Damien Parer and Me

I think I may be the first film critic to have his book adapted to film. Many film critics and film teachers have written excellent books of film history, and even novels and screenplays, but I don’t think they have experienced the agony and ecstasy of having a film version made of one of their books. If any of our readers can think of any other instance I’d like to hear about it.

During the entire research and writing of the biography of Damien Parer, which has now been adapted to film almost thirty years later, I was teaching Film History at Mitchell College of Advanced Education and at Charles Sturt University. Having on occasions defended film-makers for reshaping the plots of novels adapted for the screen, and also upheld the rights of authors against directors who have changed the meaning of the original work to make the film more “commercial”, I found going through the process myself unique, to say the least. Just how I’m going to feel when Parer’s War is broadcast by the ABC on April 27 I’m not sure.

Back in 1982 I was lecturing at Mitchell CAE in Bathurst. The course began in 1970 as part of a new Communication degree. Over the years I taught genre studies in westerns, gangster movies, musicals, theatre and film, and Shakespeare and film. As more journalism students came into the course I introduced discussions of film as a historical document. Here we weren’t just examining newsreels and documentaries. Fiction films, particularly popular movies, can tell a lot about social history. The censorship at a particular time can be revealing. What is being cut and why? And then there was propaganda. A major study in many of my courses was Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the 1934 Nuremberg rally.

It was out of these academic and teaching interests that I came to Damien Parer. I knew about him, of course: that he was a devout Catholic who had been killed in action on Peleliu in 1944, and that his newsreel Kokoda Front Line! had won Australia’s first Academy Award. (I can’t resist mentioning, in the light of some recent headlines, that the Oscar was presented by David O. Selznick to the only Australian of sufficient distinction they could find—the director John Farrow, Mia Farrow’s father.) I had seen Gil Brealey’s 1964 ABC documentary The Legend of Damien Parer and been impressed by the quality of the extracts from Parer’s films that were included. But initially what interested me most was that the Australian War Memorial held most of his unedited footage. This meant we could know what the newsreels had used, and what had been omitted. As well the Memorial held most of Damien Parer’s and the other cameramen’s dope sheets—the shot lists that described when, where and how the films were taken. In Damien’s case these often included outlines of how he thought the footage should be cut together.

This was the research find of a lifetime. Even better, the producer of the wartime newsreels, Ken G. Hall, was still very much alive and available, as were the editors of the Cinesound and Movietone newsreels. Terry Banks lived around the corner from my family home in Willoughby and Alec Ezard was in Port Macquarie. What’s more, many of the soldiers Damien had filmed were still alive and happy to help.

It began as straight scholarly research for my teaching. Mitchell College paid to have the viewing prints at the Australian War Memorial copied onto videotape. I then involved my senior students, all of whom had learned video editing in their practical courses. Parer’s film was in random order. Using the dope sheets we edited the Kokoda footage, and later the film shot in the Salamaua area with the 2/3 Independent Company, into the order in which they had been photographed originally. Until then they had been kept in the random order in which the reels had been processed. The group working on the project was particularly talented. They included Debra Holland, Jane Hutcheon, Vicky Brown, Mark Wilmott, Lyn Dwyer, Lachlan Simond and William Hall. They drew up maps showing where each reel was shot and then compared the footage with the newsreels.

Our most important discovery, to which Ken Hall had alerted us, was that Kokoda Front Line! included some staged sequences Parer had shot with the 2/5 Independent Company. These re-created a raid on Salamaua that had nothing to do with Kokoda. Damien objected at the time but was overruled by Hall.

These new assemblies combined with discussion papers were presented at various film-and-history and military history conferences, most notably at the War Memorial. Then Tony Morphett, who had been working on a screenplay about Parer that failed to get off the ground, was approached by a publisher to write a biography. He declined, but suggested they approach me.

Naturally, for the book I went much further than examining some of the cameraman’s most famous newsreels. I interviewed surviving family members, the soldiers and airmen Damien photographed, and his widow, Marie Elizabeth Parer. She allowed me to read his letters and diaries deposited in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. War Cameraman, the first edition, and Damien Parer’s War, the revised edition reprinted recently as Kokoda Frontline, are conventional biographies. What I hope is original about the books is the close analysis of Damien’s film-making and the exploration of the experiences of the soldiers he filmed.

The book also broke away from the religious hagiography the Catholic Church had built around Parer. His Catholic principles had been celebrated by the church during his lifetime but his death was commemorated by a month’s mind, prayers usually offered at the death of a prince of the Church—a cardinal or archbishop. Catholic writers had tended to emphasise Parer’s piety and devotion to the Virgin Mary rather than his photography. In portraying a more secular Parer I had the full support of Marie Parer. As she put it, referring to a Catholic Truth pamphlet she particularly detested where in a saccharine conclusion Damien finds the “shining light”, “I didn’t want Damien to find the Shining Light, I wanted him with me.” So when I came along saying, “I think he was a remarkable film-maker, will you help me prove it?” she let out a sigh of relief. “You stay with your soldiers, Neil, you leave the ‘Caatholiks’ to me. You aren’t devious enough.” She was right. I had some terrific help from priests, but also a few lies. Marie on the other hand was totally truthful and trusted me with intimate details of her life that she expected me to use with discretion. I don’t think I let her down.

By employing details from letters, diaries and interviews, a non-fiction writer can sometimes achieve the texture and intimacy of a novel. With certain chapters of the biography I tried to achieve this while remaining historically accurate. But how do I feel about dramatic fiction such as Parer’s War, which is based on my book, but changes chronology, cuts important figures from the historical narrative and creates purely imaginary scenes?

Fortunately the screenwriter, Alison Nisselle, is an accomplished historian, so the omitted characters do not violate the overall historical narrative. Still, one figure I missed particularly, partly because I interviewed him not long before he died, was Osmar White. He accompanied Parer on his journey to the 2/5 Independent Company at Mubo and was with Damien and Chester Wilmot on the Kokoda Track. The problem for the screenwriter was that White was too strong a personality—one of the finest war correspondents of the period. But when they returned from Kokoda, White went out of Parer’s story. As Alison pointed out to me, the viewer would want to know what happened to him. And indeed White did have other adventures during the war, but not with Damien. However, White does have a sort of “uncredited appearance” in the film. In Green Armour, the book he wrote about his experiences in New Guinea, there is a famous passage describing the troops moving down the trail in the darkness following “the man with a light”—actually White himself, who had one of the few torches. This description became the inspiration for a sequence created by the director, Alister Grierson, showing a shadowy line of soldiers moving down the track during the withdrawal.

Another sequence, included because of Grierson’s insistence, is where Lieutenant-General Rowell recruits Parer and ABC correspondent Chester Wilmot as liaison officers. Originally Alison had written what was in my opinion the best concise treatment of Kokoda and its military politics I had ever read. For financial reasons it was cut. But once Alister was assigned to direct he was able to insist on an impressionistic treatment of the Kokoda withdrawal and a brief scene with Rowell and the reporters. Marco Chiappi makes a splendid Rowell, with dialogue crafted by Alison that expresses exactly what the general felt. This was achieved by using comments Rowell had actually made to the correspondents (including Osmar White) but on different occasions. I have been studying Rowell since the early 1980s. I listened to him on tape for many hours where he was interviewed by my friend Ivan Chapman, and have read his letters and dispatches. I believe Marco and Alison got him right.

A figure in the Parer story I knew much better was the head of Cinesound Newsreels, Ken G. Hall. He was among the first participants I interviewed and we soon became good friends. Indeed he wrote to me describing some details about Kokoda Front Line! two weeks before he died. So how do I feel about Rob Carlton’s performance as Hall? Wisely there was no attempt to imitate KG’s clipped, slightly British accent, or to recreate with makeup his eagle-like profile. Rob Carlton has an imposing screen presence and this seemed to me enough. He also captures my friend’s authority and warmth. When we discussed how the newsreels were created, KG told me about his incessant smoking and the way he indicated to editor, Terry Banks, when to cut in and out of the footage: “There’s your in, there’s your out.” All this is re-created in the film. And to Alison’s credit, the portrayal of the discussions about how Kokoda Front Line! was assembled follows almost exactly the account Hall gave me.

But of course the two characters in the film I knew best were Damien and Marie Parer. Damien I never met, but I was able to meet many of his friends and, although I did not always realise it at the time, some of his enemies. He was also filmed introducing Kokoda Front Line! and Assault on Salamaua and interviewed by Chester Wilmot on the ABC. Damien was a vivid writer, both in his diaries—“I’ve got to get this bloody diary started sometime”—and in his very frank letters. Reading them is like hearing him talking.

Matt Le Nevez, the actor cast as Damien, read the book three times and quizzed me exhaustively. Then he went a number of steps further and climbed the Kokoda Track, something I had not done. “I lost Damien in the war. I don’t want to lose his biographer on some damn fool expedition up the trail,” Marie Parer had snapped. I allowed myself to be persuaded. Anyway I really wasn’t fit enough. But Matt did go, and it shows in his performance.

I found watching Adelaide Clemens become Marie Parer on set and later on film profoundly moving. She had been able to meet her character by listening to my twenty-year-old interview with Marie. With so many of the participants gone, the producer, Andrew Wiseman, saw the author of the biography as representing the men and women they were trying to portray in the film. The tapes of my interviews had been deposited in the Australian War Memorial. I gave permission for them to be copied to a hard drive. This enabled first Alison, then the cast and crew, to listen to the voices of the characters they were portraying.

Seeing the film courtesy of Andrew on a big screen in January was an extraordinary experience. The actors were not the same as the men and women I encountered in the 1980s, but in a way they were there. This was especially true of the major action sequences portraying the 2/3 Independent Company in the Battle of the Ridges, filmed by Parer for Assault on Salamaua. None of the characters were fictional. Some were killed in action but all the actors were able to listen to my tapes of the survivors. A bonus was that as a girl Alison had known the commander of the 2/3, Major George Warfe.

How do I find Parer’s War as a critic? Technically it is splendidly photographed by Mark Wareham and directed by Alister Grierson. Grierson brilliantly evokes Parer’s style in the Kokoda and Salamaua sequences and films the home-front scenes in elegant uncluttered visuals that are true to the 1940s without becoming simply a period piece. There are some nice allusions to Max Dupain’s stills. He is, after all, a character in the plot. But they are never obtrusive.

Parer’s War is historical fiction. But it is fiction that is always faithful to the characters, and the visual and dramatic narrative of the film illuminates the reality portrayed in my biography. For that I am very grateful.