Tim Burstall (20 April 1927, Stockton-on-Tees, UK – 19 April 2004, Melbourne) was an Australian film director, writer and producer, best known for the motion picture Alvin Purple.
Burstall was a key figure in Australian postwar cinema and was instrumental in rebuilding the Australian film industry at a time when it had been effectively dead for years. He created groundbreaking Australian films including Stork, Alvin Purple, End Play, Eliza Fraser, The Last of the Knucklemen and the 1986 adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's novel Kangaroo.
Burstall also launched the film careers of many well-known actors including Bruce Spence, Jacki Weaver, Graeme Blundell, Jack Thompson, John Waters and Judy Davis. His wife Betty, an important figure in her own right, founded the pioneering La Mama Theatre in Melbourne in the late '60s. Many leading Australian 'new wave' playwrights including David Williamson had their first successes there, and Burstall was an integral part of the fertile creative scene that centred on the theatre.
Speaking just after Burstall's death, Williamson said that Burstall "couldn't stomach" Australia's lack of a film industry. "He was determined to do something about it and he had the energy and spirit to do it. (He) was a very important cultural figure: highly intelligent, widely read, with a succinct and often highly controversial opinion on everything."
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Burstall was born in Stockton-on-Tees, England in 1927 and his family came to Australia in 1937 when he father took up a chair as professor of engineering at the University of Melbourne. He attending Geelong Grammar where he was taught by historian Manning Clark. His parents returned to England after World War II but he remained in Australia. He graduated with an Honours Arts degree from the University of Melbourne in 1946. He met Betty, whom he married, at university. They built a mud brick house at Eltham, Victoria.[1]
He and Patrick Ryan established Eltham Films, in 1959.
On the evening of Sunday 18 April 2004 Burstall suffered a massive stroke while attending a screening of his short films, organised by Eltham Council, the Melbourne suburb where he made his first feature, The Prize. He was taken to hospital, but died soon after, in the early hours of 19 April, aged 76.[1] He is survived by his wife Betty and his sons Dan, a cinematographer, and Tom, a film producer and husband of actor Sigrid Thornton.
Burstall's first film was a black-and-white short, The Prize, which won an award at the Venice Film Festival in 1960. It is the story of a boy who wins a goat in a fairground competition, then has it stolen from him, and it featured Burstall's two young sons in acting roles.
Working with other leading Melbourne film identities including David Bilcock, Dusan Marek, Giorgio Mangiamele, Gerard Vanceburg, Allan Harness and composer George Dreyfus, Eltham Films made many short subjects, including acclaimed documentaries on modern Australian art and the early children's TV puppet show Sebastian The Fox, which first screened on the ABC in 1962-63.
Eltham's Australian art films encompassed the contemporary internationally recognised artists of the Melbourne set—including Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, John Brack, Albert Tucker and Clifton Pugh -- and these films proved influential in the formation of Burstall's views on Australian cultural identity. The Eltham documentaries also covered Australian historical figures, aboriginal bark paintings and the treasures of the National Gallery of Victoria. Together, Eltham Films and Collings Productions were the main contributors of a filmed record of Australian art in the 1960s.
In 1965 he made two films for the Commonwealth Film Unit -- the documentary Painting People, an overview of the work of some of the artists he had surveyed in his earlier documentaries, and the children's film Nullarbor Hideout. He also collaborated on the Eltham Films production The Magic Trumpet, an animated feature co-directed with Dusan Marek.
From 1965-67 he travelled to the USA on Harkness Fellowship and studied scriptwriting with Paddy Chayevsky, directing with Martin Ritt and acting with Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio in New York.[1]
On 30 July 1967 the La Mama Theatre opened in Carlton, Melbourne. The theatre was the brainchild of Tim's then wife Betty Burstall and was modelled on the "off-off-Broadway" theatre of the same name in New York City. it was inspired by their trip to the U.S. - they wanted to re-create "the vibrancy and immediacy of the small theatres there". It became a hub of cultural activity—within the first two years of its life twenty-five new Australian plays had premiered there, and La Mama also fostered new works from composers, poets, and filmmakers. The theatre gained considerable notoriety in 1969 when Alex Buzo's controversial play Norm and Ahmed premiered there, leading to the arrest and charging of several of the actors by the Victorian ViceSquad for the use of 'obscene' language.
Burstall earned a place in Australian cinema history as the writer and director of the feature 2000 Weeks. Released in 1969, it was Australia's first locally-made feature film since Charles Chauvel's Jedda in 1955. Although it was a commercial failure and was savaged by the critics, it was an important influence on Bruce Beresford and Phillip Adams when they came to make The Adventures of Barry McKenzie in 1972. The poor critical reception of 2000 Weeks affected Burstall strongly. It's clear that the hostility to the film and its serious tone, combined with his close contact with APG, were instrumental in changing his views on film-making, and led to the making of the more populist Stork and Alvin Purple.
Burstall briefly returned to documentary for the making of the cult surfing film Getting Back To Nothing (1970). It was followed by Stork in 1971, which was a moderate commercial success. Burstall raised the money for the film by selling several of his Arthur Boyd paintings. It also marked the first screen credit for acclaimed playwright David Williamson, being an adaptation of one of his first plays, The Coming Of Stork, which had premiered at La Mama in 1970. The film featured most of the La Mama/APG ensemble including Bruce Spence, for whom the title role had been written.
Williamson went on to work with Burstall on three more films, Petersen (for which Stanley Kubrick praised Burstall for his direction and Jack Thompson for his acting),[1] Eliza Fraser (the first major Australian period drama)[1] and Duet for Four. After forming a new production company, Hexagon Films, he produced, directed and co-wrote (with Alan Hopgood) his next feature, Alvin Purple, which was a huge hit with Australian audiences, held the record as Australia's most successful film release between 1971 and 1977, and is one of the key works in the revival of Australian cinema in the '70s. Alvin was a defining work in the so-called "ocker" genre, films that were deliberately pitched at the mainstream popular market. It was a huge commercial success in spite of almost unanimous critical disapproval, and it was also very significant as a marker for the revival of the local industry, being the first locally-made feature to include significant backing from a local theatrical chain.
He also worked extensively in television, directing episodes of series including Special Squad, Return to Eden II, The Man from Snowy River and Water Rats. His miniseries, Great Expectations: The Untold Story, was the first co-production between an independent filmmaker and ABC TV.[1]
A portrait of Burstall won the 1975 Archibald Prize, but the artist, John Bloomfield, was controversially stripped of the honour after it was revealed he had painted it from a magazine photograph (the prize stipulates that portraits must be painted from life).
Burstall won a number of Australian Film Institute awards for his work and was awarded an Order of Australia in the Australia Day honours list in 1996.
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