Father’s Day is a trick of the calendar.
One Sunday a year where florists and cafés do a brisk trade, and the rest of us stumble through the awkward ritual of gratitude. Yet fathers, real or imagined, hover in our culture year-round.
This week, they sit in the dark of the cinema.
The Son
Take Life in One Chord.
Shayne Carter, our suburban punk son of Dunedin, never behaved like anyone’s idea of a dutiful child. He sneered, spat, and built songs that clanged like broken fences. Margaret Gordon’s rockumentary lets him narrate his life with that same self-sabotaging drawl until he objects and asks broadcaster Carol Hirschfeld to take over. A brat move, of course, and Gordon indulges it. The result is funny, self-deprecating, and true to the ethos of the Dunedin Sound: DIY, cheeky, world-shaking.
Fathers would have called it noise. We now call it history.
Life In One Chord opens this Thursday nationwide in Cinemas
The Burden
Then there is Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams. A documentary so weary it feels like fatherhood itself: endless labour, little sleep, and no guarantee of reward.
Blank followed Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski into the Amazon, where sanity rotted and patience collapsed.
At one point, Blank wrote in his journal:
“I couldn’t care less if they move the stupid ship – or finish the fucking film.”
Yet he kept rolling. He coaxed Herzog into repeating a jungle monologue that would become immortal. A filmmaker at the end of his rope, keeping the circus alive because someone had to.
Watch the documentary this Father’s Day, then come October, Rialto Film Channel brings six of Herzog’s best — including Fitzcarraldo, the mad masterpiece that Burden of Dreams is built upon. A reminder that genius is often indistinguishable from stubbornness, and that dragging ships over mountains literal or metaphorical is a burden some fathers never put down.
Burden of Dreams opens this Thursday in cinemas nationwide. Les Blank’s legendary documentary captures Werner Herzog’s impossible Amazon shoot, a battle of obsession, madness, and a ship hauled over a mountain.
Then in October, Rialto Film Channel celebrates Herzog in full, featuring six of his early masterpieces, gloriously restored, including Fitzcarraldo, the very film at the centre of Burden of Dreams.
The Father
And we come, inevitably, to John Barnett. The father of New Zealand film.
A phrase that risks cliché but in his case lands true. He shepherded stories onto the screen when nobody else would: Samoan Wedding, Treasure of the Yankee Zephyr and, of course, Whale Rider.
It was Barnett’s stubborn faith that carried Whale Rider from page to screen.
He backed it when others hesitated, and in doing so gave New Zealand a myth that circled the globe.
At its centre was a 12-year-old Keisha Castle-Hughes, whose performance burned itself into the national memory.
Castle-Hughes would later reflect:
“Thanks to a lot of people, not just myself, Whale Rider had an amazing impact emotionally, and people remember it. I count myself very lucky that all those doors were unlocked, I just had to open them.”
Barnett was one of those who unlocked the doors. Without him, Whale Rider might have been another script gathering dust. With him, it became a cultural landmark proof that New Zealand stories could stand shoulder to shoulder with the world’s best.
He gave us local mythologies and taught us we didn’t need to borrow fathers from overseas.
Vale John Barnett
So, this Father’s Day, we’re not really buying socks or mugs.
We’re watching Carter shred his way through adolescence, Blank buckle under the weight of genius, and remembering Barnett who stitched together the fragile cloth of our screen culture.
Fathers don’t always look like fathers.
Sometimes they look like punks, or burnt-out documentarians, or producers with budgets scribbled on the backs of envelopes.
What they share is a legacy.
A burden.
A chord struck once, still resonating.
— Roger Wyllie, View Mag
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