Talking Shit

Richard Watts talks with filmmaker Bert Deling about his 1975 masterpiece Pure Shit, which has just been released on DVD after years in the wilderness.


In 1975, the soft-focus historical melodrama Picnic at Hanging Rock was the acceptable face of the Australian film industry. It, not Burt Deling’s low budget junkie drama Pure Shit, was the movie the Australian Film Commission took to Cannes the following year.

“The Film Commission had given us money to make Pure Shit and when we showed it to them, two thirds of the way through… they simply broke their contract! Never done it before and as far as I know never done it since; [they] just said ‘Sorry, we’re not giving you the money to complete it’,” Deling tells MCV.

“We got the money together to complete [the film], and then we got banned. We got it unbanned – the Film Commission refused to take it to Cannes with all the rest of the crinoline films. All those people were doing their damndest to make sure that this film was never seen by anybody!

“Never underestimate the brutal power of middle class taste, because they just went after us, you know? We were hammered.”

Inspired in equal parts by the French New Wave and by Deling’s desire to respond to the first wave of the heroin epidemic, and the equal dangers of the early methadone program (“Within two years, that [initial] level of methadone was killing people. People were dying of renal failure, which is of course one way to solve the drug problem…”), Pure Shit enlisted real addicts both in front of and behind the camera to present a scathing mix of black comedy and social commentary.

“I thought I was making a drive-in movie with a political message,” says Deling.

Instead, he created a masterpiece.

Film critic and former Sydney Film Festival director Paul Byrnes describes Pure Shit as “an assault on the structures of society as well as its forms of expression. The film is a scabrous comedy, made roughly and on a tiny budget, but with extraordinary energy and commitment.”

Featuring performances by the then-unknown Helen Garner, Max Gillies and Greg Pickhaver (H. G. Nelson), it’s an often hilarious tale about desperate junkies in search of a fix, set in and around the streets of Carlton, then home to a vibrant artistic community centred around The Pram Factory and the Melbourne University Film Society.

“At that time there were some filmmakers starting to come out of Czechoslovakia and places like that,” says Deling, “and we used to say, ‘Isn’t it amazing how these guys can make films with a buried message with that sort of government control?’ Well, we have government control over our film industry, but no one seems to even know about it, you know?”

Such control, through the established funding system, results in a state-sanctioned form of culture which Deling has little time for.

“There are people in the Film Commission who’ve been doing this job for ten years and they’ve never made a film that’s covered its costs. Now, what the fuck is going on? Why hasn’t somebody put the spotlight on these buggers, you know? Asked them to justify their existence?”

It’s a question no-one will ever need to ask of Bert Deling.

Pure Shit is out now through Beyond Home Entertainment.

This interview first appeared in MCV on Thursday May 28.