From Tangata Whenua to Ngati, Graeme Tuckett talks to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM about documenting the legacy of Barry Barclay – the late, great Kiwi filmmaker in retrospective at the New Zealand International Film Festival this July and August.


THE New Zealand International Film Festival’s retrospective is usually a highlight of the year’s programme. In recent times we’ve been treated to seminal collections from Edward Yang, Nicholas Ray, Maurice Pialat and Jean Eustache, to name a few. This year is a local artist, a rare tribute for a Kiwi filmmaker. But Barry Barclay was that rare. He was, in the words of film lecturer, Associate Professor Russell Campbell, “the guy who put biculturalism on the map as far as film and television goes”. The festival is showing his (and Michael King and South Pacific Pictures’) seminal 1974 TV series Tangata Whenua, the type of television that has rarely been repeated in this country since. But its influence has been immeasurable from giving Māori their own voice on television. In addition to Tangata Whenua, the retrospective is showing the rarely seen documentary about corporate ownership of genetic crop resources, The Neglected Miracle, which was well ahead of its time in terms of its ideas, and two of his excellent short films. Introducing the retrospective however, is a documentary by Graeme Tuckett called The Camera on the Shore. This meticulous and well-crafted documentary captures the last interviews Barclay did before his death in 2008, and also incorporates testimony from some of Barclay’s collaborators and friends.

Tuckett has had a circuitous route to becoming a documentarian. Dropping out of university to become a set builder for a theatre company, he progressed to experimenting with AV and multi-media in the theatre space, and working on student radio. He then progressed to set building and being an assistant grip on film shoots. Tuckett says “I can’t imagine a better film school than a couple of years of pushing a dolly. And I just listened and listened and listened.” He started making short films after that, and biographies of local artists for the Learning Connexion. He is also currently The Dominion Post’s film reviewer.

Tuckett knew Barclay for about fifteen years, meeting him just after Ngati’s release in 1987. “We just started off a general coffee-drinking, ginger-beer-drinking, chess-playing occasional friendship which persevered for the next fifteen, sixteen years.” However the idea for The Camera on the Shore came much later with the death of many of Barclay’s collaborators. “Around the time that Wi Kuki Kaa died, Don Selwyn had died, John O’Shea had died, it just seemed like the trees were falling. I was in Bodega one night, Craig Walters was there having a beer with Baz [Barry Barclay], and I looked up and thought someone’s got to do it.”

Tuckett was surprised that no-one had attempted to make a documentary about Barclay before. He benefited from not knowing Barclay too well, compared to some of the more established documentary-makers. “I was still somewhat of a neophyte, because I wasn’t actually of that generation to see all the shenanigans that went down in the 70s and 80s. I was probably more trusted to do it. You’ve got to have an outsider’s viewpoint. You can’t make films about your own family. You can’t capture the Friedmans unless you were divorced from the family. Because I was of a different generation and hadn’t been to all of the parties, it put me in a position of trust. He said ‘okay, we should have a coffee’. Sat down and talked and that was that. It started from interviewing, within a month or so from that.”


Tuckett found his subject to be an extremely complex individual. “One of the things that was clear to me, from driving around the country and shooting interviews, not just with Baz, his various compadres, compatriots and co-workers, was everybody had a different take on him.” One facet of Barclay that Tuckett was drawn to was when an interviewee described him as a philosopher. “I didn’t know what he meant. But it became so obvious to me, he was far more of a philosopher than a filmmaker. I think filmmaking was his medium, but what he really was, was a writer. It’s very hard to get ideas published, whereas a film is a great medium for broadcasting ideas.” Tuckett suggests that even films that are considered artistic failures, like Te Rua, contain ideas that were extremely ahead of their time when it comes to cultural ownership and intellectual property.

Some of Barclay’s key ideas involved trying to figure out how to show requisite respect with a camera. He coined the term “Fourth Cinema” (following on the other “three cinemas” – first being commercial Hollywood, second being European art, and third post-colonial third world countries) to describe an indigenous cinema. Barclay created links with other indigenous peoples in places like Canada, Hawaii and South America, suggesting there was a shared experience. Tuckett says Barclay’s book Our Own Image, “asks the question ‘how to bring the camera onto the marae? How do you introduce the camera to an indigenous community who is mistrustful of anything that will take away your image.’ Where an image means an awful lot more than a temporary facsimile. It actually is a part of you. I don’t mean in some hocus-pocus spiritual primitivist way, I mean in a very, very real sense. You continue to own your face whoever paints it. Barry’s answer to that was that you sit back on a long lens. You have the camera listen and watch from a very respectful distance. Even then, only after it has been thoroughly introduced and has been taught manners. The European camera is extremely unmannered, it’s very rude. It breaks down the door, steals what it wants, and then runs away again.” This contributes to Barclay’s style of trying not to meddle with the image. “He never directed. It was very much sit-back, or you shoot this and I’ll watch.”


Tuckett confesses he was the complete opposite as a filmmaker. However, the documentary strives to be respectful of his subject. Barclay was considered a difficult character at times but the documentary steers clear of editorialising his life. “You allow people privacy. This isn’t European filmmaking, where it’s dig every little bit of dirt you can and make that the headline. Who’s the whole? Who are you really? What came through very, very clearly, right through Baz’s life, and the whole time I knew him, and was reminded so forcefully at his tangi, people that he had done wrong, or people that he had abandoned, or drunk under the table and walked away from, they all still fucking adored him. So we had to as well. Because nothing else would have been honest. So it’s a very respectful film and I make no apology for that. Because shit he was worth it.”

Tuckett wasn’t aware that this was going to be a eulogy either. He had a first cut of the film that he wasn’t happy with, but Barclay’s sudden death helped re-frame the documentary for Tuckett. “I would have gone and got the film regardless. I was going to carry on shooting. I knew there was other stuff I wanted to capture.” He talked to Annie Collins, who had edited The Neglected Miracle and worked on Tangata Whenua, and she agreed to edit the film. “She was so inside and so in tune with Barry’s rhythms. By the end of the first or second week, we knew where we were going with it. We knew we needed to say things nobody had said. When we put together all of the little facets, we suddenly went, ‘there he is’.”


Barclay’s reputation primarily rests now on his feature debut, Ngati. Ngati is considered the first indigenous feature film in the world, and played at Cannes. Tuckett says “it’s a helluva good film that is demonstrably non-colonist. It is made from within, not from outside. I don’t think there are any other New Zealand films you can say that about, certainly not Once Were Warriors or Whale Rider. They’re not even a convincing impersonation of a New Zealand film, let alone a Māori film.” However, Tuckett says “I wanted to prove that Ngati was one of the least of Barry’s achievements. It’s the one that everybody holds up, and says ‘oh yes, the director of Ngati’. Ngati works because it’s accessible to Pākehā. It’s a great strength. It plays by some of the rules, it’s got great entertainment values, it’s got a perfect three-act structure and a love story. [But] if you put Ngati up against an episode of Tangata Whenua, it’s got less meaning than that.”

I ask Tuckett why Tangata Whenua is so important. “He did something with the camera that had never been done before. He taught the camera respect, how to be a ‘younger’, as opposed to an elder. He tamed the camera and taught it tikanga. The results he got from that, and Michael King, the answers he got, were just astonishing. Of course, he was filming this, as he said in the interviews, in New Zealand in 1972. Not deliberately divided, but an absolutely divided nation. He went into the Urewera and captured people speaking in a language that was utterly foreign to almost everybody in New Zealand. He came back from somewhere foreign to most people in New Zealand. He came back from somewhere more foreign than China.” The series became an event in terms of New Zealand television history. “You’re talking about a time of a single channel. To get broadcast at half past seven, or half-past eight, when there’s only one channel to watch, pretty much guaranteed a lot of people are going to be watching. I’ve heard that it was the talk the next day, or in some cases in extremely disparaging tones e.g. ‘why are they bothering’, ‘who are these people’, ‘this is just a bunch of Māoris how funny is that’. But for other people, some scales fell off some eyes. To say it was ahead of its time is nonsensical. It was of another time.”

Barclay made plenty of other interesting work – from his writing to his documentaries. Tuckett says “Baz is unclassifiable. Nobody ever made a film like Baz, and nobody has since.” However Tangata Whenua in particular was a landmark event in New Zealand popular culture. It holds up aesthetically today as an excellent piece of art too, and its screening will be one of the highlights of this year’s festival. Tuckett’s documentary compellingly frames the man and his work, and in the process makes a moving eulogy to one of New Zealand’s great artists.