Writer John Bluck shares a very personal perspective on how moviegoing in New Zealand reflects our character, history and preoccupations.

Writer John Bluck shares a very personal perspective on how moviegoing in New Zealand reflects our character, history and preoccupations.

John Bluck traces a lifetime in the development of local cinema

A Tikiti to the Pikitea

Episode 1: The Dream Factory

What did everyone do to find their fantasy before films came along, only just a hundred years or so ago?

And each film is a magic journey, as if for the first time. When the house lights go down in the cinema, when those infuriating people in front of you finally turn off their cellphones, and the screen edges slide out to full-size, you know you're about to be taken to a place you've never been before.

It's all trickery of course. An illusion mechanically and electronically fabricated from projecting film but now videotape and digital signals through a process I can't begin to understand, creating images that move and speak like we do, even though they are twice, three times our size.

And so we sit there in the darkness, inside the dream factory, close together but not touching, in a crowd that doesn't talk or move for an hour or two; sometimes laughing out loud, sometimes weeping quietly (though it's bad form for men to look at each other when we do), and finally emerging silently, as different people, sometimes left bewildered by what we've seen.

The movie industry's first mass audiences were found in the industrial cities of Europe and America at the start of the 20th century. Silent films, shown in nickelodeons to poor migrant workers who had limited grasp of the language and couldn't read the subtitles. But the movies worked their magic regardless, giving a brief escape from the drudgery of factory life.

Our forebears in New Zealand started just as early. My grandfather ran a picture theatre during the First World War. I've still got the advertising slide shown at halftime. Bluck's Pioneer Picture Show. In Front All The Time. Watch Out for the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Sadly the theatre burnt down and the films lying around were destroyed. I remember the charred remains that sat in his garage for years.

One was a film about Captain Cook, locally made as were many productions that celebrated Kiwi life and times. It might even have been a copy of the 1906 re-enactment of Cook's landing in Gisborne.

One of the earliest, made in 1900, is entitled The Departure of the Second Contingent for the Boer War…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details