Ford v Holden
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E. 103 minutes
4 stars
I'm not a car person.
I mean, I drive a car. It's blue, which is about as much as I know about it. On the weekend I had to change the oil and I had to watch a YouTube video to locate the lever to pop the bonnet.
And so you can feel confident that this review of Canberra filmmaker Serge Ou's documentary chronicling the decades-long rivalry of Ford against car manufacturing rival Holden in a race to outsell each other in the Australian marketplace will be unburdened by my having an opinion one way or other about the cars themselves.
![Shane Jacobson narrates Ford v Holden, a documentary by Canberra filmmaker Serge Ou. Picture supplied Shane Jacobson narrates Ford v Holden, a documentary by Canberra filmmaker Serge Ou. Picture supplied](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/MxhEgQKUJhZgHxwVaKiqcq/49851546-efe7-4228-b77f-0fba3e99d138.jpg/r0_0_8024_4511_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
I've heard friends argue about the merits of their cars, diss friends' cars as being inferior and try to involve me in the conversation, and I give them the same blank stare I usually get from them when I say things like "But Dogme's transformational impact on mood and mise-en-scene evolved the indie paradigm".
In fact, I had heaps to learn in this fast-paced and informative slice through Australian history, the story of this rivalry between the country's two locally-based car manufacturers, from the introduction of the Ford Model T to the Australian consumer in 1908 to the shuttering of the Ford assembly plant in Geelong in 2016 followed by Holden's Adelaide plant in 2017.
The Gruen Factor viewer in me would say it is the story of two companies that identified a market need and manipulated that market through jingoism like the Football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars song that still plays in my head 40 years after it ceased playing on television.
So, successful manipulation.
Ou and his team work from a wealth of archival footage in piecing the story together, from increasingly slick marketing film and television campaigns to news and newsreel stories, and sports footage from the battlefield this war was sometimes fought on, Bathurst's Mount Panorama.
Shane Jacobson narrates with his Aussie drawl, and talking-head interviews that give the archival pieces context include noted sports journalists, designers and executives from both companies. Memorable industry figures like Dick Johnson and Bev Brock share stories the hyper-competitive approach both teams had on the Bathurst racetrack, a win there representing marketing fuel for the next year.
I liked the stories of both companies working together in the national interest during World War II.
And despite seeing it thousands of times, I was surprised to learn the Holden logo is based on the legend that the wheel was invented after people had seen lions rolling stones.
From the opening chords of The Screaming Jets' Better and throughout, a strumming guitar and drum soundtrack shuttles the narrative along at a cracking pace.
There's more than a century of history covered here, so director Ou doesn't allow the narrative to veer off course for less than a few seconds here and there.
There are plenty of alternate routes this story might have taken, though they're the subjects for other documentaries, some of which are already out there - about the damage to the planet from these fossil fuel guzzlers, about the way these machines had our cities built to service them and not the other way around.
Why is this film rated "E" and what does it mean?
A few years back the Office of Film & Literature Classification allowed the release into cinemas of educational documentaries without them going through the traditional (and expensive, and time-consuming) film classification process.
This was as long as they met certain standards, including no bad language, violence or adult concepts. In other words, as long as each of the documentaries was something it was safe to bring the kids to.