Pop Culture

THE RESURRECTION OF THE KELLY GANG

The Bulletin, August 2006

When it was first released, The Story of the Kelly Gang was easily the movie of the year. It was a critical success, a box-office hit... and by current standards, the world’s first feature film. Before this film, it was unheard-of for films to run for longer than (or anywhere near) an hour. Directed by Melbourne entrepreneur Charles Tait, it attracted full theatre houses in 1906, wowed them in New Zealand, and toured England as “the longest film ever made”.

            It also turned a long-dead rebel into Australia’s favourite folk hero. Ned Kelly and his gang were shown as gentlemen, frequently tipping their hats to the ladies, refusing to rob women or children. The police, meanwhile, were portrayed as larcenous cads, with sleazy lines (in the accompanying theatre program) like “Just One Kiss, Katie Dear, and I’ll Let Dan Go.”

            The Story of the Kelly Gang turned Australia into the centre of epic filmmaking. By 1911, Aussie filmmakers was making at least 10 full-length features; meanwhile, the longest British film of that year was around 35 minutes – and even that was unusually excessive.

            But length wasn’t everything. “What’s exciting about the [Australian] film industry up to World War I is that it focused entirely on the domestic market,” says film historian Andrew Pike. “There was no concept of selling overseas, no precedent. The bushrangers became the romantic heroes – a home-grown character, speaking directly to the home audience. Perhaps the most significant thing about [Kelly Gang] was that it really did start the wave of bushranger films.” These films were the backbone of the industry, Australia’s answer to the US westerns. (Eventually, they were banned in various States for encouraging lawlessness.)

            A hundred years later, Kelly Gang has obviously dated. Almost certainly, no living person has sat through the whole movie – not because it was too long, but because, like most of Australia’s silent films, the full version no longer exists. Nonetheless, the National Film and Sound Archive will unveil a new print in time for Boxing Day (the 1906 date of release). Digitally restored prints are a common anniversary “event” in the film world, but this is the first centennial edition.

            Obviously, it’s not your usual re-release. Most digital re-releases, from Il Gattopardo to The Searchers, have painstakingly improved the original picture quality. This is a sensitive matter for film purists, and an ethical issue for archivists. Rather than dragging Kelly Gang into 2006, the NFSA plans will give present-day audiences something akin to the 1906 experience. “We’re not trying to make it better,” says Joe Kelly, head of preservation at the archive. “If we do that, we’re not doing our job.”

            That isn’t as bad as it might sound. The grainy, flickering images, for which silent films are well-known, was not the original look. Audiences in 1906 would have seen a smoother, glossier film. Until 1950, movies were filmed on cellulose nitrate stock, and older film buffs still wax lyrical about the clear and beautiful image of a nitrate print. It is the long-term deterioration that gives it the flickers. Until recent digital technology, no archival restoration has been able to return it to its former glory.

            Even the NFSA does not possess the technology for such a project, so they assigned much of the work to the Amsterdam-based Haghefilm, a private laboratory that specialises in restoring silent films, using state-of-the-art equipment to overcome the chemical and physical damage.

            But there are certain things that even Haghefilm can’t restore.The Story of the Kelly Gang vanished, along with our film industry, in the first half of the twentieth century. (There were no film archivists back then.) Until recently, all that remained were nine minutes of footage, discovered under a bed in a deserted house in 1979.

            Most archivists have naturally assumed that, after all this time, the rest of it was lost forever. Nonetheless, as part of the project, the NFSA’s Sally Jackson put out a call to archives around the world, asking if they might have something to add to the surviving footage. It was a “needle in a haystack” quest. The British Film Institute had another incomplete Kelly Gang print, but this was assumed to be a spare copy. Nonetheless, senior curator Meg Labrum happened to be visiting London, so Jackson asked her to investigate.

            What Labrum found was… well, unfamiliar. It wasn’t another copy of the under-the-bed footage, despite common belief, but that didn’t mean it was Kelly Gang footage. Could it be a missing scene, or perhaps one of the many bushranger films that were produced in Australia before 1913? Eventually, someone noticed that one of the frames was identical to a photo on the original promotional poster. Bingo!

            This was reason to celebrate. “When it comes to early cinema, the discovery of only a few frames of a missing film is an ‘event’,” says the NFSA’s director, Dr Paolo Cherchi Usai. “In this case, it was quite extraordinary. We could not have hoped that, 100 years later, we would find extra footage… Compare it to a fragment of papyrus, or an ancient work of art. Archaeologically, this is just as important.”

             The NFSA hopes to release a special DVD before the end of 2006, with different versions of the incomplete film: an “authentic” version for purists, with the sort of piano soundtrack that accompanied the original release; versions filling the blanks with surviving photos and commentary from film historians; and a version with a modern music soundtrack. The style is yet to be determined, but whatever it is – rock, jazz, rap – it will be one of the few parts of the DVD that doesn’t try to evoke 1906. If the purists don’t like it… well, they have a choice.

            To many film buffs, the extra Kelly Gang footage was the Holy Grail of Australian film. It didn’t complete the film– two-thirds are still missing – but it is still a major discovery, and a reminder that our contribution to world cinema did not start with Errol Flynn.