Film Setting, Title, Historical Background, & Significance

SETTING: The film Gallipoli is set in the year 1915. The action opens in Western Australia, May 1915.  The second act moves to Cairo, Eqypt (where the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, comprised of Australian and New Zealander enlisted volunteers, was gathered and trained for the Gallipoli Campaign). The film's final act ends on 7 August 1915, at the Battle of the Nek, with the futile attack of reinforcement ANZAC* units against entrenched Turkish forces determined to defend the Gallipoli peninsula of Turkey.

*ANZAC [> A. & N.Z.A.C] = Australian and New Zealand Army Corps
"In 1917, the word ANZAC meant someone who fought at Gallipoli and later it came to mean any Australian or New Zealander who fought or served in the First World War. During the Second World War, ANZAC Day became a day on which the lives of all Australians lost in war time were remembered. The spirit of ANZAC recognises the qualities of courage, mateship and sacrifice which were demonstrated at the Gallipoli landing ("ANZAC Day"; emphasis added).

TITLE: So the film's title refers to the disastrous "1915 Gallipoli Campaign of World War I, during which approximately 8,000 Australian soldiers were killed, and over 20,000 wounded, in a hopeless battle against the Turks," and in making this film director Peter Weir "takes on one of the founding myths of Australian nationalism" (Sutherland; emphasis added).

ANZAC Day: April 25 has been commemorated annually by Australians since 1916.  April 25,1915 was the first landing of ANZAC troops on the Gallipoli peninsula, where they were stalemated by steep cliffs and fierce Turkish resistance. "The ANZACs and the Turks dug in - literally - digging kilometres of trenches, and pinned down each other's forces with sniper fire and shelling. Thousands of Australian and New Zealand men died in the hours and days that followed the landing at that beach. The surviving diggers, as the Australians called themselves, hung on waiting for reinforcements" ("ANZAC Day").  But ANZAC reinforcements and poorly-led futile offensives - such as the Battle of the Nek dramatized in the film Gallipoli - led to tragic waste of human life for both ANZAC invaders and Turkish defenders. Though April 25 is the day of commemoration, "the battles of Gallipoli last more than eight months" (known to the Turkish as "the Battle of Çannakkale" (Yasar) and ended in ANZAC evacuation on 20 Dec. 1915.  

In opinion-editorial piece published by the Turkish e-gazette Today's Zaman, Shirin Yasar considers "The Resonance of Gallipoli" as the 95th anniversary of Anzac Day nears:

     The significance of Gallipoli to Australians perplexes many from other nations. Gallipoli was a defeat; there were many other nationalities in the armies that fought at Gallipoli; the casualties of the British and French forces were far greater than those of the Australians. The number of lives lost [an estimated 81,500 men] by the Turkish army was more than any of the other nations. . . .
     . . . [Y]et there is hardly a child in Australia who has gone through the education system without becoming aware of Gallipoli. Despite the passage of time, the Gallipoli story continues to be passed down with as much zeal as the stories told to the earliest generation of Australian school children. Almost a century has passed since the war at Gallipoli, yet schoolchildren continue to listen to stories of brave Simpson and his donkey, the gallant attack at Lone Pine, the self-sacrificing charge at the Nek [the climactic event of Peter Weir's film] or various other incidents of Australian bravery. Each year the children are asked to observe a minute’s silence in memory of the men who lost their lives and the events they may never fully comprehend. Despite the valor of the ANZAC legend and the glory of the stories of gallantry, Australia was the invading country, and the battle ultimately amounted to a national loss that would only be recovered through a strategically swift retreat. So what is the significance of this event that has disallowed it to fade from the Australian psyche and perhaps more importantly, why is it that Gallipoli should continue to remain entrenched in the memories of all Australians? (Yasar; emphasis added)

To this intriguing question, Yasar provides thoughtfully balanced answer--beginning with Gallipoli's major significance representing "the birth of a nation"--and his article is well worth reading. As the Australian Government's Culture Portal web article "ANZAC Day" acknowledges, the realities of ANZAC participation in the Gallipoli Campaign grew into nationalistic legends, aided by an Australian inclination "to make heroes of noble failures." Remembrance of Gallipoli became a patriotic "story of courage and endurance amongst death and despair" ("ANZAC Day").  According to Dr. Frank Bongiorno, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of New England:

     The Gallipoli campaign was the beginning of true Australian nationhood. When Australia went to war in 1914, many white Australians believed that their Commonwealth had no history, that it was not yet a true nation, that its most glorious days still lay ahead of it. In this sense the Gallipoli campaign was a defining moment for Australia as a new nation, but also a key moment in the evolution of a particular image of Australian masculinity.
     The major features of an ANZAC legend were discernible very early in the campaign: Australians were bold and ferocious in battle but were unwilling to bow to military discipline. An ANZAC never flinched - if he died it was with a joke, or a wry smile on his face - yet nor would he salute a superior officer....In the ANZAC legend, the Australian Imperial Force was a democratic organisation, in which there were friendly relations between officers and men, and anyone could rise from the ranks to a commission. (qtd. in "ANZAC Day")

The Australian Government's "ANZAC Day" web article also acknowledges "a contrasting image to that of the bronzed and noble ANZAC," summarizing "evidence of the ANZAC's bad behavior" documented in Professor Manning Clark's A History of Australia:

As recruits, before being shipped to war, some indulged in sex orgies with an 18-year-old girl at the Broadmeadows camp, others confronted police in violent scuffles on the streets of Melbourne. Their behaviour in Egypt was no better - they burned the belongings of local people, brawled, got drunk and rioted, and spent sufficient time in the local brothels for many of them to suffer from venereal disease.
     Although perhaps less than heroic, this behavior too - brawling, drinking, fighting - is part of the Australian construction of masculinity . . . . ("ANZAC Day")

Heroic and "less than heroic" reality and legend have melded in forging Australian identity. "At Gallipoli, men from all backgrounds and classes from the newly federated Australia created the essence of what it means to be Australian - courage under fire, grace under pressure, giving a hand to a mate" ("ANZAC Day"; emphasis added). 

But as Yasar points out, not only for Australians but also for Turks and New Zealanders, ". . . Gallipoli is something apart -- a significant event in the self-development of their individual nations." The "joint suffering" and "vast loss of life in seeming wastefulness" have also forged special bonds of "mutual respect" (Yasar).  What may seem surprising is that "'Australia and Turkey are perhaps the only two countries in the world that have a strong friendship born out of a war'" (Rusty Priest, qtd. in Yasar). 

Australian "New Wave" Cinema, Peter Weir & Gallipoli

"Film in Australia," featured in the Australian Government's Culture Portal (which unfortunately will be closed down in July 2010 due to economic constraints!), provides a valuable introduction and web directory.  The  Australian "New Wave" or "Renaissance" in filmmaking refers to the enormously creative period from the early 1970s through the mid-1980s ("Film in Australia").  And, as Romy Sutherland explains:

Peter Weir helped to define the rebirth of Australian cinema, while addressing some of the most pressing concerns of the nation in the 1970s and 1980s. His intriguing images of Australia, evocative and transcendent, made an impact in the international art house scene, eager for compelling visions of geo-political areas and cultures overlooked by mainstream cinema. After achieving international recognition as an emblematic Australian filmmaker, Weir made his transition to Hollywood while maintaining a sense of experimentation and artistic exploration.

In an interview with Sue Mathews, published in her 35mm Dreams: Conversations with Five Directors about the Australian Film Revival (Melbourne: Penguin, 1984), Peter Weir called Gallipoli (1981) his “'graduation film'” (Mathews 87, qtd. in Sutherland), by which Weir meant that Gallipoli was "the first film he directed where he felt fully in control of his artistic resources" (Sutherland). 

In another interview (originally published in 1981), Weir states: "I felt somehow I was really touching history" in Gallipoli, he and his film crew coming "as close to touching the source of the myth as we could" ("Peter Weir on Gallipoli").

"Gallipoli was internationally received as a statement on the irrationality of warfare . . . . In Australia it was also received as a statement about the damaging results of British arrogance on the Australian psyche" (Sutherland). While earlier film treatments "of Australian participation in the First World War . . . highlighted Australian pride in its special role assisting the objectives of the British Empire," Weir's Gallipoli "underscores the perils of the Australian connection to Britain, as the crux of the film rests on the premise that the British commanders knew that the operation was doomed to failure, and had little compunction in sacrificing the lives of Australia's youth" (Sutherland). One "message of the film" is that "motherland" Britain betrayed young Australia's "loyalty," though the reality was more complicated.  In part because Weir emphasizes "Australia's innocence and Britain's guilt in the conflict" and represses "any sense of Australian brutality and aggressive behavior," some critics maintain that Gallipoli is less complex and satisfying than Peter Weir's other films (Sutherland). 

Some Characteristics of Peter Weir's Filmmaking

Romy Sutherland summarizes some recurring characteristics of Peter Weir's filmmaking as follows:

In Gallipoli, Weir re-creates a "dusty realism" and employs a "linear, direct style of storytelling, with fe[w] obviously stylised effects, while still conjuring richly atmospheric moments to portray the subjective confusion of traumatic events" (Sutherland). One such eerie film moment to notice is the beautiful but ominous scene of the young ANZACs, newly arrived at Gallipoli, swimming in the ocean.

Another surreal film sequence to notice:  Archy and Frank risking their lives on a foolhardy trek across the seering southwestern Australian desert to get to Perth so that Archy can fake his identification and be sent off to a death-dealing European war in Turkey.  In an interview, Peter Weir comments:

"Yes, it's strange to see these two young men off to a European war, walking through such a vast empty space. It had a fabulously abstract appeal to me, to hear them arguing about the war, and whether it's right or wrong to go, in the middle of all that blinding nothing. There are moments of that unreality throughout the film - the small boy blowing a trumpet on top of the giant enlistment wooden horse, the night landing, the sequence of the men swimming underwater at Gallipoli beach with the shells exploding all round them. . . . . To understand, you have to deal in paradox. 'They were the best of times and the worst of times' and the film is about both those aspects." ("Peter Weir on Gallipoli")