Festival guests: Jacki Weaver and Kate Fitzpatrick, 1974. Photo: Robert Pearce
When David Donaldson directed the city's first film festival in 1954, Sydney was a very different place.
Under prime minister Robert Menzies, the White Australia policy was still in place, drinkers launched into the 6 o'clock swill before the pubs closed and married women were barred from working in the Commonwealth public service.
Rather than an upmarket suburb, Paddington was one of the city's worst slums and a phone call to Melbourne had to be booked in advance through an operator.
''There was only one cinema showing anything but American and British films,'' says Donaldson. ''The Savoy in Bligh Street was showing French films primarily.''
Yet in an atmosphere of post-war optimism, a band of film enthusiasts launched the debut festival at Sydney University, taking over lecture theatres and halls for screenings.
''The university was full at that time of temporary buildings to accommodate ex-service people,'' says Donaldson.
Less than a decade after World War II, the festival became part of a new artistic life that was emerging around the National Art School, Independent Theatre, Musica Viva and small but passionate organisations such as the Sydney University film society.
Donaldson says that first festival was ''rapturously successful'', attracting many European immigrants who had been starved of cinema from their own countries.
''They knew about these things in Europe but didn't find them here,'' he says. ''And all these great wartime documentaries opened people's eyes to the capabilities of the medium.''
Despite financial struggles, controversies and organisational overhauls at times, the 60th Sydney Film Festival will take place in June. And to mark the anniversary, the festival is launching an online archive of its colourful history on Wednesday.
Sydney Film Festival 1954 To Now: A Living Archive features essays by various festival directors, including David Stratton, Fairfax Media critic Paul Byrnes and incumbent Nashen Moodley, interviews with such filmmakers as Tom Zubrycki, Liz Watts and Rolf de Heer, and David Marr chronicling the festival's long and continuing battle against film censorship.
Donaldson, who was a 23-year-old research assistant at the University of NSW when he took on the festival, says it was created by a coalition of non-commercial film interests. ''The commercial film industry had nothing to do with it,'' he says. ''Looking back, film was intensely regulated.
''There was licensing of theatres, licensing of distributors. Operating a cinema required the permission of the chief secretary, which you didn't get because Hoyts and Greater Union were sitting comfortably on top of nearly everything.
''They had their arrangements with distributors so a narrow channel of force-feeding of commercial films was what film was always understood to be in Australia at that time.''
The program for that debut festival included the Australian premiere of John Heyer's now classic documentary The Back of Beyond, about outback postman Tom Kruse, Jacques Tati's Jour de Fete, Buster Keaton's The General and Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc.
Donaldson is not surprised the festival has lasted so long. ''We had a mission: we wanted to achieve something,'' he says. ''We didn't just want to satisfy people who already had interests. We wanted to create interests and show another world.''
To access the archive got to http://online.sffarchive.org.au
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