Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This black-and-white clip shows Minister for Trade and Customs Frank Forde making a speech to mark the opening of Efftee Studios in Melbourne and the first production of sound films in Australia. Forde says that 'talkies’ will herald a new era in the Australian film industry, creating job opportunities and increased trade, and predicts that Australia could produce 50 feature films a year. He concludes by wishing Efftee Studios and its founder, Frank Thring (after whose initials the studio is named), every success.

Educational value points

• The advent of the 'talkies’ in 1927 resulted in the expansion of the US film industry, record profits for studios and the era known as the Golden Age of Hollywood. Forde says the Australian film industry could share in the success but this was not realised, partly because in the 1920s US and British distributors signed exclusivity deals with Australian cinemas. Limited screening opportunities resulted in the local film industry going into a decline that lasted until the 1970s.

• Forde says that the production of 'talkies’ could boost Australia’s film industry, which had once led the world in filmmaking. Between 1906 and 1912, Australia produced more feature-length films than Britain or the USA, including The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), the first feature-length film produced in Australia and possibly the world. By 1927 there were 1,250 cinemas in Australia and 20,000 people were employed in the industry.

• Forde’s observation that cinema 'has captured the popular imagination’ is reflected in cinema attendance figures, which show that by 1921 cinema had become the most popular form of entertainment in Australia with 68 million attendances from a population of just 5.4 million. These attendance figures peaked in 1928 when the first talking films from the USA began to be shown in Australian cinemas, with about 180 million cinema visits from a population of 6.3 million.

• Forde seems to support the expansion of the Australian film industry but the federal government did nothing to prevent the dominance of US and British films in Australian cinemas, despite recommendations made by the 1927 Royal Commission into the Moving Picture Industry in Australia. Filmmakers advocated a quota system, whereby cinemas would be required to exhibit some locally made films. New South Wales introduced an ineffectual quota law in 1934.

• The 1927 Royal Commission into the Moving Picture Industry in Australia found that about 90 per cent of films shown in Australian cinemas came from Hollywood, with only 5 per cent from Australia, and attributed this to the generally higher standard of production of the foreign film imports. This may be why, in his address, Forde stresses that Efftee Studios expects to produce films of 'such a high standard’ that they will get 'a worldwide release’.

• Efftee Studios’s Diggers (1931), a film Forde refers to in the clip, was the first commercially viable sound feature made in Australia. It used a method known as 'sound on film’. It was recorded using optical equipment imported from the USA that converted sound to an optical image, which was then transferred to the picture on the strip of film. Sound was generated when the optical image passed through a light sensor in the projector.

• Frank (Francis) Forde (1890–1983) recorded this address to mark the launch of Efftee Studios and to showcase the new sound technology the studio had invested in. The clip was one of the first sound film records of an Australian politician. Forde was a federal parliamentarian for 24 years and deputy leader of the Labor Party for 14 years. He held several ministerial positions, including that of Trade and Customs, and was caretaker prime minister for eight days in 1945.

• Frank Thring (father of actor Frank Thring) established Efftee Studios in 1930 and produced and directed most of its films, including Diggers (1931), a remake of The Sentimental Bloke (1932), and His Royal Highness (1932). Thring, who began his film career as a touring exhibitor, set up a distribution company in 1918 called JC Williamson Films. The company merged with Hoyts in 1926, with Thring as its dynamic managing director. Efftee wound up after Thring’s death in 1936.