Exits (film) explained

Exits is a 1979 Australian drama-documentary directed by Paul Davies. It centres on the effect of the 1975 dismissal of the Labor Government of Gough Whitlam on a handful of characters wandering around Melbourne.^[1]

It is the earliest of several treatments of the event, which include Home on the Range (Gil Scrine, 1982) and The Dismissal (1983).^[2]

Notes and References

1. Web site: Exits (1980). https://web.archive.org/web/20161019003010/http://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/4ce2b713e45b4. dead. 19 October 2016.
2. http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/readingroom/serial/AJCS/1.2/Cunningham.html "The only filmic treatments of the events of 11 November 1975, Exits (Paul Davies, Pat Laughren, Carolyn Howard, 1979) and Home on the Range (Gil Scrine, 1982) circulate marginally as independent 'political' films, each with tangential, though significant, modes of intersection with the politics of the dismissal. Exits situates Whitlam's dismissal in terms of its existential impact on the lives of 'ordinary' people undergoing their own relational and vocational 'exits', juxtaposed somewhat incoherently, or, to gloss it positively, 'experimentally', with rhetorical gestures toward CIA involvement in the dismissal. Home on the Range does more than gesture toward such CIA intervention, indeed, it marshals a persuasive array of evidence linking the imminent expiry of leases on U. S. military and intelligence bases in Australia in 1975, the CIA, and Whitlam's dismissal. Comparing this analysis and what is offered in The Dismissal on the CIA is instructive.