movie review of half life

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J.J. Abrams says the Valve Portal movie is ‘finally on the rails’

It’s not “i’m making a note here: huge success” time just yet.

By Mitchell Clark

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J.J. Abrams has said that a movie based on Valve’s Portal is still in the works, and that a script is finally being written, according to IGN . Abrams is light on details, but says that Warner Brothers is excited about the direction the movie is going in, and that it “feels like that thing’s finally on the rails.”

We originally heard about the movie all the way back in 2013 , when Abrams and Gabe Newell were on stage together at the DICE Summit. At the time, Abrams apparently told Polygon that the plan was “as real as anything in Hollywood ever gets.” That was eight years ago, so it seems he was right to couch it like that.

From the archives: Abrams and Newell on stage at DICE 2013 Summit, talking about movies and games.

We’ve heard confirmations that both the Portal and Half-Life movies were still in the works from both Abrams and Newell in 2016 and 2017 respectively, but news about either movie has been scarce since then. Talking to IGN , Abrams did mention that his production company, Bad Robot, isn’t actively involved in the “ Half-Life thing” at the moment.

Like games, movies can also suffer from development hell, though some do make it out: Zach Snyder’s Army of The Dead , which released on Netflix on May 21st , was announced in 2007 . This is to say that, while it does seem like there’s signs of life for the movie, it’s not time to break out the ca— er, celebratory muffins just yet. It seems like it’s still in early development, and we’ll just have to wait and see if it actually manages to solve the puzzle of how to make a movie in the Half-Life universe, or if it gets stuck flying between two portals (or companies, in this case).

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Half-Life movie: Here's what we know about its release date, trailer, cast and more

A movie based on the popular Half-Life gaming franchise is on the cards – here’s everything we know about the film adaptation.

Published: 13 Oct 2020 7:58 PM +00:00 Updated: 02 Jun 2022 9:19 AM +00:00

This article contains information about the 'release-date' of either a movie, game or product. Unless stated explicitly, release dates are speculative & subject to change. See something wrong? Contact us here

Valve’s 1998 mega-hit Half-Life and its 2004 sequel, Half-Life 2 , are widely considered to be not only two of the most influential first-person shooters, but also two of the best video games ever made.

Known for its innovative scripted sequences and impressive (for the time) visuals, the series received praise for pushing boundaries in video games. It also has an army of loyal fans – Half-Life 2 alone has sold over 12 million copies worldwide. So, where’s the movie adaptation?

Well, a big-screen version of Half-Life has been in development for a number of years now. That’s no surprise, really: the central premise – a theoretical physicist accidentally causes a dimensional rift and triggers an alien invasion of Earth – carries infinite cinematic potential.

Self-confessed Half-Life fan JJ Abrams – the A-list writer/director who’s recently resurrected both the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises on the big screen – announced that his production company, Bad Robot, had partnered with Valve and were working on movie versions of both Half-Life and Portal (the puzzle-platformer series which is set in the same universe).

Half-life movie cast, half-life movie trailer, half-life movie release date.

However, that was back in 2016, and we haven’t heard much about the project since. Abrams is reportedly still committed to making a Half-Life movie one day, though – and if there’s anyone who knows how to wrangle a big-budget sci-fi blockbuster, it’s him. His schedule has freed up a bit recently, too, now that the Star Wars sequel trilogy is all done and dusted, so it could be the perfect time for a change of franchise.

In the meantime, here’s everything we know so far about the mooted Half-Life movie…

With the Half-Life movie seemingly stuck in the cycle of neverending development otherwise known as Development Hell, it hasn’t quite reached the casting stage.

We’re not even sure how closely the script will stick to the game story. If it does, though, we imagine the lead role would be that of Gordon Freeman, the theoretical physicist who unwittingly helps to unleash an alien invasion upon the world, and fights to fix his mistake. With Abrams in the director’s chair, we imagine the role will be one that’s much-contested in Hollywood – when, or if, the film does eventually happen.

READ MORE: Everything we know about Netflix’s The Division movie

There’s no trailer for the film at the moment – it’s early days for the production, so we wouldn’t expect to see any footage for a while yet.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for a potential visual reference point, check out the trailer below for the series’ most recent entry – VR extravaganza Half-Life: Alyx , which was released on Steam earlier this year.

READ MORE: All the latest news on the new Mortal Kombat movie

There’s no word so far on a release date for the film. However, with the release of Half-Life: Alyx this year – the series’ first main instalment in over 15 years – it seems there’s still life in the franchise yet. And with Abrams’ work on Star Wars now finished, perhaps he and Valve can get back to the negotiating table. Don’t write off a Half-Life movie just yet...

READ MORE: Everything we know about the Uncharted movie

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Sundance Film Festival PARK CITY — Sundance has been criticized in recent years for surrendering to Hollywood. Indeed, many of the movies in this year’s dramatic competition have well-known actors in the cast, which is probably how they got made. But the festival still offers a showcase to truly independent filmmakers and highlights daring work that would otherwise never get any notice at all.

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Would a Half-Life Movie Be Any Good?

Gabe Newell and J.J. Abrams talked a big game at last week’s D.I.C.E (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertainment) Summit. Valve’s founder and the director behind TV and movies like Lost , Cloverfield , and Super 8 set themselves up as the pseudo-arbiters of their respective industries in their keynote address.

The upfront discussion style they used failed to mask the intended message: that the two of them, now that they plan to work together, may represent the future of videogames and film.

I respect Valve for its commitment to innovative game design and Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions for its writers’ love of mystery. Both companies, regardless of the quality of their work, take creating entertainment very seriously and seem interested in contributing worthwhile art to our culture. Just the same, I wouldn’t point at either Newell or Abrams as the best people suited toward the surprise project announced at the end of their keynote — the collaborative film based on Valve’s intellectual properties and a Bad Robot-produced videogame proposed by the two creators.

Some folks have been suggesting centring a Half-Life film on the second game’s Orwellian City 17 and that’s not the worst idea. The unseen war that leads to the police state in effect at the beginning of Half-Life 2 could be exciting and an exploration of the role that the enigmatic G-Man played in, say, the birth of the Combine forces could be interesting. These seem like workable ideas while also pretty boring ones. Once the gameplay has been removed from the equation, so much of the Half-Life mythos appears derivative, exposed as a mishmash of already well trodden science fiction tropes. Is there anything in particular that makes the game series’ resistance fighters, constant police surveillance and gnarly aliens special? I’m not so sure. Take away the novelty of gameplay and the sense of satisfaction that comes from receiving drip-fed story beats and Half-Life isn’t especially remarkable.

And a Portal movie? Both of the games have great stories, but they’ve already been told exactly as they ought to be. Remove the interactivity and the cleverness of any kind of “puzzle solving” becomes meaningless. Show Chell running through a series of laboratories and it becomes clear she’s as much of a boring non-character as Gordon. What would be the point of trying to bring this kind of narrative to a film?

I don’t think it’s likely, but maybe none of this matters. We do know that Valve has always been careful to protect the integrity of their properties and that Abrams is capable of turning casts of personality archetypes into believable people ( Lost ‘s heroic doctor and reformed criminal are more than the sum of their parts just as Fringe ‘s boy genius and mad scientist become emotionally resounding as their story is revealed). It’s possible that he may be able to do the same with the mute scientist, the rebel love interest and the amnesiac portal jumper.

Even failing a quality production it’s extremely unlikely that Abrams and Newell would create something lazy. In the worst-case scenario a bombed Half-Life or Portal film would likely still be interesting enough to impart important lessons about how to go forward with further collaborations between the videogame and film industries. As Newell and Abrams said in their keynote, this could only be a good thing. Though Valve and Bad Robot may not be the right match-up for a truly great videogame movie, they’re at least talented and dedicated enough companies that they’re capable of providing something like a way forward for inter-media cooperation. I wouldn’t be in line on opening night for a Valve/Bad Robot movie, but I sure would be interested to see how everything would shake out in the end.

Reid McCarter is a writer, editor and musician living and working in Toronto. He has written for sites and magazines including Kill Screen, The Escapist and C&G Magazine and (very) occasionally updates literature and music blog, sasquatchradio.com.

This post may contain affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something, CGMagazine may earn a commission. However, please know this does not impact our reviews or opinions in any way. See our ethics statement.

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MOVIE REVIEW : ‘HALF LIFE’ AND A LEGACY OF DEATH

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If you learn anything from watching “Half Life” (Sunday at the Nuart), a disturbing new documentary by Australian film maker Dennis O’Rourke, it’s that Americans know how to put a positive spin on the most explosive events.

In 1946, a newsreel announcer explained how residents of the tiny Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands were “well pleased” that U.S. Army officials were going to “add a little variety to their lives.”

That was a nice way of saying that the islanders were being evacuated so the Atomic Energy Commission could spend the next decade testing 66 nuclear bombs in their backyard. In 1954, the United States exploded a far more powerful H-bomb near the neighboring islands of Rongelap and Utirik. This time the inhabitants weren’t evacuated or told about the tests.

The radiation was supposed to waft in another direction, but the winds shifted. After the blast, the islands were drenched in powdery, white fallout. Children who played in the “snow” fell violently ill. The fish tasted bitter. Coconut milk turned sour. Though government records show military ships were nearby, it was two days before anyone was rescued from the fallout-ravaged islands. Could this disaster have been averted? Or did the U.S government deliberately expose the islanders to intense radiation, perhaps as part of a plan to supply longterm data on the effects of nuclear contamination?

Based on the material presented in “Half Life,” which offers interviews with islanders and American technicians who witnessed the blast as well as recently declassified Defense Department footage, it’s hard to argue with a U.S. radio operator then stationed on the islands. He believes the natives were used as “guinea pigs” because they lived in a “controlled environment” perfectly suited for studies of radiation poisoning. Or as an island woman puts it: “I used to think the Americans were smart, but now I think they’re crazy. . . . They’re smart at doing stupid things.”

O’Rourke makes no attempt to balance the islander’s testimony with any official government response. (For the record, a spokeswoman for the Defense Nuclear Agency described the film as “interesting and informative,” but “strongly disagreed” with the implication that “government officials intended to engage in human experimentation”).

However, O’Rourke’s footage is damning enough. When a Navy officer, long after the tests, sweeps the beaches of the still-inhabited islands, his Geiger counter noisily clicks away like a jackhammer on a city street. We also view a ‘50s-era Atomic Energy Commission documentary about follow-up radiation tests in America that refers to the islanders as “savages visiting the white man’s country.”

A shrewd, sympathetic observer, O’Rourke shows us post-card-pretty glimpses of the islands’ tropical vistas, then swoops in for a closer, more chilling look. We see elderly survivors and children, but after a while, you can’t help but wonder what happened to the generation in between. As the island oldsters leaf through their photo albums, you begin to suspect the worst--we first see pictures of stunted babies, then tiny children without hair or limbs and finally, shots of kids lying in open, flower-covered coffins.

Many victims are suing U.S agencies for wrongful death and destructive contamination of their property. But the islanders here display more resignation than anger. One gray-haired, toothless woman gives an account--in flat, emotionless tones--of a pregnancy that began after she returned from the initial H-bomb test: “I gave birth to something I cannot describe. It did not look human. I don’t know how to say it . . . like the innards of a beast. It was dead at birth.”

The film ends with a clip of a congratulatory message from President Reagan, taped on the eve of the islanders’ independence. Taking note of the islands’ “special relationship” with America, he says, “You’ll always be family to us.” Coming after what we’ve seen, the statement seems bitterly ironic. You may have seen fanciful TV dramas about the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. But “Half Life” (Times-rated: Mature) isn’t just a grim, heartbreaking portrait of real-life suffering. It’s a tragedy. And more important, it’s an American tragedy.

‘HALF LIFE’ An O’Rourke & Associates Filmmakers production. Producer-Director-Writer-Camera Dennis O’Rourke. Music Bob Brozman. Archival Film Research David Thaxton & Kevin Green.

Running time: 1 hour, 26 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature.

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Half-Life (2008) Stream and Watch Online

Looking to feast your eyes on ' Half-Life ' in the comfort of your own home? Tracking down a streaming service to buy, rent, download, or watch the Jennifer Phang-directed movie via subscription can be confusing, so we here at Moviefone want to do the work for you. Below, you'll find a number of top-tier streaming and cable services - including rental, purchase, and subscription choices - along with the availability of 'Half-Life' on each platform when they are available. Now, before we get into the fundamentals of how you can watch 'Half-Life' right now, here are some specifics about the Fade to Blue Films, Mark E. Lee Productions, Lane Street Pictures science fiction flick. Released January 19th, 2008, 'Half-Life' stars Sanoe Lake , Julia Nickson , Leonardo Nam , Alexander Agate The movie has a runtime of about 1 hr 46 min, and received a user score of 50 (out of 100) on TMDb, which put together reviews from 8 knowledgeable users. Interested in knowing what the movie's about? Here's the plot: "As troubling signs of global cataclysms accelerate, a brother and sister react to their father's desertion and the powerful presence of their mother's new boyfriend." .

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aka Half Life ... a parable for the nuclear age ...
documentary

The DVD collected edition of Dennis O'Rourke's first eight films used a quote from Derek Malcolm in The Guardian to pitch the film:

"One of the most extraordinary documentaries of recent years … the facts, and the documented history of them, are so terrible that one could have readily forgiven O'Rourke, the Australian filmmaker, the kind of polemic fury he never uses, particularly as the Americans were handed the territories on trust by the United Nations, with President Reagan saying many years later: 'You'll always be family to us.' Words almost fail one." (See this site's review section for more).

The film begins with archival footage of Albert Einstein and a Hawaiian style band. A first title establishes the film will be told in two parts: 'Causes' , and 'Effects' .

Titles establish the situation in relation to the March 1954 'Bravo' H-bomb test, followed by footage of Jonathan Weisgall, a lawyer for the Bikinians. He's followed by preparations for the test, including the use of live animals. The film juxtaposes the big blast with islanders at a later time going about their business in what seems like a tropical paradise.

The film listens to the testimonies of islanders regarding their situation after the explosion, and also that of two US weathermen, the patriotic Gene Curbow, and Lamont Noley and a radio operator Don Baker, all on Rongelap atoll when the contamination began.

Archival footage establishes the suffering of the islanders, and the crew of a Japanese fishing trawler accidentally overlooked and caught up in the blast.

The film's thesis gradually emerges - that the United States knew of the wind change which produced a dangerous exposure to radiation, and yet deliberately allowed the islanders to stay in harm's way. This resulted in affected humans who could be studied to learn of the effects of radiation on the human body.

The weathermen testify that the change in the wind was known; the islanders testify to their experiences when taken to Chicago for study, (shown by way of archival footage), and then it's revealed that three months after the blast, the people from Utirik were sent back to their contaminated atoll. The people of Rongelap were returned after three years. An NBC news report deems them amenable savages.

There's more testimony by the islanders as to their suffering (including mutant births and genetic malformations), as the film observes US scientists and doctors returning by ship to study the ongoing impact of radiation.

Lawyer Richard Geary makes submissions for the Rongelapese, but it is the testimony of the islanders that is most powerful, such as when islander John Anjain shows a photo album and talks of the death of his young son …

The film ends by summarising the case against the United States, using islander testimony, the testimony of the weathermen, who have also suffered physical disorders, and juxtaposes the bland, smug assurances of President Reagan on the independence of the Marshall islands against the ongoing reality of radiated island life …

(For a transcription of all the title rollers in the film, and the last few minutes of the film's provocative argument, see this site's 'about the film' section. This involves full end of film spoilers).

Key Details
About the Movie
full head credits
full tail credits
full music credits

Production Details

Production company: head presentation credit "O'Rourke & Associates Filmmakers Australia" ; a film by Dennis O'Rourke; tail credit copyrights to O'Rourke & Associates Filmmakers Pty. Limited, Australia.

Budget: c. $500,000. (The Documentary Foundation site, WM here , put the total at A$530,000). Originally O'Rourke had planned a film with a more modest budget in the c. $250,000 range, but then the decision was made to give it a theatrical release, and costs increased considerably. According to O'Rourke he funded the first week of filming on Bankcard, then raised the money from 10BA investors of the doctors, dentists and graziers kind (using a federal government tax break for private investors available at the time). Archival footage rights alone cost $125,000.

Locations: the Marshall islands, notably Rongelap and Utirik, to film islander testimony, though Bikini atoll gets into the show via footage of the 1954 nuclear test, while archival footage also shows medical activities unfolding in a Chicago hospital. Archival footage of congressmen filing out of a Washington screening of the blast ends the show. There were also trips to film the two weathermen and radio operator in situ in the United States.

Filmed: the film is copyrighted to 1985, but months were spent researching archival footage, as well as trips spent to film the testimony of islanders and the US officials, trapped on Rongelap during the blast.

Australian distributor: self/Ronin

Theatrical release: the film was released in Sydney at the Opera House from 10th February 1986; at the Russell Cinemas in Melbourne from 20th February 1986; in Perth at the Festival of Perth, 3rd-9th March, and from mid-April in Canberra the same year.

Video release: self/Shock/Ronin

Rating: G (theatrical)

16mm colour and black and white

Blown up from 16mm to 35mm for theatrical release. Includes amateur 16mm footage, 16mm and 35 mm archival footage in colour and black and white, and video footage.

Running time: 87 mins ( NY Times ); 86 mins ( NY Times, LA Times, Cinema Paper s)

DVD time: 1'20"53 (including c. 5 seconds of Hawaiian style steel guitar over black after tail credits roller has finished)

Box office:

Unlike earlier O'Rourke documentaries, Half Life is listed in the Film Victoria report on domestic box office, with a total return of $11,264 (equivalent to $24,556 in A$ 2009).

While documentaries were a specialist item, this would seem to be a little understated as the film ran in Sydney from 10th February until the 'last days' shingle went up on 7th March 1986, and it also had reasonable runs in Canberra and Melbourne. The figure also underestimates the later repertory repackaging of O'Rourke's films in double bills and retrospectives in specialist cinemas.

The film was given a theatrical release in the UK, and eventually in the US, though according to O'Rourke the French were particularly resistant to screening the film.

It's unlikely the film did much business in the United States, with American audiences not inclined to be interested in foreign films exposing weaknesses in US foreign policy, or with footage showing hydrogen bomb victims being called "savages". In any case, box office returns weren't (at time of writing0 listed on sites such as Box Office Mojo or The Numbers .

The film picked up two awards at the 1986 Berlin International Film Festival:

Winner, Berlinale Peace Prize (Dennis O'Rourke) (This is sometimes listed as the first Berlin IFF peace prize)

Winner, Reader Jury of the "Zitty", aka jury prize for Best Film (Dennis O'Rourke)

The film also won a prize at the 1986 Munich Film Festival:

Winner, One Future Prize (Dennis O'Rourke, director)

Director's Award for Extraordinary Achievement, Sundance Film Festival, 1986

At the 1986 Hawaiian IFF, O'Rourke was awarded the 1986 Eastman Kodak Award of excellence for his contribution to cinematography. This was in recognition of all his films up to that point, including Half Life (The films were screened at the festival in a retrospective).

Festivals:

Like all O'Rourke's earlier films, Half Life was screened at Anthropos '87 in Los Angeles (May 1987). It also turned up in a wide range of other festivals, including the June 1985 Melbourne International Film Festival and the 1986 San Francisco Film Festival.

When it screened at the 15th Moscow Film Festival, there was no Gold Prize for shorts/documentaries awarded, but Mary Colbert in the Sydney Morning Herald , 30th July 1987, explained that "in the current spirit of conciliation between American and Soviet film-makers" several films critical of US activity, including Half Life , "met with less attention than they would have in former years." ( Crocodile Dundee however received an enthusiastic response).

The film was a break-out for O'Rourke, and a festival favourite, as noted at the Screen Australia database here . Amongst the festivals it lists, including but not limited to:

1985: Visions du Reel: International Documentary FF Nyon; Festival International Du Film D'Amiens; USA Film Festival, Dallas; London FF

1986: Berlin IFF; Los Angeles Int Film Exposition - Filmex; Wellington FF; Toronto IFF, Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival; Hong Kong IFF; San Francisco IFF; Leipzig International Festival of Documentary and Animation Films; Cinema du Reel; Hawaii IFF; Vancouver IFF; Sundance Film Festival; Locarno IFF; Uppsala International Short FF; Munich IFF

1987: Moscow IFF; New Delhi IFF

1988: Houston International Film and Video Festival

Availability

The film could still be found second hand in the two volume DVD release of the first eight indie documentaries by Dennis O'Rourke.

This was a useful package, consisting of:

Yumi Yet Independence for Papua New Guinea (1976)

Ileksen Politics in Papua New Guinea (1978)

Yap … How did you know we'd like TV (1980)

The Shark Callers of Kontu (1982), with commentary track

Couldn't be Fairer (1984)

Half Life A parable for the nuclear age (1985), with commentary track

Cannibal Tours (1987), with commentary track

The Good Woman of Bangkok (1991), with commentary track

Bonus disc, Dennis O'Rourke on Dennis O'Rourke (2008), running 2'00"17

Half Life had the advantage of a commentary track, which provides additional insights to anyone interested in the film and O'Rourke's work. Additionally, the image was better than other films in the package, such as seen in Yap , though it was standard def soft, and some of the archival material was of poor quality.

At time of writing, and despite O'Rourke's death in 2013, his company still had the film for sale here .

It could also be found on specialist streaming sites.

As for the film, it caused controversy at the time of its release, but the testimony of the islanders and two US weathermen and a radio operator, stranded on Rongelap to experience fall out and exposure to intense radiation, seems clear enough.

The talk of the failure to take into account the shift in the wind is something of a distraction to the main issue - the return of the islanders to their island homes shortly after the blasts, after three months for Utirik and three years for Rongelap.

Whatever US government personnel knew about the wind, they must have known that they were returning people to a radiation saturated 30 year half-life lifestyle that would have an inevitable impact on their bodies, while also knowing this exposure would afford years of interesting study for interested US scientists.

The indifference to the fate of these island 'savages' is notable.

The use of US archival footage kicks up a notch when an archival narrator notes that John "is a savage… but a happy, amenable savage. His grandfather ran almost naked on his coral atoll. The white man brought money, and religion, and the market for his copra. John reads, knows about God, and is a pretty good mayor."

So where's the harm in exposing the amenable savage to a bit of nuclear radiation, and giving him the chance to get a little closer to God a little more quickly?

The condescension gets even worse after that, but more harrowing is the woman describing a miscarriage to produce a beast, and a subsequent pregnancy leading to a scarred child who lived only a month.

There's a rich irony in the United States later denouncing North Korea for its nuclear activities, when it's remembered what the United States did to a people given to the country in trust, supposedly with the prime directive being to have the best interests of these people at heart.

The Americans interviewed in the film talk of a conspiracy so that the Marshall Islanders might serve as a live experiment in the effects of a nuclear blast, and it's hard by the film's end not to think of this so much as a conspiracy as a lived (and/or deadly) reality.

The result of all this - the genetics, the impact on mind and body, is told in O'Rourke's usual, understated, clinical style. He leaves the sense of outrage to the audience, if they care to think about, or feel for, what's happened to the happy, amenable savages.

But the will to power is stronger than the empathy for happy, amenable savages. At the end, the film treats the audience to smug pieties from Ronald Reagan, followed by an island woman asking "Don't Americans know that every life is precious? They are educated people … do they really believe that one person's life is unimportant? What goes on in the minds of these people? They think they are smart … but really they are crazy. They are smart at doing stupid things."

The punchline comes when congressmen walk out after a screening about the 1954 test, and the last one to speak (after comments of the "terrific" and "frightening" kind) says "makes one realise just how insignificant a human being is."

Well, there's life, and then there's happy, amenable savages offered up as victims to a greater cause. Why anyone should find this surprising after the use of Agent Orange, the ongoing use of land mines (which would lead to another O'Rourke film) or the commissioning of other war atrocities can only be matched by the surprising sight of US film reviewers offering pained innocence and panning the film for not including official responses, when it's clear enough that all the officials would offer would be denials and lies.

The Rongelap wiki here offered this coda to the film:

2000: Marshall Islands government submits Change of Circumstances petition asking for significantly more compensation than the $US150m.

2005: Bush Administration determines it has no legal responsibility to provide additional nuclear test compensation.

2007: The Nuclear Claims Tribunal awards Rongelap more than $1 billion as fair damages for its land damage claim, however, since the $US150m trust fund is almost completely depleted this compensation can never be paid.

2012: United States government (Barack Obama administration) reasserts its position that it has satisfactorily compensated Rongelap victims.

So it goes, not that Australia or Britain could be righteous, what with they did at Maralinga , nor the French, who kept on letting off bombs in the Pacific, far from Paris and long after what the Marshall islanders had endured. (WM here ).

The ASO has three clips from the film here , but the film works by building cumulative power, an investigation which involves testimonies and a suggested conclusion, and should be seen as a whole. As is often the case with an interesting movie, better to skip the clips, read the cuator's notes and go to the film.

Dennis O'Rourke wrote, directed, shot and produced the film. There is much to be found on the internet in relation to the 1954 Bravo shot, Rongelap, the victims and the controversy the film generated, though unfortunately at time of writing the film's wiki listing was a stub.

2. O'Rourke on O'Rourke - DVD extra:

In the extras disc which accompanied the two volume release on DVD of O'Rourke's first eight films, Dennis O'Rourke on Dennis O'Rourke , O'Rourke had this to say about the film:

"I often make films by … from an accident, where I meet somebody somewhere, often in a bar I have to confess… In this case, it was er a man who was a representative of the people at Rongelap* atoll. He was in the capital of the Marshall Islands, Majuro**, staying at the same hotel as me and we got to talking and he said 'why don't you … I've got a plane out to my atoll tomorrow and um you can't get there by any official means, but you can hitch a ride with me, if you'd like to come out and I'll show you what's going on in my atoll …' and I said, 'sure'.

"The plane left us there, and then the next day it didn't come back, it didn't come back for ten days, it had some engine problems, and they had to wait for some parts, so during this ten days, I'm just there on the island and listening to people's stories, and swimming in the lagoon … very beautiful, beautiful physical place, as the film shows …and people were telling me their stories, in the Marshallese language, which of course I knew not one word of it …they didn't speak English… Anjain, the man who I went with was telling me what they said, and they were telling me how, you know what had happened to them through this … the fact that they were exposed to radioactivity …to fallout … and I decided there and then, without any funding, or any way of knowing how I'd make the film, that …I made a commitment that I would tell their story …"

"But at that stage to me the story was really the story of just documenting how life was in a post-nuclear environment really … these people…"

"There are a whole lot of issues come into play when you decide to use images that are er for want of a better word, expropriated from other sources, that is the images not created by you, as the cinematographer, as the filmmaker, it's … every image that's filmed by somebody else carries a whole lot of weight of other values, other intentions, which …no matter how you use it, it's still, as it were contained in those images …"

"The footage started to … you know, accumulate … it came from strange sources… there's one amazing scene in the film, er, extraordinary scene of a network newsreader referring to the Marshallese as savages …that for instance, as the word 'fell off the back of a truck' (chuckles) … to use the expression. Not the actual images, the images were provided by NBC, but their policy is never to give you the sound, and the sound as it were 'fell off the back of a truck'".

"Bit by bit, although I'd started to hear the conspiracy theories that it may have been deliberate, the people were deliberately exposed, to test the long term effects, I didn't … I was sceptical, I didn't want to believe it …but it was like a jigsaw puzzle …er, you know that the more that I learned, both from the oral histories of the people on the islands, and then I got to meet some of the US weathermen, servicemen who were there, who were also contaminated, and I tracked them down, all across middle America, and they told me their stories, and then (deep sigh) some of the archival footage that was … each individual piece of archival footage, often by itself, may not have been incriminating, but it was the combination of … of a whole lot of different pieces, not to mention documents, you know, boxes and boxes of documents, that eventually led me to a fairly strong conviction, although I couldn't be sure, that these people on Rongelap and the other neighbouring atoll of Utirik***, were deliberately exposed to fallout as a way of using them, as, as the term they use themself, guinea pigs, to test the long term effects of radiation …"

O'Rourke ends his clips with Ronald Reagan juxtaposed up against an islander calling the Americans crazy, smart at doing stupid things.

"The scene that comes towards the end of the film where, after President Reagan says, 'thank you and congratulations', and Mijjua, her name is Mijjua, comes on the screen and she says the Americans are smart at doing stupid things, well, it makes me look very clever as a film-maker, how I could film that and have that there, the place in this great position, towards the end of the film, after Ronald Reagan, but I have to confess to you that, of all the film I took, of all the rolls on the very first trip, when I was stranded on the island, when I had no idea what she was saying, I was just filming, that was the first roll I filmed …"

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongelap_Atoll

** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majuro

*** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utirik_Atoll

3. O'Rourke on O'Rourke - film's DVD commentary track:

Dennis O'Rourke did a commentary track for the DVD release of the film.

Some of this replicates observations he made in the DVD extras disc recorded above, but duplications are included here for the sake of completeness. The comments are in the order they appear on the commentary track; timings relate to the DVD release:

O'Rourke starts his commentary by noting that the film contains a lot of archival footage, though he prefers to call it "found footage". He notes that the film was, in simple terms, about the effects of nuclear explosions in the Marshall islands during the 1950s and 60s and in particular, the nuclear test known as Bravo, which took place in 1954.

The film isn't narrated in a traditional sense, but because O'Rourke's dealing with an historical matter, he took to using 'rolling captions' to make a lot of factual points. (He also uses narration from early newsreels/documentaries to make many factual points).

Perhaps perversely O'Rourke then doesn't bother with any commentary on his early use of archival footage, and suggests skipping ahead. O'Rourke doesn't return until the 9'50" mark, to suggest that the shocking things seen in the film have to be seen in the context of the 1950s cold war with Russia.

O'Rourke notes that during the US trusteeship of the Marshall Islands, the US conducted at least 66, possibly more, nuclear tests there.

About 11'47", with a sail boat on the water, O'Rourke identifies the location as Rongelap atoll. After the Bravo test, Rongelap received significant amounts of radioactive fallout.

O'Rourke notes that the resources for archival footage in the US was amazing - the Americans documented everything, and even used B grade American actors to present some of the information. His film relied on the footage, but the process of getting it was quite complicated.

O'Rourke thought that the images of nuclear testing were cliché laden and predictable, and he thought that the job of himself and his editor was to somehow subvert that, by cutting it the way they did - away from the archival footage to life on the islands.

At 15'26" O'Rourke identifies the explosion as actual footage of the Bravo test, a thousand times greater than the blast that devastated Hiroshima. He thinks every shot in the film came from a different source, edited together to evoke the explosion, accompanied by music from Shostakovitch to create the whole scene. O'Rourke cites poet Yeats, when referring to something else, as having a "terrible beauty" . (That phrase came in Yeats poem, Easter 2016 , about the Irish revolution).

O'Rourke explains that when he went to Rongelap, he thought he was going to make a film about the effects of the fall-out. The official story was that the whole thing was a terrible accident, but during the time he was there, on and off over a year, "eventually it came to me that it perhaps wasn't an accident. People talked about conspiracy theories and I didn't want to believe them, but bit by bit as I started trying to put all the pieces of the jigsaw together, the only way that the jigsaw puzzle would turn into one complete picture was if I just theoretically accepted the idea they could have been exposed deliberately, used as guinea pigs, and on that basis I went searching more, trying to meet more people who were witnesses, trying to find more archival footage that may explain what really happened."

"A t the very beginning, I decided to … on a few ideas that I thought would constitute the style of the film… one was, which was at the time quite unusual for me, that I would make the film in a very still way, that is, I would use a tripod a lot of the time and film in a very formal way the testimony of the islanders when they talked about their experiences".

"Another rule I gave myself was that I would only talk to people who had direct experience of the events …"

O'Rourke says that filming started using 16mm, but that at a certain point it was decided it would be released theatrically, so it was blown up to 35mm.

O'Rourke only spoke a few words of Marshallese, but he was generally filming with a colleague on sound, and he had Marshallese people as translators with him as he worked the camera, getting translations pretty much as he went along: " …I needed to know what was being said then because it was what the islanders told me that led me on my search back in the United States for archival footage. That is, the events that they described, I would then go and see if I could find any footage that existed… and a huge amount of archival footage exists, and still exists …the hard part was to find it. I worked with two very, very excellent archival picture researchers based in Washington and we travelled around all over the United States in search of archival film…" O'Rourke thinks that by the end they had used at least twenty different sources.

It was the footage of Admiral Strauss, just after 21 minutes into the film (with President Eisenhower) that first made O'Rourke suspect that there was something fishy about the US operation. (Strauss blames shifting wind conditions for the exposure of inhabitants on three islands, while the search also missed a Japanese trawler). O'Rourke suggests that it was the choice of his words that led O'Rourke to investigate what had really happened. When they obtained more archival footage, and O'Rourke met the two US weathermen stationed on Rongelap, O'Rourke was able to take the investigation further.

Listening to Strauss speak, O'Rourke observes that the business of spin hasn't changed since the 1950s (Lewis Strauss, who had acted as head of the Atomic Energy Commission during Eisenhower's time, was notoriously rejected on the floor of the Senate for the position of secretary of commerce - see the US Senate records here ).

O'Rourke says he found the first weatherman in his film (Gene Curbow) in Roanoke, Virginia. Lamont Noley, the second weatherman in the film, also conformed to O'Rourke's desire to film only those with a direct experience of the event. Noley lived in Oklahoma.

Don Baker, the radio operator on Rongerik atoll, lived in northern California.

O'Rourke says the reason the three men agreed to talk with him was that they felt they had been let down by the US government. They and some of their children were suffering ailments and illnesses that had also been experienced by the Marshallese. When Baker explains his theory of the Marshallese as guinea pigs, O'Rourke adds "Precisely!"

O'Rourke explains that he decided early on to use the sounds of classic Hawaiian steel guitars as the theme. He found the particular piece of music he wanted, but though he frequently travelled via Honololu while making the film, try as he might, he could not find a Hawaiian who could play the steel guitar in the style that he wanted.

About 27 minutes in, O'Rourke notes that islander Bella is telling him about a seaplane landing and three men coming ashore, and on that basis, O'Rourke returned to the United States to go through catalogues looking for any key words (there being no computerised database at the time). The trick was to find what films were being kept at which facility.

The film then shows men with Geiger counters walking up the shore where O'Rourke was every day during his filming. The footage was classified until he came across it, and he gives credit to the Americans for allowing him to access the footage. But at the same time he notes that a lot of what had been given to him was, once the film had come out, reclassified and put away again.

The footage shows Marshallese with burns, severe hair loss (easily pulled from the head), etc, which O'Rourke notes was shot the same week as Lewis Strauss had testified that the Marshallese were happy and well. (Bella is one of the Marshallese filmed to show the damage to her skin).

As well as having to find the archival film, the other challenge was to use devices such as FOI, to obtain documents. O'Rourke quotes the expression "truth lies at the bottom of the well" - it's not one individual piece of film or individual piece of knowledge that actually makes the damning case that they deliberately exposed the Marshallese to radiation: "It's only when it's all put together and in the context of all of this film."

About 32 and a half minutes in, when a title announces a secret film with restricted data, O'Rourke says that when they discovered this piece of film, it was when he was most excited. (The footage's graphics shows the nature of the radiation drift towards Rongelap and other atolls and the rates/size of exposure). O'Rourke notes that it's extraordinary, even for a film intended only to be seen in-house by people inside the military, that the narration would still use the words "destined for Rongelap."

O'Rourke says he doesn't have a scientific mind, and it was very strange for him to have to learn all the scientific terms and a lot about radioactivity in order to make the film.

O'Rourke notes that it's very difficult in a documentary film, especially in a film in this style, which isn't narrated, to deal with historical (and heavily scientific) facts, especially facts that are disputed and especially when "what the film is trying to say is that the official history is wrong…so normally this sort of revised history is told through a book, or some such, but I wasn't able to do that because I'm a filmmaker. I did use the words on the screen to try and have some of that authority of what would be the words on the printed page, but it did mean that my critics in the US government, after the film came out, were able to sort of, those who wished to, were able to sort of attempt to dismiss the thesis of the film."

Over footage of a US representative speaking to camera about the Rongalese being restored to health, O'Rourke says that as much as the archival footage forms a powerful indictment of the US government's attitudes, actions and policies at the time, O'Rourke has to say that if he tried to make a similar film about the British and Australian tests at Maralinga, or more so the French tests in the Pacific, or even the Soviet tests, "then I would not have been able to have the same access to the archival footage".

O'Rourke notes that the footage which begins about 38 minutes in, showing the Argonne National Laboratory, USAEC, came from NBC news. (The narrator refers to savage people, happy amenable savages). O'Rourke says that they licensed the footage directly from NBC, but NBC's policy was not to give the journalist's commentary or any images of the journalist, so he was able to get the narration "when it fell off the back of a truck, so speak, and once it was in the film and released, then NBC thought it would be better not to complain and draw attention to the fact that it was their material, it was their journalist … and he was a famous journalist at the time."

The doctors seen in the NBC footage, seen giving the Marshallese tests in the "iron room", were the same doctors who embarked on a long term study of all the people who were on the exposed atolls which continued to this day (ie O'Rourke is referring to the study continuing up to the time of his commentary being recorded, but presumably it continued after that).

At c. 41'06" there is a shot of the research leader Dr. Robert A. 'Canard', head of the AEC, who can be found online in various bits of literature (his name is also spelled 'Conard', and this seems the more common spelling). He's wearing a trench coat in the film.eg. see a reference to him here in pdf form. Quote:

"For the Marshallese, the aftermath of Bravo led to tragic consequences. The US military and medical staff from Brookhaven National Laboratory, led by Dr Robert Conard, saw an opportunity to research the effect of radiation on people living on contaminated land. Under Project 4.1, medical studies were undertaken on at least 539 men, women and children—often without informed consent—including experimental surgery and injections of chromium-51, radioactive iodine, iron, zinc and carbon-14".

O'Rourke notes that Conard made his career out of this research for many many years

O'Rourke says that the test happened in 1954, when black people in the United States still rode in the back of the bus, and he thinks that racism played a large part in the mind set of the Americans to allow, or to cause this to happen - because they were brown people.

Around the 42 minute mark, O'Rourke points out the footage of islanders boarding a ship (and then on board) was amateur 16mm footage he found in Honolulu. It was shot by one of the sailors there at the time.

At this time the Hawaiian style steel guitar returns and O'Rourke recalls it was Bob Brozman rather than an Hawaiian who did the score. He recalls Brozman was a New York Jew and a very fine guitarist. "…the trick was to take the particular music that I wanted and then slow it down, by a factor of two or even four, which of course makes it much more difficult to play." O'Rourke notes that it was the first time he'd ever commissioned music for a film and he was very happy with the way it worked out.

Brozman has a detailed wiki listing here .

Just after 44 mins in, O'Rourke thinks he was only able to make the film because of the donated Nomad plane whose propellor features in a shot (later followed by shots of it landing). Until a few months before he went to the islands to make the film, all access was controlled by the United States, and travellers had to go via their Kwajalein military base and go by ship. Apart from the doctors and scientists (seen landing around 44'30"), no foreigners - particularly no media people - were allowed to go there. It was just that it was a time when the United States was handing back authority to the Marshallese part of the UN trustee agreement.

At the time the Marshallese were negotiating compensation for the islanders for the effects of the nuclear tests and O'Rourke thinks that the film helped them negotiate for more compensation. But he knows from friends in the Marshall Islands that (at the time of the commentary) they hadn't been successful and in some ways money had become part of the problem, more than the solution.

O'Rourke says he went to the islands four or five times. He'd go and stay as the islanders' guest for three or four weeks at a time. Once he went with the Americans on their boat when they came on their biannual medical inspections. O'Rourke found the discussions with the US scientists and doctors interesting. By this time he was quite open about his agenda.

The Liktanur II was owned by the US Department of Energy, and is the large vessel seen in the film. The Liktanur II had on board a modern version of the machine seen earlier in the film (in Chicago). The original was called the Iron Lung and measured the amount of radiation in the body. O'Rourke, who had been living on the island and eating the local food for some weeks when the boat arrived, offered himself for inspection. His Caesium 137/Caesium 131 levels were much higher than normal.

While O'Rourke notes that none of the doctors or scientists were responsible for what had gone on years earlier, he also thought there was some cognitive dissonance going on: "… they'd rather not speculate on what might have happened or what the real purpose of their job is …but I notice when they come ashore … and the islanders are very hospitable …and the islanders would offer them coconut juice to drink, they'd put the coconuts to their lips and smile and pretend to drink, but I didn't see them drinking too much."

When one of the US scientists (just under 49 minutes in), refers to a thirty year decaying Half Life , O'Rourke notes "hence the title of the film…"

Just over 49 minutes in, with the islanders on a boat heading out to the Liktanur II, O'Rourke notes that all the residents are ferried out to the boat, and undergo all kinds of tests regarding levels of radiation and present health. The biggest problem that was admitted when he was there was the problem of thyroid disease. It was very common and caused by radiation.

O'Rourke says he became friends with some of the people on the boat, and when the film was out, he went to one place up in Long Island where their headquarters had been and he stayed as a house guest in the house of one of the leaders of the US expeditions. He also met and filmed Dr Conard, who was retired by then. O'Rourke put it to him that it had been deliberate and it was very shocking for him, but O'Rourke didn't include it in the film because his view is that it was too easy to find one scapegoat and blame one person for what is essentially a collective crime: "I didn't want that easy solution."

Just after 51 minutes, O'Rourke notes that the Department of Energy had produced a very fancy book in Marshallese, explaining what radiation is and what its effects can be. O'Rourke points out the book can be seen in the film, as it's being held up by one of the lawyers (Richard Geary), working on a commission basis for the Rongelapese. The film of Geary was taken on commission for O'Rourke at a congressional hearing in Washington - he couldn't be there to do the filming.

Around 53 minutes in, O'Rourke suggests that in a sense the Rongelapese were the first victims of any third world war. It was such a small population, with a small gene pool, that the effect of this one test on these people, and the fact that they were relocated back to the island not long after the test - O'Rourke claims this was for benefit of the long term study - means that the whole population over some generations has been killed because the chromosomal changes affect more people as each generation comes and goes.

Around the 54 minute mark, O'Rourke notes that a lot of these scenes were filmed on another island, Utirik . A third island, Rongerik , had no people living on it when O'Rourke was filming.

The people of Rongelap were all evacuated not long after O'Rourke had finished filming. The US government had been forced to admit that the levels of radiation where the Rongelapese had been living - at that stage for thirty years - were too high.

"Many, many of the people from these islands were taken to the United States for testing and operations, as you saw in that earlier scene, in Chicago. The standard of medical care that they've been getting I'm sure is fine … the bigger point though is that the reason why they're getting it is, is it's part of a long term program to test the long term effects over a lifetime, over generations of the exposure to fall out on human beings."

Regarding the sad story of Lekoj told in the film, O'Rourke notes that the boy was just one year old when the radiation fell, one year and one month …

"Of course there's no way to authoritatively prove that any one of these cases was caused by radiation …it's just the probability when you see how many children are affected similarly to that little boy … and this girl here … (on screen just before the sixty minute mark is a girl in a yellow dress with one warped leg badly bent up behind her, hobbling along on crutches) … and because of the science that tells you about the probability of the increase in mutations because of radiation …"

"Of course the Marshallese have no word for radioactivity …or nuclear … or hydrogen bomb …the word 'poison' came out of their language as the word for radioactivity."

About 63 minutes in, O'Rourke notes that the graphics explaining the effects of radioactivity came from an official US film: "… for me, a much more elegant way to describe science than trying to tell the story yourself."

"I came to make this film because I met a political representative of these people one night in a bar in Majuro when I was there researching for something else altogether some years before … and he said, and everyone knew about Bikini and Bikini atoll, and in fact my theory is that Bikini was exposed to the media in Life magazine covers and lots and lots of newsreels at the time, because it was a way of … a smokescreen in a way for the real story … the real story is not the people who were taken off their island, which was then used for the test, it was the people who weren't taken off the island, and this story was not known to anybody, until we made this film in the mid-80s … and so Jeton Anjain, who was their representative in the Marshallese parliament, government, he invited me to come out there, and I went out there with him on that little plane to have a look, and I was due to stay there only for one day, the plane was to go to some other islands and hop around and come back the next day, and take us back … it's about a four hour flight across the ocean back to Majuro, the capital of the Marshall islands, and you'd travel via Kwajalein, which was still the American air force base … but the plane broke down, and they had to wait a week or ten days for the part to come from Australia, so in those ten days I was on the island, and I had my camera with me, and I had a box of film stock … I had thirty rolls of film stock, each of ten minutes, and the people were telling me their stories and it was being translated to me and all the people that you see here in the film … and I just decided then, I didn't have any backing for the film, I said right, I made a promise to them, 'I'll tell your story'…"

66 mins in, O'Rourke identifies John (Anjain), in a blue shirt with floral patterns. John was the man who was called the savage, the happy, amenable savage, as seen in the archival film being put into the Iron Lung/Iron Room shot in Chicago by NBC news. John is showing photos of his son to camera, the same son, Likoj, whom Mijjua (Anjain) was talking about earlier in the film, who was one year old when she was at his grave.

(Over shots of John narrating his family album, showing death and funeral parlour and burial, etc, which go on for some time): "Some scenes in this sort of film … in fact all scenes, need to take their time …if you need to cut it to shorten it, is to destroy its meaning."

Just after 69 minutes in, with Mijjua speaking to camera, O'Rourke recalls that it was one of the rolls of films that he shot when he went there and was stranded there for ten days because the plane broke down: "What I decided to do was just to film testimony, like you're seeing here, people talking directly to me in camera, they've been …they've been, explained to them to speak in Marshallese and just tell me their stories … and that's what they did …so I filmed thirty rolls of film, just like this, just of these people, the people telling me their story …By this stage of course I hadn't seen any of the archival footage, I didn't know what I'd discover, I hadn't met the weather men, I hadn't thought that it was deliberate, I thought it was an accident. I hadn't seen any of those photographs in the photograph album … all I started with was this testimony …I hadn't raised any money for the film, I just filmed it and processed it on my credit card, and had these rolls translated so that was the starting point for the journey, for the story ..."

When weather man Lamont Noley returns just after the 71 minute mark to say he's concluded it was deliberate, O'Rourke says his position is much the same as his own.

"These three weather men who testify here in the film I think are very powerful because of the fact that they are patriots all, they are not er activists who've got some particular anti-nuclear axe to grind …"

When the film returns to the congressional hearings after the 72 min mark, O'Rourke notes that lawyer Weisgall is using - quoting - from documents O'Rourke found in the course of making the film and passed on to him.

O'Rourke notes that the year of the filming was the year of the negotiations for the US to hand over to the Marshallese, and President Reagan released a recorded announcement which was sent out and played to all the people in the Marshall islands … (74 mins into the film)

Following Reagan's speech, as Mijjua says Americans are very smart and do stupid things: "Technically the most powerful man in the world at the time and the most powerless woman … however that's not how you feel when you see the film. I have to say that that last image of Mijjua talking, I talked earlier about the first thirty rolls of film that I made, and yet it's the last real scene in the film … in fact, that roll, with her talking … the Americans are smart at doing stupid things, that was the very first roll of film that I took in making this film …"

"So the film was released in 1985, the United States government issued … the State Department on their official letterhead, issued press releases everywhere the film was shown around the world, it was very widely shown, in cinemas, in many, many festivals and won many awards, er and on television, and er although it was very hard to get it on television in America for quite a long time … the New York Times opinioned about it, that er that it was er… it couldn't possibly be true, that it was er, that to suggest that Americans would have done it deliberately … and er my motives were attacked in all sorts of journals. However, I can say that a few years later when President Clinton was in power, he held a Commission of Inquiry into various things to do with the radiation experiments, including the issue of the story of the Marshallese, and the evidence that is in the film was presented to that committee, and the committee vindicated the thesis of the film …"

As the end credits roll, O'Rourke notes that he couldn't have made the film without the help of archive film researchers David Thaxton and Kevin Green - "they were extraordinary" in helping locate all the footage from so many different archival sources. He jokes that he was the one who had to turn up with hair neatly combed and tie on and speak to which ever military official it was, to ask permission to use the film and "of course you've got to be straight with them, you've got to say what sort of film you're going to make, and to their credit, they were often very, very helpful. In fact, I can say that there were some people, people in uniform, who went out of their way to help me to get material … otherwise I wouldn't have got them. People who probably felt they had a duty to help me to tell the story that I told here …"

As a final note, O'Rourke adds that as well as American television, it was France that wouldn't show the film for many, many years, "because they were still testing in the Pacific, and it was too close to home. Then there was a change of government in France … " (there's a hard cut on the last word to end the commentary).

4. Music and narration:

As noted above, this was the first time that Dennis O'Rourke had commissioned music for one of his documentaries, and music plays a significant part in the atmosphere and tone of the film. See this site's pdf of music credits for more details.

O'Rourke typically also disliked using narration - Couldn't be Fairer was a significant exception - and he maintained that tradition in Half Life .

The film is divided by titles into two parts - 'causes' and 'effects' - and in lieu of narration, opening titles set the scene (what narration there is comes from the narrators on archival films):

Opening and body of film titles:

About two thousand miles southwest of Hawaii there is a cluster of tiny coral atolls called the Marshall Islands.

The United States took these islands from Japan during the Pacific War.

In 1947 the United Nations placed the Marshall Islands under the protection of America.

The Trusteeship Agreement stated that the United States was required to:

"Recognize the principle that the interests of the inhabitants are paramount …" and to "… protect their rights and fundamental freedoms."

Instead, the United States used the Marshall Islands as a testing ground for its new atomic weapons.

(later, after more archival footage showing the islanders being packed on to a vessel to leave, c. 3'23", more titles roll …)

The first tests were held on Bikini Atoll. The people living there, and on the atolls downwind, were removed from their traditional homeland.

During the next decade the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (A.E.C.) exploded at least sixty six nuclear bombs on these islands, contaminating them for centuries to come.

Today, the United States is in the process of terminating the Trusteeship Agreement.

In Washington, officials and members of the U.S. Congress are debating the amount of compensation to be given to the Marshall Islanders.

(Still later, about 9'55" into the film, another roller):

In 1953 Russia successfully tested its first hydrogen bomb.

This astounded the American military and scientific leaders, who had yet yet developed a deliverable hydrogen bomb.

Under conditions of absolute secrecy a new series of tests, known as "Operation Castle", was planned.

The first bomb, code-named "Bravo", was scheduled to be exploded at Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954.

Official documents show that the major purposes of "Bravo" were to demonstrate to the Russians that America had the H-Bomb, and to provide the military planners with vital information on the effects of the fallout which this bomb would create.

The A.E.C. had estimated that "Bravo" would be at least five hundred times more powerful than the earlier tests at Bikini.

Inexplicably, the people on Rongelap and Utirik Atolls, downwind from Bikini, were not evacuated as they had been for previous tests.

(After footage of the islanders in later times and the Bravo explosion, another roller, about 16'40" into the film):

"Bravo" was detonated as planned on the morning of March 1, 1954.

The winds carried the fallout towards the inhabited islands.

At midday a snow-like powder began to fall on Rongelap.

The islanders were not warned, and their children, who had seen pictures of snow, played in the fallout.

That night everyone became violently ill.

Navy ships at Rongelap were measuring the radioactivity. These ships were protected from the anticipated fallout. They could have rescued the people but they were ordered to sail away.

(About 41'15" in, there is another roller):

The A.E.C. now had an ideal source for research into the long-term effects of radiation on human populations.

After three months the people from Utirik were sent back to their contaminated atoll. They ate radioactive food and drank the poisoned water. The amount of radiation in their bodies rapidly increased.

The people of Rongelap were returned after three years.

The A.E.C. declared that:

"The habitation of these people on the island will afford most valuable ecological radiation data on human beings."

(About 43'40" in, another roller):

Every year since 1954, doctors and scientists under contract to the A.E.C. and the Department of Energy (D.O.E.) have travelled to the Marshall Islands to study the exposed people.

They tell the islanders that their atolls are now safe - but they are not believed.

Closing titles:

O'Rourke saves his strongest islander interview - shot on the very first day - to the end of the film. It begins this way.

Islander Mijjua Anjain , speaking to camera: "He was only nineteen when we learnt that he had radiation sickness. They took him away to the United States, to their big American hospitals … and the way they treated him, it was certainly thorough. But to my mind, they used him as if he was an animal …they continuously punctured his body …in the way you might cut up a chicken. He bled from the things they stuck into him. He was like a laboratory animal. I saw this with my own eyes …it was something that tore at my heart. I watched them treat him like a guinea pig …and this is what is always on my mind. They destroyed my son …they used him …like a worthless animal. This is the one thing which I can never forgive… that's all …"

(Islanders returning from the US scientific vessel).

Cut to US weather man Lamont Noley saying it would be difficult for him to even consider the idea that the US had done it deliberately… "but from you know what information that's been in the service now, you know, you're not left with a whole lot of choice … to base your opinion on …you can only come to one conclusion, that is …because there is no way that they could not have been aware of the prevailing winds there, you know, in the time of day, because we had been there for months, you know … and they had, no doubt had records from previous operations out there ..."

Cut to patriotic US weather man Gene Curbow , explaining that US officials knew what the fall out patterns would be: "They knew where the radioactive fallout was gunna go … and they took that risk and went ahead and detonated the bomb, knowing full well which way it was gunna go …they still had an opportunity to evacuate, even on the day of the shot …but these people were not evacuated, we were not evacuated, and the people on Utirik were not evacuated … so it only leads one to believe that number one, the United States needed some guinea pigs, to study what the effects of radiation would do, and that's a pretty strong indication that the United States knew that …"

Cut to lawyer Jonathan Weisgall offering testimony in relation to the 'crime' of Bravo - he doesn't use the term lightly - and calls the talk about an unexpected wind shift being a lie. He cites evidence that the officials knew of the wind shift, and detonated the bomb knowing that the United States would contaminate people entrusted to its care by the United Nations.

(Following footage of young islanders watching an American TV show -shades of O'Rourke's Yap , a US spokesperson appears):

Fred M. Zeder II , to camera: "Ladies and gentlemen of the republic of the Marshall Islands, I'm Fred Zeder, president Reagan's personal representative. It's my great honour and privilege to present the President of the United States of America …"

President Reagan , to camera: "Greetings on this historic occasion to our friends in Micronesia. For many years a very special relationship has existed between the United States and the people of the Trust territory. Under the Trusteeship, we've come to know and respect you as members of our American family… and now, as happens to all families, members grow up and leave home. I want you to know that we wish you all the best, as you assume full responsibility for your domestic affairs and foreign relations. As you chart your own course for economic development, and as you take up your new status in the world as a sovereign nation, we look forward to continuing our close relationship with you in your new status… but, you'll always be family to us … (then over shots of islanders on a small boat heading out to the larger US boat for testing) … over the years, perhaps the most lasting and valuable things we've built together are not the roads, the airports, the schools and hospitals, but rather an understanding of the meaning of democracy and freedom, and the dignity of self-determination. You've built a strong foundation for your future. Together in free association we can and will build a better life for all… (back to a CU of Reagan to camera) … thank you and congratulations ..."

(The film then cuts to Mijjua Anjain to offer a kind of "islander right of reply"):

Mijjua, to camera, subtitled: "Don't Americans know that every life is precious? They are educated people …do they really believe that one person's life is unimportant? What goes on in the minds of these people? They think they are smart … but really they are crazy … (laughs) … they are smart at doing stupid things."

(A long look to camera and then cut to the US scientific vessel, as steel guitar returns over playing kids).

(A roller title, white on black):

Recent studies show that the radioactive danger to the Marshall Islanders is many times greater than the official estimates.

The weathermen who were on Rongerik Atoll are suffering from the same illnesses as the Marshallese.

The people of Rongelap Atoll, fearing the effects of radiation, have abandoned their islands.

In the United Nations and in the U.S. Congress the plight of the Marshall Islanders is still being debated.

(Cut to a Bell and Howell projector being turned on, and a screen, and then archival footage of congressmen emerging from a screening of the 1954 H-bomb tests).

First congressman ( Jacob Javits ) to interviewer at door : "I think the United States and the people have the most awful responsibility in leadership that's ever been given to any people on earth …"

Second, bowtied congressma n, to interviewer: "I thought it was absolutely amazing and I can't help but feel the same as Mr Javits. It's a horrible thing."

Third congressman: "Frightening!"

Fourth congressman: "Well it's really amazing and very, very impressive. I haven't gotten over it yet …"

Fifth congressman: "Terrific!"

Sixth congressman: "Very enlightening!"

Seventh congressman: "I'd say it was terrific."

Eighth congressman: "Very revealing picture … and shows what we have to look forward to if we have an atomic war … (he almost leaves, then leans back to add) …which I hope we can avoid."

Ninth congressman: "Very interesting, but frightful."

The tenth and last congressman provides an answer to Mijjua's question "do they really believe that one person's life is unimportant?" : "Makes one realise just how insignificant a human being is …"

Cut to black, steel guitar and end credits.

5. Filmnews - Take 1, Catherin Fisher:

By the time Dennis O'Rourke made Half Life , he had begun to accumulate a significant body of work, and at last domestic film magazines began to pay attention.

Thus Filmnews , which had failed to review Yumi Yet or Ileksen , having decided that they were ideologically suspect, ran an interview with O'Rourke in its February 1986 issue (page 9).

The review was headed Photography Plus Cinematography Equals Memory. It's a Helluva Thing. In it Catherin Fisher talked to Dennis O'Rourke:

Catherin Fisher: You began your career as an independent filmmaker in 1975 with Yumi Yet a film that scrutinised independence in Papua New Guinea. Since then all of the films you've made have directly or indirectly dealt with the impact of western culture on non western black peoples. Is there a strategy?

Dennis O'Rourke: I have never consciously decided to make films about these subjects. Going to Papua New Guinea was the result of a phone call. It could just as easily been Antarctica. If you prove you can do one type of film well, that's what you get offered.

Fisher: Are you saying that the issues that this area raises don't take a precedent for you, and it's by accident that you've decided to explore them?

O'Rourke: Not by accident. I believe in a certain amount of fate. Correctly described it is something I believe in. Not everything we do is done for the reasons we think we do them. Trying to understand it leads to wimpering fanaticism — of the kind of ratbag religions you see around.

Fisher: Well I'm a wimpering fanatic, and going to try. Are you conscious of your position working with black populations being white?

O'Rourke: I don't like the term black and white, it's misleading. A person's point of view isn't always determined by the colour of their skin. I am very conscious of the fact that white people, to use your term, make films about black people, and never the other way 'round. There was a period I went through where I felt guilty and apologetic for my role. I don't feel that now. I've been in enough circumstances where people from the cultures I've worked with have had the opportunity to use film and all that's occurred is that they've let glamour run away with them, and they've become clones of what I think is worst in the western media.

Fisher: So you accept responsibility for revealing the people in a certain light, and I gather to make structural and artistic choices about how this is to be executed. What relationship do you artistically negotiate between the people and yourself?

O'Rourke: Each film is sort of structured as a journey of discovery with me being the discoverer. I'm rarely in my films, my voice is hardly heard, but nevertheless the relationship between the subject, the people in the film, the events and landscapes and me, is quite strong. This comes about because I am the photographer. This is the nature of making good documentary film. The person behind the camera is ultimately the author. The essence of photography, especially when it's combined with cinematography, is the closest people have ever got to memory — it's a "helluva" thing.

Fisher: What are you saying about the relationship between you and the people? That it is close, you exchange ideas and together develop the film out of the process?

O'Rourke: The ethnographic term for what you're getting at is refilexivity. No, I run away from the term ethnographic. That way of looking at films is imperialistic. Like anthropology, it has been used as a tool for imperialism.

Fisher: Then you're showing your own point of view.

O'Rourke: No. A synthesis takes place. I know it's cliche — but the film makes you — you don't make the film. The material is paramount, — what you've got (is) what you get.

This is the basis for my objection to ethnography and cinema verite. The whole idea of truth, objective truth, is crap. It's unrealistic in context with the whole nature of filmmaking. It's not just what you do on the editing table, or what order you choose to put the scenes in — or the idea that you don't zoom the camera. These are furphies, what people talk about when they analyse documentary film. As far as I am concerned far more important is what side of the bed you get out of in the morning — whether something crucial happens just when you've run out of film. Some of the greatest filmic moments of my life have been lost because I've been loading the camera.

Fisher: The style of filmmaking has evolved in your films though. In The Sharkcallers Of Kontu for example you framed the people tight when you interviewed them. In Half Life the interviews are looser. The subjects are obviously in familiar surroundings, and people walk freely in and out of the frame while they speak. The feel is more realistic. Was this a conscious development?

O'Rourke: In each case I have developed a photographic style for the film. Kontu was nearly all shot by a hand held camera, so was Yumi Yet and its sequel lleksen . I set out with Half Life to use a tripod — and I didn't use a zoom, except for one shot at the end, which came off the first roll I shot. What happened to them was at such a level of tragedy, and of such import to the rest of the world, that it had to be formal. So what I decided to do was to just place the camera in a position, and not even look through the viewfinder.

Fisher: Did you rehearse the Marshallese?

O'Rourke: I made the decision that every time I filmed the people who were talking about their terrible loss that I wouldn't use any tricks. Each interview represents a day for most people, several for some. I left them the ease of the wide frame. Sometimes there were variations, I'd start off with a wide frame and get a little closer. For a few I put their partner beside them. This was planned, if you like, rehearsed. It wasn't always my choice, sometimes it was theirs.

Fisher: The real power in Half Life lies with the islanders. The archival footage is set up in contrast to them through the mise scene, rather than them to the archival footage. It could have taken the spotlight — but instead it is left on the islanders. You also used the bomb image with great restraint.

O'Rourke: Yes. Not so much other films, but television has used the bomb shots so much they've become cliche. It gets to the point like a lot of television does where it anaesthetises your response and it's just a big bang. As Helen Caldicott points out it's also a phallic and masochistic image. Once you get the sexual connotations, then the destruction has to be considered — the boys with their toys syndrome — the pleasure in seeing destruction. I think it's got to be acknowledged that this is in all of us — but how to control it, that's the real issue.

You see in Half Life, as you said, the real intensity comes from the quiet relationship between the audience and the people who give the testimony. There are three levels in the film — the official view as represented by the Atomic Energy Commission propaganda films and news reels, and then the story — the actual events as they reoccur, and then the testimony which is really filmed oral history of the weather people who were out there in '54 at the test, and the islanders. The story had been around for a long time after all — denials and counter claims and so on. So I decided to start with the point of view of the islanders and work back.

Fisher : Was this also because on a personal level you felt some affinity with the islanders' story?

O'Rourke: What I'm really doing through the film is searching for meaning — what we all do — we do it in our love lives — we do it in our parenting — even in the way we express aggression. In Half Life I looked at what this all meant to me. And I went about recording my own impressions and went to whatever lengths I had to so I could get this. I suppose what I am trying to do is to get back to the place to what would be happening if you'd never introduced the concept of filmmaking in the first place.

It's a search for truth, if you like. I try very hard to construct films that represent my opinion at the time. I could never be involved in a film that worked to abase the human spirit. You see on one level Half Life involves a sort of reflection of me as a refugee from the catholic church It is about questioning the nature of human values. Like all my films, it has a crypto christian philosophy.

And then there's the story. Well I just can't come to the point where I can say that the Americans deliberately exposed the people. The weight of instinctual reactions makes me believe that there were elements of deliberation in this — that the Americans deliberately allowed these tests to happen. I know from being with them that this is the case — so it's the truth to me.

But you also have to consider the other aspect of the film determined by the budget. Before I made Half Life I did ... Couldn't Be Fairer , the style of that film was really determined by the lower cost. Because of 10BA with Half Life I was removed from all that and able to make a film that wasn't a traditional documentary — but nevertheless works at the level of a traditional documentary, whatever that is. Does this make sense?

Fisher: Yes, but there seems to be a mass of contradictions.

O'Rourke: That's right. In fact the whole thing is a mass of contradictions. But I don't really have the answers. Documentary suffers from this terrible curse of definition — what is right and what is wrong. I should add that I would run miles to get away from being pigeonholed as a documentary filmmaker, and therefore having some higher claim to truth.

Really in many ways I don't see the difference between fiction and non-fiction filmmaking. Everybody else probably has a clear definition of what it is. I don't. In my mind I can find more of a separation between Chris Marker's films and a news or current affairs program than I can between Marker's and Nick Roeg's, and then again there's a huge difference between Roeg's and Hitchcock's. Documentary is dogged by definition. I actually intend to make narrative feature films — but I'm not going to say OK I just graduated from documentary, now I'm going to make narrative fiction.

6. Filmnews - Take 2, Pat Fiske and Tina Kaufman:

Pat Fiske and Tina Kaufman interviewed Dennis O'Rourke for the February 1986 issue of Filmnews (page 6), with Half Life the excuse for a more general look at his career. It ran under the header You don't make the film - the film makes you , with a sub-header HOW I ROSE WITHOUT A TRACE.

There was an introduction:

Dennis O'Rourke's film, Half Life, was invited to the prestigious United States Film Festival, Park City, Utah, in January where it was screened to an audience of US and overseas filmmakers, both mainstream and independent, film company executives, distributors, exhibitors, publicists, local residents and visiting film buffs.

At the end of the screening independent US filmmaker Mark Rappaport suggesting cancelling the rest of the screenings at the festival, and Half Life was awarded a special and spontaneous Director's award for "Extraordinary Achievement".

In the National Times in February, a group of Australian documentary makers placed an advertisement honouring Dennis and the ten years of filmmaking which culminates (at this stage) with the release of Half Life in cinemas around Australia. Half Life is the search for what happened to the Pacific Islands exposed to the H-bomb tests of 1954.

At the Berlin Film Festival this month, not only is Half Life the only Australian film invited to the Forum for Young Cinema, but a retrospective of four of his films ( Ileksen , Yap - Didn't You Know They'd Like TV? (sic), Sharkcallers of Kontu and Couldn't Be Fairer ) will also be screened - a noteworthy event at this important festival.

O'Rourke then led off the interview:

Dennis O'Rourke : After I left university without completing my course, I worked on a ship, on a cattle property, hung around the beaches in Queensland where I grew up, and taught myself photography — still photography. I had a lot of fights with my parents, and just lived on the outside of things really, saw all my school friends become accountants and doctors and lawyers. Of course some of them went off to Vietnam. I didn't go to Vietnam, but I spent a lot of time trying to avoid going.

In 1970 I left Queensland and came down to Sydney to get into the industry, break in to the "big time". The only job I could get, and this was because there was a kindly person at the ABC, was as an assistant gardener at the TV studios in Gore Hill. The idea was that as I weeded the gardens and planted the eucalypts I'd get a chance to meet people as they came in and out, important people and I hoped they'd give me a job in the industry. And after about six months that happened and I got into the camera department which was were I wanted to be. You have to remember that there was no film school then which wasn't a bad thing as far as I'm concerned.

I stayed for about two and a half years — and I learnt about cameras and editing machines, and laboratories and Nagras. I travelled a lot around Australia as an assistant camera operator, but I got a chance to shoot my own film from time to time. Then I left. To stay in the ABC and work your way up in that hierarchical structure wasn't what I had in mind. I borrowed some money and bought myself my first 16mm camera and became a self styled independent camera operator director.

Filmnews: So it was '75 when you made your first film — how did that happen?

O'Rourke: Well I had a chance to work in Papua New Guinea as a camera operator on a film looking at the Independence Celebrations. The director, the person who was going to direct it early on in the piece was called upon to do something else so I stepped in and changed the concept around, and I made the film that I wanted to make. It turned out to be Yumi Yet . It wasn't successful initially — I couldn't get it on TV here, but as a result of making it I managed to get to make another film in Papua New Guinea — lleksen — really a sequel to Yumi Yet about the first election after Independence, and it analysed concepts of how the western system worked as a transplant into Papua New Guinea.

Filmnews: Where did you get the money from for that film?

O'Rourke: That was funded by the Electoral Commission in Papua New Guinea ... under a very special contract that gave me carte blanche to do whatever I wanted to do.

Filmnews: And was that distributed widely?

O'Rourke: No, what happened was that I took both films to Europe. I knew they were OK, I knew I was doing reasonable work, and they started winning at major festivals ... and British TV, American TV, bought them straight away ... and then offered me finance to make other films, so really as they say I rose without a trace.

Filmnews: Why do you think they were so popular overseas, and not in Australia?

O'Rourke: Well they weren't unpopular here, they were widely reviewed and shown theatrically — but not picked up by TV. Really we're talking about Australian television networks. The way the TV industry is structured and with the kind of films I make, there is only one outlet for them — the ABC. The ABC in those days, the departments that I would have to go to, just didn't buy independent films. If they ever did, and it was exceptional — they'd buy something from someone already in the club — not from people who'd worked as gardeners or assistant camera operators. The people who were in charge of programs to be bought were the people who were themselves making programs. Films like mine, and like David Bradbury's, were really quite challenging to those people because we were making films that were being accepted — more than accepted, although I don't want to use publicity type words like acclaimed — but they were being accepted — all around the western world, and being bought overseas for television.

Filmnews: You said you got money from overseas television companies to make your next film. What film was that and how did it get made?

O'Rourke: It was Yap — How Did You Know They'd Like TV? , and I'll tell you how it came about. It'll seem like a long story but it's actually indicative of the way I approach my films. The people at WGBH in Boston bought both my films and said they'd like me to make a film for a series of theirs, and we decided on Micronesia as the location. I travelled through Micronesia, to Palau and the Marianas and Guam and Truk and Ponape and the Marshall Islands, and the only place I didn't go to was Yap because it didn't work out with the airline schedule. I was on my way back to Boston, to have a meeting with the series producers and the researchers they'd employed to do paper research in the States on Micronesia and the US involvement.

The only brief I'd had was to make a film, tell a story, which was a metaphor for the US involvement in its colony of Micronesia. In a bar in Ponape one night I met the man who was the Governor of Yap and found him interesting. Now, only two or three hours out of Boston, flying across the country in the middle of winter, I still didn't know what film I was going to make. I thought to myself, "Well, I'll tell them I'm going to make a film about the Governor of Yap. I haven't been to Yap, but I've been to the other places and none of them has gotten me completely excited, so I'll say I'll make it about the place I didn't go to". They had all these other ideas lined up from the research but I was enthusiastic about the Governor of Yap. The title sounded good — it's nice to have evocative working titles. They were sceptical in the beginning, but the paper research can always be made to fit the imagination and within two or three weeks they'd gotten back to me and said "Sure, it's a great idea. He sounds like a great character. Let's do a film about the Governor of Yap."

Eight weeks later Gary Kildea, who was doing sound, and I landed in Yap and got a truck ride into town — a quaint little place. It was raining — the middle of the monsoon season. We took our shoes off and walked down this muddy street into the Governor's office and I said "Hello, remember I met you in a bar. We've come to do a film here about you". As it turned out the Governor, nice guy that he was, underwent a personality change every time the camera was turned on. He became a wooden, small town official playing out a role in a sponsored movie about himself and it wasn't working.

Yap's a very small place. There was one person, Willy Gorongfel, who was press liaison officer, local journalist and TV newsreader on their recently inaugurated television station. Willy was looking after us, so, while I'm struggling to find a film in the Governor, every night we're back at Willy's house eating fried fish and drinking beer. Willy's sister had recently bought the television set you see in the film. One night I said to Gary, "That's it. I'm going to forget about doing the film about the Governor. I'm going to throw away the first two weeks of shooting and the box of thirty rolls or so we've shot. I'm going to make a film about Willy and the introduction of television."

I didn't contact WGBH — I didn't contact the BBC, who also had money in the film, except to get them to send me another box of stock and say all was going well. I stayed incommunicado for the next six weeks or so. When I finally got to Guam I called up WGBH who were understandably concerned and they said, "Oh, we've been trying to contact you. How're things?" I said: "The film is fine, it's just a different subject, that's all." And eventually they were happy with it. But it didn't achieve the impact it should have in America because it went out at the time of the Iranian hostage crisis in December or January of 1980. The BBC screening was very successful, however.

Filmnews: Did you have any of those thirty rolls processed?

O'Rourke: Yes, you must — as soon as you shoot anything it doesn't matter what it is. You're obliged to process it and look at it and live with it.

Filmnews: I always remember seeing you at that meeting, in 1980 I think, at the Paddington Town Hall called by independent filmmakers to confront the ABC about not buying their films. You got up and made an impassioned speech, and next day the ABC bought several Independent films, but not one of yours.

O'Rourke: The rumour was — in those years — that if I made a film of Jesus Christ ascending to heaven, the ABC would still find a reason not to buy it!

You know, in the development of my career, if that's not too pretentious an expression, the best thing that ever happened to me was that the ABC and other groups in this country didn't take a great liking to my early films. At the time I was very upset — for even though we filmmakers put on a brave front of being very self assured, in fact I think in order to do good work it's a prerequisite to be self doubting most of the time. I know I am — it's a strange combination of the two things. You're both supremely confident to sally in anywhere and take on anything but during the actual process of synthesis of all these elements which go into the final film, you've got to be absolutely riddled with self doubt but you like people to recognise that you're doing good work because it encourages you.

So I was a bit depressed for a little while there but now looking back on it, it was definitely the best thing that ever happened to me that the ABC, particularly, found all of my films "unacceptable for broadcast" and rejected every film, because it ensured that I looked outwards. The BBC and PBS people didn't believe it. I'm better known in broadcasting circles in Britain than I am here. Not just the people I deal with but I'm surprised to find that other people know me and know my work quite well.

Filmnews: Perhaps we should talk now about how Half Life came about?

O'Rourke: You don't make the film — the film makes you. Both in the choice of the subject matter and then how you approach the making of the film. I don't have any really preconceived idea about how it's going to go. I just like to throw myself into a situation and then see what comes out the other end. As I told you, I first went to the Marshalls when I was researching Yap . Then I produced a series for Film Australia in 1983 — The Human Face Of The Pacific. Not my title I hasten to add. "The Human Face..." You wonder where that came from. The first one was "The Human Face Of China" — what's the other face — "The Inhuman Face Of China"? It's all part of the whole Australian confused attitude towards Asia and the Pacific. I'm waiting to see them make a series "The Human Face Of Australia".

To say it succinctly, the experience producing that series was not a happy one. It was not very long before I was put through the mangle. I collided head on with the attitude towards the process of filmmaking held by that entrenched group of sad, self deluded, untalented and bitter people who have so much influence on this process of filmmaking at Film Australia. But — it's an ill wind, as they say.

That series took me to the Rongelap Atoll, and it so happened that the aircraft that took me there broke down, left me there and was supposed to come back in two days and didn't come back for ten. So there I was, on Rongelap Atoll, with my camera and some film stock. I got to talking with the people who explained what their life was like and what had happened and I decided on the spot that I had to make their film. So I filmed that week and processed on my Bankcard, and then I set about raising the money.

I wrote a treatment and went out and raised the money under 10BA. The film is very close to what the treatment was — because we're dealing with history here. Unlike my other films where I couldn't really do much of a treatment, only present a of impressions of what I'd do with Half Life I was able to be fairly specific. As soon as I got back I called up my friends at the BBC and they agreed to a presale.

Filmnews: When did the film get bigger?

O'Rourke: After working for a year, I realised the film needed more than one hour and that I wanted to release it on 35mm. In the second year I raised the balance of the money from the same investors to bring the budget up to its final budget of $500,000 — a great proportion of which just went into both researching and paying for the royalties of the archival footage.

Filmnews: Did you do all the archival research as well?

O'Rourke: No, I did not. I found two people who live in Washington, David Thaxton and Kevin Green, who are in my view, the best archival picture researchers in the world, and they were very committed to the project and we conducted many of the searches together. I hadn't made a film with any real measure of archival footage in it, so it was something new for me. David and Kevin know all the commercial libraries pretty well inside out and they could put their hands on things much faster than I could. With requests for a lot of the official film, though, I couldn't put that onus on them. I was responsible for the film. I had to go and ask the people at the Defence Nuclear Agency, the Pentagon, the Atomic Energy Commission.

Filmnews: Was it hard to get that footage?

O'Rourke : Surprisingly, no, but I'm sure the BBC connection didn't hurt. America truly is a different culture. The commitment is there — let's leave aside the actual legal principles of any freedom of information acts — but just in terms of the attitude of public servants towards a person who comes in with a legitimate request. A film like Half Life just could not be made about the British tests in Australia. There were some films I couldn't get ...

Fillmnews: That you saw — you were able to see?

O'Rourke: No, I couldn't even see. The big breakthrough was obtaining a catalogue from the Defence Nuclear Agency (which had the major responsibility for the whole testing program), which listed all the films made about the tests, including their classification — secret, top secret, super super secret! From the catalogue David and Kevin and I would systematically request preview material and we'd look at it and decide whether or not we wanted to order preprint material. All the preprint is stored in Santa Barbara in a very large facility and had to be shipped across the country. I had to establish a relationship with a good lab, in America — in this case it was Bona Film Services in Washington, who does most of the National Archives work, and material was shipped to them, duplicated and shipped back to Santa Barbara.

Commercial library film, the newsreels, the hula girls at the beginning and the Strauss press conference etc, that material is very straightforward to get. You just have to pay the royalties. In the case of the official films there are no royalties to pay, duplication costs only. They knew that my film was about the testing program — I was quite straight with them — you have to be. For instance, in negotiating with the Department of Energy, who was responsible for the tests so that I could film these medical surveys that they now do in the Island - I made it quite clear that the film would be portraying the testing program as an unmitigated disaster for the Marshallese. I suggest anything else any intelligent person would know …

(Unfortunately some lines are obscured at at this point in Trove's online copy of the magazine and are unreadable)

…you know, there's this expression: (obscured) .. the bottom of a well: and I was getting further and further down the well and it was a process of revelation for me as well. At the time I maintained a scepticism about the conspiracy theory regarding the idea of deliberation but at the end of the day, as one of the weather forecasters in the film, Lamont Noley says, "you can only come to one conclusion."

So at the end there were films on Bravo I particularly wanted which were just not available to me. They said "If you want them, you'd better hire a good lawyer." But by then I'd run out of time and money.

Filmnews: You hadn't seen the films, but you knew more or less what they contained?

O'Rourke: I knew, yes. One of the principles that David and Kevin and I tried to apply to the search and the use of archival footage in Half Life was that we would only use that which was historically correct footage, the actual footage of the event as it occurred. Not like a compilation television series where you've got any plane or any bomb. Having seen all those films, often the most spectacular looking blast is used and yet it will have nothing to do with the real bomb. So the bomb you see going off in the film is Bravo!

At the very end when the two films about the Bravo shot, which would have included the actual operational footage, that is the countdown etc. were not made available. I resorted to using the film that you see with the Hollywood actor, and I've titled it "AEC Propaganda Film — 1954".

Filmnews: Did you know you were going to find some of those propaganda films?

O'Rourke: I got a lot of help from the people who made Atomic Cafe — Pierce and Kevin Rafferty, and Jane Loader, had scoured the archives for the making of that film. For instance they put me onto the television newsreel piece where the Marshallese are referred to as "savages", also the piece at the very end of the Congressmen talking after seeing film of the test. That was copyright material, and it cost thousands to buy the rights but I think it was worth it.

Filmnews: Was there a lot of other footage that you couldn't use or afford?

O'Rourke: We were never stopped by money. That's why a film like Half Life might be categorised as being a worthy film, and therefore worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars to make. But it really needed $500,000 and could only have been made because of 10BA. Normally, in independent filmmaking we're so constrained by the idea of using commercial library footage because we just can't afford it. The archival footage rights in Half Life were $125,000 — that's enough to make a fairly good film. It never would have been made if it weren't for 10BA. It wouldn't have been made through any funding process of any other kind, either in America or Australia. It needed that system.

7. Cinema Papers:

Cinema Papers had also largely managed to ignore Dennis O'Rourke's early career, but made up for it with an extensive profile in the March 1986 issue.

Half Life's geographic location provided the art work for the first two pages of the piece, titled O'Rourke's Drift .

These were explained in a break-out at the start of the piece:

Rewriting geography: two official US military maps from March 1954.

The one above shows the relative positions of Bikini and Rongelap (together with the path of a stray Japanese fishing boat). (See the first one below).

The one on the right-hand page (now the second one below) shows where the Navy's ships were when the bomb went off, and the expected fall-out area. According to the map, the USS 'Gypsy' was ideally placed to evacuate Rongelap if, as the Americans claimed, the wind direction had shifted at the last minute, carrying the fall-out cloud in the direction of the atoll. But Rongelap itself has been conveniently omitted from the map.

(Below: click on to enlarge the two maps at the top of Cinema Papers' pages, first the one on the left, and below it, the one that was on the right hand page in the magazine).

The piece then began with an introduction: "Nick Roddick talks to Dennis O'Rourke about Half Life, his widely-acclaimed study of how the US military used the inhabitants of a tiny Pacific atoll as nuclear guinea pigs"

The piece followed with a survey of O'Rourke's early work, interspersing comments by O'Rourke:

For most filmmakers, surviving in Australia has meant learning to play a certain kind of game. If it wasn’t such a loaded word, ‘compromise’ would be a good name for the game: one person’s aspirations have had to be made fit another’s perception of commercial realities, ambitions have had to be brought into line with resources. But, for those filmmakers who are willing — or have learned — to play the game, Australia remains a pretty good place in which to make films. Thanks to a tax system which, for all its recent dilutions, still compares favourably with anything anywhere else in the world, there are filmmaking opportunities out of (most) proportion to what the ‘market’ — not to mention the population — could be expected to bear. Provided you make a certain kind of film. And provided you play the game.

In this respect — in others, too — Dennis O’Rourke is something of an anomaly. Unlike most Australian directors, he is better known abroad than he is in Australia: his films have been seen and won prizes at a whole slew of European and American festivals, and they have been commissioned by and broadcast (albeit sometimes in adapted versions which O’Rourke loathes) on the BBC and other overseas television stations. What is more, O’Rourke has made a living out of directing documentaries, has not ‘played the game’, and has produced some of the most distinctive film work to come out of Australia in the past decade. Finally, in a genre dominated by an almost puritanical belief in theory, O’Rourke has made aggressively untheoretical films about the South Pacific and its inhabitants — films which show an overwhelming commitment to the lives and problems of the people they are about, yet bear the unmistakable stamp of their maker’s personality.

O’Rourke’s films, like O’Rourke him self, are not easy to categorize. But, while integrity is a dangerous word in the field of documentary — it has been used too often to justify distortions of reality which are true to the ‘spirit’ of a subject, or flights of self-serving fancy which are supposed to have the integrity of art’—it applies well to O’Rourke’s work, which has integrity in the sense of wholeness as well as that of honesty. Indeed, his films are a rare mixture of the two things: they treat their subjects with affection and respect, but not reverence; and they do not shy away from the resources of cinema. Fellow documentarist and frequent colleague Gary Kildea has called O’Rourke’s films ‘essays’. The word is a little misleading, implying the free-flowing editorializing of, say, Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (Sunless). But ‘essays’ is, finally, a good word for what O’Rourke does: with a camera and a Nagra rather than a pen, he discourses on a subject, using the images and sounds of that subject to tell its story.

O’Rourke’s subjects have, to date, always been the natives of the Pacific basin and their rearguard action against the colonizers — economic, religious, military — who have moved in on their homelands, touting the joys of 'paradise' with one hand, taming, adapting (or in the cast of Half Life) destroying it with the other. A shot which appears in at least two of his films has a transistor radio in the foreground, broadcasting commercials for imported delights, with a circle of island huts on a Micronesian beach in the background. The shot is almost a cipher to O'Rourke's work: he certainly placed the transistor in the shot, but he didn't put it on the island in the first place; and his visual composition is designed to create a small irony which, however, testifies to a larger tragedy.

 In Yumi Yet (1976) and Ileksen (1978), O’Rourke chronicled the process whereby Papua New Guinea got its independence. In Yap . . . How Did They Know We’d Like TV? (1980), he looked at a bizarre scheme, part comic-opera, part tragedy, which introduced television onto the tiny Micronesian island of Yap by means of tapes flown in once a month from Southern California; they turned out to be simple, off-air recordings of a San Fernando valley TV station, still complete with the commercials for junk food and J.C. Penney.

In The Sharkcallers of Kontu (1982), O’Rourke’s most ambitious film before Half Life, he examined the ancient ritual of sharkcalling — basically, going out in a boat and luring the sharks (thought to contain the spirits of dead ancestors) into a fishing noose with a combination of magic, cunning and coconut shells banged together — and looked at how white newcomers were gradually destroying it.

In ...Couldn’t Be Fairer” — the title is a quote from Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen — O’Rourke moved ‘onshore’ to the northern part of his native Queensland, to look at Aboriginal land rights. The film (made in 1984) is his least successful, perhaps because it is dominated by a voice-over from Mick Miller, a land rights spokesman, who (inevitably) uses the kind of confrontatonal rhetoric O’Rourke himself has managed to avoid. But ...Couldn’t Be Fairer” is a far better film than the version of it the BBC (who commissioned it) decided to transmit, arguing that such background scenes as the small-town ‘Brown Eye Contest’ — a beery com petition to establish the best anal sphincter in town— were‘‘not very nice” and didn’t really belong in the film. O’Rourke, who didn’t much like the BBC changing the title of the Yap film to South Seas and Soft Soap , is now having similar problems with Half Life. “The issue,” he says, “ is rights of authorship, to which television tends to take a rather cavalier approach, especially if you’re a long way away.”

O’Rourke knows about television, since he started out at the ABC in 1970. After a couple of false starts in the sunny north (one of which was university), he arrived in Sydney looking for work, and ended up as an assistant gardener at the ABC’s Gore Hill studios. “All those gum trees you see there in the front yard, I planted,” he says. From the gum trees, he moved up — slightly — to the job of assistant camera man. “ I always knew I was going to make films,” he says, “but not everyone else shared my certainty.

The ABC was quite happy to let me stay there for ever in that so-called ‘technical’ role. It was almost like you were supposed to put on a grey dust jacket when you arrived for work. According to the hierarchical system, if you came out of the camera department, you weren’t directorial material: for that, you were supposed to come out of management or from the journalistic side. That’s changing now. But, when I left the place in 1973, I thought: Well, maybe the most important thing I've done here is plant those gum trees."

He had, however, learned about cameras, which is why he went there in the first place; and, after leaving, he went freelance as a cameraman. That is how he first got to Papua New Guinea, then still under the tutelage of Australia. It was to prove an ongoing love affair: O’Rourke spent most of the seventies there, learned to speak New Guinea pidgin, and married a New Guinea woman, Roseanne, who is now a regular collaborator on his films.

The love affair with New Guinea has had one problematic side-effect, however: in a genre more beset with pigeon-holing than any other, O’Rourke has come to be labelled an ethnographic documentarist. Norman Douglas, for instance, in a perceptive and enthusiastic account of The Sharkcallers of Kontu for the Pacific History Association, had no doubt: “The new concern with visual ethnography in the Pacific,” he wrote, “has produced at least one outstanding talent. The Sharkcallers of Kontu is not only O'Rourke's most compelling and mature work, but a film of considerable significance in the canon of Melanesian ethnography."

O’Rourke, who has kept the PHA’s newsletter, “presumably because I like it,” is not so sure about the categorization. “Because I went to Papua New Guinea, liked the place, and my films were about brown people, I was supposedly in that school of filmmaking which some people call ethnographic. I don’t term myself an ethnographic filmmaker, but it took me a while to realise that that whole ethnograpic/vérité ethic was a forced one, and a blind alley: there is storytelling, and how you choose to do it should in no way be confined by somebody’s theoretical writings or interpretations.

“I think you’ve got to make the distinction, in a film, between the moments and the total statement — the construct of the film. You can have moments, and they are accidental. But they’re accidental like you don’t have a car accident unless you hop in a car and drive on the road. The film — the intention to make it — is not accidental. Yumi Yet is a real ‘first film’ — a mixed bag of all sorts of cinematic tricks and ideas. But, from Ileksen onwards, all my films have basically been journeys of experience: that is, me seeking to find out some thing. You have two protagonists: all the people who represent the subject of the film; and me, the filmmaker. That energy is there in all the films, and the films work,not because they are about people who go out and catch sharks, but because, in the end, they’re cinema, and because of the way in which cinema can affect people.”

The notion of the two protagonists is clearly crucial to O’Rourke’s films (and it may well be why "...Couldn’t Be Fairer”, which has a third protagonist in the shape of Mick Miller, is the least successful). Their power comes, from the sense of a dynamic (as opposed to a one way) relationship between the maker and the made. As O’Rourke puts it, “the nature of the film is: you go and stay in an isolated community. You are a guest.”

His films repeatedly testify to the advantages of that method. In Yumi Yet , two groups of people — the men building the festive huts, and the women sarcastically watching them do it — interact through the camera, commenting on each other; in Sharkcallers , one of the fishermen berates the camera about not talking while the magic is taking place ("Like any other form of fishing," remembers O'Rourke, "you don't always catch a fish, no matter how good the magic is. Mostly, it was my fault, I was told"); in Yap , the US consular representative talks through the rationale for his support of the television-implant scheme with extraordinary honesty; O'Rourke has clearly gained his confidence and, more importantly, does not betray it.

Before Half Life, though, which owes a good part of its power to the relationships between O'Rourke and the inhabitants of Rongelap Atoll, the clearest illustration of the dynamic at work comes near the end of The Sharkcallers of Kontu , where the fishermen have taken one (apparently knowing) step further towards the destruction of the custom. Bundling up the shark fins and taking them into the nearest small town, they sell them to Ah Chow, proprietor of the local Chinese store, who pays them in cash but warns them they will not get the “world market price” unless they can supply him with fins by the ton. The men accept the price, because they need cash in the new, ‘mixed’ economy of New Ireland. And their first stop on the way home is a local bar.

“Drink takes away our inhibitions caused by traditional customs,” they tell O’Rourke/the camera. “ It’s the drink which gives us hope.” Without a real relationship between filmmaker and subject, such ‘confidences’ would be unlikely to occur. They are, in the strictest sense, ‘provoked’: the sharkcallers wouldn’t have explained all that if the camera hadn’t been there. But they are no more provoked than the statements people make to one another in conversation; and their positioning within the film makes them more than mere asides.

O’Rourke is proud of his role in bringing the information out. “If I didn’t,” he says, “I’d consider myself to have failed. And, with people who are more doctrinaire in documentary filmmaking, it’s almost as if the measure of their success is the degree to which they’ve failed. The more they fail in doing what cinema can do — synthesize this wonderful emotion, this indescribable, dream-like energy — the happier they are. Some people object to it, but the best way I have to describe how I make films is this: I don’t make the films, the films make me. I put myself in a circumstance, in a situation; then, as each new thing unfolds, I pursue it.”

The pursuit of Half Life began some six years ago, when O’Rourke went to Micronesia for TV station WGBH, Boston, to make the Yap film. On that visit, he met some of the people he would work with on Half Life. Then, in 1983, while working for Film Australia (an experience about which he has plenty to say, but prefers not to be quoted on), he was stranded on Rongelap Atoll for a couple of weeks when the only plane serving the island developed engine trouble.

“We were sitting around, talking to people,” he says, “and the story, most of which I’d heard before, started to come out and coalesce. So, one day, I got up in the morning and thought: We’re here; we might as well make a film.” That was when the first interview with Midja (sic, Mijjua) Anjain (which appears late in the film and which, O’Rourke quietly points out, is at stylistic variance with the rest, in that it uses a zoom) was done. “I filmed all week, until the plane came back. Then I processed the rushes on Bankcard, and set about raising the money. At that stage, it was still to be a one-hour film, along the lines of the others. But I ended up making a film about some thing much wider than the Marshall Islands: I worked out from there, into the heartland of America, into the Pentagon, the AEC and the wider issues the film encompasses.”

The wider issues encompassed by Half Life (as Mark Spratt points out in his review on page 74 - see this site's review section ) are those of the deliberate use of the Marshallese as guinea pigs for the effects of nuclear fall-out. By implication, the issues extend to include the whole of the ‘first’ and ‘second’ world’s policy towards the Pacific, a region made up of small pockets of people who are unlikely to put up much organized resistance to nuclear tests on or near their homes, and whose larger islands are now proving to be the ideal location for today’s fly-in-sun-bathe-and-fly-out holidays (which will be the subject of O’Rourke’s next, as yet untitled, film).

The gradual realization of the degree of forethought that went into the supposedly accidental irradiation of Rongelap and Utirik is something that came as O’Rourke made Half Life. And, in an area where an understandable hysteria often prevails, his caution — almost his reluctance — about accepting the evidence is one of the things that gives the film its persuasive power.

“You have to go back to March 1954,” he says, “when the Bravo bomb was detonated on Bikini Atoll. These things were happening: the McCarthy hearings were in full swing; late in March, Oppenheimer lost his security clearance, mainly because he was opposed to developing thermonuclear weapons; the French were losing in Indo-China, and everybody still believed in the domino theory. Most crucially, the Russians had detonated their first thermo-nuclear weapon; and, from sampling they had done, the Americans knew the Russians had made an enormous, quantum leap in their nuclear technology. Today, with the threat of nuclear war hanging over us, everyone works on the principle that we must avoid it. But, in 1954, the feeling was that it was inevitable. The bomb was new, and the fall-out it created a completely unknown element. Bravo was perfect for testing it. The elements they used, the size they made it, the height above the ground — it was designed to suck all that stuff up.

“They had this tiny outpost, Rongelap, which could only be reached by ship after a three-day voyage and was controlled by the military, and the Americans there thought it was likely to stay that way. What they didn’t reckon was that, 30 years on, the debate would be in the United Nations, that these people would be hiring their own hot-shot lawyers, and that there’d be people like me out there making films about it! They thought it was isolated and would stay isolated. It’s only in the last few years that the Marshallese have taken control of their own immigration. In the mid-seventies, for example, a group of Japanese radiation experts arrived in the Marshalls to carry out a study. The Americans wouldn’t let them in: they turned them back at the airport.

“The rumours have always been around. There were people telling me, before I made the film, that it was all deliberate. I found that rather hard to accept: I was inclined to think, in the early stages, that it was the normal ‘conspiracy theory’ idea. But this is what I think happened. To start with, I can’t imagine that there is a document anywhere from President Eisenhower to Lewis Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, that says: ‘We need to irradiate these people’. But it’s like arguing a case before a court; and, in the film, I present the evidence. Questions have to be asked. For the previous Bikini tests, the people on this island were evacuated for their own safety. For this one, they were not. So, I don’t say the islanders were deliberately exposed, because that might suggest that I believe there is a document somewhere. What I say is: decisions were made, both before the test and during it, deliberately to allow them to be exposed.

“In the film, you see American service men coming ashore from a seaplane with geiger counters. Now, it’s OK for them to do that — to walk around in their protective gear — because they were only there for 20 minutes. It’s the cumulative dose — the dose per hour — that counts. It’s very much like turning on a microwave oven, putting in a chicken and dialling it up. You don’t want to burn it: you just want to give it the right amount, a semi-lethal dose.

“On the weight of the evidence now, the historical circumstances, the lies about the wind direction, the position of the ships - the ability they had to take the people off, the nature of the studies since, you can come to only one conclusion: they knew what they were doing. That is what the American weatherman says at the end of the film. He’s a patriot, and he doesn’t want to believe it. I don’t want to believe it, either: it gives me no pleasure at all. But I now believe it to be the case.”

Reluctant or not, O’Rourke makes the case convincingly in Half Life. Indeed, it is his reluctance to rush to judgement that makes the finished film so effective. The other thing which makes it work so well is the meticulous attention that has been paid to the filmic means whereby the case has been put over. The information is not simply presented: it is crafted with all the care of a Clarence Darrow, summing up for the defence (or the prosecution), and paying as much attention to the style of his speech as to the content.

Three techniques stand out: O’Rourke’s reliance on static compositions; his sound track; and his use of written information. The soundtrack makes brilliantly ironic use of Hawaiian steel guitar, played by Bob Brozman, a New Yorker living in the Californian redwoods, who has the world’s largest collection of Hawaiian 78s. On Hawaii itself, O’Rourke could find no one willing or able to play the music the way he wanted it: slow, insistent, putting the words ‘South Sea paradise’ between inverted commas. Like the music, the sound of the waves lapping on the shore has again been mixed in over the 'direct' sound of the interview, testifying to O'Rourke's interest in a precise control of the aural experience. "You might liken it to the ticking of a clock in a quiet room," he says. "The sound of the sea was like the inevitability of a slow death by radiation poisoning, and the inevitability that the film is leading to a conclusion.”

O’Rourke makes similarly careful use of written information, specifically subtitles and roller titles. The subtitles distil the words of the Marshallese, turning them from comments into statements, and they are set slightly further up the screen than normal subtitles, so that they become a part of the image, rather than something scribbled across the bottom. And the roller titles, which contain crucial information about the UN trusteeship agreement and the facts of the Bravo test, are similarly a part of the film, not away to get in a lot of dense and awkward information. “They are, in fact, scenes in the film,” says O’Rourke, “just like any other scene. All the connections between a particular choice of word, the timing, the amount of space between when they exit and when the next scene comes on — the juxtaposition of all those elements that you’re always dealing with when you’re making a film, apply equally to the roller titles as they do to any other scene in the film.”

It is the confidently emphatic framing, though, which is the most distinctive thing about Half Life as a film. “With the filming,” says O’Rourke, “the technique was to spend quite a bit of time getting the framing right, and then basically put the camera on autopilot. I think it’s only a cameraman who might take those liberties: you spend so much time moving cameras round that you get a very healthy respect for the integrity of the locked-off frame. Also, I wanted to emphasize the gravity of this simple story.

“Once I had the frame and was satisfied it would give me all the dynamic elements and composition I needed, I would close down the viewfinder, so that light wouldn’t come in at the bottom of the film, and probably not look through it again for the ten and a half minutes the magazine would run. I’d turn on the cameras and we’d talk — we’d have a conversation. Even though the film running through there is expensive — you’ve got to process it, work through it, sync it up — I would never turn the camera off, even when something was translated to me. You need only so many wonderful moments to make the whole thing, and if you get one wonderful moment lasting no more than a minute in a roll of ten, who cares?”

It is this concern with ‘the whole thing’ — with the story to be told, and the way of telling it — that characterizes all of Dennis O’Rourke’s work, though Half Life demonstrates it most impressively. It is, of course, not a style of filmmaking entirely free of compromise: there is more evidence that might have been gathered for the film, if time and budget had allowed. Nor, for all its commitment, is O’Rourke’s filmmaking a transparent, selfless image of the issue at hand. O’Rourke is not obtrusively and physically present, like Martin Scorsese was in The Last Waltz. But the films are certainly his: there is an ego at work. Without it, the films would be passionless and powerless. But one thing they definitely do not do is ‘play the game’ — the game, or any game.

8. The Canberra Times:

The Canberra Time s ran a short uncredited profile under the header Complex visions of cultures in conflict , published on April 10th 1986 in time for the local release of the film:

Dennis O'Rourke is internationally recognised as one of the most perceptive makers of films about tensions between western and traditional cultures. His films express a highly complex vision of people engaged in often silent but bitter contests as traditional societies are overwhelmed by the West.

His other work includes ' Yumi Yet' (1976) which chronicles the events surrounding the getting of independence by Papua New Guinea in 1975; 'The Sharkcallers of Kontu' (1982) a record of the dramatic ritual of calling and catching sharks by hand, as practised by the people of New Ireland; and 'Couldn't Be Fairer' (1984) is a portrait of alcoholism, racial violence and political oppression faced by Australian Aborigines in their effort to gain land rights.

'Half Life' was financed under the film industry's tax incentive scheme, by a group of doctors, dentists and graziers from Queensland where he grew up.

He stuck to certain rules when deciding on the structure. Except for a brief extract from a speech made by the US President, Ronald Reagan, on the Marshall Islands independence day, the only voices to be heard in the film are those of the people present at the time of the tests. Library footage is used strictly in context.

O'Rourke says his decision to do so was more aesthetic than ethical. "I wasn't dealing with something ineffable as I have in other films. I was retelling history. I chose not to have any commentary either...."

Though regarded as applying his own style of ethnographic/essay filmmaking to a subject of universal relevance, he doesn't class himself as an ethnographic film-maker and is not particularly happy about being labelled a maker of non-fiction films.

He thinks too much is made of the distinctions between fiction and non-fiction.

"To claim some higher level of purity — or truth — for non-fiction over fiction film is a spurious idea. After all, our greatest insights — the verities we've handed down — have come out of works of fiction. I think the Irish have it right — I'm half Irish. They say, 'It's the truth to him'."

9. The Washington Post:

The United States had a prickly response to the film, and its screening was delayed. In due course, on 7th April 1986, The Washington Post published a story by Cynthia Gorney under the header Islands in a Storm (available here ):

Three years ago, on a mid-Pacific island landing strip cut from a single swath in the coconut trees, an Australian filmmaker named Dennis O'Rourke climbed from a small airplane and began looking around to see what he might film. The island was Rongelap, in the then-U.S.-administered Marshall Islands, and the Australian government-sponsored Film Australia had commissioned O'Rourke to prepare six educational documentaries on Pacific island life.

O'Rourke knew the islands well; he had spent 10 years filming Pacific culture, and there were lessons he had learned about easing his cameras and his large Caucasian presence into communities largely unaccustomed to either. One moved more slowly, kept from stepping physically too close to people, defused the sexual threat by pulling out snapshots of one's wife and children. He was not certain just what he was after, but when the airplane broke down and his two planned Rongelap days stretched to 10, O'Rourke found himself listening again and again to the men and women who stopped their fishing and coconut gathering long enough to tell him a story that seemed to have the makings of an extraordinary film.

The tale O'Rourke was hearing, the essence of which is now compressed into his startling and award-winning documentary "Half-Life," was this: Thirty-two years ago, as part of its unprecedented series of Cold War-era nuclear tests, the United States dropped a hydrogen bomb -- the largest ever detonated on the surface of the Earth -- on the island of Bikini, 100 miles from Rongelap. The Bikinians had been evacuated, but the people in Rongelap had not. That evening their children, who had seen pictures of snow, played in the white powder that fell to the ground around them. "When I bailed out my canoe," an aging man tells the camera in slow Marshallese, "the water had turned yellow. And that night we ate the fish, and they tasted bitter."

"The stories that people were telling me about what had happened before, during and after the tests -- I knew I had to stay and make a film," O'Rourke says, leaning across the kitchen table in the house where he is staying as the San Francisco Film Festival screens "Half-Life." He is blond, broad across the shoulders and slightly rumpled-looking in his tweed jacket and day's growth of beard; O'Rourke is spending nearly every day and evening now discussing or arranging distribution for his documentary. "I just knew what the essence of the film would be," he says. "It would be a film which dealt with people living in a postnuclear environment."

O'Rourke knew a little about the Marshalls before he arrived, he says; he was familiar with the well-publicized plight of the Bikinians, who had lost their homeland to the American tests, and he knew there were angry accusations about American responsibility for the bombing's after-effects on other island people. So many lawsuits have been filed, in fact, that seven American law firms now work jointly on the Marshall Islands Atomic Testing Litigation Project, which represents 13,000 people suing U.S. agencies for wrongful death, personal injury and destructive contamination of their property during the 12 years of U.S. nuclear testing in the Pacific.

But what O'Rourke says he found, as he set to work on his film, was something he insists seemed beyond belief in the early days of his research. The central and intensely controversial argument of "Half-Life" is that American officials, in their quest for data on the effects of nuclear contamination, deliberately allowed the islanders of Rongelap and nearby Utirik to be exposed to radiation so intense that as a people, O'Rourke says, they have now been "genetically destroyed" -- left with leukemia, miscarriages, birth defects, thyroid tumors and damaged genes that O'Rourke says will now be passed, "like Darwinism in reverse," from each generation to the next.

"I was unwilling to believe what the thesis of the film has become," O'Rourke says. "I'm not a conspiracy theorist-type person, and I'm not an antinuke person. I've never marched. I'm not an activist ... I didn't come at this film from any polemical point of view. In fact, having seen the whole canon of antinuclear films, I find most of them to be quite ineffective in the end, because they present such a closed point of view."

"Half-Life," which in January received the Director's Award for Extraordinary Achievement at the United States Film Festival in Park City, Utah, uses archival footage to present what has consistently been the official American explanation of the aftereffects of "Bravo," the March 1954 bomb detonation that remains the largest of all America's nuclear tests. An American official, speaking calmly into movie cameras of the 1950s, announces that the predicted wind patterns should have carried bomb fallout to the uninhabited area north of Bikini -- but that the wind shifted south, leaving Rongelap and Utirik at the edge of the wind-borne contamination.

Using government documents and filmed interviews with three American weather and radio technicians, O'Rourke suggests in "Half-Life" that the official account is wrong -- that by midnight the night before the tests, military personnel knew the direction of the wind and proceeded anyway. Island inhabitants had been evacuated for earlier, less powerful nuclear tests, the film declares; this time they were neither removed nor warned about possible dangers of contact with the contamination.

And although government records showed military ships and helicopters were waiting in the immediate vicinity, O'Rourke says, it was two days before the people were taken from the fallout-contaminated land. "The dose that is killing the Marshallese was a cumulative dose -- it took 50 hours," O'Rourke says. "Any of those ships, especially the one that was right there -- they knew exactly where the people were living. Instead of removing them right then -- and they could have removed them at minimal risk to the servicemen ... the people at that stage would have all been rescued, and the dose they would have received would have been very much the same dose you and I might receive if we had been working in a nuclear plant for a year."

Thus American scientific and military officials provided themselves with an ideal test population to examine the effects of nuclear fallout, O'Rourke says -- particularly when they sent the Marshallese back to what O'Rourke says were still-contaminated islands, and then scheduled regular medical and scientific examinations that have continued to this day. "These people are a perfect control group," O'Rourke says. "They're not going anywhere. They're a closed gene group. They intermarry. Their diet is closed -- they can't just go down to the Safeway and get food from elsewhere. And there's nowhere else for them to come into contact with carcinogens."

"Half-Life" premiered only three months ago in the United States -- the film was introduced last summer in Melbourne and has since been shown in a number of international film festivals -- and because distribution will not bring it to Washington and other American cities until this fall, few scientists or government officials have seen O'Rourke's documentary so far. A spokeswoman for the Defense Nuclear Agency, which provided O'Rourke with some of his documents and archival footage, says DNA personnel have seen the film and publicly wish to comment only briefly. "While we found the film to be interesting and informative, we strongly disagree with the implication that the responsible government officials intended to engage in human experimentation," she says.

"It's absurd... absolutely ridiculous," says Herbert York, director of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation in San Diego, a physicist who in 1954 directed the Livermore laboratory and visited the Marshalls shortly after the Bravo test. York has not seen "Half-Life," and was not among the scientists O'Rourke interviewed, but he says he cannot accept either the decades-old memories of American weathermen or the modern-day conclusions about what precautions should have been taken when.

"What we knew about the wind on those days made us think it was safe," York says. "In my experience the people did the best they could ...They thought it was going to go slightly northeast, and the past experience was just not all that good."

As for the delay in removing the islanders, York says, "There was general stupefaction and surprise...it really took time for them to figure out what had happened. And even if they did figure out what happened, it took time for them to figure out what to do about it. And I don't think there's anything more complicated or sinister about it. The notion that it was deliberate is just totally bizarre...An individual might react quickly, but a bureaucracy never does."

O'Rourke says he has heard these explanations before, and indeed that they helped persuade him at first that the Marshallese must be mistaken when they told him they believed they had been used, as his filmed American radio operator puts it, as "guinea pigs." "There's a lot of guilt floating around out there in people who were responsible for some of these things in the early years," O'Rourke says. In his film, he says, "there is no one document -- nor do I believe there's one document that exists -- that says, 'Right, these people will become an object of study'...Circumstantially, I think the case is won. But the words that I use to this day are, 'Decisions were made deliberately to allow them to be exposed... Decisions were made which in the end resulted in great damage to these people -- the death of these people.'"

O'Rourke calls his film, in the opening credits, "A Parable for the Nuclear Age," and it is as parable, he says, that he refrains in the documentary from presenting much present-day political information about the Marshalls. The film does not discuss the Compact of Free Association, which was signed by President Reagan last January and must be approved this summer by councils within the United Nations; the document essentially severs the United States' 39-year-old trusteeship of the Marshalls and other Micronesian islands that have now become independent republics. Included in the compact is a clause that grants $150 million to settle all future Marshallese claims arising from the testing. That clause is now under legal attack by attorneys for the Marshallese, since it would exempt the United States from any responsibility beyond the $150 million, which one attorney estimated might be a fifth of the total claims now pending.

And the medical stories of nuclear after-effect, in their jarring juxtaposition against blue ocean waters and large-eyed island children, are presented not as documented statistics but as personal and sometimes bewildered accounts. An old man turns the pages of a photo album, pointing to the snapshots of his teen-age son being peered at by American doctors and then lying in a flower-covered coffin. A gray-haired woman, with no audible emotion in her voice, describes the pregnancy that began when she returned home after the "Bravo" test: "My stomach started to swell, but before the proper time I gave birth to something which I cannot describe. It did not look human. I don't know how to say it ... like the innards of a beast. It could not survive -- it was dead at birth."

O'Rourke chose to present his dramatic material this way, he says, partly because he believes mortality and illness statistics to be suspect -- "any figure I quote is going to be somebody's figure," he says. More powerful, to him, were the voices of the angry islanders, like the woman near the end of his film who describes her son's slow death before American doctors who poked at him, she says contemptuously, as though he were a chicken being prepared for dinner. "Don't Americans know that every life is precious?" the woman says. "I used to think they're smart, but now I think they're crazy... They're smart at doing stupid things."

And O'Rourke does not pretend to be a scientist or an investigative reporter, he says -- he is a filmmaker, who prefers to make what he calls "observational films, about these people and the pressures being applied to them." Some of his previous films have examined the independence of Papua New Guinea, or the arrival of television on the island of Yap; his wife, in fact, is a New Guinea woman who met O'Rourke while he was making one of his documentaries.

His wife stayed at the family home in Canberra while he was filming in the Marshalls, O'Rourke says, and worried about him. "When we first went there, we were planning to have another child, and my wife was terrified because I was there," he says. He did submit to a full medical examination, and was told that he seemed to have been eating a lot of contaminated coconuts. But their child was born entirely healthy, O'Rourke says, and he is convinced the tradeoff was worth it. "I just considered that comparatively speaking, any risk I took was minor," he says. (O'Rourke much later died of cancer, but so far as this site is aware, no connection has been made between the cancer and his filming on the island).

10. Domestic newspaper stories - The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age:

Paul Byrnes did a story about the film in the Sydney Morning Herald in time for its commercial release in Sydney. It ran on Thursday, January 30th, 1986. Click on to enlarge:

Philippa Hawker talked to Dennis O'Rourke for a profile of the film in The Age , on Saturday 15th April, 1986. Click on to enlarge.

11. Dennis O'Rourke:

O'Rourke died of cancer in June 2013. He has a detailed wiki listing here .

Anne Thompson wrote an obituary for IndieWire about O'Rourke, published 18th June 2013, and available here , WM here .

The great Australian documentary filmmaker Dennis O’Rourke has died at 67. His often controversial documentaries on the human condition include “Half Life: A Parable for the Nuclear Age” (1985) “Cannibal Tours” (1988) and “The Good Woman of Bangkok” (1991) and “Cunnamulla” (2000)... Many of his films, often dealing with decolonization, were shown on the international festival circuit, including the Sundance Film Festival.

Pat Fiske, a fellow Australian documentarian, posted on her Facebook page a brief obit written by Stefan Moore, Martha Ansara, Ruth Cullen and Tracey Spring:

His unique cinematic style defied conventional narrative and notions of objective reality in pursuit of larger truths about the human condition. As an artist with exceptional vision, he was passionate, argumentative and courageous and his documentaries were provocative and often controversial.

Dennis’s documentaries, including Yumi Yet , Half Life, Yap: How Did You Know We’d Like TV , Shark Callers of Kontu , Cannibal Tours , The Good Woman of Bangkok , Cunnamulla , and Landmines: A Love Story are all imbued with exceptional insight, wry humour and a deep love of his subjects. His films, especially The Good Woman of Bangkok and Cunnamulla generated huge discussion and are studied in film courses around the world.

For Dennis, making documentary films was an intuitive process of discovery. He encouraged younger filmmakers to follow their own muses and resist pressure from television broadcasters looking for reality TV and other formats that he said had nothing to do with documentary or the pursuit of truth. He was a man of great compassion and a deeply loving father. He will be greatly missed.

According to his biography on Wikipedia, O’Rourke was born in Brisbane and raised in a country town until he was sent to a Catholic secondary boarding school. In the late 1960s, after two years at university, he traveled in the Australian Outback, the Pacific Islands and South East Asia, working as a farm hand, salesman, cowboy, roughneck on oil rigs and maritime seaman. He taught himself photography and moved to Sydney where the Australian Broadcasting Corporation employed him first as an assistant gardener and later a cinematographer.

He lived from 1974-1979 in Papua New Guinea, which was in the process of decolonization, working for the newly independent government and teaching documentary filmmaking. His first film, “Yumi Yet: Independence for Papua, New Guinea,” was well-received in 1976.

Retrospectives of O’Rourke’s work have been held at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Pacific Film Archive in San Francisco and many other cities; his films have earned many prizes and he has accepted many achievement awards.

Despite his death, O'Rourke's production company site was still active at time of writing, though his biography here assumed he was still alive:

Dennis O'Rourke was born in Brisbane. For most of his childhood he lived in a small country town, where his parents ran a failing business, until he was sent to a Catholic boarding school for his secondary education. In the late 1960s, after two years of fruitless university studies, he went travelling in outback Australia, the Pacific Islands and South East Asia. During this period he worked as a farm hand, salesman, cowboy, a roughneck on oil rigs, and as a maritime seaman. He also taught himself photography and dreamt of becoming a photojournalist. Wanting to make documentary films, he moved to Sydney where the Australian Broadcasting Corporation employed him as an assistant gardener. He later became a cinematographer for that organization.

From 1974 until 1979 he lived in Papua New Guinea, which was in the process of decolonisation. He worked for the newly independent government, teaching documentary filmmaking skills to Papua New Guineans. His first film, YUMI YET - INDEPENDENCE FOR PAPUA NEW GUINEA , was completed in 1976, and it was widely acclaimed.

His other films include ILEKSEN - POLITICS IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA (1978), YAP... HOW DID YOU KNOW WE'D LIKE TV? (1980), THE SHARK CALLERS OF KONTU (1982), "...COULDN'T BE FAIRER" (1984), HALF LIFE - A PARABLE FOR THE NUCLEAR AGE (1985), "CANNIBAL TOURS" (1988), THE GOOD WOMAN OF BANGKOK (1991), CUNNAMULLA (2000) and LAND MINES - A LOVE STORY (2004).

Retrospectives of O'Rourke's work have been held at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Pacific Film Archive in San Francisco; and in other cities, including Freiburg, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Marseille, Melbourne, New Delhi, New York, Singapore, Taipei, and Uppsala.

In 2005, Dennis O'Rourke received the Don Dunstan Award for his contribution to the Australian film industry. His many other awards include the Eastman Kodak award for Cinematography, the Australian Film Institute Byron Kennedy Award, the Director's Prize for Extraordinary Achievement at the Sundance Film Festival, the Grand Prix at the Nyon Documentary Film Festival, the Jury Prize for Best Film at the Berlin Film Festival, the Grand Premio at the Festival de Popoli in Florence, the Film Critics' Circle of Australia Award for best Documentary, the Australian Film Institute Best Director Award (for CUNNAMULLA ) and the Australian Centenary Medal "for services to Australian society and Australian film production".

Dennis O'Rourke is the father of five children; he lives in Cairns. Currently, he is producing and directing "I LOVE A SUNBURNT COUNTRY...", which is a feature film on the subject of being Australian, as seen through the poetry and poetic imagination of 'ordinary' people.

The ACS had a vale for O'Rourke here , saved to WM here :

The friends and colleagues of Dennis O’Rourke are deeply saddened by the death of one of the greatest documentary makers of his generation. Dennis died of cancer on June 15 in his home in Cairns surrounded by his partner Tracey Spring and his five children, Bill, Davy, Celia, Xavier and Sophie.  His unique cinematic style defied conventional narrative and notions of objective reality in pursuit of larger truths about the human condition. As an artist with exceptional vision, he was passionate, argumentative and courageous and his documentaries were provocative and often controversial.

Dennis was born in Brisbane in 1945. For most of his childhood, he lived in a small Queensland country town until he was sent to a Catholic boarding school for his secondary education. In the late 1960s, after two years of fruitless university studies, he went travelling in outback Australia, the Pacific Islands and South East Asia, working variously as a farm hand, station hand, seaman, and on oil rigs. He also taught himself photography and moved to Sydney with the dream of making documentary films, eventually becoming a cinematographer in the ABC. From 1974 until 1979 he lived in Papua New Guinea, which was in the process of decolonisation, teaching documentary filmmaking skills to Papua New Guineans. In 1976 he completed his first film, the widely acclaimed Yumi Yet - Independence for Papua New Guinea.

Dennis shot, directed and in more recent times also recorded sound for his documentaries, achieving high technical standards with relatively simple equipment. Half Life, Yap: How Did You Know We’d Like TV , Shark Callers of Kontu , “Cannibal Tours” , The Good Woman of Bangkok , Cunnamulla , and Landmines: A Love Story are all imbued with exceptional insight, wry humour and a deep love of his subjects. His films, especially The Good Woman of Bangkok and Cunnamulla generated huge discussion and are studied in film courses around the world.  

Sydney Morning Herald obituary:

Karl Quinn wrote an obituary for O'Rourke, published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 18th June 2013 under the header F iery maker of passionate films dies , with the sub heading "The documentary maker Dennis O'Rourke - whose The Good Woman of Bangkok won plaudits and condemnation in equal measure - has died". It's available here , WM here :

Dennis O'Rourke, the documentarian whose films The Good Woman of Bangkok and Cunnamulla won praise and enemies in equal measure, died on Saturday, aged 67, from a rare form of cancer.

Some of his peers remembered him on Monday as a man whose personality was as passionate and divisive as the films he made.

''He was a hard-living bloke, and for me very inspirational,'' said Tom Zubrycki. ''He was one of the first documentary filmmakers to get his films into the mainstream – he got his film Shark Callers of Kontu screened at the Opera House in 1982, when nobody was doing that.''

O'Rourke's early films were made in Papua New Guinea, where he arrived just as the former colony was transitioning to independence. His films were political as well as anthropological in their inclinations, and all the more remarkable for the fact that he frequently did everything himself – the camerawork, the interviewing, the sound recording.

He made five films in PNG, one about the impact of atomic testing in the Pacific (Half Life) and two in Australia, but it was his 1991 documentary The Good Woman of Bangkok for which O'Rourke is most likely to be remembered.

In the film, he became almost as much a subject as Aoi, the Thai prostitute whose life he documented and whose bed he shared.

''It was really pushing the boundaries, but it's now seen as a classic,'' said Zubrycki. ''I thought maybe he'd gone a little far – certainly further than I would have gone. Back then documentary liked to see itself as pure even though it wasn't necessarily so, and Dennis started to challenge those preconceptions in a very provocative way.''

Bob Connolly – whose most recent film, Mrs Carey's Concert, won best documentary at the 2012 AACTA awards – said O'Rourke's early work deserves far greater recognition. ''I don't think it's fair that he'll be remembered for Good Woman of Bangkok, '' he said. ''Some of those earlier films – Yap , Half Life, Cannibal Tours – were great films. I told him Land Mines (2005) was his best work, and in typical Dennis style he got quite cross.''

The Canberra Times, obituary:

Jack Waterford wrote a personal obituary of O'Rourke, published in The Canberra Times on 23rd June 2013, and available here (paywall affected) under the header A couple of film characters :

When I were a lad, I said I'd like my journalistic dotage to involve writing obituaries, but I never realised there would be times when folk were dying so fast one would have to consider them in job lots, God rest their souls.

Dennis O'Rourke, filmmaker extraordinaire, died in Cairns this week, after a struggle with cancer. He never made a film of Canberra, or in Canberra, but he lived here a good time, and edited all his best work here, and, perhaps befitting that commitment, the defamation case associated with one of his films, Cunnamulla , was fought in our very own ACT Supreme Court.

Filmmaker Dennis O'Rourke with Habiba and Shah in Kabul. Habiba and Shah are part of O'Rourke's new documentary film called Land Mines: A Love Story .

His films Land Mines: A Love Story and The Good Woman of Bangkok (about his relationship with a Thai prostitute), like Cunnamulla and all his other movies, were artistic and commercial successes, and shown internationally.

Among other documentaries were Cannibal Tours (looking at luxury tourism of ''primitive'' communities from the locals' point of view), Couldn't Be Fairer (about Aboriginal living conditions), Half Life (about the effects of nuclear testing on the people of the Marshall Islands), Yap: How Did You Know We'd Like TV (about the introduction of American television to a remote Pacific island), and three Papua New Guinea documentaries, The Shark Callers of Kontu , Ileksen and Yumi Yet .

It was rare for Dennis to have anything resembling a film crew - though sometimes there was someone (such as me) who might be cajoled into holding a microphone, or helping him lug his gear around. Mostly he operated with but a camera on his shoulder - and after a while the camera was so unobtrusive that people he was filming scarcely noticed it. He shot a good bit more footage than most others, but very little of it was set up in any way, and if he had been any sort of participant in proceedings, he was completely edited out. The people of whom he told, in short, spoke for themselves - and often wonderfully, lyrically, or very embarrassingly or confrontingly.

When thus, a young Aboriginal woman aged about 12 candidly spoke of her sexual activity in Cunnamulla , or her friend was berated by her mother for her behaviour, there were critics who felt Dennis had exploited - perhaps tricked - the young women into appearing. That was not so, even if some of those who had been involved later reconstructed proceedings to suggest that they had not realised what they were doing.

The film served an important social and political purpose - of highlighting the exposure of young women in a remote country town - but there were those who wondered if the girls had been revictimised by being the subject of the film, or whether, indeed, O'Rourke had any ''right'' to show such life in the raw.

Typically, when O'Rourke conceived this documentary, he had no clear idea of what would happen, or what he would focus on. He thought of making a film about a south-western Queensland town (200 kilometres from Goodooga), and, over a period of six months, lived in the town filming public and civic events, and meeting, filming and talking to town characters, including a tip scavenger, a taxi driver and his wife, a would-be radio DJ, a retired shearer and others, all of whom figured in the ultimate production. The girls came to his notice as they were contemplating competing to be Miss Cunnamulla.

It was by no means the first O'Rourke film to make people gasp - indeed there is something of an academic discipline in studying his technique and some of the ethical questions his documentaries have provoked. There was never one about which Dennis did not himself agonise or consider more than any critic or person affronted.

He once said: ''What is 'authentic' is only my perception. The process is empirical, emotional, instinctive. I always try not to be rational but to trust my emotions and intuition. I think you have to be irrational, because when you try to be rational the true meaning and the beauty of any idea will escape you.''

Yet if there was a strong moral purpose in all his creations, Dennis was no anchorite bursting with reforming zeal. He lived life to the full. He was funny, generous, kind and a little mad - a man after my own heart. He had largely seared away his rural Queensland Catholicism and boarding school background, but never the rambunctious Irishism.

Dennis first married in Papua New Guinea and with Roseanne had Bill, David and Celia. Later, with Catherine Vandermark, he had Xavier and Sophie. His partner, Tracey Spring, was with him and the children when he died, aged 67, on June 15.

This is the CV that appeared on the inside cover of the DVD of Land Mines . It has the same text as the CV on the inside cover of the collected edition. Click on to enlarge:

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In the movies, and unfortunately in life, we tend to accept the easy falsehood that someone who behaves badly in one respect must be bad in others, even if they're totally unrelated. So, if a person is a gambler, he must be a drunk. If he's a pedophile, he must be a murderer. If he's a cigarette smoker (in the movies, at least), he must be corrupt conspirator of some kind.

In a black-and-white world, human flaws are not allowed. In order to do good, a person must himself be a paragon of goodness. "Half Nelson," the miraculous movie by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden , is about a junior high schoolteacher who smokes. Crack. And the thing is, he's a good teacher, even if (or, rather, because) he doesn't always stick to the district-approved syllabus.

Dan ( Ryan Gosling ) wakes up on the hardwood floor of his apartment in an open short-sleeved shirt and white jockey shorts. And then he somehow gets himself to work, dragging himself up the stairs like an escapee from a George Romero movie. He's wan and thin, and his bruised blue eyes look like they could roll back in his head at any minute. But once he gets started talking about the dialectics of power and world politics, he comes alive. Back in the teachers' lounge, or alone in his car, for lunch, he's halfway back to the realm of the undead again.

Dan does some bad things -- reckless, destructive and irresponsible things. But is he a bad guy? I don't think so. And neither do his students -- especially Drey ( Shareeka Epps ), the stoic and rather sullen student who finds her basketball coach half-unconscious on the floor of a school restroom after a game. She gets him a wet paper towel. He says he's sorry. Neither of them makes a big thing about it. Somehow, it brings them closer. "See you tomorrow," she says when he drops her off at home.

Dan is tossed out of a game after throwing a ball at a ref. Off court, he punches a wall. Afterward, on the ride home, Dan tries to give Drey the requisite "do as I say, not as I do" lecture, telling her that he shouldn't have lost his temper and thrown the ball at the ref. She says it must feel good, though, to just "get it out," but he reminds her there are other ways of getting it out.

"Right, like you do," she says. Her tone is almost but not quite neutral; not accusatory, but with a subtle yet affectionate rebuke. "Look, just because you know that one thing about me ...," Dan says. "One thing doesn't make a man." Pause. She frowns, looks at him. A smile breaks across her face and she quietly snickers: " 'One thing doesn't make a man?' You know I'm just talking about your hand, right?" Dan, knowing she's got him, also smiles and tries unconvincingly to recover: "Yeah, I knew that ..."

Everything that makes this movie so terrific is right there in that scene, in the interplay between these two characters -- and these two actors. The whole sequence is shot from the back seat, in separate shots, so that only part of each character's face is visible at any given moment. There's a lot going on between these two, but it's mostly through indirection.

"Ryan Gosling" may sound like the name of a teen heartthrob, but this performance, coming after " The Believer ," proves he's one of the finest actors working in contemporary movies. And he's only 25 years old. Epps (no relation to Omar) is his perfect foil, as the kid for whom Dan cares the most. She doesn't say much, but she doesn't have to. Drey's got Dan's number, and may be the only person on earth who comes close to understanding who he is.

"Half Nelson" isn't one of those "inspirational teacher/mentor" movies -- at least not in any generic or conventional sense. There's no triumph, no breakthrough, no by-the-numbers victory in test scores or on the basketball court. This movie isn't about those things, but is concerned with an even greater achievement that is generally unacknowledged: how people -- flawed, miserable, frustrated people -- go to work every day and find a way to care about something beyond themselves, despite themselves.

Dan himself is confused about his relationship to Drey. He knows he can't save the world; he just wants to do right by this one girl. But there are boundaries. He's her teacher, after all, not her friend. But Drey needs both, and she's not going to let job descriptions get in her way.

Watching Dan teach -- or some of the oral reports about history and politics delivered by his students -- the proverbial line between the personal and the political becomes meaningless, because they can't help being one and the same. The slogan says: "Think globally, act locally." But thought and action begin in the same place: inside one's own, messed-up head.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Rated R for drug content throughout, language and some sexuality

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‘Megalopolis' Review: Francis Ford Coppola's Bold, Ungainly Epic Crams in Half a Dozen Stars and Decades' Worth of Ideas

In the long-gestating, career-encompassing allegory that is "Megalopolis," director Francis Ford Coppola puts his name above the title and, in the film's lone act of modesty, the words "A Fable" beneath it. To call this garish, idea-bloated monstrosity a mere "fable" is to grossly undersell the project's expansive insights into art, life and legacy. Here, backed by an estimated $120 million of the "Godfather" director's own money, is the sort of big swing audiences and critics have come to adore him for: a recklessly ambitious, ginormous epic in which humanity's eternal themes - greed, corruption, loyalty and power - threaten to suffocate a more intimate personal crisis. In this case, a conservative politician and a forward-thinking urban designer clash over the future of a city's future.

It's Coppola's fortune, and he can spend it as he likes, but grandiose title aside, it's not at all clear why "Megalopolis" needed to be made at such a large scale. For the press screening before its Cannes Film Festival premiere, he insisted that it be seen on the town's only Imax screen. And yet, so much of the film is shot in close-up, it would play just fine on iPhone screens (apart from the bizarre moment a man walks out, faces the screen and reads a few lines into a microphone). The cast is first-rate, pairing hot young stars like Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza with Coppola veterans Laurence Fishburne and Giancarlo Esposito, though their performances are oddly cartoonish.

Though it's been three decades since Coppola's last triumph, Cannes audiences were hoping he might deliver another "Apocalypse Now." Turns out, world-building - that invaluable tool of 21st-century Hollywood franchises - may not be in his wheelhouse. Strangely enough, animation (rather than vfx-heavy live action) might have been a better way to tell such a story, helping to balance a tone that's Shakespearean at times (including a recitation of Hamlet's most famous monologue) and downright campy at others, as when a browless Shia LaBeouf quips, "Revenge tastes best while wearing a dress." Animation would've also given Coppola more control over a setting meant to synthesize modern New York, ancient Rome and the forests of Pandora. But as one character repeats in the film: "When we leap into the unknown, we prove that we are free."

In some corners of the real world (such as China and Saudi Arabia), leaders have sought to create forward-thinking "smart cities" from scratch. But that's not how thriving metropolises typically come to exist. Instead, they're built up and burned down, then they're rebuilt and improved in fits and starts, dragged into modernity - not without outrage and criticism - by visionary urban developers like Robert Moses (New York) and Georges-Eugène Haussmann (Paris). Men like Cesar Catilina, the fictional city planner single-handedly trying to drag New Rome into the future, whom Driver plays with the wild-eyed, monomaniacal intensity of Howard Roark (the speechifying architect in Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead").

Like such slow-to-evolve population centers, "Megalopolis" is positively awe-inspiring in some places and an absolute eyesore in others, until you pull back and try to take it all in. Only then can you see the unwieldy way old and new concepts crowd next to another, like an art deco skyscraper squeezed between a cathedral and a Starbucks. The film opens with Catilina stepping off an upper ledge of the Chrysler Building, at which point he commands time to stop. And it does. There, hovering 70-odd stories above the streets of New Rome, he takes a page not from Plutarch (who documented the Catilinarian conspiracy that loosely inspired Coppola), but from the Wachowskis. This time-freezing "Matrix" move - which immediately follows a Laurence Fishburne-narrated scene-setter - suggests something far more fantastical than what follows.

"Megalopolis" is not so much a sci-fi movie, as some have reported, as it is a sexless "Caligula," transposed to New Rome. The city looks like modern-day Manhattan, except that men sport bowl cuts and women wear see-through robes, made either of gauze or an innovative, all-purpose building material called Megalon, discovered by Catilina and central to his scheme to revamp the city. In this, he is opposed by "slumlord"-turned-mayor Franklyn Cicero (Esposito). The two first have it out at a high-concept press conference, where most of the film's key figures - including Jon Voight as obscenely rich oligarch Hamilton Crassus III and Plaza as manipulative TV personality Wow Platinum - navigate catwalks dangling amid a scale model of the city. Franklyn plans to erect a casino, whereas Catilina wants to create "a perfect school-city for its people, able to grow along with it."

To make these competing visions more interesting, Coppola introduces Franklyn's adult daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), an overexposed party girl who gets serious after witnessing Catilina "pause" a building demolition. (Coppola hatched the idea for the film decades ago, but abandoned an earlier plan to make it after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.) Much of the film's iconography and worldview seem frozen in time, just before and after the 2001 tragedy. What might have felt "too soon" for that moment now feels exasperatingly out of step with today's concerns, despite a handful of references to Donald Trump and the Jan. 6 riots (including an angry mob seen waving a Confederate flag).

Cicero isn't happy that his daughter has taken Catilina's side in the redevelopment scheme. And he's even more annoyed when Julia falls in love with his adversary, whom ex-DA Cicero once prosecuted over the death of his wife, still unsolved. That subplot introduces an element of ambiguity to Catilina's otherwise heroic-seeming character. As the film goes on, it feels that Coppola has projected himself onto both Cicero (whose first name, Franklyn, stems from "Francis") and Catilina (the artist-architect whose ambitions recall the director's costly Zoetrope Studios folly "One From the Heart"). Family matters to the former, as it clearly does to Coppola, while atoning for infidelity and his "bad boy" ways is part of Catilina's journey. Their power struggle pales compared to HBO's brilliant "Succession," though the film digs into what makes such time-stoppers tick. "When we ask these questions, when we have a dialogue about them, that basically is utopia," says Catilina.

At times, Coppola injects bawdy and outrageous moments into his "fable," which keeps the often-sentimental tale from becoming too self-important. Plaza and LaBeouf bring a satirical edge to their scenes, which recalls a previous Cannes debacle, "Southland Tales," in which Richard Kelly cast comic actors and outside-the-box celebrities (like Dwayne Johnson and Justin Timberlake) to heighten the absurdity. By contrast, most of Coppola's ensemble is composed of "serious" actors, which lends everything a stilted, almost theatrical quality, while angst-meister Driver taps into those deep wells of internal torment he brought to the "Star Wars" movies. When Catilina steps out onto a giant clock face floating high above New Rome, fuming about the obstacles in his way, he looks not unlike the sulky Kylo Ren.

And yet, apart from Megalon (which sounds suspiciously like James Cameron's laughable "Unobtanium"), the sci-fi elements here aren't so far from reality. At one point, characters refer to a Soviet satellite dumping radioactive debris on the city, and though Coppola depicts such a shower, no further mention is made of the disaster. Perhaps the budget didn't allow for it, which may also explain why no screentime is dedicated to the construction of Catilina's elaborate urban development project - though it certainly seems like Coppola spared no expense. Consider the wedding scene, so different from the one that opens "The Godfather." This one transforms Madison Square Garden into a decadent Roman arena, swinging between "Ben-Hur"-style chariot races and a Taylor Swift-sounding original song from Grace VanderWaal, "My Pledge."

So many big-city movies are told from ground level. That was Sidney Lumet's specialty, whereas Coppola takes us to the tippy top of the city's tallest building, or else looks out from floating I-beams on the glowing horizon, where it's magic hour all the time. The man made four masterpieces - "The Godfather," "The Conversation," "The Godfather Part II" and "Apocalypse Now" - and then he made a fortune off his vineyards. He's seen the world from the upper echelons, rubbed his share of elbows, made his share of mistakes. Instead of retiring comfortably with his wealth, Coppola's opted to bring us this message, which is part mission statement, part mea culpa. "Megalopolis" is anything but lazy, and while so many of the ideas don't pan out as planned, this is the kind of late-career statement devotees wanted from the maverick, who never lost his faith in cinema. But now that he's built it, will they come?

'Raju Yadav' movie review: A lacklustre, pointless film steeped in misogyny

They say art often makes you question things about life and yourself. After some point in the second half of Raju Yadav, I frequently found myself questioning a few things: What is the seemingly intrinsic connection between self-pity and misogyny? How problematic does a Telugu film hero have to be before the director turns a critical eye upon him? And most importantly, how can two hours feel this long?

The plot of Raju Yadav revolves around its titular protagonist, Raju (Getup Srinu), a 26-year-old unemployed man living in the town of Mahabubnagar, merely 100 km away from Hyderabad. Raju’s life takes a drastic turn when he suffers a facial damage, after an accident and is treated by an incapable doctor, leaving him with an irreversibly smiley face at all times. Raju becomes the laughingstock of his neighbourhood even as he struggles to make peace with his renewed identity and move on to a better life. That is when Raju meets Sweety (Ankita Kharat), a strong-headed girl working at a college, and falls head over heels for her. How Raju decides to pursue Sweety, and how the decision changes his life altogether forms the crux of the story.

The biggest sin Raju Yadav commits is in offering us a protagonist who has no redeeming qualities to begin with. The accident that sets the plot in motion is rather tragic, so we feel sad for Raju for a while. But director Krishnamachary K keeps us confused and guessing about many things: Is Raju an intelligent man, merely hindered by his circumstances? What’s stopping him from applying for jobs? Is his medical condition a deterrent to him finding employment?

Also, Raju’s smiley face condition might be the novelty element of this film, but it has nothing to do with the film’s prime conflict, as we realise eventually. In a tender moment, Sweety admits that it’s Raju’s ever-jolly face that she likes the most about him. However, this admission doesn’t add to our understanding of either of these characters or their evolving relationship. Raju’s love life would probably be as miserable with or without his medical condition. The unconditional smiley face, then remains a gimmick at best.

It’s even more disingenuous how Krishnamachary never explores Sweety’s state of mind or reasoning for her change of heart. At one point, Sweety confronts Raju and slaps him after the latter obtains her phone number in a cringe-inducingly deceitful manner, This moment makes us momentarily hopeful about the film’s intentions in terms of examining its protagonist. Every time Sweety rejects Raju’s overtures early in the film or reminds him of their ‘just friends’ status, you go along with the film. However, Sweety’s actions become increasingly indecipherable once Raju decides to come to Hyderabad in her pursuit.

Raju Yadav makes no attempt to maintain balance in its narrative as we proceed further, indulging its doomed protagonist in his self-pity. You cannot root for characters who you don’t understand – Raju Yadav fails on this basic level, remaining a lopsided and trite exercise in pandering to the more conservative among male audience. The plot simply stops moving after a point, and all we are offered is repetitive visuals of Raju plunging himself deep into the pits of self-pity and self-destruction until the audience themselves begin rooting for a drastic turn of events that would end things once and for all.

There are brief, fleeting moments in Raju Yadav where things make sense—the deliberate excess of dream sequences, showcasing how some characters prefer to live in a parallel imagination, instead of facing the real world. Even the introductory song for Raju has a pleasant quality, capturing the protagonist’s tragicomic plight, but these pleasures are few and far too infrequent to matter.

Even the sub-plots in Raju Yadav offer no respite from its insensitive portrayal of women. While Raju is trying to find ways to bump into Sweety after their first meeting, one of Raju’s friends agrees to ride an autorickshaw in the hopes of finding a girlfriend for himself. The friend evaluates the women sitting behind him one at a time, in an objectifying gaze. There are plenty of other moments where the camera unnecessarily fixates on women’s bodies, always reminding the audience of the distance between the filmmaker and female characters in the film.

The subject of Raju holding a substantially lower place in society than Sweety comes up only in the final segment. Like a lot of Telugu cinema from older times, Raju Yadav attempts to garb its misogyny under the guise of a class-struggle conscience.

In a way, I was glad that the director pulled out all the stops in the climactic sequence. This is when Raju Yadav is most efficient in conveying a message about the rich’s exploitation of the underprivileged. It is a pity that the director only chooses the most regressive and archaic tropes possible to make his point.

Cast: Getup Srinu, Ankita Kharat, Ananda Chakrapani, RJ Hemant, Rocket Raghava

Director: Krishnamachary K

Rating: 1.5

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The Good Half

Renn Wheeland returns home to Cleveland for his mother's funeral. Once there, he forges new relationships while healing old ones, before confronting his problems and trying to face his grief... Read all Renn Wheeland returns home to Cleveland for his mother's funeral. Once there, he forges new relationships while healing old ones, before confronting his problems and trying to face his grief. Renn Wheeland returns home to Cleveland for his mother's funeral. Once there, he forges new relationships while healing old ones, before confronting his problems and trying to face his grief.

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Elisabeth Shue, Brittany Snow, Matt Walsh, and Nick Jonas in The Good Half (2023)

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‘Garfield: The Movie’ Review: An Animated Adventure With More Heart (and Lasagna) Than Laughs

Chris Pratt and Samuel L. Jackson star in the first halfway decent movie based on the classic comic strip

It says a lot about the human condition that we all love “Garfield.” Jim Davis’s nearly 50-year-old comic strip tells the ongoing story of Jon Arbuckle, a lovelorn sad-sack loser, and his snide, pompous, hedonistic cat Garfield. Neither of them are conventional heroes. They rarely even leave their house. Jon symbolizes the misery that stems from seeking external acceptance, while Garfield symbolizes the inner peace that stems from accepting yourself, vices and all. Or maybe it’s just about kicking helpless dogs and eating lasagna. Your mileage might vary.

The point is there’s something about “Garfield” that endures. So they keep cranking him out in every way imaginable and we keep buying it. That comic strip is somehow still running, even though the funny pages are harder and harder to find. The cat’s iconic face has been slapped on clothing, toys, video games, telephones, typing tutorials and even a short-lived ghost restaurant that served lasagna and “Garficcinos.” We love Garfield even when his products stink, and let’s be fair: they often do.

“The Garfield Movie” is the third theatrically-released feature film based on “Garfield.” Those first two are pretty rancid. It’s not enough that the Bill Murray movies have zero laughs, oh no. Those films have negative laughs. They take laughter out of your life — like the torture machine in “The Princess Bride,” but for comedy. The bar for this movie franchise was set so very, very low.

So when I say “The Garfield Movie” is the best “Garfield” movie, it’s going to sound like faint praise. Because it is. But faint praise is still praise. While this new film isn’t especially funny it’s still a reasonably enjoyable kids flick. It’s short on laughs but surprisingly big on tenderness.

“The Garfield Movie” begins with Garfield (Chris Pratt, not even trying to be anyone but Chris Pratt) telling the story of how he met his roommate Jon (Nicholas Hoult). Garfield was an adorable little kitten, left alone in a box in an alley by his criminal father. Garfield went begging at the window of an Italian restaurant, Jon scooped him up and took him home, they adopted their dog Odie (Harvey Guillén, “What We Do in the Shadows”), and settled into a nice, dull life of gluttony and couch potato-ry.

Garfield’s story takes an unexpected turn when two tough dogs, Roland (Brett Goldstein, “Ted Lasso”) and Nolan (Bowen Yang, “Dicks: The Musical”), kidnap the Arbuckle pets. When Garfield’s father Vic (Samuel L. Jackson) tries to rescue them, they’re interrupted by a villain named Jinx (Hannah Waddingham, also from “Ted Lasso”) who Vic betrayed years ago. Now she wants revenge.

Her price for letting Garfield, Odie and Vic go is 1,675 quarts of milk, which they have to steal from a company called Lactose Farms. The fact that “The Garfield Movie” acknowledges the existence of lactose is bizarre, since most cats are lactose intolerant, and can’t digest dairy products. So Jinx should have no use for that milk. Then again, this is a universe where Garfield gorges himself on cheese every day. (There’s a reason why Jim Davis never draws his litter box.)

So Garfield has to work with Odie, his thieving father, and a disgraced bull named Otto (Ving Rhames) to pull off an epic heist. Along the way he’ll process his abandonment issues and get knocked around like a Looney Tune. Everyone learns a valuable lesson and somehow nobody farts, despite the whole lactose thing. As kids movies go, that kind of restraint almost qualifies as classy.

“The Garfield Movie” was directed by Mark Dindal, who has been working in feature film animation for over forty years, and previously directed “Cats Don’t Dance,” “The Emperor’s New Groove” and “Chicken Little.” This is his first feature directing credit in nearly 20 years, and it doesn’t have the same zing of his earlier films. But it zooms along at a brisk, enjoyable clip. As light entertainment, it’s pretty darned light and it gets the job done. (Dindal also knows how to animate a delicious-looking pizza, although the standard for cartoon pizza was set way back in 1989’s “All Dogs Go to Heaven” and still has yet to be topped — although “A Goofy Movie” came close. Look, somebody else cares about this subject. I know they do. I can’t be the only one.)

What’s surprising about “The Garfield Movie” is that although it’s based on a pretty cynical comic strip, its highlights are all sentimental. The flashbacks to Garfield’s kittenhood are shameless gut punches of maudlin cutesiness, but eventually they tear down one’s defenses. Garfield’s relationship with his father earns real sympathy by the end. What the film lacks in hilarious jokes — there’s only a few (watch out for the used catapult salesman) — it makes up for with good nature.

That’s not to say that “The Garfield Movie” comes across as a genuinely sincere kids movie. It’s packed with shameless product placement for Olive Garden, FedEx, Wal-Mart, and Nacho Popchips. Then again, for “Garfield” maybe that is sincere. This cat’s been selling out for longer than most of us have been alive. At this rate it defines him as much as anything else does.

Mark Dindal’s film is unlikely to be hailed as a family movie classic, and as animated interpretations of “Garfield” go, it lags way behind the classic Halloween and Christmas specials or the “Garfield and Friends” TV series. But it’s a heck of a lot better than most of his other 21st century adventures, and a lot less hate-able than Mondays.

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