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.

'For Love or Money: Conflicting Temporalities'

For Love or Money: A history of women and work in Australia is a feature documentary by Megan McMurchy, Margot Nash, Margot Oliver and Jeni Thornley released in 1983. This feminist classic was digitally restored from original film materials by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia in 2017. The film has been in active distribution for over 40 years with Ronin Films and is available on VOD, DVD and DCP.

Newcastle Barmaids, Tribune, 1962 

The following essay, 'For Love or Money: Conflicting Temporalities' is a revised and edited extract from Felicity Collins, “The Experimental Practice of History in the Filmwork of Jeni Thornley”, uploaded to Screening the Past Issue 3, 29 May 1998. 

 The most synthetic of all art forms, film is the space in which the representative and symbolic birth of a female person can can take place through the reconstruction of her history. (Barbara Kosta, Recasting Autobiography, 1994: 164)  

In a belated reading of Claire Johnston’s influential work as a 1970s cultural activist, Meaghan Morris attempts to clarify the paradox of feminism’s constructive approach to social change in the face of its skeptical approach to history. She argues that feminism’s difference from other radical political and aesthetic movements is characterised by modes of action “to bring about concrete social changes while at the same time contesting the very bases of modern thinking about what constitutes ‘change'” (“‘Too Soon, Too Late’: Reading Claire Johnston, 1970-81,” in Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970-90, ed. C. Moore, 1994: 128). Morris’s essay is an attempt to think about what it takes for feminist forms of action (which include festivals and seminars, essays and films) to redefine (as well as survive) historical change.

Here, I draw on contemporary readings of Walter Benjamin’s disruptive concept of history to revisit the 1983 documentary film, For Love or Money (a collective film by Megan McMurchy, Margot Nash, Margot Oliver and Jeni Thornley). Assembling a vast amount of archival footage and adding a rhythmic and intimate voice-over, For Love or Money was part of a paradigm shift in feminist film-thinking, away from the concept of ‘the spectator’ towards cinema as a public sphere “through which social experience is articulated, interpreted, negotiated and contested in an intersubjective, potentially collective, and oppositional form.” (Miriam Hansen, “Early Cinema, Late Cinema” in Viewing Positions, ed, L. Williams, 1995: 140) 

For Love or Money had its origins when Sandra Alexander, co-ordinator of the 1977  Women’s Film Production workshop, suggested to Thornley and McMurchy that it would be a good idea to get together all the images of women in Australian films and have a look at them. This dovetailed with a request, in 1978, from the organisers of the first Women and Labour Conference to the Sydney Women’s Film Group to make a film of all the archival images of women at work. These apparently modest requests resulted in six years of painstaking work of collecting, cataloguing, and reprinting film and photographic images.

For Love Or Money Filmmakers, Sydney 1983
(photo Sandy Edwards)

The formal challenge of narrating two centuries of Australian women’s history in a feature length film which used over two hundred film clips was further complicated by what Walter Benjamin identified as a crisis in the tradition of storytelling, evident since World War I when “men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience.” (“The Storyteller” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn and ed. Hannah Arendt, 1970; reprint, 1992: 84). For Love or Money was conceived as an antidote to the exclusion of women from Australian national history, yet the problem of finding a suitable narrative form for communicating women’s historical experience was never fully resolved by the makers of For Love or Money:

"There were times when it got very frustrating because we would have liked to have structured For Love or Money differently. The showreel was great to cut; it was such fun because it wasn’t chronological and I could really play, in the editing, across periods. It didn’t have that dreadful rigid chronology. In trying to find another structure that was not chronological, there just came a time when we had to let go because no one came up with anything; no one solved it". (Margot Nash. Interview with the author, 1 July 1992).

The challenge facing the filmmakers, to find a non-chronological structure, can be understood in terms of the distinction between conscious, voluntary memory and the act of remembrance. Like Benjamin, Irving Wohlfarth contends that modern historiography is a “mere pile of souvenirs” which “substitutes voluntary memory for authentic remembrance”. (“On the Messianic Structure of Walter Benjamin’s Last Reflections,” Glyph 3, 1978: 166). This contention is particularly pertinent to the struggle to produce an authentic, feminist mode of remembrance in For Love or Money. Wohlfarth suggests one path to authentic remembrance via Benjamin’s claim that the epic is the oldest form of historiography, containing within it the story and the novel, and their corresponding forms of memory: the storyteller’s epic memory (gedachtnis) of short-lived reminiscences and multiple events; and the novelist’s perpetuating memory (eingedenken) dedicated to “the one hero, the one odyssey, the one struggle” (1978: 149-50). Distinguishing between the epic genre of the chronicle (associated with oral tradition) and the conflation of chronology with the idea of progress (in the novel), Wohlfarth poses a choice for the historian: “historicism’s universal panorama” or “highly particular interactions between past and present” (1978: 167).

For Love or Money adopts historicism’s “universal panorama” yet fractures it in three ways. Firstly, “multiple events” are narrated from a feminist perspective on the present, challenging standard accounts of Australian national identity built on mateship and the bush ethos. Secondly, the film evokes “particular interactions between past and present” through audio-visual montage-sequences and the voice-over, offering a history of “multiple reminiscences” rather than one of lone heroes. And thirdly, the film’s apocalyptic perspective, on the present (the atomic age) heralds the annihilation rather than the redemption of history.

A feminist, historical temporality is specified at the beginning and in the closing montage of For Love or Money. The opening montage of shots is accompanied by a non-Anglo woman’s voice-over which establishes that this will be a history from below: “We find heroes only in monuments in public parks, but I think the real heroes are us.” The closing montage includes photographs of the filmmakers at work on the film, followed by a compilation of scenes from local feminist films, and a voice-over:

"We go back. We ask what happened then. We find documents, diaries, letters, images. Stories are uncovered. The stories of women’s work.”

Mother and children, Victorian Railways, 1951

Like Benjamin’s historical materialist, the filmmakers understand that historicism favours the victor, and that their task, as feminist activists, is to take the documents preserved by the victor and “brush history against the grain” (Benjamin, 248). This task is made all the harder by the disjuncture between photographic representation and the memory-image. As Kracauer reminds us, the recent past captured in the photographic image can become comic, like recent fashion (“Photography” in Critical Inquiry, 19.3, 1993: 430). A wry montage of marriage proposals from Australian feature films in For Love or Money exploits the comic effect of antiquated images of the recent past, inviting sceptical laughter at an outdated nationalism. This contrasts with the significance of the memory-image which “outlasts time because it is unforgettable” (Kracauer, 1993: 428).

At the time of its release in 1983, For Love or Money attracted vocal criticism for the way its first-person plural voice-over : “We remember her labour. We remember that she gave. What we were to each other”. “We” was heard, then, as producing a unified female subject of history and eliding differences between women. A retrospective viewing of For Love or Money offers another interpretation: that the collective “we” of female unity is fragmented into multiple reminiscences which work against the unifying voice of the narrator and against the linearity of historicist time. From this perspective, modernity’s conflicting temporalities (of race, class and gender) undercut the panoramic unity of the first-person voice-over in For Love or Money. Drawing on key events of national history (such as the long struggle for equal pay and women’s rotation in and out of the workplace at times of war) as the sites or loci of memory, the filmmakers organised a wealth of archival images into a new temporal order. This disruptive temporality serves to undercut the panoramic logic of a masculine, nation- building history. The “we” of the narration, then, brings together a multitude of voices.

For Love or Money begins with anthropological footage of Aboriginal women whose stories reverberate with the on-going consequences of their dispossession from the land. Their colonised modernity is a different temporality from that of white, settler women whose historical experience takes multiple forms under convictism, land settlement, industrial, and digital economies.

Aboriginal Day of Mourning, Man magazine, Sydney 1938

The 1890s, the 1920s and the Depression of the 1930s constitute significant events in white women’s temporality. While working class women engage in struggles for equal pay, union representation and access to better paid ‘male’ jobs, middle-class women appear in the public sphere as reformers and campaigners.

The influx of a labour force of immigrants after World War II produces the greatest temporal shock since colonisation: southern European rural time is traded for the industrial time of the assembly line and its promise of mobility expressed in the anonymous voice-over, “Sometimes I dream I will be coming out of that bloody factory.”

In the 1920s and again in the 1950s, as the commodification of housework and child care intensifies, women enter new temporalities as consumers of modern, privatised lifestyles. In the 1960s access to higher education propels the postwar generation of upwardly mobile young women (including the filmmakers) into an oppositional public sphere defined by the New Left and the liberation movements.

How, then, is a feminist narration of history to end if not in the present as a redemptive awakening through women’s liberation? In the interests of a united women’s movement, For Love or Money, at one level, attempts to subsume the film’s multiple reminiscences into one temporality. It stages the present as “a state of emergency” (Benjamin, Theses 248), a disruptive “now-time” that appears in modernity’s ultimate eruptive image: Hiroshima. The narrator declares: “We are the daughters of the atomic age: numb, silent, grieving.” While this is a point of unity in the film, multiple endings pile up as different histories are brought to a standstill by the image of the atomic mushroom cloud.

The first of the film’s endings begins with footage of a women’s demonstration, accompanied by a voice-over which seeks “new meanings for work,” challenging “work ruled by profit, efficiency, progress, war.” The film acknowledges its own historicist impasse when its careful documentation of the ninety-year struggle for equal pay ends with the statement, “Progress, but it didn’t really change things.”

The second ending begins with a slow motion shot of women in black, arms linked, faces quietly determined, as they participate in the first Anzac Day commemoration of women raped in war. The voice-over declares, “We are women of the nuclear age. We resist. We place our bodies in the way.”

The Sydney Women Against Rape in War Collective, Anzac Day,
George St Sydney 1983

The image track cuts abruptly to a third ending with a shot of Aboriginal artefacts hanging on a wall, followed by an aged photograph of Aboriginal women. A new voice speaks over the Aboriginal song: 

“Listen to us. Our country is very beautiful. It is our grandfathers’ country and our grandmothers’ country from a long time ago. It is the sacred soil of the dreamtime. Why do you never understand?”

A fourth ending begins with stills of the filmmakers, seeking to construct a new, feminist temporality, as they work with images and stories they have uncovered. This ending contrasts the daughter’s story of resistance with the mother’s “story of the kitchen, the story of the clean house.” A compilation of mother-daughter photographs, accompanied by a ‘hymn to the mother’ is followed by shots of men holding their children: 

“We ask what might happen if men learnt the story of women’s work.”

At this point the film seems to be over, but the return of the problem of women’s work and the maternal is displaced by a last-minute reprise of the activist ethos in the resonant image of the Anzac Day memorial march for women: an image that fades, blurs, turns to blue and finally to black. What is the future of this deeply mournful image – an image of feminists born under the sign of Hiroshima, mourning unknown women raped in war?

Women's march against rape, Anzac Day Sydney, 1983
 [super8 frame]

For Love or Money ends in a nuclear present where the cessation of history (and its modernist myth of continual progress) threatens to be apocalyptic rather than redemptive. Osborne is critical of the persistence of apocalyptic narrative in Benjamin’s thinking, especially the emphasis on a “generalized sense of crisis, characteristic of the time-consciousness of modernity as perpetual transition” (Osborne, The Politics of Time, 1995: 157). Osborne revives the discourse of political modernism when he argues for now-time “as an integral moment within a new, non-traditional, future-oriented and internally disrupted form of narrativity” which cannot be co-opted into reactionary refiguration “of history as a whole” (158-9).

For Love or Money occupies a space between historicist and materialist forms of narrative: it draws on multiple temporalities to refigure “history as a whole” in order to bring it within the grasp of the present moment. Yet, the attempt to grasp history in the present (to arrive at a future-oriented ending) is precisely the point at which narratives of crisis, redemption, or apocalypse fall into ruin. This breakdown of historical narrative, in the present, marks the moment of skepticism in feminism’s experimental practice of history.  

 © Screening the Past  

Screening the Past publishes material of interest to historians of film and media, to film and media scholars, to social historians interested in the place of film and media within general history, to film makers interested in the history of their craft or in representing history through their productions, to film and media librarians and archivists. 

"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

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) .

"There’s No Such Thing As Post-Colonialism". Jim Everett

This month I was pleased to read Will Owen's blog: Aboriginal Art & Culture: an American eye and his thoughtful response to my documentary Island Home Country: 
Although Island Home Country may have begun as a film about her childhood, Thornley quickly became swept us in the larger questions of history, and then just as quickly in the questions of cultural protocols.  She visits with Jim Everett, with Aunty Phyllis Pitchford, with Tasmanian artists Julie Gough and PennyX Saxon.  Gough in particular raises the issues of image making and image use; Everett and Pitchford urge her to tell her own story and not try to tell the Indigenous stories (although they do contribute their own in snippets throughout the film).  Thus the weave become tangled as Thornley struggles to explore, to learn, and to tell what she learns: to tell a story that is both hers and not hers... She knows as she does so that she is laying a landscape atop country, and knows there is no other way to do it.  It is Jim Everett who speaks the phrase I’ve chosen as the title for this essay: “There’s no such thing as post-colonialism.”  Unless and until the white man leaves and leaves the country to its original inhabitants, whatever remains is still colonial.  There is no escape from history....

"I began to experience a strange tension with my technology".

Walking with Kabir by Shabnam Virmani: " As I ventured into the life of Kabir in the community, I began to experience a strange tension with my technology. The presence of my camera seemed to separate me from the action and relegate me to being a passive observer...Being part of the making process seemed more vital and important than consuming what is made, in my case, ‘recording’ it. It seemed imperative to be fully enveloped in the live pulsating music, to allow it to infiltrate your very pores and have the poetry literally enter your body by singing it...Our middle class lives deliver to us mediated experiences that come to us through books, TV, radio, music CDs and the internet — technology that can certainly deliver powerful experiences, but that can also circumscribe our lives, cut it off from immersion in a vital life force that exists in nature, in the tactile experience of sound, music and earth. We get alienated, we become watchers of spectacles, far-removed, we become phlegmatic, we don’t participate... What I realized in that moment was that in some sense, these were not my films at all. They were not something I made or earned or chose. They were experiences I received as gifts, from a space that lay beyond the claims of my small self. All I had to do now was to pass them on and gift them to others:

Meraa mujh mein kuchch naheen
Jo kuchch hai so teraa
Teraa tujh ko saunp dun
Kyaa laage hai meraa?
There is nothing in me that’s mine
All that is — is yours
I offer to you what’s already yours
What can I say is mine?"

Article by Shabnam Virmani January 2010 Seminar magazine based on a talk she gave in October 2010. View Shabnam's talk and singing here:

Shabnam Virmani is a filmmaker and artist in residence at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, India. 7 years ago she started travelling with folk singers in Malwa, Rajasthan and Pakistan in a quest for the spiritual and socio-political resonances of the 15th century mystic poet Kabir in our contemporary worlds. Her documentary Koi Sunta Hai: Journeys with Kumar & Kabir can be watched online at Culture Unplugged

I recommend her work to you. It is profound.

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.

documentary modes

It is documentary film theorist Bill Nichols who writes about the chief characteristics and deficiencies of each documentary mode (Introduction to Documentary (2001:139). It was interesting, then, this morning to read Cynthia Lucia's interview with the filmmaker of Dogora, Patrice Leconte in Cineaste: "Personal Politics and Vision in Dogora: An Interview with Patrice Leconte". Now, Leconte is not really a documentary filmmaker, nor has he read any documentary film studies (most documentary filmmakers haven't). In the interview I can sense how he is struggling over the shortcomings of the mode(s) he chose for this film:

Lucia writes: Yet, as is true of certain moments in Wiseman’s work, at points in Dogora the absence of information not only impedes viewer comprehension, but it also potentially inhibits active or, at best, activist viewer response. The footage centered on the Steung Mean Chey garbage dump—the largest open landfill in Asia, located a half hour outside Phnom Penh City—is a case in point. We see impoverished adults and children collecting waste (and sometimes consuming something edible they may find) through day and night. We also see images of children studying and sleeping in a schoolroom. It’s difficult to make sense of these images—what they mean or how they are connected. In the French DVD release of the film, Leconte, on the commentary track, explains that the school is run by PSE (Pour un Sourire d’Enfant [For a Child’s Smile]), a French organization devoted to helping the children, many of whom are orphans, obtain an education and the basic necessities of life. At the time of filming, Christian des Pallieres oversaw the school and the charitable work involving landfill residents. While the images evoke a powerful emotional response, one wonders if a bit more information might elicit something more substantial—whether through further research, donations, or other support of landfill workers. At the same time, of course, that could easily tip the film’s balance away from the lyrical to a more didactic, public-service mode—and that, too, would present a problem.. Lucia writes of a 'fissure—between the personal, lyrical project of the film and those disquieting images that seem to press for something more'.

Martha of the North

I haven't seen Martha’s film yet, only the trailer. I have ordered the film for UTS library. But have a look at this clip here: Mary May Simon, a dynamic activist for her people, former Canadian diplomat, Fellow of the Arctic Institute of North America, introduces Martha Flaherty's film Martha of the North at its launch in this year in Ottawa. In this intro I think she acknowledges that Martha’s father Josephie Flaherty, (Flaherty’s Inuit son), is in the audience. I am not sure: watch this clip! Also today I learned of a 1990 documentary, Nanook Revisted which revisits the site of Flaherty’s filming. Here too is a wiki on Nanook Revisted that furthers discussions around these complex issues in documentary

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.

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.