{"id":73,"date":"2002-05-01T15:34:24","date_gmt":"2002-05-01T22:34:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/?p=73"},"modified":"2002-05-01T15:34:24","modified_gmt":"2002-05-01T22:34:24","slug":"no-sex-please-were-aussie-filmmakers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/?p=73","title":{"rendered":"No sex please, we&#8217;re Aussie filmmakers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Sydney Morning Herald<\/em> April 8, 1999<br \/>\n<strong>No sex please, we&#8217;re Aussie filmmakers<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Bill Bennett wanted no misunderstandings when he was filming on the Island of Love. Howard Feinstein reports. Film-maker Bill Bennett sits atop a large boulder half-buried in the beach of Kiriwina, the largest of the Trobriand Islands. The shore and the dense greenery behind are nearly singed by the harsh tropical sun.<\/p>\n<p>He wears a wide-brimmed hat and strong sunblock, and long sleeves to ward off mosquitoes bearing malaria and, occasionally, Japanese encephalitis. He doesn&#8217;t seem to mind. &#8220;Everywhere I walk, I look up and see lizards copulating on walls,&#8221; he says. &#8220;I look down, and I see butterflies copulating on leaves. This is, after all, the Island of Love.&#8221; Island of Love is the term coined by the Polish anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, in his 1929 book <em>The Sexual Life of Savages<\/em>, an account of his field-work in the Trobriands from 1915 to 1918. An avid observer of the native population&#8217;s sexual rituals and mores, he described their explanation of the sex drive: &#8220;The eyes are the seat of desire and lust. They are the cause of sexual passion. From the eyes, desire is carried to the brain&#8230; and thence spreads all over the body.&#8221; Bennett first heard the expression at the age of eight, after coming across pictures his war-photographer father took around New Guinea. &#8220;I heard that the women were incredibly promiscuous, and thought, `Wow, that sounds amazing&#8217;.&#8221; His decision 36 years later to shoot a movie in the Trobriands may be an example of what Freud called sublimation. The camera lens is, after all, an extension of the eye; it allows us to be voyeurs, looking into intimate relationships we are not otherwise privy to.<\/p>\n<p>Bennett has begun shooting his $10 million &#8220;In a Savage Land&#8221; just after the annual yam harvest, a festive period when, according to Malinowski, both men and women freely take multiple sexual partners. To prevent any misunderstandings, he has put in all 35 contracts of his cast and limited crew that no sexual liaisons with locals are permitted during the 12-week shoot. The irony is twofold: locals consider dim-dims (foreigners) unappealing; and, thanks to El Ni<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sydney Morning Herald April 8, 1999 No sex please, we&#8217;re Aussie filmmakers Bill Bennett wanted no misunderstandings when he was filming on the Island of Love. Howard Feinstein reports. Film-maker Bill Bennett sits atop a large boulder half-buried in the beach of Kiriwina, the largest of the Trobriand Islands. The shore and the dense greenery [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[37],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}