I’m ending my Sydney Film Festival coverage looking at a short film that was a perfect end to the run of incredible cinema at the 62nd annual event. Sari Braithwaite’s Smut Hounds was a nine minute film, screening before the French film Metamorphoses, detailing the festival’s role in bringing the conversation of censorship to the forefront in the late 1960s courtesy of the festival’s then director, David Stratton. The all too brief account, told by Stratton and accompanied by clips from films censored in Australia over the prior years, marks the introduction of the R rating in Australia and the film classification board’s exception for film festivals, something which would perhaps have not come about – at least at the time that it had – if it hadn’t been for the campaign to get the Swedish film I Love, You Love (Jag älskar, du älskar) onto the screens at the Sydney Film Festival in 1969.
Though it may feel grandiose for the festival to screen a film about itself to help close the event, it’s a story worth telling – and put amongst the wider backstory of censorship in Australia, could even have been a feature documentary. This is an important moment in our cinema history, and both Stratton and the festival deserve the recognition.
Given the film’s timenframe, and the fact that Stratton’s story was compelling as it was by itself, its simplicity makes sense. A well shot interview with Stratton, intercut with brief clips from films, previously censored (some for less clear reasons than others), overwritten with typefaces screaming the words that would have presumably been screamed by the censors and the parents who want everyone to “think of the children”. It may have been a bit much in a longer piece, but the approach worked well in the context.
With this short, Sari Braithwaite has a compelling argument to bring together a feature documentary. I’d love to hear more from the politicians involved, the bewildered filmmaker and the cinephiles of Stratton’s generation. Shall we start the petition?
Review Score: THREE AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Smut Hounds screened at the Sydney Film Festival with Metamorphoses
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