The digitally remastered print of 1927 classic Australian silent comedy The Kid Stakes is being screened for AFI-AACTA members in Sydney next month.
But the credits don’t acknowledge that the film could have been lost to posterity but for the rescue efforts by the Sydney University Film Group including John Morris in 1953.
That omission dismays film activist David Donaldson, a member of the group who later became the inaugural director of the Sydney Film Festival.
Directed and written by Tal Ordell, the film is a faithful adaptation of Syd Nicholls’ Fatty Finn comic strip, chronicling the adventures of a gang of kids in Woolloomooloo.
The National Film and Sound Archive restored the film as a DCP (Digital Cinema Package), which was screened at its Arc cinema in Canberra in June with a new score composed and played by Jan Preston.
A donor, borrower, critic and advocate of the Archive and its predecessor the National Library of Australia for more than 60 years, Donaldson tells IF, “I am full of praise for what NFSA has done in getting out the DCP, in itself a notable step in making available a national treasure.
“The principal reason that the Archive holds the film is by that rescue effort in 1953 after the original 1927 prints had been cut up in 1953 as two-reel comedy shorts.
“The film might well have languished a while in its tea-boxes of cut up pieces, then surely been in the way and thrown out. It was the work of Sydney University Film Group, John Morris in particular, who pieced it back together and got the film into a duplicate negative and to National Library in 1954."
Morris went on to a distinguished career at Film Australia, where he directed and produced more than 50 docus, and later as the CEO of the SAFC, the NSW Film and Television Office and the Film Finance Corporation.
Donaldson urged the Archive to acknowledge the university students’ crucial contribution in the DCP’s credits before the screening at Event Cinemas Bondi Junction on August 10.
But NFSA acting senior curator Gayle Lake told him her colleagues in Canberra advised they are unable to push that process through the various units in preservation and technical services.
Contemporary practice is to include this information in the form of a blog and onstage acknowledgement, she added.
Donaldson, who will take part in a panel with Lake at the August 10 screening hosted by producer Tony Buckley, has asked the Archive to consider ways of acknowledging such contributions in the future as it embarks on its new era of engagement.
Lake tells IF, "The work of John Morris and the SUFG is more than admirable and the national audiovisual collection is richer for it and will be acknowledged in the lead up to the screening. In fact we would be more than happy for David to write the story of the film's process of re-discovery for online publishing."