‘Breaking out of the nationalist/ic paradigm’: international screen texts on the 1915 Gallipoli campaign

Abstract

Peter Weir's 1981 feature film, Gallipoli, is perhaps the most influential modern text on the 1915 campaign in Turkey. Underpinned by a radical nationalist interpretation of events, Weir's film is a text that reinforced Australian (and Turkish) national mythologies and simplified a complex multiethnic campaign with key international linkages through its exclusive interrogation of the British–Australian imperial relationship. Weir's film has been profoundly influential in educational circles both within and beyond Australia. The limitations of the nationalist paradigm have increasingly been challenged in the new millennium by historians and filmmakers who have reinterpreted Gallipoli through a more layered and nuanced transnational lens. Two prime examples of such visual texts that embody the work of leading historians in the field are Wain Fimeri's Revealing Gallipoli and Tolga Örnek's Gallipoli: The Frontline Experience, each made in 2005 for the ninetieth anniversary of the campaign. A comparative analysis of these two texts demonstrates the value of the new documentary form as a tool for recovering memory of the campaign outside Australia and for exploring its multiple meanings. This article discusses the transnational production dimensions of both documentaries and their varying intercultural reception by considering the distinctive meanings and role in collective memory in turn for a New Zealand, Turkish and Irish audience.

Notes

^1. See in particular: Travers (2001), Gallipoli 1915, Broadbent (2005), Gallipoli: The Fatal Shore, Stanley (2005), Quinn's Post, Anzac, Gallipoli and Prior (2009), Gallipoli: The End of the Myth.

^2. Strictly speaking, Örnek's approach more closely resembles drama-documentary rather than docu-drama in its form of intertextuality. As Paget argues, the former draws on a real historical event to present an argument, whereas docu(mentary)-drama is essentially a fiction that takes on a ‘documentary look’ and which may reference ‘factual or possible situations’. See Paget (1998), No Other Way to Tell It: Dramadoc/Docudrama on Television.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Bennett

James Bennett is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle, NSW. He is co-editor of, and a contributor to, Making Film and Television Histories: Australia and New Zealand (I.B. Tauris, 2012), co-editor of ‘Gender Readings in History and Film’, a special volume of the Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, 10:1. He was an interviewee for the 2010 American documentary Reflections of the Past: An Open Discussion on the Parker-Hulme Case, arising from his publications on the 1954 murder case and its representations in film and media. His most recent work has considered cultural nationalist productions on the Gallipoli campaign produced in New Zealand in the late twentieth century.