Publicity shots of Gwen Munro for Orphan of the Wilderness (Ken G Hall, 1936) that appear in Cinesound casting book. NFSA title: 356234
The Cinesound casting books formed the heart of the NFSA and National Portrait Gallery collaborative exhibition, Starstruck: Australian Movie Portraits. They are a beautiful example of organisational history and portraiture.
Cinesound Productions was an Australian feature film company established in June 1931. Ken G Hall, the General Manager, directed all but one of the 17 films produced. He was committed to making the type of entertainment the public wanted to enjoy and creating a Hollywood-style star system, promoting Cinesound as a ‘little Hollywood’.
Cinesound established a talent school at Rushcutters Bay Studio for young actors, offering training in ‘deportment, enunciation, microphone technique and limbering’. By 1940 the school had over 200 students. The casting books contain applications, letters and photographs sent by aspiring students – ‘the names of dozens of beautiful girls and handsome men who are breaking their hearts to become motion picture players’, according to The World News in 1938.
The individual images can be removed and studied separately through the lens of art history for a number of qualities – the stamp of the photographic studio, the signature of the photographer, or use of particular kinds of lighting.
In total, three scrapbooks containing over 1500 portraits demonstrate an aspect of the history of Australian filmmaking. They are a record of mostly unknown and keen amateurs; ‘starstruck’ hopefuls dreaming of making it big in the local industry. As Cinesound casting director George Cross said in an interview, ‘Everyone would like to be a star’.
Below is a gallery of selected pages from the Cinesound casting books:
