The Public and Private Lives of a Sentimental Bloke

Perhaps not many of the original viewers of The Sentimental Bloke recognized it immediately as the Great Australian Film that many critics have since proclaimed it to be, but they liked it well enough to make it the top-grossing Australian production of the silent era.' Raymond Longford's film seems to have been one of the few things, however, on which any number of Australians could manage to agree in 1919, for these were fractious and unruly times. The war was over, but conflict was continuing unabated on several domestic fronts: on the streets (with pitched battles between returned servicemen and socialist demonstrators), in the workplace (with strike action reaching a new high), and in the home (with divorce sharply on the rise). Australian society was perhaps more deeply divided, in fact, than at any other point in its history. Remarkably, in light of its popular success, The Sentimental Bloke neither ignores nor evades these social divisions. On the contrary, it directly addresses issues of class and gender (and, at least by implication, issues of religion and ethnicity as well). Longford seems to have managed somehow to make his way through an ideological minefield. In order to understand the film's success with its original spectators, however, we have to look not only at its treatment of these potentially divisive issues but also at the curiously divided form of spectatorship it solicits. Both the film's social ideology and its implied spectatorship ultimately prove to involve the same dialectic of public and private experience

Art · Humanities · Cinema and Media Studies · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

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