Cinema
The Story of the Kelly Gang
Charles Tait · 1906
Synopsis
In Victoria, the police talk of an arrest warrant against Dan Kelly, and his sister Kate turns one of them away. The Kelly brothers and their companions take to the bush: at Stringybark Creek, the gang kills three policemen, Kennedy, Scanlon and Lonigan, then holds the people of the Younghusband station at bay and robs a bank; later, it shoots Aaron Sherritt. The film presents the Kellys as heroes and the police as the enemy, without apologising for celebrating outlaws.
Context
The film was shot mainly at Charterisville, near Heidelberg, on the edge of Melbourne, for a budget estimated at between 400 and 1,000 pounds, and it perhaps earned more than 25,000. It had no intertitles: a lecturer or actors provided continuity in the cinema, and in Melbourne sound effects accompanied the images. Shown on 26 December 1906 at the Athenaeum Hall in Melbourne, it reached the United Kingdom in 1908. Banned from April 1907 in Benalla and Wangaratta, it preceded the ban on bushranger films in New South Wales and Victoria in 1912.
Who it is for
A silent film of more than an hour, of which only sixteen or seventeen minutes survive, restored by the Australian film archive.
Prizes and reception
Inscribed in 2007 on UNESCO's Memory of the World register as the world's first narrative feature film.
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