POWER AND THE PERSONALITY Ray Argall’s Midnight Oil: 1984

In many ways, Midnight Oil: 1984 (2018) serves as a culmination of several years’ collaboration between director Ray Argall and the iconic Australian band. Having worked on several videos and concert films for them from 1982 to 1986, Argall embedded himself among Midnight Oil to document their national tour for the 1984 album Red Sails in the Sunset. While the tour itself marked a bold new direction for the band, who were undertaking promotional duties for themselves for the first time, an added wrinkle came with frontman Peter Garrett agreeing to take the role of Senate candidate for the newly formed Nuclear Disarmament Party (NDP). The band were always staunchly political in their art, particularly regarding the issue of nuclear proliferation, but this tumultuous collision of the politics and music worlds would resonate through the following eighteen years of the band’s career, and lead Garrett on a path to political office in the cabinets of prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. As the film’s press release puts it:

With the mounting pressure of balancing the demands of music and politics [1984] is the year that would make, but nearly break, Australia’s most important rock and roll band […] the film tells how a group of awesomely talented musicians with a powerful and ambitious message were able to inspire a generation to try and change the world.

Constructed, in large part, from the wealth of 16mm footage shot by