Like all cities, Sydney changes at a granular level every day. Buildings are demolished, new ones slowly take shape, shops open, restaurants change hands, homes are renovated, roads are widened.
Every so often, there’s a dramatic change in the city’s fabric that affects hundreds of thousands of lives: a new tunnel, a Metro extension or, later this year, a new airport.
And once something changes, it’s hard to remember what was there before. It’s a novelty when we catch a glimpse of the past in a photo or video.
But the films shot in Sydney are a permanent record of what the city looked, sounded and, importantly, felt like in the past.
The blokey surfie culture in the southern suburbs in the late 1970s and early ’80s is preserved in Puberty Blues. The vibrant gay scene is in the raunchy The Adventures Of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert (1994) and the more tender Holding The Man (2015). Stripclub-era Kings Cross and a scrappier Bondi are in Two Hands (1999).
There’s a contrast in the warm-hearted Italo-Australian inner west of Looking For Alibrandi (2000) and the edgier middle-class version in Lantana (2001).
The city’s extremes of wealth and opportunity show up vividly.
At the gritty end, there is the heroin-soaked past of Cabramatta in Little Fish (2005), the Indigenous culture of Blacktown (2005) and Around The Block (2013), the richly multicultural Here Out West (2021) and revealing documentaries like Whatever Happened To Green Valley? (1973), Billal (1996) and Temple of Dreams (2007).
At the well-off end, there is the advertising industry hedonism of Ruben Guthrie (2015) and beachside charm of Palm Beach (2019).
Two films and a notable documentary show the city in the early 1980s when heritage vs development in Kings Cross and Woolloomooloo was a battleground that led to the murder of newspaper publisher Juanita Nielsen: The Killing Of Angel Street, Heatwave and Rocking The Foundations.
These films might be filmmakers’ interpretations of the city’s subcultures, but they reflect the reality of the times.
“It’s wonderful how films can capture a place and times,” veteran director Gillian Armstrong says.
After triumphing with My Brilliant Career (1979), she made the comic musical Starstruck, which captured life around The Rocks and, across the water, the Opera House in the early 1980s. It had the vibrant Jo Kennedy as a teenage barmaid and aspiring pop singer, Jackie, who wants to win a talent contest and save the Harbour View Hotel from repossession.
Little seen in recent years, the restored Starstruck opens Sydney’s new Cinematheque, at the Art Gallery of NSW, on Saturday. It is part of a program called Harbour City Cinema that includes such hits as The Adventures Priscilla, Sweetie, Strictly Ballroom and Muriel’s Wedding alongside lesser-known Sydney films, documentaries and experimental shorts.
It’s a timely program given two recent Hollywood hits, The Fall Guy and Anyone But You, both showcased the harbour more effectively than any postcard.
To native Sydneysiders, The Matrix (1999) is even more fun when you recognise landmark buildings as Neo and Trinity rescue Morpheus from Martin Place in a captured helicopter, swing over the city and crash.
Ironically, given Starstruck is such a Sydney film, Stephen MacLean’s semi-autobiographical script was originally set in Melbourne, where he grew up.
With producer David Elfick, Armstrong switched it to Sydney.
“My review from David Stratton was ‘why is Gillian Armstrong wasting her talent on this film?’, which was really upsetting because he was the leading film reviewer,” she says. “It did put off a lot of people to go and see it.”
But when two of the songs became hits after appearing on Countdown, Armstrong says the film attracted young teenagers who went to see it multiple times.
“The distributors were a bit worried but the cinemas were full and there were repeat viewings,” she says.
At Q&A sessions in recent years, Armstrong has been surprised to learn how many people, including, Amanda Duthie, the new head of content for Netflix locally, were encouraged to take up creative careers from watching Starstruck in their early teens. Others appreciated that it had a gay character whose sexuality was treated matter-of-factly.
“David and I were gobsmacked this piece of rubbish that David Stratton thought I was wasting my time on actually had an amazing cultural effect on kids in Australia,” she says. “They said ‘we wanted to be bohemian, we wanted to be different’.”
Given the bridge and Opera House are much the same, Armstrong isn’t sure how nostalgic Starstruck will feel 44 years on “but it’s definitely a celebration of the harbour”.
The gallery’s acting senior curator of film, Ruby Arrowsmith-Todd, says the program is not just about nostalgia. It includes classic films set in Sydney alongside films that were shot here, including The Matrix.
“I always wanted Sydney Cinematheque’s opening season to celebrate the cinema of our own backyard,” she says. “Local films don’t always get the dedicated focused programs they deserve, especially short films that appear on the festival circuit then sometimes fade away.
“So the Harbour City Cinema program provided an opportunity to showcase some of the incredible work being made in Sydney right now.”
Arrowsmith-Todd also wanted to show Australian films by directors who shot here but lived elsewhere.
“Sydney is a great port city, a place of meetings, encounters, exchange,” she says. “So I wanted the series to be focused in on Sydney, but also look across the state and include filmmakers who have passed through the city.”
Among these filmmakers are Hong Kong-raised Clara Law, whose Floating Life (1996) is about a migrant family in the western suburbs, and Istanbul-based Ayten Kuyululu, whose short feature A Handful Of Dust (1974) is about a Muslim couple whose romance is threatened by a blood feud.
Harbour City Cinema runs at the Art Gallery of NSW from Saturday until May 27. The Starstruck screening has a Q&A with director Gillian Armstrong and production designer Brian Thomson.
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