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A Cultural Assault: The New Zealand Films of Peter Jackson
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In only a decade, Peter Jackson has managed to carve a niche for himself within both exploitation and mainstream practices. Jackson's visual imagination was apparent with his first movie, Bad Taste (1987), but its gross-out content continued in his next two films Braindead (1992), and Meet the Feebles (1989), and caused him to be dismissed by many as merely a purveyor of horror movies, albeit perhaps with a mildly amusing, though adolescent, sense of humour. The subsequent breakthrough of "the Kaiser of Kiwi ketchup" to art cinema auteur, with Heavenly Creatures (1994), was no surprise to perceptive viewers who saw Jackson's style through the splatter. Steadfastly refusing to work away from New Zealand, Jackson's most ambitious project has been the directing of a trilogy of films based on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, for the American company New Line Cinema; "the biggest cinema production ever undertaken in the Southern Hemisphere", a newspaper declared. Given Jackson's critical and commercial success, his work is crucially important both for New Zealand film specifically and for an understanding of national cinema generally. To clarify this point, one might usefully compare Jackson to the Canadian director David Cronenberg, who early in his career similarly exploited the horror genre. Both filmmakers work within English-speaking national film industries dominated by American cinema and popular culture. Initially, both were coolly received by the international critical establishment but quickly found an enthusiastic following with horror and exploitation audiences. Both have also extended their work in horror to more highbrow projects, gaining critical respect and ultimately being embraced by official culture as an example of national artistic pride. Like Cronenberg in Canada, Jackson is now regarded in his own country as a respected champion of indigenous filmmaking (a position Jackson hilariously exploits in his mockumentary, Forgotten Silver [1995]).This book is the first critical study of Peter Jackson's films and includes sections on each of his first six productions - from Bad Taste, via Heavenly Creatures and The Frighteners, to Forgotten Silver - as well as consideration of Jackson's childhood 8mm amateur movies and his epic The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The publication concludes with a comprehensive filmography and bibliography. |
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