On a dark and stormy night in the Coral Sea, six French men are in a whaleboat, and are rowing for their lives towards a steamship at anchor at the entrance to a harbor. The six men have made a dramatic escape from a French prison in New Caledonia.
Their only hope lies in the hands of the Australian sea captain of that steamship on the horizon.
What will he do?
This night of daring courage and kismet is the inspiration for this Edourd Manet painting, a painting which he called The Escape of Rochefort because the only face looking directly at the viewer standing on the shore is the face of Henri Rochefort a revolutionary comrade of Manet’s.
THE (DRAMATIC) STORY:
In France in 1871 Henri Rochefort is a famous figure – journalist, political writer and a communard. Over his long life, he was painted by Gautier, Manet and Courbet and sculpted by Rodin. As a young journalist in Paris, he was known as the Prince of Polemics and, for his role in the Paris Commune, he was arrested, imprisoned and deported to New Caledonia.
The first climatic point of the opening to our film is when two men of history meet.
Henri Rochefort, a political refugee from a foreign country, is standing on the deck of a large boat in the South Pacific Ocean, and he is asking the Australian Captain David Law to take a risk by agreeing to hide these six French prisoners on his ship, in order for them to escape across the Coral Sea to Australia.
This is a profoundly human moment when one man looks into the eye of another man, and asks for help. The other man is thinking,’ But why, there is no advantage to me, and this is a big risk, I could lose my job’.
(Captain Law did risk, and lost, as a consequence, his livelihood, and that of his six children in Newcastle, Australia).
But Rochefort is rescued, and arrives in Australia, in a surreal irony, to a hero’s welcome. 10,000 people are on the wharf. They are there for the arrival of the Premier of that part of Australia, the ‘workingman’s paradise’, a place of optimism and hope, a place where the local Member of Parliament could marry the local barmaid, and none would think any the worse of him. Rochefort wrote a very moving and very detailed eye-witness account of the escape, the ocean journey and the arrival in Newcastle.
This painting is the visual motif at the heart of this film, and each time we return to it, we see it in a new way. We return to it throughout the film, as we learn more about the location of the French Prison in the South Pacific; as we learn more of the men and women (including The Red Virgin) arrested and imprisoned at the fall of the Commune; more of the sea-captain and the world that he inhabits as a Novacastrian at the dawn of a ‘workingman’s paradise’ in Australia.
The second climactic moment of this film is when the direct descendants meet – one the great grandson of the French revolutionary, the successful businessman Max Torres from Madrid and Richard Law from Newcastle, Australia. These men both travel to Paris to meet for the very first time in front of the very famous painting of the night that their great-great grandfathers first met.
How has this night reverberated down the generations? How have the actions of these two men, the radical journalist from Paris, and the Australian sea-captain whose lives collided so dramatically in the South Pacific, been remembered by their direct descendants?
The story will be told through the words of Henri Rochefort himself, a writer of intense observational acuity as an actor reads his diary. It is a story only recently translated into English and never before told in Australia.
Rochefort finds himself with his companions singing along to the ditties being sung in every Newcastle bar on the night they arrive. As he listens to The Conspirators Song, he wonders how it is that these people know so well a song that was the most recent hit of the Paris Opera.
Rochefort is to spend the next six years in exile, leaving Australia for San Francisco, is celebrated by the New York Times, travels to London, and Geneva, until finally an amnesty is declared and he returns to his beloved Paris. It is there in 1881 that he writes his detailed account Escape from Noumea; and there that Manet paints the Escape of Rochefort.
The popularity of shows in Australia such as Who Do You Think You Are and Who’s Been Sleeping in My House points to a deep interest by viewers wanting to know more about the generations before us.
Rochefort records his travel across the ‘symphony in blue’ as he described it, on a boat that carried him from Noumea, past the extraordinary Ball’s Pyramid near Lord Howe Island, and on to Newcastle in Australia.
It will come as a surprise to many Australians to discover that not all colonial prisoners in Australasia were English or Irish. The story of French prisoners escaping to Australia in that century introduces a new and interesting strand to the Australian convict narrative.
For a French audience too, this film is an insight into a turbulent time in France’s history, when journalists were arrested, and sent to a colonial prison. The film will unravel this little known connection on how history impacted on, and intertwined with, two very different countries in the South Pacific.
© Seven Emus Productions
