That Miller’s project can so casually be demystified as the three Ms – music, montage, and myth – and that he himself ably defines the terms, has perhaps contributed to his general under-appreciation in critical and scholarly discourse. It is evident, even in his earliest work, that he intuitively grasps the expressive possibilities of the medium – a formal aptitude that led to film scholar Adrian Martin labelling him Australia’s “most completely cinematic filmmaker.” 8 The quote also suggests something of his stylistic confidence. Miller has in fact consistently been obsessed with what he terms the “plasticity” of cinema: the way a film is made by stringing together a series of shots like “notes on a piano.” 6 The musicality of cinema and specifically, montage cinema, has been the foundational principal of his career, from the first Max (assembled, he has suggested, as a kind of ‘rock’n’roll’ movie) 7 to his two works of animation, the freewheeling jukebox musicals Happy Feet (2006) and Happy Feet Two (2011). In fact, Max’s shoot was difficult precisely because he had an ambitious montage schema in mind – he would say that he had problems getting his crew, who were accustomed to shooting the plain coverage of Australian television, to adhere to this vision. The early Cinema Papers quote is notable for the deceptively off-hand way in which Miller justifies what is actually the essence of his style, characterising the ‘montage film’ as an expedient choice for a first-time filmmaker. He has even referred to cinema as ‘public dreaming’, in an allusion to the songlines of Australian Aboriginals (he devoted a one hour documentary, 40,000 Years of Dreaming, made in 1997 for the BFI, to this idea). He sees the movie theatre as a kind of spiritual sanctum, and filmic storytelling as having a role analogous to the transportive ritual of primitive cultures. This is partly a commercial decision (monomyth narratives are thought to have a reliable appeal), but it is also founded in a sense that cinema has a cultural or social function. 3 Like many other filmmakers – including, famously, George Lucas – Miller has adopted the framework of this monomyth as the blueprint for his films. Since the release of the second and third Max films – Mad Max 2, in 1981 (released in the US as The Road Warrior) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, in 1985 – he has been particularly forward about his passion for the work of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, who posited an archetypal ‘monomyth’ that inheres in all cultures. Miller, famously, trained in medicine, completing a residency at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney before launching his film career, and there’s something of the doctor’s bedside manner in his public conduct – a professorial mien that makes him an able explainer of his work, though he is in other respects firm in his resistance to intellectualising film and the audience’s experience of it. In a crazy sort of way, you actually have more control over a montage film, particularly if you are dealing with inexperienced actors…for a first feature, you go for more cutting.” 2 “There are two basic types of films the mise-en-scene film, which is the camera recording performance or incidents, but making little editorial comment, and the montage film, which is all done with the camera. He was likely bitter and dispirited at the time- Max’s shoot had been difficult, and its post-production long and onerous, and the final product was not to his expectations 1 – but, in the interview, he sounds breezily confident: The film had yet to become an enormous success, and so Miller was only just starting out on the path to becoming the foremost commercial titan of Australian cinema. In a 1979 interview, just prior to the release of his debut feature Mad Max, George Miller gave an encapsulated account of his understanding of film style to Peter Beilby and Scott Murray, from Australia’s Cinema Papers.
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