IFC #5: THE FAR PARADISE

(dir. Paulette McDonagh, 1928, Australia, 480p)

Festival season is here. As you read this, Venice will have finished, and Toronto will have begun. In England, Open City started this week with their focus on documentary, while the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival launches on the 17th. The big one is the BFI London Film Festival, which announced its program at the start of this week. (Each of the English festivals are mostly taking place online, while the BFI are screening a selection of films in cinemas across Britain.)

There are quite a few highlights in the LFF line-up (that’s right, a new Kevin Jerome Everson short), but I always enjoy investigating the Treasures section, which screens new restorations of older films. My highlight of last year’s slate was Muna Moto (1975), Jean-Pierre Dikongué Pipa’s black-and-white tale of young, star-crossed love being thwarted by class and family structures. It’s streaming on Filmingo and is 1000% worth the €6 rental fee. One feature from this year’s Treasure programme was The Cheaters,a silent Australian melodrama from 1930 written, produced and directed by Paulette McDonagh.

Paulette McDonagh is a part of film history I did not know. Unlike the localised Australian filmmaking scene that grew over the 1920s, Paulette did not come from a theatre tradition. She studied films by returning to the cinema repeatedly to analyse a film’s rhythms and learned screenwriting by doing a Hollywood writing course through the mail. When she started making films, Paulette collaborated closely with two of her sisters. Phyllis became an art director, publicist and “business manager of screen ventures” (as per a 1928 newspaper cut-out). Already working under the screen name Marie Lorraine, eldest sister Isobel became a regular cast member.

This brings us to The Far Paradise (1928), the second silent feature by the McDonagh Sisters, starring Isobel as the lead in a tale of young, star-crossed love that is thwarted. The story, to be honest, is pretty bare-bones: Pete and Cherry meet on a train, fall in love, then are restrained by Cherry’s shitty drunk father. Let’s call him SDF. SDF also hates Pete’s dad, who’s Sydney’s attorney general; something happens in ten minutes of the film that are quite literally lost; Cherry and SDF end up in a cabin out in West Australia, where the film transforms into a psychological drama. Of course, there’s a happy ending at the end, because it’s a silent feature made in 1928 that was a success with audiences.

Narratively, this is pretty simple stuff. I admit that I am nowhere near an expert on silent film, mainly when the film’s hyper-damaged YouTube rip doesn’t feature de rigueur jaunty piano accompaniment and is entirely silent. However, the film’s form is worthy of praise. The McDonaghs are often compared to German expressionists, due to their shadow play and understanding of space within the frame; considering how much slower film culture travelled in the Twenties, the visible influences of Murnau and Dreyer are quite surprising. Seeing the negative space and gothic affectations of that movement re-utilised for suburban melodrama is fascinating. It brightens up the more light-hearted portions of the film, and plumbs the darkest parts into the depths. SDF’s cabin sojourn, in particular, feels claustrophobic, as if daylight has ceased to exist; the square-jawed Pete glances into a fireplace, and doesn’t just look sad, but seems to be creasing through his very being. You can feel the hours Paulette spent rewatching films in the cinema coming to fruition.

Isobel is very, very good as the lead (particularly during the haunted-house-but-in-a-cabin climax). Still, more so than her performance, there is a stubbornly didactic moment in The Far Paradise that I cannot shake. About two-thirds into the film, a previously introduced buddy of Pete’s mentions having seen Cherry, living unhappily outside of Syndey. Puffing a cigarette, the friend looks at the ceiling and mutters, the interstitial title telling us his words: “Some poor little kid… The world is tough on women.”

I certainly didn’t expect a male character to say that in a silent film from the Twenties, and perhaps that speaks to the chauvinism underlying film culture and its canon, even back at the start of the Twentieth Century. While this one sentence doesn’t necessarily count as a treatise, it’s perhaps it’s no coincidence that those words came from three sisters that co-wrote their films’ interstitial dialogue. It’s blunt and sad and beautiful.

The film’s commercial triumph kept them regular presences in Australia’s newspapers. Two years later, they released The Cheaters but ran completely out of money, having to sell the house they shot many of their films’ scenes in. Then the talkies arrived, effectively wrecking the country’s community of independent silent-era filmmakers. Frank Thring Sr, a powerful studio boss in the Australian film industry, offered the sisters Hollywood work, but they decided to maintain their artistic independence and continue trying to make films at home. They made one feature with sound, 1933’s anti-war parable Two Minutes Silence. However, it was stopped from screening at the powerful Hoyt’s cinema chain: payback for the McDonaghs declining the Hollywood offer from Thring Sr, the cinema chain’s new owner. 

The sisters disbanded. Isobel moved to London with her husband, eventually retiring from screen and stage acting. Phyllis left film behind, becoming a newspaper editor in New Zealand. Despite many attempts, Paulette never directed another feature. She directed widely-distributed short documentaries on athletes, but they have vanished into the aether, like many films from the cinema’s first decades. She did not live to see her films rediscovered in the mid-Seventies. Until the release of Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979), she would be the last Australian woman to helm a feature film. That’s almost half a century. The Far Paradise and the creative lives of its creators tell us so: The world is tough on women.

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