Australian
Screen

Clip description

Because of their connections with the Communist Party of Australia, members of the Realist Film Unit were monitored closely by ASIO for many years, even after they had left the unit and their relationships with the Communist Party had soured. Here, in an old interview, Ken Coldicutt describes the impact of a negative ASIO assessment on his job prospects. Academic David McKnight speaks more broadly about ASIO's mission and its extensive surveillance activities during the time of the Menzies government.

Curator’s notes

These glimpses of old ASIO surveillance footage, a largely hidden part of Australia’s screen history, provide a rather chilling counterpoint to the lost footage of the Realist Film Unit. Simple street scenes are made sinister by our knowledge of the secret nature of their capture. An irony is suggested: ASIO’s covert filmmaking was an attempt to discover the covert activities of a group of filmmakers. There is a moment of humour in the editing as talk of ‘subversive activities’ overlays footage of a man patting a cat.

The unit’s relationship with communism exposes the complexities of the interface between art and politics. McKnight suggests that members of the unit viewed their involvement with the Communist Party and their film activities as two manifestations of a broader commitment to social change. In contrast, ASIO viewed one as a subset of the other, believing the Realist Film Unit to be a front for the Communist Party. Instead, The Archive Project traces an increasingly rocky relationship and ultimate estrangement between Coldicutt, Mathews and the party. Fittingly, one of the crystalising moments is disagreement over a film: the Russian drama The Fall of Berlin (1949), which Coldicutt believed symptomatic of a Soviet totalitarianism he did not support.