This Fine Island (Experimental short film)

Abstract

This Fine Island revisits Charles Darwin's journey to the Bay of Islands in New Zealand in1835, but in his adaption, Darwin's nineteenth-century travel writing in The Voyage of the Beagle becomes a vehicle for present day tourisms, travel romance, and racial othering, against the backdrop of New Zealand's lush landscape. Shot in 16mm colour negative film, the aesthetic of This Fine Island calls on the look of key postwar nation-building New Zealand films including John O'Shea's landmark bicultural romance Broken Barrier (1952) that engaged pictorial traditions of New Zealand's native landscape representation. The editing of nineteenth-century natural history animal plates in the film montaged against the contemporary naturalistic backdrop aims to reflect on traditions of observational accounts and the building of taxonomies of the world through travel and the British Empire, as well as citing Darwinian theories.