This book can't have been cheap to produce: commissioned by Diane Pivac of the Film Archive with nearly everything outsourced locally, including the printing, it weighs in at just under 2 kg and contains 360 colour pages on thick glossy paper with a hard cover; and it has a bonus DVD with extracts (most around 2 minutes) from several types of film made in NZ since 1900. Accordingly, Te Papa Press has done well to keep the retail price at only $85.
When we produced the book Celluloid Dreams to mark a century of both film exhibition and production in New Zealand in 1997 (actually the former was in 1996 and the latter in 1998) we intended it to be an objective and informative history without too much academic waffle and psycho-analysing of the films; that could be and was done by others. And it is what you get plenty of with this book, not unexpectedly given some of the contributors.
Does this have lots of nice stills, posters and production scenes (surrounded by artistic white space)? Yep. Is it complete and comprehensive? Despite its size, no. One area that we wanted to dwell on a lot more with Celluloid Dreams, but the budget didn't allow it, was industrial and short films; this book adds little. But it does contain a fair bit of general movie information which complements our book. We intend to produce a free update of Celluloid Dreams, particularly the filmography, as an e-book next year.
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