Norman Lindsay would have enjoyed the recent tryst between the ABC and the Mardi Gras organisers on one hand and the conservative legislators and religious figures on the other.
Lindsay, lifelong artistic and literary combatant against wowserism, might have been saddened that the battle goes on, but he would surely have applied his wit to brawl.
The religion vs sex and art theme is the subject of a new film with Lindsay the centre. Art is played by Sam Neill (as Lindsay), Religion by Hugh Grant as the Reverend Anthony Campion and Sex by Elle MacPherson and three others as Lindsay’s models. The four (one is Lindsay’s wife) are modelling for a painting called Sirens, which is also the name of the film.
Sirens has just opened in New York and will open in Australia in late May or early June, though there will be a private screening at Parliament House on March 23.
The film is set and filmed at Lindsay’s Blue Mountains house and grounds which he left to the National Trust on his death (at the age of 90) in 1969.
The film is based on a novel by John Duign, who is also director.
The novel and the film explore the themes of artistic and sexual freedom in the face of religious opposition, ignorance and misunderstanding. It is centred on the real-life controversy surrounding Lindsay’s etching The Crucified Venus, which shows a voluptuousm, naked woman on a cross.
In the novel the fictitious young Anglican clergyman, Anthony Campion and his wife Estella (Tara Fitzgerald) arrive in Sydney from England to take up a parish west of Sydney. The bishop asks them to stop at Lindsay’s house en route to attempt to persuade him not to exhibit the etching at an international exhibition.
A train derailment keeps them at Lindsay’s house, allowing the plot and the themes to unfold.
Just as Lindsay’s etching shows religious repression (indeed crucifixion) of female sexuality, we see the clergyman’s wife breaking out from his repressive influences. At first shocked by Lindsay’s models wandering around naked and swimming in the dam carefree and naked even in the presence of a mysterious man who does odd jobs for Lindsay, Estella slowly becomes fascinated by it.
The obvious scoreline is Religion 0, Sexual Expression 1 consumated in the usual way. In the other game the obvious scoreline is Religion 0, Artistic Expression 1, but how that is done would be unfair to reveal, except to say that it fits the true-life Lindsay’s wicked humour.
Norman Lindsay is a good role for Sam Neill. It is more like his irreverent, independent Reilly, Ace of Spies, role than his roles in the Piano or Evil Angels.
Sirens is fiction, though it portrays Lindsay’s philosophic position: a detestation of post-Reformation Christianity.
Lindsay wrote (aged 84) that before the Reformation, the Catholic Church allowed the carrying on of the Greek tradition. Then Protestantism and Puritanism put it on the defensive.
“”The Catholic Church of the Renaissance was the freest and most tolerant of institutions. It was political rather than religious.”
And then this delicious off-hand summary of the pre-Reformation Church’s attitude to art: “”As long as the Church got its fair supply of Crucifixions and Madonnas and martyred saints the painters were free to disport themselves as they pleased with the glorious wealth of inspiration in Greek poetry, mythology and the Greek gods, turning in a breath from Jesus to Apollo, and from the Madonna and Child to Venus and Cupid; the source of the Mother and Child myth, and of all cults of the mother goddess. The Reformation smashed that fine spirit of tolerance in life and art. . . .
The Puritanic hardening of doctrine in the Catholic Church, due to alarm over the revolt of the Reformation, has clamped the Catholic mind in a mental straitjacket.”
He argued that since the Reformation the creative urge became moribund in people dominated by the Catholic Church and the great artistic achievements came from Protestant countries.
He was equally scathing of communism: “”In this present conflict between Catholic and communist, it is the communist who is the most relentless doctrinist, for where the Catholic merely pronounces anathema against eh apostate, and jeers and ejects him from the corporate body of the Church, the communist puts him up against the wall and shoots him.”
Russia had “”a barren mass of people bullied into slavery by a few autocratic demagogues.”
He despaired, too, over the lack of culture of his countrymen. He reacted more in sorrow than anger when in 1959, a print of his was removed from the walls of the Hotel Acton in Canberra because the housemaids complained.
But we are getting there. Sirens could not have been shown in 1959 and perhaps not in 1979, certainly not without a R rating, even though there is not a stroke of violence in it.
In Sirens, there is a goodly amount of apple and snake symbolism and some exquisite use of Australian bush light on bodies and hair.
A theme of the film is the prurience of the English, as exemplified by the clergyman and his wife. Lindsay expresses his abhorrence of England in üScribblings of an Idle Mind.@ It is a joy to read because it (as Lindsay says) makes no concessions to popular opinion. You don’t have to agree with it, but you have to admire the man’s boldness. They range from an appalling scribbling on race to a delightful pricking of the James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw myths.
Anyway, England:
“”The other instance I referred to of the prurience in the English mentality came for another publisher, Heinemann. He was producing Shakespeare’s plays in a series, with coloured illustrations, and he commissioned me to illustrate Othello. I rejected Othello, a play I never cared for. He asked me to select one, and I chose Henry IV. Oh no; that would never do; impossible to introduce Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet into a pure English home. So I selected Antony and Cleopatra, and again that would not do. There was that bawdy talk between Cleopatra’s girls and the soothsayer.
“”That is where I gave up any proposal to have further dealings with the English national ego. . . I couldn’t get out of England quick enough after that experience.”
CROSSHEAD OR SOMETHING
Sirens is produced by Sue Milliken, chair of the Australian Film Commission and co-producer of Black Robe.
Milliken said the film took seven weeks to shoot in the Blue Mountains and (because Sydney has swallowed up what was bush and villages in Lindsay’s days) the NSW hamlet of Sofala.
Milliken is optimistic about Australian film production but has some worries, mostly about the economic climate for film-making, which she describes as the most expensive art form ever devised.
Australia had the social advantage of having a small population of only 19 million people. It helped make the physical climate for film-making better, but it meant a smaller domestic market.
Australian film-making therefore had to be export-oriented and had to be subsidised.
Sirens is both.
Australian Film Finance Corporation, a German/American company and British Screen Finance provided the lions’ share of the money. Post production was carried out in UK with all but one UK staff, and shooting was in Australia with all but one Australian crew.
The commission is keeping a watching eye on GATT, the general agreement on tariffs and trade. With world trends towards free trade, subsidies and local-quota arrangements in the film industry are under fire.
“”But films are rice,” she says. “”If there are not quotas or subsidies our own view or ourselves will drift as between the 1930s and early 1970s in the major art form of the 20th century.
“”Our national self-awareness, our national self-confidence and national pride can be enhanced with Australian film and television production. As can the awareness of us and respect for us by the rest of the world.”
In that respect, she said, Australia had done very well.
“”The Canadians envy us,” she said. “”Everywhere you go in the world people have seen an Australian film, and can discuss it with you.”
Present GATT arrangements were a reasonable compromise, but the opening up of the TV advertising market to the world could cause problems with developing talent. International competition had taken the up-market ads which had been an excellent training ground for young Australian talent since the introduction of television in 1956.
Not every year would be a good on for Australian production. “”Creative endeavour is a bit like a cricket team. Some years it goes well, but not so in other years, but it will always come back.”