Monday, August 8, 2022

Agnes Varda Tribute

Agnès Varda  (1928-2019) was a Paris-based photographer and film director and a key figure in modern film history. She is much revered across the globe for her deconstruction of the documentary form and her boundary-pushing work. In a career spanning 57 years, Agnès Varda, is one of the most original and renowned of the French ‘New Wave’ directors; in fact she is the only female director associated with it – her early films anticipating the work of Godard and Truffaut.

Beaches of Agnes 2008

Antenna Documentary Festival, in collaboration with the Alliance Francaise, the French Embassy and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, presented a tribute to this legendary French filmmaker on October 13th 2012. The films screened in 35mm (what a treat!) Special thanks to AGNSW Curator and projectionist Robert Herbert (1958-2017) ; and thanks to Antenna for inviting me to introduce her films The Gleaners and I and Beaches of AgnesHere is an extract from my introduction: 
 In 'The Beaches of Agnes' we are in the mind of an Elder who is ‘essaying’: she weighs up her own life, pays tribute to her lovers, friends, family and colleagues. She time travels back into her own films – and into Demy's films. It is a tribute to cinema – to the nouvelle vaugue, to documentary, to fiction, to imagination, to creativity. There is a great freedom in this film – everything is possible – as in a Melies film. It is magic, the stuff of dreams.
In  'The Gleaners and I' Varda plays with representation – from Millet’s painting – which serves as visual metaphor and foundation text – and she transforms it into her own film text of gleaning. She pushes beyond the surfaces of Millet’s three gleaners and his framing – to blow open the edge of frame and ‘essay’ into her film’s themes; and she gives us herself and her gleaners in fleshy reality. 


The people actually filmed in 'The Gleaners' – and the way she films with them – is worth thinking about.  How does Varda achieve such a special quality in her interviews? – a feeling of compassion and intimacy – a sense of shared humanity. Varda says this: “The people I have filmed tell us a great deal about our society and ourselves.  I myself learned a lot as I was making this film.  It confirmed my idea that documentaries are a discipline that teach modesty”. 

 Last year (2021) I was writing about Varda's unique approach to film-making and I came across a thoughtful interview with her by Sheila Heti in The Believer (Issue 66). Sadly, this online magazine's link is no longer active, but here is a quote that expresses Varda's film-making ethic:

If it can be shared, it means there is a common denominator. I think, in emotion, we have that. So even though I’m different or my experiences are different, they cross some middle knot. It’s interesting work for me to tell my life, as a possibility for other people to relate it to themselves—not so much to learn about me… It’s a way of living, sharing things with people who work with me, and they seem to enjoy it.  

Back in 1999,  we were blessed to meet up with Agnes Varda at the Creteil International Women's Film Festival in Paris. A group of us Australian women filmmakers screened our films in a program called, Les Antipodes. What a wonderful experience! Varda, one of our great mentors! And yes, we need them.

Margot Nash, Jeni Thornley with Agnes Varda,
Creteil International Women's Film Festival, Paris 1999


 Notes

Heti, S. (2009, October 1). An interview with Agnes Varda. The Believer. Issue 66. https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-agnes-varda/

 Sheila Heti, Interviews.  http://www.sheilaheti.com/interviews, accessed 9th August 2022.



Sunday, March 20, 2022

farewell film poem to life

memory film: a filmmaker's diary:  

 An immersive film poem about transformation and ‘the personal is political’

Digitising the Super8, Christina Peacock NFSA 2017
Digitising the Super8, Christina Sparrow,  NFSA  2016
       
 memory film: a filmmaker's diary is based on my Super8 archives filmed over three decades 1974-2003. The film is an expression of the passage of time, as well as a historic document reflecting personal and political issues of each era. Currently in post-production, the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA Canberra), acquired and digitized the super8 collection during 2016-2017.  The film is unique as its legacy harks back to the silent movie era; the film has no speaking voices, no interviews and no narration. Its story is told visually and poetically, with images and music and sound.

memory film is currently at rough-cut stage (80mins); editor Lindi Harrison (ASE) worked with me to edit the current 80min rough cut and trailer.  I am currently working on permissions with people (and places) who appear in the rough cut, along with clearing text/quotations permissions. There is a guide music track and we will be licensing quotes from the those musician/composers in this edit. Egyptian Australian oud player, Joseph Tawadros has generously provided the track for the memory film trailer (while we work on raising the post production budget for the film); a number of his tracks are in the rough cut, along with Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem, Canadian cellist Zoe Keating  and Australian ensemble, Chaika.

The impulse for this film comes from the Japanese death poets. In Japan elders and (Buddhist monks) write poems to express their feelings about the transience of life and the inevitable passing of all things (jisei: “farewell poem to life”). Householders write poems as a gift to their children – a legacy of beauty and insight gathered over years. I like this idea– the contemplation of ageing and approaching death, yet brimming with the lightness and beauty of life. 

I borrow moonlight
for this journey of a
million miles
(Saikaku 1730)

A friend gave me Yoel Hoffman's book Japanese Death Poems years ago and I always carry it around - thinking, ruminating, writing - gradually realising that I could make a film in the spirit of this poetic tradition. Then I discovered that video artist Bill Viola has done just this! So then, everything is perhaps borrowed! The other filmmaker I return to in the vein of death poetry film-making (and the use of the home movie archive) is Derek Jarman and his innovative film Blue that he made when he was in hospital dying (1994). Yet, ultimately as Thacker in his essay Black Illumination: Zen and the poetry of death writes, quoting death poet Toko: 

Death poems
are mere delusion
death is death
(Toko 1795)

Preparing the Super8 for NFSA
2016 Preparing the super8 for NF&SA 

What I know about the content of the film – it is composed only of my Super8, filmed between 1974-2003. A layer of the film reflects films I have made and the politics of each era: Maidens (1978), For Love or Money (McMurchy, Nash, Oliver & Thornley 1983), To the Other Shore (1996) and Island Home Country (2008).  Why the title: “memory film”? Film, unlike creative forms like painting, sculpture or writing, is ephemeral. Like theatre and music it, too, is passing by. The movement of film through the gate of the camera, through the projector, (both film and digital), parallels the movement of life – its transience, its flow; watching film we experience time passing, and like the mercury of old we cannot really hold it still. Also some of the Super8 is degraded with time; the colour might have faded, mould has eaten away at the celluloid; the body of the film is ageing, as is mine. I will not hide it. These fragments of life on my 137 rolls and 9 composite reels of Super8 trigger my memory as it fades with age. 

The Super8 original is preserved and catalogued at NFSA

The production context for the film is the School of Communication, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) UTS, where I am a Visiting Scholar. Marcus Ekermann, FASS MediaLab, is technical consultant. I edited a first assembly (3.5hrs) and editor Lindi Harrison (ASE) worked with me to edit the current 80min rough cut and trailer. 

                                         Squatting at the Lyndhurst Estate, Glebe, Sydney 1976

All this happened. Yes, I was in the women’s liberation movement; I had a share in women’s land; I marched against the war in Vietnam; I filmed Super8 on the set of Journey Among Womenon Anzac Day, Australia Day and the Aboriginal Awakening ceremonies; I loved women and men; I have a husband, children and grand children and I had a therapist; I bow to my meditation teachers. And yes I made these films. Here is the evidence, it was real, I filmed it. memory = film. And so, I share this “farewell film poem to life” (jisei), tenderly with you.

Clear sky
The way I came by once
I now go back by
(Gitoku 1754)

my sister's garden, Blue Mountains: 
country of the Dharug,  Gundungurra & Wiradjuri nations














Wednesday, January 5, 2022

“the river of souls”

                     
           mizuko kuyō (水子供養) 
 water child memorial

Mizuko Kuyo, a Ritual for Unborn Children
Japanese Buddhist ceremony for those who
have had a miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion

 
Last year I was interviewed for the documentary film Brazen Hussies (2020, dir: Catherine Dywer). The crew spent a day filming with me. Later, when I saw the edit of my account of an illegal abortion I had in 1968, I found it confronting. For many reasons – perhaps because the inner work I have done around abortion was not incorporated. Or perhaps because it is still an emotional and layered site. So be it. Its not my film. I accepted the edit - as I felt it was a historically important account of womens lack of power over our own bodies in that 1960s era.  Then, I happened upon this essay, Brazen Hussies and the weaknesses of the women’s liberation movement by Diane Fieldes in Red Flag (May 14 2021).  It triggered emotions again linked to my memories and trauma. I especially took issue with Fieldes’ factual mis-representation of my illegal abortion and also her simplistic class analysis of it. So I decided to write about it to connect with the deeper resonances of abortion for myself and other women.  Here is Fieldes paragraph in full: 



For middle-class women like Jeni Thornley, who is interviewed in the film about her undoubtedly unpleasant experience, an unwanted pregnancy meant going to Sydney and having the abortion at a posh clinic in Macquarie Street once you’d paid £300the mark of the procedure’s illegality being that you had to go at night instead of during the day. For working-class women, as Communist Party member Zelda D’Aprano outlines in horrifying detail in her autobiography, it meant scraping together a much smaller sum but with much greater difficulty, and surrendering yourself to the hands of a backyard butcher.

 Unfortunately, Fieldes has misconstrued my interview in Brazen Hussies to suit her one-dimensional class analysis. She has no idea of my class origins, my  personal life or the circumstances of my illegal abortion. In fact my abortion was not in a “posh” Macquarie St clinic.  It was at the infamous Heatherbrae Clinic in Bondi; a clinic that operated at night to avoid police raids due to the fact that abortion was a  crime; a clinic to which desperate women from all classes across Australia and New Zealand sought an abortion; whats more, even if my abortion had been performed in Fieldes “posh clinic”, what does her dualistic argument offer us in understanding the emotional, traumatic inner space of womens illegal abortion experience across class? As Simone de Beauvoir  so clearly articulated in The Second Sex (Alfred Knopf, 1949, p. 489):

"it is difficult to imagine abandonment more frightful than that in which the menace of death is combined with that of crime and shame."

In fact Fieldes’ rather crude class based analysis of my “posh” abortion, juxtaposed against  Zelda D’Aprano’s horrifying...working class abortion is demeaning to womens shared, usually traumatic experience of illegal abortion. Moreover, it is the collective, shared experience of women, and our concerted political work, that led to the potent national Womens Abortion Action Campaign organising across class lines to decriminalise abortion. This act of solidarity ultimately provided access to safe, free legal abortions for women, initially in women’s health clinics (then, later in clinics such as Preterm) right across the country – and to this day. These clinics, like Leichhardt Women’s Community Health Centre, were created specifically to focus on womens health needs in a broad social and political frame, across class.

Fieldes rudimentary class paradigm is one of the reasons I left the Socialist Labour League  in the early 1970s and became more deeply involved in women’s liberation, navigating the feminist maxim “the personal is political”. Subsequently, some years later, I found psychoanalysis, recovery programs and Buddhism to be necessary and vital companions, along with feminism, on the lifelong journey of liberation.

I want to pay tribute to African American writer and feminist  bell hooks (1952-2021) at this point as she discusses feminism in such an insightful way – illustrating her desire to bring feminism to everybody. A recent obituary by Sarah Leonard (2021) bell hooks transformed feminism articulates this clearly:

“More than three decades earlier, in 1984, bell hooks (author and activist) had already sliced through those questions in her book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Feminism’s aim is “not to benefit solely any specific group of women, any particular race or class of women. It does not privilege women over men. It has the power to transform in a meaningful way all our lives. Most importantly, feminism is neither a lifestyle nor a ready-made identity or role one can step into.”

By defining feminism so precisely in lucid and welcoming prose, hooks issued a challenge to all of us to participate in overturning what she frequently called the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” She also provided me with my own understanding of socialism by making clear that you can’t practice feminism while leaving the brutal hierarchies of capitalism intact. She referred in her writing not to the feminist movement but to “feminist movement.” As in, you get up and go....In short, the range of hooks’ work expressed a desire to bring feminism to everybody. It expressed her belief that feminism really could transform the whole world, and that each of us has a part to play (Subtext17th December 2021).

I finish this short piece with another image of the Mizuko Kuyo Ritual for Unborn Children as the abortion experience is profound and also involves spirit. Fieldes’ description of my 1970s abortion in Red Flag stirred up many emotions  – not only because the assertions about my abortion were factually incorrect, but because there is no acknowledgement of the depth of such an intense body/mind/spirit experience - one that unites women in our journey towards liberation. 

Recently I read about this documentary“Mizuko”: Visual Exploration of the Grief & Search for Healing  (dir: Kira Dane &  Katelyn Rebelo); it  explores the cultural, spiritual and personal implications of misuko – holding a memorial service for ones unborn child. I have appreciated this water child memorial ritual for some years; it is such a healing ceremony that offers a way beyond the sad struggle of the pro/anti-abortion/pro-life debate that plagues our western societies.

   Mizuko kuyō water child memorial service

Japanese Buddhist ceremony for those who have had a miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion 



Postscript

For the record, Zelda DAprano was a sister in the free safe legal abortion struggle, and a colleague. We were privileged to document her equal pay activism in our feature film For Love or Money: the history of women and work in Australia (McMurchy, Nash, Oliver & Thornley, 1983). Distributor Ronin Films









Sunday, January 2, 2022

Current documentary writing 2022

 In Press: Book chapter: ‘The enigma of film: memory film: a filmmaker’s diary‘, Constructions of The Real: Intersections of Practice and Theory in Documentary-Based Filmmaking, (eds.) K. Munro et al., Intellect Books Series: Artwork Scholarship: International Perspectives in Education, 2022.  

Grading the Super 8, Christina Sparrow, National Film & Sound Archive, 
                                                                                Ngunnawal (Canberra) 2016.

This chapter is written from within the production process of memory film: a filmmaker’s diary, currently in post-production and crowd sourcing via DAF:


Composed entirely of my own super 8 filmed between 1976-2003, acquired and digitised by the National Film and Sound Archive in 2016-17. It is a film poem about history, time and impermanence inspired by the tradition of the Japanese Death Poets, who wrote their poetry about the transience of life (jisei: ‘farewell poem to life’) as a gift to their children – a legacy of beauty and insight gathered over years. A textual layer of the film reflects my earlier documentaries and the politics of each era: Maidens (1978), For Love or Money (1983), To the Other Shore (1996) and Island Home Country (2008); these four documentaries all utilised Super 8 from my Archive. The process, and the film itself, reflects not only an essayist approach, but at times, it is a meditative text – keenly linked to both an art practice and a lay Buddhist meditation practice. The film's production process, supports my essayist–meditator’s approach – an approach not driven by narrative, story and character, but rather by an intuitive process, form evolving through practice – ideas developing through the materiality of image and montage – supported by an innovative use of music and sound design as the film’s major structuring device. 

In Press: Book chapter: ‘“We are not dead”: Decolonizing the Frame’ –  First Australians, The Tall Man, Coniston, First Contact and their predecessors.(ed.) E. Blackmore et al., The  Routledge Handbook of Indigenous Film. 2022.


Bullfrog and family, Coniston (2012)

As the settler nation state of Australia continues to colonize Aboriginal people on the territories and waters that the British crown illegally possessed in 1788 what kind of contribution can film and media works make to decolonization? This article discusses several documentary films and series (with foundational films from the 1970s) that take on the decolonizing challenge: Blackfella Films’ historical series First Australians (Perkins & Cole 2008), their investigative documentary The Tall Man (Krawitz 2011), their reality TV series First Contact (Sharkey & Weekley 2014), and Coniston (Batty & Jupurrurla Kelly, 2012), produced by PAW Media and Rebel Films. These programs have been produced across different modes and genres, with varying degrees of collaboration between their creative principals and Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal participants. In this chapter I suggest that these projects influence both their participants and audiences (television, educational and online networked communities). In their analysis of racism and the long-term consequences of interminable colonizing by the settler state, these documentaries move viewers to ‘step outside the colonial dome of thinking’ (Everett 2008).