David Stratton

David James Stratton AM (born 1939) is an English-Australian film critic and historian. He has also worked as a journalist, interviewer, educator, television personality, and producer. His career as a film critic, writer, and educator in Australia spanned 57 years, until his retirement in December 2023.

Stratton's media career included presenting film review shows on television with Margaret Pomeranz for 28 years, writing film reviews for The Weekend Australian for 33 years, and lecturing in film history for 35 years.

Born in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England, in 1939, David James Stratton was sent to Hampshire to see out the war years with his grandmother, an avid filmgoer, where he was taken to the local cinemas regularly and saw a diverse range of films. He attended Chafyn Grove School from 1948 to 1953 as a boarder, but never finished secondary school.

He saw his first foreign film at Bath in 1955, the Italian romantic comedy Bread, Love and Dreams. That was soon followed by Akira Kurosawa's Japanese adventure drama classic Seven Samurai, found showing in Birmingham. At the age of 19, he founded the Melksham and District Film Society.

Stratton arrived in Australia in 1962 or 1963, and soon became involved with the local film society movement. He directed the Sydney Film Festival (a job he landed after fighting film censorship) from 1966 until 1983. At the time, he was the subject of surveillance by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), due to the festival showing Soviet films, and his late-1960s visit to Russia. This information was not made public until January 2014.

Stratton worked for SBS from 1980, acting as their film consultant and introducing the SBS Cinema Classics on Sunday evenings and Movie of the Week for 24 weeks a year. From 30 October 1986 onwards Stratton co-hosted the long-running SBS TV program The Movie Show with Margaret Pomeranz, who was also the show's original producer. Stratton and Pomeranz (often referred to as "Margaret and David"[10]) left SBS in 2004.

From 1 July 2004 they co-hosted the ABC film show, At the Movies with Margaret and David.[11] On 16 September 2014, Stratton and Pomeranz announced that they would be retiring at the end of the 2014 series. The ABC confirmed that the series would end, with the last episode broadcast on 9 December 2014.[12]

Stratton wrote for US film industry magazine Variety from 1984, and has also written for TV Week. He lectured in film history at the University of Sydney's Centre for Continuing Education,[13] from around 1988 until December 2023, during which he covered around 840 films and showed 7,506 film clips. Many of his students re-enrolled year after year.

In 2008 he released his autobiography called I Peed on Fellini, a reference to a drunken attempt to shake director Federico Fellini's hand while using a urinal.

The documentary film David Stratton: A Cinematic Life, written and directed by Sally Aitken, was released in 2017, and re-edited for television, featuring interviews with Stratton about his life and with actors, directors, producers representing Australian cinema since the 1960s.[14][15] A preliminary version of the film was first released at the 2016 Adelaide Film Festival as David Stratton's Stories of Australian Cinema, a "work in progress screening ... a celebration of 110 years of Australian Cinema history and its creators".[16] The title was later screened as a three-part series on ABC Television.[17]

In 1993 Stratton made an uncredited cameo appearance in Paul Cox's Touch Me, one of the short films featured in the series Erotic Tales.[18][19]

He has appeared in several ABC programs, including The Chaser's War on Everything, Review with Myles Barlow, Good Game, Adam Hills in Gordon Street Tonight, Lawrence Leung's Choose Your Own Adventure, Dance Academy, and The Bazura Project, often parodying himself.

Stratton has been invited to sit on many international juries at film festivals. Regarded as an expert on international cinema, particularly French cinema, he was president of FIPRESCI (International Film Critics) Juries in Cannes (twice) and Venice. He was also a member of the jury at the 32nd Berlin International Film Festival in 1982.[20]

He has also acted as programming consultant to the London and Los Angeles Film Festivals, and has contributed regularly to the International Film Guide, compiled and published in London.

On 14 March 2015 Stratton appeared in front of a sold-out crowd in a meeting with David Lynch on the opening weekend of the exhibition David Lynch: Between Two Worlds, at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) in Brisbane, Queensland.[21] The one-hour conversation was Lynch's first and only public appearance in Australia.[22]

Stratton and Pomeranz are patrons of the Adelaide Film Festival.[23]

Stratton has presented a number of film reviews for Palace Nova cinemas, which are posted on their website.[24]

As of 2023[update] he had authored five books.

Stratton has said that his favourite movie is the 1952 American musical Singin' in the Rain: "I grew up on musicals and this is the best musical ever made".

Stratton participated in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll, where he listed his ten favourite films as follows: Charulata, Citizen Kane, The Conversation, Distant, Distant Voices, Still Lives, Kings of the Road, Lola, The Searchers, Singin' in the Rain, and The Travelling Players.[33]

Two articles which analysed their reviews at SBS and ABC showed that Stratton was generally a slightly harsher critic than Pomeranz.[34] At SBS, they only both gave five stars to four films: Evil Angels (1988), Return Home (1990), The Piano (1993), and Lantana (2001).[34] At the ABC, they only both gave five stars to six films: Brokeback Mountain (2005), Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), No Country For Old Men (2007), Samson and Delilah (2009), A Separation (2011), and Amour (2012). They disagreed particularly on Romper Stomper (David refusing to rate it because of the racist violence in the film), The Castle (1997), Last Train to Freo (2006), Human Touch (2004), and Kenny (2006), with Stratton awarding fewer stars than Pomeranz on all but Human Touch.[34]

Stratton and Pomeranz have played an important role in challenging the often heavy-handed decisions of the Australian Classification Board throughout their career.[35][36] One of Stratton's legacies is the part he played in bringing about the R18+ film classification.[11]