Magic Playgrounds: Historical Images of NZ Childhoods

The Film Archive

Listing details: The Natural Environment – Ko te Taiao exhibition When: Exhibition opening Thurs 6 June, 5.30pm; exhibition runs June 7 - 20 July Where: The New Zealand Film Archive, 84 Taranaki St, Wellington

FREE ADMISSION

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Magic Playgrounds: Historical Images of New Zealand Childhoods

The first of a series of three moving image exhibitions curated by Tina Makereti, on the social history of childhood in Aotearoa / New Zealand, The Natural Environment – Ko te Taiao explores the relationship between children and the natural environment.

Featuring documentaries, television footage, home movies, feature films and rarely seen films from the early 1900s.

Social history allows us to explore the stories of ordinary people as their worlds change.

Each of the three exhibitions which constitute Makereti’s Magic Playgrounds: Historical Images of New Zealand Childhoods series focuses on how one characteristic of New Zealand identity and childhood have been represented in our nation’s film output.

Exhibition one, The Natural Environment – Ko te Taiao, focuses on children and the natural environment, exhibition two will focus on children and cultural diversity, and exhibition three will focus on children and social equality. The exhibitions ask: is New Zealand still a great place to grow up? Was it in the past?

These exhibitions do not presume to present history as it was. Instead they ask: was it the way we presented it?

The Natural Environment – Ko te Taiao includes very early films of the New Zealand landscape. Implicit in the viewing of these films is the question of what was there before the earliest footage. There is some irony if, having seen early images of Māori on the land, a 1950s tourist film intones grandly the arrival of the British Empire. The development from very rural to very urban communities is traced, with the tacit question: what remains of our iconic environment and our relationship to it? How has the way children relate to the environment changed?

It’s not all serious though. Older visitors will be reminded of childhood streets they had forgotten, customs that have gone out of style, and a way of life that has transformed dramatically in recent decades. Younger visitors may be surprised by the British accents used by broadcasters of the mid-twentieth century, odd soundtracks featuring experimental music from the sixties, and the idiosyncrasies of historical Aotearoa. Viewers will be transfixed by film dating back as early as 1910, when filmmakers looked around this fresh yet already transformed land, and realised there was something very unique and magical here that needed to be recorded on film.

Exhibition curator Tina Makereti is The Film Archive’s 2013 Curator-At-Large. She is a writer with a background in Social Anthropology and Māori Studies. Makereti has won several awards for her writing, including the Nga Kupu Ora Māori Book Awards Fiction Prize in 2011 for her short story collection, Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa (Huia Publishers, 2010) and the Royal Society of New Zealand Manhire Prize for Creative Science Writing (Non-Fiction) in 2009.

The Natural Environment – Ko te Taiao opens Thursday 6 June, at 5.30pm. Join us for a selection of picnic food and a curator’s talk by Makereti.

The exhibition will run from 7 June through 20 July 2013.

The second and third exhibitions in the Magic Playgrounds: Historical Images of New Zealand Childhoods series will open on 25 July and 12 September.

A programme of feature films will run in conjunction with the The Natural Environment – Ko te Taiao exhibition:

- VIGIL (1984) There are few films where the landscape takes on the ominous and unrelenting power of the farm in Vigil. The main character, a girl named Toss, has the imagination and independence to meet this landscape head on.

7pm, Thursday through Saturday, 6 - 8 June

- THIS WAY OF LIFE (2009) Shot around the rugged Ruahine mountains and Waimarama Beach, the documentary This Way of Life asks whether it is possible to go back to the land, and shows a family determined to do so.

7pm, Thursday through Saturday, 13 - 15 June

- RANGI’S CATCH (1973) Rangi’s Catch is a children’s film in which two escaped convicts attract the attention of a group of kids, including Rangi (a very young Temuera Morrison), after stealing clothes from a remote Marlborough Sounds sheep farm. The children track the crooks through Picton, Wellington, Waitomo, the Whanganui river and Rotorua.

4.30pm, Saturday 20 July

ENDS

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