not respond as intensely to the 2004 release of Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ in the way that happened in the USA.  As I detail in my article “The Passion of the Christ Six Years On” (Perlgut 2010), these five key elements appear to have kept the controversy in Australia to a minimum: 

- Although he lived a substantial part of his life in Australia, Mel Gibson did not visit during the film’s promotion and theatrical release, thereby depriving local media of a personality to interview.

- The leadership of the Australian Jewish community – possibly observing what had happened in the USA - was generally unwilling to engage in a vigorous, pointed and detailed criticism of the film and its content.  Nor did the controversy have the essential criteria (a local Australian angle or Israel focus) for mobilisation of the Jewish community in Australia. (Levey and Mendes 2004, p. 224)

- There were no Australian Jewish commentators – such as Michael Medved and Daniel Lapin who were willing to support Gibson, as there were in the USA. (Medved 2004)

- Although a number of Australian commentators wrote and spoke favourably about the film, there were virtually no Christian commentators willing to promote the film by appealing to anti-Semitism or referencing the ‘culture wars’.  In fact, some Australian Christian commentators seemed to have gone out of their way to avoid feeding the anti-Semitic controversy surrounding The Passion (Schutz 2004, p. 8).

- The Australian media was simply not interested in – or did not understand – the controversy over anti-Semitism in particular, sensing that the Australian public was not concerned with such a conflict.  This was probably due in part because of a different media structure, with fewer – and less powerful – niche and single-interest media outlets (such as Fox News) that were able to sustain constant coverage. 

 

 

(1) See B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission http://www.antidef.org.au/www/309/1001127/displayarticle/1001458.html, accessed 28 February 2010.   Other estimates of Jews in Australia range up to 120,000, with the number of Australians with Jewish ancestry to some hundreds of thousands.

(2) As a film critic for the Australian Jewish News (and its predecessor, the Australian Jewish Times) since 1988, I have been in a unique position to observe – and in many cases participate in – the interaction between the Australian Jewish community and popular film.  This includes lectures to a universities, high schools and community groups on Jewish film; teaching adult education courses on Jewish film; and organising Jewish film screenings, conferences, events and prizes.

(3) In 1979, 1981, and 1985. Mad Max 4: Fury Road is due to be shot in late 2010.

(4) Levy was then a drama producer for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).  She later became head of the ABC’s drama department, head of the television division and is currently the Director of the (national) Australian Film, Television and Radio School.

(5) Australian Rules was nominated for an Australian Film Institute award for best film.

(6) See http://www.jewishmuseum.com.au/New%20Celluloid%20Soup/index.htm, accessed 28 February 2010.

(7) Disgrace – from the J.M. Coetzee novel, also co-produced by Emile Sherman – is set in South Africa, but is classified as an Australian film.  The John Malkovich character David Lurie is thought by some commentators to be Jewish, although is never explicitly so.

(8) Guy Gross, son of Yoram, is a noted Australian screen composer.

(9) An “art house” opening in Australia is usually about 30 screens, and a “wide” opening will be more than 200.  In December 2009, Avatar opened on 590 screens, the largest number ever.

(10) Source:  www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s2178007.htm, accessed 28 February 2010.

(11) University of Sydney film economist Jordi McKenzie refers to this as “the David and Margaret effect” – that they are some of the only Australian reviewers who can actually have an impact on whether or not people will see a film (McKenzie 2007).

(12) While I have been a film reviewer for The Australian Jewish News for many years, I did not review Hey, Hey, It’s Esther Blueberger.

(13) The oral sex scene was reportedly removed from copies of the print which screened in a number of Jewish film festivals in the USA in 2008.  (Source:  Sharon Rivo, Executive Director, National Center for Jewish Film, Brandeis University, Boston:  personal communication 15 October 2008.)

(14) Source:  Screen Australia, based on data from the Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia (MPDAA); www.screenaustralia.gov.au/gtp/mrboxausttop5.html, accessed 28 February 2010.

(15) Personal communication, Darren Levin, 17 November 2008.

 

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