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Arts / The stars come out for summer

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IT’s not every day that curators from two of our national institutions get together, but Jennifer Coombes, from the National Film and Sound Archive, and Penelope Grist, from the National Portrait Gallery, did and the results are star-studded.

The NPG’s coming summer exhibition, “Starstruck: Australian Movie Portraits”, would have been impossible had not the two curators struck up a conversation during 2014 when the gallery staged an exhibition called “Promo: Portraits from prime time” that looked at professional photographers and the stars of Australian television, music and comedy.

“I realised then that the National Film and Sound Archive has film stills,” Grist tells “CityNews”, meaning photos, not posters, celluloid and digitised movies. The finished exhibition shows how still photographers created formal and candid shots, capturing the actors at work and the characters they are playing.

Grist and Coombes met for coffee, realised that the work of the usually unnamed photographic geniuses in Australia would present a treasure-house of work for exhibition, then pitched the idea to NPG director Angus Trumble who subsequently talked to the chief of the NFSA, Michael Loebenstein, and shook hands with him on it.

The results will be seen not just by Canberrans. A condensed version, “Starstruck on Location”, will also tour Australia until 2020, supported by the National Collecting Institutions Touring and Outreach Program.

It’s been a huge amount of work, Coombes and Grist explain, which involved digitising a lot of material. Luckily the film company Cinesound had bequeathed to the NFSA huge scrapbooks of glamorous photographs showing stars past and present and there were also the casting books from which they found their actors.

“We thought: ‘We really have a show’, but it wasn’t always easy,” Grist says.

For one thing, until around the 1960s, photographers who took the stills were never credited. Nowadays we know names such as Robert McFarlane and Mark Stray, but the two curators had to float a few theories to help them identify the “artists”. Usually they couldn’t but they live in hope that the show will nudge memories.

The collection was seemingly bottomless, so they narrowed it down to Australian feature films starting with the 1906 feature “The Story of the Kelly Gang” and going right up until “Ali’s Wedding”.

The list of familiar faces is endless, but there are also almost forgotten stars such as Louise Lovely, Lottie Lyell, and “Snowy” Baker, all of whom have fascinating stories that extended captions will delineate.

There’s Peter Finch in the 1938 “Dad and Dave Come to Town”, where director Ken G Hall gave him one of his earlier chances. Grist has become a huge Finch fan during the curating process – “So young,” she sighs.

There are celebrities such as Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, but often in forgotten guises, as with the striking portrait of Kidman in “Dead Calm”, the film that first attracted Tom Cruise to her.

“These images started off as working marketing images,” Coombes says, but she and Grist have discovered that the most powerful of them exude energy and life “because of the strange connection between fact and fiction – often the actors are more interesting in character than out of it.”

Coombes sees the benefit of the exhibition as “to draw audiences back to film and to put our collection back into context,” while Grist sees the works of art as portraiture, in which the photographer “gets the real self”.

Some of the characters are archetypal, such as Mick Dundee, and while there are glamorous shots like that of Paul Mercurio and Tara Morice in “Strictly Ballroom”, not all are glamorous, as when Gillian Armstrong is seen relaxing in dungarees with Sam Neill and Judy Davis, in costume.

Coombes and Grist have hung the exhibition like a movie, in three parts, The Setup, The Journey and The Resolution, “as if you are walking through a screenplay,” they say.

Perhaps the most interesting part will be the Journey section, which deals with turning points, as in “Storm Boy”, where Peter Cummins, playing the father, insists that Mr Percival be returned to nature, or in the 1995 “Dad and Dave” film when Leo McKern expresses emotion as his son leaves home.

“Their faces are their fortunes,” Coombes says of the actors, citing a portrait of Deborah Mailman while performing in “The Sapphires” and Toni Collette as Muriel trying on a wedding dress.

“This exhibition is for people who love film and portraits, and that’s everyone, isn’t it?” Grist says.

“Starstruck: Australian Movie Portraits,” National Portrait Gallery, November 10-March 4, 2018, bookings to portrait.gov.au

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