Fictionalising History on Film

 The accuracy of Brett Jenik’s article “Myth, Reality and Oskar Schindler” (Quadrant, June 2010) with its extract added from Jitka Gruntova’s book seems unquestionable. The whole article is impressively detailed. Thomas Keneally’s glamourising of the background, character and motives of Schindler is convincingly revealed. One had read some of this before but never assembled so comprehensively.

In one small but interesting particular is there a different recollection: Keneally’s inspiration for the story of Schindler is referred to by Jenik as Leopold Pfeffenberg, a New York Jewish shop-owner. He was apparently well known as Poldek Pfefferberg in a luggage shop on Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills. I remarked this when reading it long ago because I had actually been in the shop before Keneally and recalled I had been served by Mr Pfefferberg. This was not such an unusual coincidence, as purchase of a luggage piece was common for homeward-bound Australians. Shops on the several Rodeo Drive blocks extending from Wilshire Boulevard, before they became world-renowned at up-market rentals, had everything priced to use up one’s remaining dollars before the last leg home. Hence the need for an extra container!

Pfefferberg’s beautiful story of the good German saving Jewish lives was perhaps “too good to be true” but Keneally must be given credit for realising its potential. The fact that the most accomplished film-maker of our time in Steven Spielberg then gave such a superb rendering of Keneally’s book as Schindler’s List in 1993 put the seal of international fame on Keneally’s already successful fictionalisation of history. His being unknown on the world stage in 1982 and not himself Jewish adds to the impressiveness of his achievement, even if Jenik has shown that there were a multitude of details of Schindler’s life that Keneally not only did not get right but distorted diametrically from the fact.

The key question in Jenik’s article is perhaps when he asks: “What sort of man was Oskar Schindler really?” And answers: “Very likely not what Keneally makes him to be.” He then proceeds to demolish the character and characterisation of Schindler. He introduces Jitka Gruntova as “a conscientious historian” and quotes her negative opinion of Keneally’s book, adding: “To me it is mind boggling that such a compilation of inaccuracies, half-truths and plain untruths could be so successful.”

Yet the rounded Oskar Schindler portrait created by Liam Neeson and Spielberg will live in people’s memory long after the points made in Jenik’s article are forgotten. It will do so largely because literate Jewry—which must be acknowledged one of the most powerful forces extant today—seems to want it to be that way. Considering this raises again the whole question of what is acceptable, and indeed praiseworthy in the altering of historical fact in the interest of dramatic or artistic licence as we used to term it.

Ann Curthoys and John Docker have recently reissued an updated edition of their 2004 book Is History Fiction? It poses the question as to whether history is indeed fiction, going back to Herodotus himself, whom we were taught was the original drawer of the long historical bow according to the point that he wanted to make, and then moving forward through a series of other celebrated or would-be historians to “the History Wars”, where history has become politicised. The three historical disputes chosen to illustrate such “wars” are the debate about the legitimacy of the bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945, the Nanking massacre by the Japanese in 1937–38, and the debates about the alleged extermination of indigenous Tasmanians in the early decades of the nineteenth century. This latter would lead readers of Quadrant to the whole debate over the “Stolen Generations”, which has become so well known in recent years through the published works of its editor and his literary campaign service in launching historically correcting strategic offensives and repulsing repeated counter-attacks.

The whole issue of the correct (“conscientious”?) ways of recording history is one of the most fascinating. One presumes only to offer some recollections of what has or has not “worked” in respect of some well-known films and try to suggest the distinction between legitimate fictionalising and what crosses the line into politicisation.

Thomas Keneally published The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith in 1972. His friend, the emerging Australian film-maker Fred Schepisi, with whom he had already collaborated in one of the episodes of Libido (1973), a well-received production in our early revival, was immediately interested. Some two decades before Poldek Pfefferberg is supposed to have laboured (on the basis of a family connection) to interest Steven Spielberg in filming Schindler’s Ark, Schepisi had conceived the idea of filming Keneally’s novel based on real events in the short life of Jimmy Governor, who was hanged for multiple murders just after Federation Day in January 1901. Schepisi felt the time was right to present the crimes of Jimmy, his brother and another friend as the inevitable and understandable result of their ill-treatment by a racist Australian white society.

Schepisi is responsible for a great deal of the script. He injected as much as a quarter of a million dollars of his own into the venture. My understanding was that the film cost $1,250,000—by far the largest budget for an Australian movie at that time—with a million coming from the Commonwealth-funded Film Commission and $250,000 from Hoyts Theatres. Some may also have come from the Victorian Film Commission. Certainly Schepisi was committed to the film in every way and may be assumed to be chiefly responsible for changes to Keneally’s novel which may have been more acceptable in print than they proved when realised with greater impact on the screen.

About a decade earlier I had participated in the making of a film which was supposed to present an Arunta tribal murderer in an attractive light, also in the post-colonial Australia of 1901. It was financed entirely by venture capital from US and Australian investors with a far smaller budget. It was entitled Journey Out of Darkness but was a journey into darkness as far as the investors were concerned. Its greatest mistake was not finding Aboriginal actors for the starring roles of the full-blood and half-blood Arunta. It never made any money despite my great efforts personally for several years to sell it to syndicated television in the USA and Europe. It brought about the dispersal of the group with its film-making tail between its legs.

When The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith premiered in Sydney in June 1978 I was not on the invitation list. I had given offence several years earlier by testifying about restrictive practices inhibiting Australian film production to the Tariff Board inquiry of 1972–73, and in any case, my cinema was not scheduled to play The Chant. By this period the distribution oligopoly had discovered the public had an interest in local films. I made a point of seeing it as a paying customer at first opportunity. Like the entire audience I was shocked at the axe murder sequence and afterwards had relayed to me by a Hoyts friend that the always prominent Sir Norman Rydge (whose Greater Union Organisation had not invested) had turned thumbs down decisively at the premiere with the comment: “Women don’t want to see black fellows chopping up white women with tomahawks, and if they won’t go not many men will get to see it.”

So it was to prove. The Chant would become one of the greatest bombs in our cinematic history. At the time I happened to be dining at The Lodge in Malcolm Fraser’s second prime ministership. I expressed a negative view of The Chant’s prospects and voiced my disappointment with the way the hard-won Commonwealth funding of our film industry was being spent.

Whilst racially prejudiced remarks made by white female characters in particular were believable, I had strongly resented the unrelieved lack of balance in the film’s recounting of the cheating of the luckless Jimmie by every white person with whom he came into contact. This excess was unmistakeable even though I had not then researched the real Jimmy’s life to find that there was no basis in fact for the character of the Irishman “Healy”, who cheats Jimmy over the post-and-rail fence earlier, refusing to pay him and causing him to seek the work with “Newby” (in reality Mawbey). Newby is represented as again cheating him and refusing to supply his agreed rations. This also was an invention by Keneally. One can rely on the trial testimony by Mawbey and others. Mawbey said he got on well with Jimmy Governor and there was corroborative evidence that rations were supplied, agreement being reached even on the day of the murders.

I remember telling the Prime Minister, who shared a pastoral background with me, and his staff adviser, the then youthful Petro Georgiou, that my own father had been a nine-month-old infant on a remote property about 200 kilometres west of where the “Breelong Blacks” (as the media of the day called them) started their killing spree, and it would have been a nervous time with news coming out from town of their forays against elderly men and women and children on isolated properties. My grandfather may not have been the “squatter peeing in his moleskins” of Les Murray’s “Ballad of Jimmy Governor”, but he would have been concerned not to leave his wife and five young children home alone. In the event the gang had turned north and not west but they were not all apprehended until after a 3200-kilometre, fourteen-week chase.

I said that whilst I could accept the racial remarks depicted, it was not customary for Aboriginal workers to be diddled out of their wages. This was simply not consistent with the attitude of my own family who had employed Aborigines on properties or any of the early pastoralists of whom I had knowledge. These men had brought standards of behaviour from England, Scotland and Ireland with them and continued to prize them when they got off the boat. I concluded by saying that if Commonwealth funds were to be made available by grant to Australia’s film-makers there ought to be some check on the way in which they were going to present Australians to the rest of the world.

Petro expressed the view that he did not think “vetting” scripts by the government would do any good. Although I was not satisfied with this view at the time I can see with the gift of hindsight that it had substance. The sort of creative talent we had in our reviving but fledgling industry was—and probably would be at most times—anti-establishment. One can imagine its rejection of the statement of criteria required to qualify for support and denunciation of it as censorship.

The only effective measure with The Chant was the public staying away in droves. The industry took note. It was some twenty-four years before a film with the theme of racial prejudice against Aborigines was again attempted, but today they are made by Aboriginal film-makers themselves. Schepisi himself left for Hollywood. When he did return here after a decade it was to make Evil Angels, a film financed overseas, and a vehicle—one of her wonderful gallery—for Meryl Streep, which took a highly critical view of Australia’s treatment of Lindy and Michael Chamberlain.

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith represents one of the most interesting case studies in the history of the Australian film industry. Two years ago it was revived by the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra and discussed by historian Henry Reynolds at the time of the publication of his short book-length study of the film and why he found it unsatisfactory. He analyses the film by contrasting the “based-on-facts fiction” of Keneally with the true facts of Jimmy Governor’s life, which have been reliably recorded in several sources. He sums up that the novel “takes a real historical character but invents so much that the story loses its touch with past reality”. I had an agreeable conversation with him, mentioning my ancestral proximity to where the first murders took place which even extended to the remains of the tragically provoking Ellen (or Helena) Kerz being returned for burial at Girilambone, just outside the western boundary of the property where I was born. Ms Kerz, quite accurately represented in both book and film, was testified to have said to Governor just before the murders: “Pooh, you black rubbish, you ought to be shot for marrying a white woman.”

One surmises that Reynolds’s disappointment in the film was that its negative reception was a setback for the cause which was important to him. He complains in his book that we learn more of the film-maker and the writer than we do of Jimmy Governor and his brother: “What we see is the way in which progressive liberal white Australia sought to come to new understandings of the nation’s history while still encumbered by remnants of discredited racial thought.”

One could say more simply that despite some admirable film-making features, The Chant was spoiled by bias. It went beyond artistic licence for a political purpose but did not achieve it. History itself is a serious subject. It may never achieve complete objectivity but surely its task is to get it as right as possible without becoming overcome by emotive content.

By way of contrast one can refer to a much smaller but more satisfying film that had a limited screening in Australia this year: Me and Orson Welles. The sequences recreating the Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar convey how effectively a twenty-two-year-old Welles used dramatic licence with amazing boldness to change Shakespeare’s Rome into modern-dress Fascist Italy and to make Brutus (whom he played) its central figure. He is quoted in Simon Callow’s great biography (The Road to Xanadu) as saying the play was about the anguish of the liberal in an age of dictators. He was able to create a smash hit with New York’s theatregoers of 1937. His panic-producing broadcast update of H.G. Wells’s Martian invasion and his fictionalisation of Hearst’s life in the masterpiece Citizen Kane were to follow. These are but examples of a multitude which readers could call to mind of departure in art from the fact or the classical text which pass the test we used to erect in the film business: Does it work?

Darrel Killen was chairman of Cinema Center, an independent film exhibition and distribution group based in Canberra for several decades.