mbc stuff

All the civilising things which were once considered women’s work in pioneering society, because by large women were unable to travel and learn...

Franklin’s view of manhood and the bush legend
My Brilliant Career is often read as the tale of a woman finding her (romantic) voice against the odds (the reality of bush life): a reading popularised by Gillian Armstrong's 1979 film

Novel suggests that the central character Harold, and men more generally, seem incapable of true passions because it might mean giving up control.
- If Harold can not give into passion freely than he can never excite Sybylla. Similarly for Franklin, men are trapped within masculinity, reaping the benefits of power but are afraid of giving up control.
From today’s perspective this book seems to have appeared on the scene at exactly the right time. It was federation year, women all over Australia were about to get the vote and many ‘brilliant careers’ were expected from young women of Franklin’s generation.
Initially greeted with praise and affection, it brought its young author both fame and embarrassment, for it was read as an autobiography. For many years it was out of print, with Franklin refusing to republish. Her will, when she died in 1954, prevented it from being republished for a further 10 years. Nevertheless, since it reappeared in 1965 it has been continuously available. This is a rare occurrence for an Australian title, even one that is now considered one of the ‘books that made us’ (Weekend Australian, August 1995)

Gillian Armstrong’s film of Miles Franklin’s novel remains remarkable true to the spirit of the original which, almost unbelievably, considering the modernity of its sentiments and the ebullient confidence of its tone, was written by a young woman of 16 and first published in 1901.

The story centres on Sybylla Melvyn, a young woman living with her parents on a remote farm in the bush...... She dreams of living a more intellectually and culturally rewarding life in the arts, and is writing a ‘memoir’. When she goes to stay on her grandmother’s estate at Caddagat things improve somewhat, and she is courted by Frank Hawden, a rather idiotic English immigrant, and Harry Beecham, a young landowner. She is attracted to the latter, and is then faced with the choice of trying to pursue a ‘brilliant career’ or getting married.

The real importance of both novel and film lies in their acute description of a young woman’s feelings at a transitional moment in her life.
Carmen Callil, author and the founder of the independent publishing house, Virago Press, aptly noted,
“ Miles Franklin was decades ahead of her time, and My Brilliant Career was written for an audience not yet born. For the character of Sybylla Melvyn, Mile rankling created a character who mouths with incredible charm but deadly accuracy of the fears, conflicts and torments of every girl, with an understanding usually associated with writers of the 1960s and 70s” .

All the main qualities admired in the book have been triumphantly retained by the film, which it might be added, also manages to exclude some of the original’s slightly less attractive qualities, such as its nationalism (which it shared with many of its literary contemporaries), and a certain tendency to let ebullience and exuberance overflow into gush and overly self- conscious romanticism. The dialogue, too has been considerably updated and ‘de-literacised’ ; but the sentiments expressed by Sybylla are very much those that animate her in the novel.

As with many women who make films, much is made of the values portrayed in Armstrong’s work and their relevance to current feminist theories (thus often ignoring her working practice or aesthetic choices). Armstrong’s films are character studies, with human interaction and personal journey at the heart of the narrative. So with this as her springboard.....
The conflict between career, creativity and marriage is a developing theme in Armstrong’s work and MBC is merely her first commentary on it. MBC describes the conflict between relationship and career. It is a story of unrequited love, restrained passion and friendship between men and women, which i believe the heart of all Armstrong films. Sybylla can never marry Harry, anymore than Jo could marry Laurie. And Lucinda is fated to lose Oscar with no more than a kiss between them. [Little Women (1994), Oscar and Lucinda (1997)]
My Brilliant Career makes the best of a variety of stunning Australian landscapes but demonstrates its real beauty and clout as an inward journey into the soulscape of an artist determined to dance alone to the music of her own special muse.

Sybylla - as a teenage girl who dreams of transcending her rural background to become a cultivated, independent woman

Armstrong upset her critics when Sybylla refused to marry harry, despite several proposals from him. Even Geater Union (the company who distributed and exhibited the film) were worried that the female audience would be dissatisfied. So Armstrong added the line at the end with Sybylla saying “I am so near loving you”, which implied some sort of ambiguity..............

Sybylla is plain, defiantly outspoken and determined to be an accomplished musician, actress or writer rather than humble outback farmer’s wife. So her poor family dispatches her to rich Grandma Bossier (Aileen Britton) and Aunt Helen (Wendy Hughes), and later neighbouring Aunt Gussie (Patricia Kennedy), in the hope of quieting her ambition, or at least instilling some propriety.A staunch opponent of a premature marriage, and rejecter of pompous suitor Frank Hawden (Robert Grubb), Sybylla finds herself in the novel position of falling in love with her grandmother’s neighbour, Harry Beecham (Sam Neill). Beecham is one of the few men of his station not to be galled by her presumptuous behaviour and Sybylla must soon choose between married life and pursuing her vaguely formulated career.

The book is direct, tough, amusing though laced with a bitter-sweet irony, and with a wild freedom about it. And director Gillian Armstrong has managed to include all those aspects in her 1979 movie- aided of course with a superb cats and crew.

However, we need to consider that My Brilliant Career’s main crew- director, producer, screenwriter and production designer- were all women intensely dedicated to creating a cinematic version of the 1901 novel by the revered Australian author and feminist Miles Franklin.
Their rendition successfully let most of the original intact while adding their own, contemporary layers of nuance. Indeed the rich interplay of innuendo that results from a character who simultaneously speaks to both past and present is the film’s most significant feature.

Sybylla Melvyn, the aspirant careerist of the title, is an 'uppity woman.' Her high spirits, her attitudes towards marriage, equality, and careerism, and her tomboyish actions mark her historically as an independent New Woman. The film's handling of certain motifs, while remaining faithful to a portrayal of life circa 1900, encourages viewers to see Sybylla as sharing traits and concerns with the activist woman of the 1970's. Armstrong uses cinema's visual power, for instance, to suggest the timeless influence social forces exercise in controlling women's lives. When Sybylla appears under a mosquito netting, her face covered by a grotesque and all too modern appearing facial treatment, playfully gesturing like a cat, all women can relate to the entrapping tyranny exercised by the pressure women feel to make themselves beautiful. The unforgettable pillow fight between Harry and Sybylla is an incident that in Victorian terms illustrates inappropriate, but innocent, tomboyish behavior. The manner in which this sequence is photographed and played out by the actors, however, clearly reveals pent-up sexual tensions erupting into a friendly battle of the sexes. And feminists of the Seventies derived vicarious delight from the fact that Sybylla was forward enough to strike the first blow and determined enough to land the last one.
At the end of the film Sybylla becomes a true, self-possessed heroine by setting aside the childish worldview she held at the beginning--the exasperating pronouncements, the unpredictable, often contradictory actions, her spoiled brat behavior. Thanks to the humanistic education she gained during her "walkabout" among family situations of differing levels of privilege, class, and wealth, she has matured into her determination to remain single and have a career. When she refused Harry Beecham's first proposal, it was out of egotistic, youthful bravado. When she definitively declines him, it is from the strength of her self-knowledge.
Sybylla's decision comes from a maturity carefully prepared over the course of the film.

Even so, the note Armstrong adds at the end that Sybylla's book, My Brilliant Career, was published in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1901 is a device that contrives to reassure and convince disappointed viewers that Sybylla's career as a writer turned out positively and was not just another immature, girlish whim. And, furthermore, that it really was acceptable to say no to marriage.

Miles Franklin published her famous novel MBC in 1901. It was later adapted into a film and released to rave reviews in 1979 under the direction of Gillian Armstrong. The story focused on a young bush girl who wants more than a husband, a farm and a brood of kids. The key figure is Sybylla, played by the young Judy Davis.
Sybella is a poor farm girl, who wants nothing more than to be writer. That single desire drives the story of her struggle. It is a struggle against a powerful set of conventions- gender, class; as most of the key figures around Sybella want her to mature, marry and settle down. Sybella too on some level is drawn to the idea-represented by the handsome, kind and wealthy figure of harry Beecham of ‘Five-Bob-Downs’. Harry played by Sam Neill, is the rather hard-to-resist love interest.
But resist she does, and tis is where the film is unusual. Much of the story is about Sybylla’s resistance, the outward defiance and the inner, emotional struggle that ends up in her heartbreaking choice- she knocks her suitor back. She chooses her way.
The film spawned a heap of commentary; loads of praise and buckets of criticimsms. Many argued about what the film was saying about women, female character, freedom and choice. And many of the key concerns raised by the feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s were concentrated in the film.

MBC had made a sharp break from traditional portrayals of bush heroines in earlier Australian films. During the 1920’s, Australian bush heroines were depicted as ale to ride and shoot, brand cattle and even rescue the men. (eg. A Girl of the Bush - 1920).
Similar to Hollywood films starring Bette Davis and Katherine Hepburn, Armstrong depicted her female protagonist as a woman ‘in control of events’. But unlike that of Sybylla, these spirited and independent heroines still ended up in the arms of the male lead in the movies final scenes.
Not so in MYC, with Sybylla saying ‘no’ to Harry in words that make one thing clear- she will not abandon her talents and give up her dream. As she says:
“The last thing I want is to be a wife out in the bush, having a baby every year. Maybe I’m ambitious, selfish. But I can’t lose myself in somebody else’s life when i haven’t lived my own”.


Director Gillian Armstrong had her own take on the story... she argued that Sybylla was passionately attracted to Harry but he wasn’t the right person for her.

In adapting a novel, the screenwriter is always faced with difficult choices: what to include/exclude, how to compensate for necessary excisions, how to conflate characters and incidents, how to show what the writer tells. Underlying these decisions are the contrasting circumstances of reading and watching. It is worth reminding ourselves - and our students - that a novel will take many hours to read; that unless we are impelled to stay up all night to finish it, the novel will be read in chunks, over a period of days or weeks; that reading is an intimate experience, usually undertaken in private; and that the reader is always at liberty to re-read, to skip, to jump ahead and generally to control the experience. The experience of watching a film, on the other hand, is concentrated into two or three hours at most; it takes place on a single, uninterrupted occasionand the viewer is a captive audience, with no choice but to follow the relentless progress of the action on the screen.
Literature Matters 32: Film and Literature - Two Ways of Telling

by Alan Pulverness

_____________________________________________________________________

My Brilliant Career tells the story of Sybylla Melvyn, one of the great heroines of Australian literature and fi lm. Sybylla is a passionate, headstrong woman who articulates her discontent with the narrow paths set out for women in the 1890s. Despite poverty and hardship, isolation and the rigid expectations of her society, Sybylla is determined to resist the tempting but stifl ing security of marriage and to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. Above all else, she refuses to be owned, and it is her independence of spirit and mind that makes her story both moving and inspirational.

The text has much to say about the inequities of marriage, the solace offered by art, and the workings of class and gender in Australian society. It also offers a re-working of myths about our bush landscape. Beyond that, My Brilliant Career is, on several levels, a testament
to the courage and conviction of Australian women artists.


In 1965, Margaret Fink stumbled on Miles Franklin’s book. She describes herself at the time as ‘half way through a breeding decade in a lace prison of marriage’. Fink found inspiration in Sybylla, and she dedicated herself to becoming a producer who might one day bring the story to the screen. On the set of The Removalists (Tom Jeffrey, 1975), her first feature as producer, she was impressed by the young props assistant, Gillian Armstrong, and thought that perhaps she had found someone who could help her realize her dream.
My Brilliant Career was to become her first feature fi lm as director, and the first Australian feature fi lm to be directed by a woman in fi fty years.

Fink’s faith in the power of Miles Franklin’s novel was rewarded and the fi lm was a tremendous success, both critically and commercially. (winning six out of nine nominated AFI awards in 1979)

Every shot of Sybylla conveys some information about her character and builds our understanding of her. She is a dynamic fi gure, often presented in movement: consider, for example, the two scenes in which she dances, the pillow fi ght, and the scene in which
she literally rocks Harry’s boat. This is a woman who doesn’t walk, she strides.
We see her swinging, running and climbing, all of which serve to convey a sense of her strength and vitality. There is nothing meek or demure about her; as Harry’s Aunt Gussie says, all the young women who have been to Five Bob seem insipid by comparison. For
all her girlish, artistic pretensions, she is a direct and forthright person. Uncle Jay Jay delights in her breathtaking disregard for social conventions and her wonderful unpredictability, while elegant Aunt Helen and Grandmother Bossier exchange nervous glances:
‘the only trouble is, you don’t know what she’ll do next’.

Halfway through the fi lm, there is a moment that captures a sense of Sybylla’s vigour, a quality of alive-ness, a mix of sensuality and abandon. In long shot, we see Frank
Hawden approach her with a posy of fl owers. In affected accent, Sybylla exclaims, ‘How terribly kind!’. Frank scuttles off and she tosses the fl owers into the pond. A close-up on the
water reveals a few spots of rain. Dropping the book she had been reading, and shedding hat, glove and parasol—part of Aunt Helen’s regime to train her wild niece in the arts of feminine vanity—Sybylla launches herself into the sudden downpour, crying ecstatically, ‘Rain!’. She turns in circles, arms aloft, face upturned to the sky, rejoicing in the drops of rain which herald the end of a long, hard drought. Sybylla’s boundless energy is as much a
defining attribute as her passion for all that is elevated and artistic. This scene also gestures towards Sybylla’s place in the landscape, an almost unmediated sense of connection and belonging.

The parched, dusty farm at Possum Gully, with its relentless work rhythms and endless toil, estranges Sybylla from the ‘world of art, music, literature, culture and elegance’ that she aspires to join. But it has also freed her from middle-class conservative ideals of femininity,
decorum and propriety, that one imagines would have suffocated her wildness of spirit. At Possum Gully, she is not subject to the tyrannies of colonial femininity: keeping one’s
complexion unblemished is a luxury not afforded by the labours of farm life.

All the activities we see Sybylla’s hands performing, for example: writing, playing piano,
chopping wood, milking a cow, pulling a calf from the mud, caning one of the McSwat children, whipping Harry, pillow-fi ghting, writing ‘Miss’ on the McSwats’ blackboard, driving
a carriage.
What effect does all this action have on our impression of Sybylla?
Consider the ways in which it casts her as a dynamic, active, capable person.


In the novel, Sybylla observes, ‘Marriage to me appeared the most horribly tied-down and unfair-to-woman experience going’ (p.31). How is marriage represented in the fi lm? Consider Sybylla’s Aunt Helen, who says, ‘Marriage gives us respectability’. She married for love, but was abandoned by her husband for another woman. She tells Sybylla that she’s ashamed of her situation. Sybylla queries, ‘Why should you be ashamed?’ Also consider Sybylla’s own mother, once beautiful, but now so careworn by a life of hardship, endless toil and children, Sybylla doesn’t even recognize a photo of her as a young woman. She too
married for love.

In the book, Franklin writes oh Harry, ‘He offered me everything— but control’, p.223. Consider statements from the fi lm such as: ‘I can’t lose myself in somebody else’s life when I haven’t lived my own yet’; ‘I don’t want to be a wife living in the bush, having a baby every year’; ‘I don’t want to be part of anyone’.)

Letters are an important device in the fi lm, furthering the plot and also subtly underlining the ways in which Sybylla, as a young, single woman, lacks control over her own destiny.
Grandmother Bossier’s invitation to Caddagat releases her from her mother’s plans to secure her work as a servant, and her mother’s letter to Grandmother Bossier informs
Sybylla of the arrangement for her to work at the McSwats.


Geoffrey Barker, reviewing My Brilliant Career in 1979 for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, criticized the film: ‘its feminist points a touch too obtrusively’.

Sybylla’s hair, which connotes wildness, unruliness, and yet Harry’s Aunt Gussie describes it as her greatest asset

the image of Sybylla and Aunt Gussie in the bird sanctuary

The varied landscapes captured in My Brilliant Career by the talented cinematographer,
Donald McAlpine, have a powerful presence. This is a fi lm in which the setting could be considered to have the force of another character. The very fi rst words we hear are: ‘Possum Gully, Australia, 1897’, signalling the ways in which place will be an important theme.
As Brian McFarlane states: ‘[M]uch of the fi lm’s meaning is made in the impact of the changing scenes on Sybylla; in the tensions created between her and the place she finds herself’ (Cinema Papers).
Syb and landscape: Armstrong interprets it as ambivalent and highly charged: oppressive,
in that it separates her from the elegant life of art and music that her soul craves; but also a source of inspiration for her writing

The film conflates the identities of Miles Franklin and Sybylla Melvyn, so that the book Sybylla writes in the fi lm appears to be My Brilliant Career.
Over our last view of her, a title provides information about the novel’s publication.
Why do you think the film-makers might have chosen to blur the distinction between the real-life novelist and her fictitious creation? Does this blurring in some way validate Sybylla’s decision to pursue a life of art at the expense of marriage with Harry?



Austen undertones
Margaret Fink explains in commentary, ‘ the reason i am making this film is because she said no’ – radical at the time


Role of music – setting
The idea of writing a book (see written notes) often forgotten, always in the tree with cats
Birdcage image – metaphor for trapped woman, trapped by the confinements of gender
Pillow fight - courtship
Depiction of outback – social status
Harsh and severe landscape, vs. Culture and civilising city
Pub - seen from perspective of woman
Ugliness
Character portrayal – face + hands, costume, hair (consider solitary plait similar of franklin)
Whose story is it?
Smacked bottom?
Role of letters
Miscenscene – dinner table vs. Possum gully
The kiss – for cinematic pleasures
Feminist undertones
Ugly Duckling often the heroine (look at other aussie films – Muriel’s wedding)
Modernising and adapting original for targeted audience
The need to establish enough back story, so we still like judy davis character... is she able to convince the audience of her decision – critics debated

“ Uncle first said he was glad to see I had the spirit of an Australian, and then threatened to put my nose above my chin if I failed to behave properly. Grannie remarked that I might have the spirit of an Australian, but I had by no means the manners of a lady.... (128) “
The democratic 'Australian' ('my organ of veneration must be flatter than a pancake', 5) is thus opposed to the romance role of aristocratic 'lady'. This is the role Grannie, the owner of Caddagat, prefers, greeting Sybylla as 'some grand relative honouring them with a visit' (50) on her arrival. But Sybylla cannot remain so self-controlled. Her vigorous behaviour bursts through decorum -- it is uncontrollable --just as the realist mode bursts into romance in her narrative.