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 Agnes. Here 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.

"The archive of the self and deconstructing the national archive," Ozdox Forum, August, 2014.

My talk, 'the archive of the self and deconstructing the national archive' – was part of  "Maestros of the Archive: The Art of Archival Documentary", Ozdox Forum, August, 2014: "Gathering, manipulating and presenting archival material is an art form, one that is sometimes overlooked. Through archival film making, a seasoned story teller can tap into our nostalgic tendencies, our memories and collective subconscious with precision and eloquence". In this Ozdox Forum I presented along with Paul Clarke, Shane McNeil and Nicole O’Donohue.  Curator was Brendan Palmer, with moderator Ruth Hessey.

The focus of my talk is: what image do you choose to represent or communicate an idea, or a feeling; how do you work with your own subjective memory…and how might your own personal archive link to public history - the historical record of a nation; and where does your intention and ethics play out in all of this?  

Also I want to note the difference between approaching the archive as a source of shots for a film, in contrast to thinking about the archive as metaphor: that is, reading the grain of the archive, AND reading against the grain of the archive – to hear the whispers in the archive, to see the problem of the archive and what’s not there; and to think about the nature of power in the production of the archive itself. For instance filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, with his 1985 10 hour documentary on the Holocaust, Shoah – refutes the archive. 

Lanzmann reads the grain of the Holocaust archive (which is vast) and he rejects it. No archival footage of the camps. Nothing. For him it is an ethical decision. Lanzmann knew his intention so well ...he honed it over the 11 years of production – to create Shoah as its own unique archive, with a completely different way of representing and understanding history and what happened on the killing fields.

So back to intention – that is, trying to understand your intention with each film, sequence or image; I want to unpack my intention in several films I have made since the 1970s till now. Some colleagues who worked on these films are here tonight and I would like to acknowledge them - Megan McMurchy: co director and co producer For Love or Money, Karen Pearlman, editor Island Home Country, Erika Addis cinematographer on For Love or Money and To the Other Shore and Jane Castle additional camera on To the Other Shore; and in absentia Martha Ansara for Film For Discussion and co-filmmakers on For Love or Money: Margot Nash and Margot Oliver.

I want to start with Sophia Turkiewicz’s recent film Once My Mother – 

surely a case study in the Art of the Archival Documentary. In it we see a lucid example of intention, and the relevance of duration to a filmmaker’s internal process and filmmaking method. I refer here to the b&w 16mm footage Sophia filmed of her mother while at film school in 1976 – the film she couldn’t make then – and the crucial, integrative moment of her return decades later for a 2^nd look. Sophia says: “Looking back, I lacked the skill, the maturity and the perspective to do my mother’s story justice. The rushes lay in film cans in my hot attic cupboard for over thirty years… waiting until I was ready…”

I want to link Sophia’s ‘found footage’ to Film For Discussion, by the Sydney Women’s Film Group, a film we completed in 1974, with Ansara directing and me co-scripting and performing. It’s an improvisational drama documentary about a young woman in a crisis of identity around family, boyfriend and work – it shows the contradictions around the position of women at the time. I play the girl. Or am I playing myself? Martha composed several shots in mirrors. This clip is a 1 minute extract from the excruciatingly long 3minute mirror shot of the girl – just after a horrible family argument at dinner, with an aggressive drunken father and a submissive mother, and a boyfriend who just doesn't get it.

(BTW most of my clips tonight are from films made on 16mm 4;3 not HD – ripped from DVDs – and I am no maestro of ripping; and remember Film For Discussion was made over 43 years ago…almost half a century!)

CLIP 1 FILM FOR DISCUSSION: 0:58

 Like Sophia's footage of her mother, this mirror shot was emotionally too much for me to deal with at the time, yet it became foundational in my subsequent turn to a kind of poetic, found-footage, autobiographical film-making style – developing an ‘archive of the self’; Sophia buries her footage in an attic, but my family crisis plays out on the massive screen in the State Theatre during the documentary finals at the 1974 Sydney Film Festival. This moment is a site of instability – where, as the film’s subject, my intention is not yet realized. This is what I mean by duration – how long it takes to gain insight into one’s intention with a piece of archival footage – as an internal process of the psyche.

My next project began after Film For Discussion in 1975 as a drama script on illegal abortion – about a confused pregnant girl, her broken love affair and the police raids on the abortion clinics of the late 60s; I got a grant from the Experimental Film Fund for this project but was unable to make that film as a drama – instead I worked instinctively gathering sequences from films I had acted in, or worked on, weaving them together with my home movies and photographs – into a story of four generations of an Australian family. This became my documentary film Maidens, completed in 1978. Little did I realise the repercussions of using women’s naked bodies to represent the emancipatory, utopian impulse-of women’s liberation.

CLIP 2 MAIDENS a: 1:14 (this is not the clip I screened...)

In fact, my intention was not at all clear to me at the time – apart from the filmmaking method being some attempt to mend or reflect on the broken parts of my life. It was a time of intense personal crisis and huge social change: ‘free love’, the Vietnam war, conscription and my brother’s death in a head on car crash. Maidens was explosive – bearing family secrets in public…partly triggered by the psycho-drama of Film For Discussion, and the impact of feminism’s notion that the personal is political. 

Feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham writes of : “the contradiction …between private and public, personal and impersonal as the fissure in women’s consciousness through which revolt erupts”. My subsequent film-making method unfolded from inside the split-self of the Film For Discussion mirror shot – perhaps as a way of navigating self and society – unravelling hidden secrets and finding footage that viscerally expresses breakdown, revolt and transformation.

Also, being exposed to a range of international women’s films we screened at the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op Cinema and Women’s Film Festivals around the country…where we programmed the early films of great women filmmakers like Agnes Varda, Maya Deren, Su Freidrich, and Helma Sanders Brahms – many of them re-configuring their archives to make films with an intense female subjectivity.

Like Turkiewicz was drawn back to the footage she filmed of her mother, I was drawn back to that footage of the girl in Film For Discussion to take a 2^nd look and re-use the footage in Maidens. From a film-making craft perspective I was developing a remix or inter-textual film practice – marking a dynamic shift from being passive subject to becoming the agent of transformation.

Here’s the mirror shot remix from Film For Discussion to Maidens offering what writer Frances Lionnet calls “a space of possibility”…where the filmmaker sees her own personal history implicated in larger social processes.

CLIP 3 MAIDENS b: 1.26

              For Love or Money, our feature documentary about the history of women and work in Australia, begun in 1979 and completed in 1983 – reflects an organic shift to link the personal to larger social processes – by doing extensive oral histories and research combing archives across the nation. In all the archives we researched, as in society at large, women were stereotyped in fixed roles – in the family and in the workforce; but how to represent the known documented stories of revolt, like the struggle for the vote and equal pay, or the hidden work of women’s unpaid work in the home as wives and mothers – in images – when so few existed in the archive? In For love or money’s closing sequence you might get a sense of the visual, poetic metaphors we developed to read against the grain of the national archive. Here we re-pose the film’s main thesis – still relevant to now – 3 decades later:  

CLIP 4 FOR LOVE OR MONEY: 2:49 (this is not the clip I screened; it's coming!)

My next documentary To the Other Shore began as a diary film about motherhood, filming on super 8 starting in 1986 – and taking 10 years – collecting images from a range of archives, local and international, and editing them with my home movies and dramatized sequences. The method and structure of the film was drawn from Freud’s ideas around the ‘work of mourning – remembering, repeating and working through’. I wanted to suggest the dark side of motherhood, with its irruptions from the unconscious and the way the external world of war and violence, could penetrate the fragile membrane of a mother’s mind – especially a breast-feeding mother.  

Anne Tenney in To The Other Shore 1996 (pic: Sandy Edwards)

CLIP 5 TO THE OTHER SHORE: 2:33

A key question about intention when working with intimate family footage like this is ethics  – who might this footage harm? When you film a baby, a toddler…they can’t give permission. But what about when they become adults…do they feel violated by the footage? How do they relate to their image being appropriated for the filmmaker’s tale?  Consider the beautiful footage of my baby daughter, filmed in the golden light of afternoon while I prepare the evening meal…with its voice over about suicide and maternal ambivalence.  How does this affect her, or others in the family – then, and now?

And finally to my film Island Home Country, completed in 2008, where the ethical question on the use of the archive and working with the Tasmanian Aboriginal community and their protocols becomes the very foundation of that film’s process. This film is about my memories, growing up in Tasmania, and knowing no Aboriginal history or culture. Here is an island where the violent race war, (some call it attempted genocide, others ethnic cleansing) has been so repressed that approaching this terrain is a mine-field – whichever way you turn; the existing archive of documents, photos and film has been produced by the victors of that war. The present day Tasmanian Aboriginal community do not welcome ‘outsiders’ using that material about them.  How to proceed? The film takes 5 years of negotiation, of edits and re-filming. The Aboriginal community are crystal clear: don’t make a film about us, make a film about you, your mob. It’s here I became “the other” and experienced “instability’ around being white. For this internal feeling I created a visual metaphor – "the white ghost of Australian history" – with a remix sequence from another film I had acted in earlier.

CLIP 6 ISLAND HOME COUNTRY: 2:04

 So gaining insight into intention, timing and the ethical frame is a process and I think it’s fundamental to the art of the archival documentary.

Finally a few closing words by Sophia Turkiewicz. She is truly a maestro of the ‘archive of the self’ and its intricate linkages to international archives of memory and history.

Thinking back, it was fortunate that “Once My Mother” took so long to make. If I’d told this story when I was younger, I wouldn’t have been able to do it justice…. As I say in the film, I had ‘plundered’ my mother’s life to make various fictional films in my career as a drama director. Now that I was making my first documentary about the ‘truth’ of my mother’s life, I realized I had to be as honest with myself…. through tracking my own journey towards ‘forgiveness’.

Thankyou

Manu Tutura by Barry Barclay

I am only beginning to get to know something of Barry Barclay's significant contribution to documentary film in New Zealand and his notion of 'Fourth Cinema', described by Stuart Murray in his book: Images of Dignity: Barry Barclay and Fourth Cinema as:

"An umbrella term referring to the multiple forms of Indigenous cinemas that operate at local, national and international levels, Fourth Cinema is primarily guided by the desire to provide the conditions for the expression of Indigenous voices and ways of seeing... Barclay's mode of practice insists upon the importance of linking cultural production to the community from which it emerges.

I am currently reading Barclay's book Mana Tuturu: Maori Treasures and Intellectual Property Rights (Auckland University Press, 2005). Part One, 'Before the Beginning' takes an extraordinary perspective –  Barclay imagines 'what if' Lieutenant James Cook and his Endeavour crew arrived with a film camera and started 'shooting' documentary footage on the west side of the Turanga River that October day in 1769 on Rongowhakata lands. Barclay's way of thinking about The British Crown's assumption that all land belonged to the Crown (for its taking), turns the whole story of colonial possession around and makes us think deeply about the way any of us might use 'camera' - in any situation. It accords with my view that the the kind of deep philosophical thinking by Indigenous filmmakers around 'filming people' has something very profound to teach all of us.

Journey To The End Of Coal

Honkytonk Films – Online screening: Journey To The End Of Coal

Journey To The End Of Coal a new web documentary tells the story of the sacrifice millions of Chinese coal miners are making everyday, risking their lives, yet also causing ecological havoc in order to develop China's economic growth (online now!). It was made out of 300 photographs, 3 hours of video and 10 hours of sound materials gathered in China by Samuel Bollendorff and Abel Ségrétin in the winter of 2006. Using Flash, they have produced  an immersive environment while letting the audience access a large selection of this audio-visual materials at their own pace.

Walking by David Perry

A wet morning in Sydney! And by accident this morning I came across filmmaker David Perry's grainy, silent super 8 footage 'Walking'. Filmed in 1955, Perry's camera tracks a young man walking Sydney's rainy streets, through Ultimo, across Pyrmont Bridge; it's a fragment of a city film, and it's like an original moment with Arthur Stace 'Mr. Eternity'. It's now part of an installation at Damien Minton Gallery featured in the group exhibition 'Five Bells - A Visual Ode to Sydney' (1-18 February, 2012) .

‘the shock of the feminist’

The omission of women from the cultural record meant the search for a women’s tradition

I came across this article a few months back: "Wonders Taken for Signs: The Cultural Activism of the Australian Women’s Movement as Avant-Garde Reformation" by Margaret Henderson ( Lilith 17: 2008). It's a very thoughtful discussion of feminism and cultural production and what we can learn from that intense period of the "1970s and 1980s, in Australia and throughout the West, (when) relations of cultural production, reception, and texts (and films) all worked together to create the ‘shock of the feminist’". In her essay Henderson also discusses the "collective, as (the) defining structure of the women’s movement, signifier par excellence of its cultural politics"; here she also refers to various women's collectives including the Sydney Women's Film Group - which I became a member of in 1969:

Collectivism, as a strategy to demystify artistic production, to challenge the bourgeois artist figure and ideology of individualism, and to overcome women’s isolation, is the creative ethos powering feminist culture, whether in textual production or distribution. In the case of film, the auteur theory was rejected in favour of a non-hierarchical collective structure of film making, ‘one in which all the creative and technical roles were shared among the group’.

There's a longer essay to be written which explores the rise and fall (and rise) of 'the collective' in women's film-making; food for thought as a group of younger feminists contacted the For Love or Money (A history of women and work in Australia, feature documentary and Penguin Book 1983) team recently as they produce a short film on the history of International Women's Day. Younger women are discovering that the 'post-feminist' era is not necessarily a place of liberation! We did, after all call our movement Women's Liberation! Another group of young feminists saw For Love or Money at an IWD screening at their uni last year: "Last night, I watched the feminist documentary ‘For Love or Money’ at my university...As I sat there, waiting for the sense of relief and liberation to wash over me, I suddenly realized that every injustice suffered by our foremothers still exists today – it’s just dressed differently." ( Zoya Patel, 'Get Outraged!' in lip magazine, March 2010).

It's worth thinking and acting on this too: that our early film works of the 1970s and 1980s were all produced prior to Web 2.0. We have much to do to give these historically significant films presence in the 21st century.

tayenebe and meditation on a photograph

I am coming across a range of links to the Oyster Cove photographs by Nixon and representation; yet both unsatisfying - neither of them approaching nearby the heart of the matter. At least the The Representation Of Trucanini essay acknowledges the subjectivity of the photographer or the observor: "It is clear that no archival photograph of the Tasmanian Aborigine can be viewed as a document of truth, as the decisions of the photographer inadvertently affects the way in which the subjects were represented" . But how in 2009 can this writer place his whole study within the 'doomed race' theory of Tasmanian history! It's incredible. Just visit tayenebefor the living dynamic presence of the culture of Tasmanian Aboriginal people today.

Bishop Nixon's photograph of the Elders at Oyster Cove (1858) haunts me. It always has – from the moment I first saw it in 1982 in the State Library of Tasmania collection. The photograph is a ‘trace’ of the real. But, I am white and I have obtained a copy of it, and now I carry it around – slowly becoming aware of the ethics involved in having it in my possession; There is no return back to some fantasy of Tasmania as a ‘good’ white place. Sitting with this photograph, with the survivors of invasion, I look at the hands of the women, the comfort of their physical closeness to each other and their dogs. As the camera apparatus captures their image on silver nitrate for me to gaze at them – they look back at me – and for this moment, as observer, I stand in photographer Nixon’s place . I am his camera. I look at the women – Emma, Trucanini, Flora, Wapperty. They look back at me. I know it is their country. They belong to this island. Dispossessed by the British, yet the photograph speaks their possession.

This is a photo of their sovereignty of their own country. I allow this photo to possess me back. The women, their dogs – their gaze at me – is grounded, strong: ‘this is our country, back off, you stranger – white ghost’. They speak to me, not in words, but they affect me. I dream of them, at night. I see them as I walk the streets of Hobart. Their spirit is there, whispering to me to reckon with their presence. They are not gone, as the British hoped, as most of the whites in Tasmania hoped, that they would be gone forever. No, I ‘let them come visit. I allow myself to be haunted and, as I do, I sense myself as the stranger: ‘making whiteness strange’ and the risks involved. I am the interloper. Once, this island felt like home, but now I am in another country – strangeness, dislocation. I do not belong to this nation called Australia. This nation is a Thing, a fantasy space. The Oyster Cove photograph disturbs; it is a kernel of The Real.

tayenebe is now; tayenebe makers discuss their work today.

Robert Flaherty's Secret

‘It seemed ironic that the global popularity of “Nanook”, had served to freeze the Arctic and the people who live in it, including Robert’s (Flaherty) own son and granddaughter, in a version of a past that never was, in a land that could never be.’ (The Long Exile by Melanie McGrath, 2006).

After reading The Long Exile - a tale of the betrayal of the Inuit people – in their 1950s relocation to barren islands far away from their homelands, I found Martha Flaherty's email address and wrote to her. In my mind the relocations and subsequent struggles for justice by the Inuit people cry out for a broad contextualising of Flaherty's 1922 documentary Nanook of the North, from its time of production right up to the present. Martha Flaherty wrote back and told me about a new film about her life, Martha of the North and how she is planning a book about the true story of what happened during the relocations. I have been very touched by this correspondence and how it contributes depth of understanding around the complex site of documentary film-making process and ethics.

One of the exiles was Robert Flaherty's son- Josephie Flaherty - a child he had (and abandoned?) with Inuit woman, Maggie Nujarlutuk (who plays Nyla in Nanook of the North). The story of Flaherty's relationship with Maggie (and his son) is never told in the documentary film scholarship (or rhetoric) of Flaherty's film-making - so obsessed is it with textual analysis and 'the past' and whether the dramatizations are ‘documentary’ or 'ethnographic'. Such debates may be functioning as smoke screen to developing a contextual analysis that really changes the way we think about Flaherty and his film. Martha Flaherty's documentary (and for me also McGrath's book) opens up present day realities of the Inuit people and the role Nanook of the North played in forming a certain idealized and heroic narrative of the Inuit people that fed into racist stereotypes - which contributed to the disastrous relocations of the Inuit people in the 1950s.

the disobedient reader...viewer

Why an image from Sunless? Well, a blog on Sebald, Vertigo: Collecting& Reading W.G. Sebald, compares Marker and Sebald.
This site also reviews Australian author Deane Blackler's book, “Reading W.G. Sebald: Adventure and Disobedience”. I have found her analysis of Sebald's narrator persona insightful. She looks at how we read Sebald and argues that his books call forth a proactive reader: one who is challenged to question the text by his use of seemingly documentary photographs, the pseudo-autobiographical narrators.

In Island Home Country I peer into my own ‘white’ mind, and create a narrator – a staged performance – of white instability, uncertainty, fissure. As Blackler reflects in her study of W.G. Sebald ‘how can the reader trust this mad writer narrator as a guide'… as in this film, I create a narrator who is ‘trying’ to make a film, a filmmaker who ‘forgets to turn on the microphone’, a narrator who says, ‘this film is dissolving’; a narrator who loses her way. ‘Where is the reader to go? If we follow a ‘mad’ narrator, won’t we be implicated in (her) pathology?….This self-conscious writer, this constructed ‘I’ is not a stable authorial figure. Blackler argues that this unstable, figure gives birth to a ‘disobedient reader’, one who has to break ranks, cross an unstable line, in order to stay empathic.

Island Home Country- Current news 2009

Distribution of Island Home Country: where to purchase DVD's, & the recently published ATOM Study Guide. Island Home Country is a poetic cine-essay (52 mins) about Australia’s colonised history and how it impacts into the present. It offers insights into how various individuals reckon with the traumatic legacies of British colonialism and its race based policies.

Island Home Country was recently offered a broadcast contract with National ABC Television: Sunday Arts Program July 2009.
Screenings:
TAC International Film and Video Festival, Oregon USA May 2009.
Premiered at Brisbane International Film Festival August 2008.
Screened in the Film Program, 'Re-Orienting Whiteness' Conference (Monash University) December, 2008.
Awards
Nominated: Best Achievement in Sound for a Documentary, Australian Screen Sound Awards 2008. (Sound Designer Sharon Jakovsky; Sound Consultant Danielle Weissner).
High Commendation - UTS Reconciliation Award, UTS Human Rights Awards, October 2008.

The Island Home Country ATOM Study Guide is now available a free PDF from Metro ATOM (Australian Teachers of Media)

Purchase DVD's direct from Anandi Films or
The Education Shop

Three Rooms of Melancholia

This week in a Seminar on Constructing the Nation I screened a montage from the opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games; a clip from Obama's Democratic Acceptance Speech and a clip from Three Rooms of Melancholia. For me Honkasalo's haunting film enters into a space which explores the traumatic consequences of militaristic nationalism. With Sarah Palan's furies unfurling across the political landscape - we need more than ever the poet's mind and eye. Thankyou Pirjo for your contemplative, thoughtful film - ultimately a film about the need for tenderness.

Pirjo Honkasalo's director's statement:
Having completed my 'Trilogy of the Sacred and Satanic”(the full-length documentary films Mysterion, Tanjuska and the 7 Devils, and Atman), I felt I had purged myself of what I had sought from the documentary film: its purifying and implacable concreteness. I had given whatever I had to give; to that concretion, an intimation of human silence.
I felt an attraction and attachment to the logic of the dream, to which the fictional film provides the most natural path. The world of the dream is half in the past, half in the future. Its gods swing back and forth between life and death. There is no sense of longing in dreams. Time in dreams is not time in time. I directed the feature film “Fire-Eater”. I have always been stimulated not only by the Sacred and Satanic, but also by the Poetic and Political. It was this that drew me back to the documentary. I don't care for truths, for I see all thought as roiling foam that adheres to nothing nor holds fast; but in the time when I am not asleep or dreaming, I wish to know how the human tribe leads its life, shapes its history and expresses its will, which always seeks to improve the human condition and yet wallows, bewildered, in its blood like some elk gone astray in the city and impaled on the spikes of a cemetery fence. It should not happen this way.
Europe is filled with people who need grace of some kind to cope with their righteous rage. The righteous rage turns, a reflection, against them. And life is no court of justice; justice does not prevail, life does. It rises out of chaos in an ascending spiral, briefly appears to have structure, and descends in the curve of a downward spiral toward fresh chaos.
Stripping away icons of the enemy calls for the acceptance of grace along with righteousness. Grace is illogical and irrational - in other words, a profoundly gratuitous liberation from the compulsion to hate.

amnesia

An effect of amnesia is the inability to imagine the future.

strange, I meditate to try and be in the present and stop worrying about the future.....in any case here is Chapter 1 Menu design for the film Island Home Country. Thank you Tim Baines - graphic designer - for all your work these past few weeks. Making a DVD is like making another film!

Maidens an autobiographical essay film (1978)

A clip from Maidens


In a way making Island Home Country has been a revisiting of both Maidens and Tasmania, growing up, as I did, in the repressive era of the 1940s-1950s on that island. Returning to Tasmania in 2004 to make this film I began to excavate into the hard crust of my early childhood memories of a peaceful island with the reality of colonisation and the attempted genocide of the island peoples. When I made Maidens I had no idea of colonisation and 'what had really happened'. I lived in an all 'white world'. The Island Home Country project was conceived amidst the bitter time of ‘the history wars’ as ‘a work of mourning’, utilising psychoanalysis to make some kind of reckoning with history. I was interested in the relevance of the Mitscherlich’s research on post war Germans and their seeming total repression of Germany’s painful past straight after the war. As well I wanted to explore the kinds of amnesia represented in both my upbringing and in my films. As Christopher Koch (1987) writes in Crossing the Gap: A Novelist’s Essay, "we who lived (in Tasmania) between the thirties and the fifties were living in the half-light of a dying British Empire; but we only slowly came to realise it. The culture based in London was the imaginary pole star of our world. "

Download This: The Future of Distribution is Just a Click Away

The future, and this present moment of documentary distribution- on line and the role of the traditional educational distributors is discussed in this article in independent, the new on line Independent Film & Video Monthly. This is a timely article as I look at the distribution choices I have for Island Home Country. To be continued....

remembering, repeating, working through

We finished the film last night. Assistant editor Andrew Corsi and I working through this last (almost) year to bring this project to completion, a project that began in 2004. Karen Pearlman joined me as editor in 2005. I keep Karen's text on my mobile: when she got my 4 hour assembly (from 40 hours). She texted: A cut is born - 90mins 35sec and 15 frames. Karen delivered picture lock off (52mins)last June 07 and due, in part, to the film's commitment and responsibility to the the Tasmanian Aboriginal Protocols process, Andrew and I have taken almost a year to make the required changes and to then complete the online work. Sharon Jakovsky completed the final mix two weeks ago; So many people to thank - but a special thank you right now is due to Sarah Gibson (script and project consultant), Toula Anastas (production supervisor), Megan McMurchy (consultant producer), my whole extended family, especially Stephen Ginsborg and of course all those who appear in the film: my sister Jan Thornley, Auntie Merle Archer, Cousin Leigh Archer, Aunty Phyllis Pitchford – nunarng, Jim Everett - puralia meenamatta, Julie Gough, Penny X Saxon, Clive Atkinson, Moni Lai Storz, Dur-e Dara, Julie Janson, Anthony Bell, Rinki Bhattacharya and Arundhati Roy.
And here is a 3 min quicktime (Thanks Andrew.) It is from a sequence of the film about private memory and public memory and the fluid movement between the two. I have called the clip remembering, repeating, working through after Freud's 1914 essay. Also the film, for me, is about this process of remembering the past and working it through - both personally and in the public arena. The 2008 Apology is perhaps the most recent example of historical memory enacting and reverberating through our lives in so many ways. Yet, as Noel Pearson says in When Words Aren't Enough, "Blackfellas will get the words, the whitefellas will keep the money. And by Thursday the Stolen Generations and their apology will be over as a political issue."

me and mr greenaway

The frame is from Island Home Country. The text - a quote from David Tiley at AIDC 08 on Greenaway's plenary at the Conference. I, didn't go, of course. No money and at the beginning of the fifth year of making a film that defies completion....how to explain this rabbit hole I am down? Who would understand? I can't.

"He is also unimpressed with the documentary tradition, which he calls “false and phony – this desire to tell the truth, the truth is untellable.” We create subjective, individual truths; to assert they are more is “an act of extreme arrogance. I would rather advertise and proselytize myself as a liar in order to be able to tell you the truth of those lies than the opposite way round.”

“I’m duty bound I think as a self conscious filmmaker to always tell you that when you are watching one of my films that you are just watching a film. You are not looking through a window on the world. I’m giving you a film. An extraordinary vocabulary and language which is deeply, deeply artificial.” Peter Greenaway

The end of empire: Jarman, Swinton and "pre-industrial filmmaking."

Isaac Julien and Tilda Swinton, at the filmmaker's grave. Julien has curated a retrospective on Jarman. Photo Nina Kellgren.

On August 17, 2002, eight years after Jarman's death, Tilda Swinton, published an epistle to  Jarman entitled Letter to an Angel:

 Derek made filmmakers out of all of us who worked with him. Our work came out of the pre-industrial atmosphere of an art context, not the segregated professionalism of industrial filmmaking. This is the atmosphere I carry with me everywhere, like an amniotic sac.  It is the only way I know to work.

Well, some call her essay a lament for a lost era, yet I love the way she keeps it alive in her mind and the way it influences how she thinks and works today. A thinker, is Swinton.

navigating jonas mekas

Immersed in links to international distribution of documentaries - in this era of multi platforms - traditional and new paradigms circling each other...and I stumbled on Jonas Mekas's site: what a find! And then STREAM.

documentary: A Letter to a Boy from His Mother

documentary: A Letter to a Boy from His Mother

why Jonathon..I was so happy to get a response to my blog - so thanks for that (it hardly ever gets a response;  my daughter says: "well Mum, it's because it's so boring like your films." ) And then, the only response I get from you is navigational advice for the poor user who doesn't realise that the link is always in the header of each post I write! I must say I'm more interested in what you think of Tilda's essay than navigational advice...maybe it was irony.....By the way, what do you feel about Tilda's essay?

A Letter to a Boy from His Mother

Boy , my darling is how Tilda Swinton starts her beautiful essay on cinema and dreams and possibility and ethics : You asked me the other day, just as you were dropping off, what people’s dreams were like before the cinema was invented. You who talk blabberish and chase rabbits in your sleep, hurrumphing like a dog..you who never watch television..I’ve been thinking of your question ever since. I need to print her essay out and read it slowly, savouring each word as this actor/writer/cultural activist speaks in a voice little heard in the speed of the age, in the age of speed. 
Tilda Swinton’s State of Cinema address, San Francisco, 2006. First published in Critical Quarterly, vol.48, no.4. Now in Vertigo