Abstract
Film plays a crucial role in the formation of national identity, and an equally important part in providing interpretations of history.1 Many people who have no formal knowledge of history will gain an understanding of the past from film and television. Nations often identify themselves by glorifying key moments in their history, and film and television interpretations then bring these events to life in a more immediate way than any other form of communication. Peter Weir’s Gallipoli is a film about an historical event that played a key role in shaping Australia’s perception of itself, and its qualities, as a nation. To Australian and world audiences, the film took on an added significance for it also marked the coming-of-age of the Australian film industry. Few moments of Australian history had ever been put on film before, and so Gallipoli brought to world audiences an Australia shaped by an Australian cast and crew.
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Notes
See Jeffrey Richards, Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997 ).
For a history of the fighting on the Gallipoli peninsula, see Tim Travers, Gallipoli 1915 ( Stroud: Tempus, 2001 )
for the impact of the Anzac legend on Australian society, see Jenny Macleod, Reconsidering Gallipoli ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004 )
Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the legend ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994 ).
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 ( New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992 ), pp. 5–7.
For more details on Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, see Jeffrey Grey, A Military History of Australia ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 )
Jeffrey Grey and Jeff Doyle (eds), Vietnam: War, Myth and Memory ( Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992 ).
For a history of modern Australian cinema, see Brian McFarlane, Australian Cinema, 1970–1985 ( London: Secker & Warburg, 1987 ).
Bill Gammage, David Williamson and Peter Weir, The Story of Gallipoli. The Film About the Men Who Made a Legend ( Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1981 ), p. 6.
Peter Simkins, ‘Everyman at War: Recent Interpretations of the Front Line Experience’, in Brian Bond (ed.), The First World War and British Military History ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 ), pp. 305–7.
Brian McFarlane, ‘Peter Weir’s Gallipoli’, Cinema Papers, 33 (August 1981), pp. 285–6.
See Glyn Williams and John Ramsden, Ruling Britannia: A Political History of British History, 1688–1988 ( Harlow: Longman, 1990 ), pp. 475–96.
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© 2007 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Connelly, M. (2007). Gallipoli (1981): ‘A Poignant Search for National Identity’. In: Chapman, J., Glancy, M., Harper, S. (eds) The New Film History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/9780230206229_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/9780230206229_4
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