The only decent piece of advice I’ve ever had for young, aspiring filmmakers: get yourself a scene. A cultural scene. Preferably one in which diverse inputs intersect: writing, filming, music, theatre, design, architecture, theory. Have the immediate contact with all these people you can draw upon for their creative contributions in the acting, set building/dressing, costume, cinematography, soundtrack composing/recording and scriptwriting departments.

This is not solely a matter of getting your film made. The scene’s influence extends into the film’s afterlife as well. Make sure (for instance) to have the written defenses – reviews, essays, a manifesto from within your scene – ready to go, and optimum places in which to publish them. Having friends in high places (funding agencies, major movie distributors, festival programmers, mass media journalism) will not go astray, either, when push comes to shove.

Bert Deling’s Pure Shit (1975) is a shining example, within the Australian context, of a scene-driven film. Many of the performers (Phil Motherwell, Jane Clifton, Max Gillies) hail from the Pram Factory/La Mama nexus. The soundtrack music corralled by Martin Armiger (1949-2019) and Red Symons derives from early formations of bands such as Skyhooks and The Sports (while Ross Wilson of Daddy Cool fame went off, instead, to Chris Löfvén’s Oz – A Rock’n’Roll Road Movie [1976]). Deling credits his contacts in the recording industry not only with generous studio time, but also large spaces-in-construction loaned for use as several sets (such as, I am guessing, the queer-ish jazz lounge).

Deling (1942-2022) himself brings along his cinephile background nurtured during the 1960s at University of Melbourne, with its modest New Wave of independent filmmakers – as well as a sensibility of radical social analysis well encapsulated in the late ‘70s essay on “Loneliness and Alienation” by Rod Bishop and Fiona Mackie (published in Scott Murray’s book The New Australian Cinema), with their connections to a wider network of like-minded allies in universities and arts colleges. Much of the composite scene gathered for Pure Shit has a precise geo-cultural location: Carlton (Mark Rubbo’s pre-Readings venture of Professor Longhair’s record shop gets a cameo scene).

Yet the film is not, finally, a ‘when the sun sets over Carlton’ number. Lygon Street briefly features, but it’s just a blurry stopover on a largely indiscernible tour of nocturnal any-spaces-whatever – underground (broken down share house), suburban, abandoned factories, bars, a few pharmacies, a museum during cleaning hours. It is a work strikingly bereft of conventionally helpful establishing shots – the only concession to a wider view occurring only in the very final image, the mobile camera uncharacteristically pulling over to contemplate the passing parade of a non-place highway somewhere between Melbourne and Brisbane.

Pure Shit inaugurated a mini-tradition in Australian cinema: the compressed, dusk-to-dawn, low-life, picaresque adventure concerning a group of characters on the run or in pursuit, ranging in its cultural coordinates from the blues-rock/progressive theatre background of Deling’s contribution, to the various phases of punk/grunge/queer refracted in Haydn Kennan’s Going Down (1983) and Richard Lowenstein’s Dogs in Space (1986) – with other, related glimmers in films including Aleksi Vellis’ Nirvana Street Murder (1990) and, further afield in the Berlin night, Ian Pringle’s Wenders-produced (but today unseen and forgotten) The Prisoner of St Petersburg (1990).

I don’t need to rehearse, in 2025, the somewhat mythified public reception of Pure Shit in its day as either scummy and reprehensible or a revelation from the lower depths of society. (Adrian Danks, in an excellent piece for a dossier on “1975” in a 2006 issue of the now-defunct Metro, both covers and corrects this ground well.) As an ambitious but very low-budget film, with a mosaic script of multiple characters and abruptly introduced, new plot threads, it has evident hits and misses: it’s not for nothing that words like ‘chaotic’ and ‘fragmented’ tend to dominate even the most sympathetic previous accounts.

But Deling and his collaborators (including cinematographer Tom Cowan, sound recordist Lloyd Carrick and editor John Scott, all later veterans of the industry at both mainstream and independent levels) muster enough drive, energy and black comedy to hold the scattered pieces together. Ah, for the Good Old Days when people (viewers, reviewers, funding body representatives, development agents) didn’t automatically complain that a film like Pure Shit lacks ‘characters you can care about and relate to’!

Highpoint: Helen Garner (soon bound for the fame of Monkey Grip’s publication in 1977) as a manic speed freak, opening and closing kitchen cupboards and, in a split-second, forgetting what she’s looking for. Lowpoint: the difficulty in crafting the narrative timeline of night-to-day amidst what Susan Dermody politely called in 1980 a “confusingly-lit darkness” (a crucial transition engineered via a mock TV-talk show titled Next Week – which looks more like the then-burgeoning video-art-cum-community-TV of the Fitzroy variety – is particularly disorienting).

What’s at stake in Pure Shit? Deling testifies, in his looks back on the occasion of the 2009 DVD release, that he was dismayed to see so many of his confederates in the Carlton scene (including some of his film’s key actors) turning to heroin and suffering accordingly. His more objective political stance (evident also in his previous, more nakedly experimental feature, Dalmas [1973]) mixes standard anti-authoritarian jabs (cops are violent, stunted “pigs”, bursting, in slo-mo, into the plot with all guns blazing now and again) with an overall sense of state violence and coercive control over all those deemed deviant.

Simultaneously, Deling is sensitive and empathetic to the pro-drug justification: that it gives not merely escape but also active pleasure in a harsh, repressive society (of “middle class taste”, as he loved to say) that denies the possibility of either outlet (hence the roughly Marcusean terms of the ‘loneliness and alienation’ critique, prevalent during the ‘70s in Australia as it was elsewhere). The general air of manic-ness, finally, is more speedball than screwball: upper and downer in the same hit.

In this context, Deling, simply by showing the act of shooting-up in an unflinchingly realist, close-up way, was courting the media and censorial attack which he duly got: the charge that he was promoting and even glamourising drug taking – when, indeed, his film was clearly intended as a more cautionary tale, beamed from the very frontline of this subcultural lifestyle. (Deling’s general dream, he explained, was for cinema to file such reports to the mass audience before mainstream media could ideologically filter and editorialise them. Such a ‘70s ambition!) Collaborative involvement, alongside some financing, came directly from the Buoyancy Foundation – a government-funded drug and alcohol counselling service begun in 1967 – which fully approved the project and the on-screen result. The off-screen discourse, alas, proved harder to control or cajole in the mid-to-late ‘70s.

Back to the film as a film. With its almost continuous, screwball patter of high-pitched, whiney voices – punctuated by deflating Aussie-isms such as the couplet “Things change”/“Like fuck they do!” – the crowded dialogue track of Pure Shit is not always comprehensible or even audible (I needed subtitles, which I couldn’t find). Yet the aural hubbub carries a definite vibe or tone of its time: it’s a pre-Mumblecore movie!

Although there is a (retrospective?) credit for sound design at the end of the NFSA restoration print, there’s a not-quite-worked-out but nonetheless fascinating fixation on the radio medium as transmission point for music and sound, wavering between diegetic and extra-diegetic status: voices communicating pertinent flashpoints of global politics waft in and out of the action, alongside the composite score that slides from pub rock to cool jazz stylings (the saxophone tracks anticipate, by several years, John Lurie’s scores for Bette Gordon’s Variety [1983] and related No Wave projects in USA). This radio thread is not as together as a sonic/narrative concept as in American Graffiti (1973), Do the Right Thing (1989) or Pump Up the Volume (1990), but it percolates away intriguingly. (Could there be a radio movie made, any longer, in advanced-Internet societies of the 21st century?) Deling never goes for a big, rousing, triumphalist burst of song in the mix – even during the brief but memorable avant-garde/abstract car-wash montage! Five years on, Albie Thoms’ Palm Beach (1980) – this time, drugs in the surfing milieu – would attempt another, similar experiment in overall sound ambience.

Today, it’s easy to relate Pure Shit, in a global frame, to the tougher vein of teen movies in the ‘80s, or the gruesome-grunge portraits of drug life made since the ‘90s. But what pops out for me now is its surprisingly Eastern European flavour (a ‘60s tradition to which Deling gestured in his 2009 interviews): the mayhem at the methadone clinic parallels Miloš Forman’s wildly popular One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (also 1975) while, more allusively, the gender-play around a woman, her car, and the guys who get to drive it, only to later nod off sexlessly in a heroin haze, reminds me of elements in Jerzy Skolimowski’s even more frenetic caper, Le départ (1967).

Deling’s career, after the confrontational one-two punch of Dalmas and Pure Shit, did not go as he might have wished in the ‘70s. Dead Easy (1982) saw him (like so many at the time) playing the genre game, but the result went nowhere (in every sense). From that point, he took on various positions in the film and TV industry as scriptwriter, script editor and occasionally director (series to which he contributed include Sweet and Sour, Ramsay and The Ferals). It’s a long way from Pure Shit to the TV soap opera Neighbours in its 2000s phase, where Deling did his last tour of duty in the writing room. Unless, of course, I’ve missed some nicely layered-in subversion lurking in the televisual archive …

An Instagram tribute from his son Saran, posted on 25 December 2022, suggests that Deling’s deepest-held attitudes never changed: “Forever a larrikin, a shit stirrer, a fighter for the underdog, a master of the one-liner. A lover. A storyteller. A punk. He encouraged so many people”.

Bert Deling (eye to camera) with cinematographer Tom Cowan shooting Pure Shit

Pure Shit screened on Tuesday, April 15, 2025, in Melbourne, at Thornbury Picture House, as part of the Unknown Pleasures series. It will also screen in Adelaide on Saturday, April 26, 2025, check here for details.

Adrian Martin is a film and arts critic who lives in Malgrat de Mar, Spain. His website is at http://adrianmartinfilmcritic.com/