I’d been there once before, but forgotten exactly what it feels like.
Visiting Keith.
Down by the beach.
He used to live with his mum. After a long time, she died. His aunty then moved in with him. She lived well into her nineties, but then, she too died.
Keith now lives on his own.
With his cat and the hundreds of birds he feeds every morning. Neighbourhood birds. He keeps a turtle dove in a cage. The dove cannot fly and likes living in the cage. The dove has friends – other doves that can fly. They come and visit the caged bird everyday. They must compare lifestyles, I think. The house and contents have not altered much in over 40 years. Keith is a creature of habit.
It’s an odd experience walking into a home that remains in the past. Not a re-created past, not a retro look. Nay – this is the real McCoy – a time travel experience that’s disturbing yet comforting in the same instance. I have no right to know this era. The clocks stop once you step across the threshold.
Keith is retired. He is three score years and ten.
He was a teacher. A brilliant man by all accounts. He won a scholarship to become anything he wanted. He thought about being a lawyer, but decided to be a teacher instead. They would pay him five pounds a week while he studied and guaranteed him a job afterwards. He liked the idea of a steady job. Besides, he had heard that the only way that lawyers ‘got ahead’ was by knowing someone. This was back in the late 1950s.
He records all the events of his day in his diary. Every, single day since 1957. Nothing much, just brief notes of what happened in the day. He has a remarkable memory (apparently) and only needs a few words entered on each page, to prompt his memory and recall the events and circumstances of that day. That’s persistence.
Keith has not seen a doctor in 50 years. Early this year he had a massive heart attack.
He saw many doctors.
He exercised for 3 months, because the hospital made him do it.
He doesn’t exercise now.
His heart probably doesn’t like that.
His heart just has to adjust to Keith, I guess.
Keith has lived by the beach for over 40 years.
He never, ever goes onto the beach, or swims in the water.
It’s just there. down the road.
a location.
We ate shop-bought ‘home cooked’ roast lamb and vegies.
Homemade trifle.
Sterling cup of strong tea.
You can learn an awful lot about a person in a few short hours.
Three months since my last post! I’ve been busy writing my Home Movies thesis and am slowly making progress. Early cinema – documentary, home movies? They were made before we began defining moving image ‘terms’. I thought this film was a good companion piece to my Randwick Race day tram clip post.
Tacita Dean is renowned for her 16mm film installations as well as for other works closely related to the films including photogravures, drawings on alabaster, overpainted photographs, sound recordings on magnetic tape, installation works and objets trouvés. Running through all her work is an obsession with time, with perception, with the nature of seeing: with things that lie outside of time or on the verge of disappearance.
Yesterday I went to the Tacita Dean exhibition at ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art), in Melbourne. Kodak (2006) is a 44 minute, 16mm film installation shot by Dean at the Kodak factory in Chalon-sur-Saône, France. The film production facility was closing down; Dean is here to witness a point of departure.
I’m in awe of Dean’s films, but you have to ’stay the pace’ to truly breathe in the lost spaces, timelessness and sense of ‘passing’ that her work evokes. Kodak is set in a factory. I generally associate factories with noise and bright lights, but the Kodak factory space that Dean presents is deeply meditative. Nobody seems in a hurry as they routinely go about their work. Sound is subdued, yet constant throughout, while the ‘production line’ of film is seen as rythmic and fluid. The lighting in the factory and the colours created by the celluloid running through the machinery appear symbiotic.
The factory workers, in their white boiler suits, quietly load and unload large spools of film. These methodical workers hover about like nurses comforting a dying patient. They are attentive, professional, but have the demeanour of those who know they are witnessing life ebbing away. In this instance, Dean is capturing celluloid in its death throes, threading its way through miles of machinery: celluloid without a story, but still able to project abstract images of glistening colour – flashes of peacock blue and smudgy red – determined to show its vibrancy even though its days are numbered.
Dean makes you stop and think. Her films make you stop and watch. It’s only by staying in a moment for much longer than the moment, that Dean’s camera forces you to see differently. Or maybe it’s not that you see, but that you begin to absorb the small, seemingly insignificant details – the quietness. About process. About the beauty in the banal. About the things we miss, because we just don’t look hard enough. About the death of industries and how things vanish while we are looking the other way. Of knowing too late. Of d.i.s.i.n.t.e.g.r.a.t.i.o.n.
Kodak is one of several films at the exhibition. If only I had time to tell you about the English man and his apple orchard, or Merce Cunningham. Both are mesmerising. Go see for yourself!
Tacinta Dean showing at ACCA
6 June 2009 – 2 August 2009
I’ve just read Giuliana Bruno’s splendid book called, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. Writing about architecture, art, film, memory, cartography, motion and (e)motion, Bruno maps a cultural history of spatio-visual arts.
A book infused with the ‘female perspective’; ideas on domestic and intimate space, the body, haptic geography, and the transposition of cinema space into gallery and museum space. All areas that tie in with my research interests. It has nothing to do with home movies, yet has everything to do with home movies. It’s about the power of lived spaces, emotions and memories. Nothing is fixed, all is fluid. I love this idea that Bruno has about our bodies as maps:
Film and architecture are practices of representation written on, and by, the body map. As dwelling-places of gender, they are loci for the production of sexuality, not simply vehicles for its representation. Insofar as they are productions of space, their imaging is to be understood as an actual map – a construction lived by users.
Film and architecture share a dimension of living that in Italian is called vissuto, the space of one’s lived experiences…they are about lived space and the narrative of place. They are both inhabited sites and spaces for inhabitation, narrativized by motion. Such types of dwelling always construct a subjectivity. Their subjectivity is the physical self occupying narrativized space, who leaves traces of her history on the wall and on the screen. Crossing between perceived, conceived, and lived space, the spatial arts thus embody the viewer (Bruno 64-65).
Bruno argues that although we think of film as a visual medium, it is as much about the positioning and movement of the body in space – hence it is, as she puts it, ‘haptic’.
The installation space becomes a renewed theater of image (re)collection, which both takes the place of and interfaces with that performative space the movie theatre has represented for the last century and continues to embody. An archive of moving images comes to be displaced in hybrid, residual interfacing (347 Bruno).
I can’t help but think this book will help me enormously in my work. It’s just hard for me to articulate how, as these ideas are all so fresh in my mind and need to settle awhile. Such a voyage of discovery!
INTERVIEW PROJECT has just been launched online. It comprises short interviews with people who Lynch encountered on a 32,000 kilometre road trip across America.
A new instalment will be posted every three days for the next 12 months.
Home movies have escaped the domestic confines of family gatherings, lounge-room walls and dark cupboards, to enjoy a renaissance within contemporary, image-saturated society. Why this relatively recent shift in attitude and representation of historical home movie footage within media production and archival practice? I’m interested in exploring how home movie footage and aesthetics have been incorporated into Australian screen practice, particularly documentary film and screen-based art, since 1998. By focusing on several case studies and examples of work, I want to see who is telling stories; how they are inserting home movies back into public history and what are the social implications.
That’s it…a four-line abstract that sums up what I hope to achieve this year when exploring home movies in contemporary life. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point. While I don’t presume ‘the rest will be easy’, I do feel that now I have this statement, things will fall into place a lot easier.
Randwick Racecourse Crowds.Taken from the historical footage Sydney Tramways (c1928). From the NFSA collection.
At its peak, after London’s, Sydney’s tramway network was the largest tramway system in the British Empire.
I live in Melbourne (a ‘tram proud’ city), but am a born and bred Sydneysider. I recently went to the Shooting through: Sydney by Tram exhibition at the Museum of Sydney. Lots of ephemera there, but I was mainly interested in watching the exhibition doco that was showing interviews and old film footage about Sydney trams. I discovered that the Fort Macquarie Tram Depot was demolished in 1959, to make way for the building of the Opera House; there were special ‘prison trams’ that transported criminals between courtrooms and prisons; and that tram services ceased entirely in Sydney in 1961. There’s now a light rail service in the Sydney CBD, but its range is limited.
I used to live opposite the Randwick Racecourse in Sydney and while watching this archival footage of race day chaos, I couldn’t help but think it looked such a fun way to (literally) catch a tram!
Taken from the home movie Farrow, H: Victorian and South Australian Holiday Scenes (c1930). Collection: NFSA
I’ve been spending precious time blogging about art, when I should be concentrating on home movies! I continue to trawl through the vast array of home movie footage available online at Australian Screen.
I’ve been watching movies that are mostly pre-1960. One silent, black and white clip shows a female ice skater(circa 1930) on Lake Catani, in the Mount Buffalo National Park, Victoria. Wearing a flared, black dress (with an occasional flash of bloomers worn underneath), the lone skater twirls around on the frozen lake, while a crowd of onlookers mill on the edge of the lake. At the end of her ‘performance’, the film cuts to shows many people ice skating, chatting or watching those on the lake. There’s nary a safety fence, crash helmet, or piece of protective clothing in sight; just people strapping on skates and having fun.
Suddenly, I was struck by one thought – Freedom. I began to think just how much freedom we don’t have in contemporary society. I’m not talking about democratic freedom, but the number of rules, regulations and threats of litigation, that now permeate our everyday lives.
A 1 minute 14 sec home movie clip, taken in 1930 succeeds in challenging my notions of freedom and constraint in contemporary times? Interesting. I have no wistful longing for the past, but am fascinated by how it can inform and contribute to present culture and society.
Nearly 80 years since that footage was shot. I wonder, does that lake still freeze in winter?
Sonja Henie , you ask? She was a famous Norwegian figure skater, who won her first Winter Olympic gold medal in 1928. After turning professional, she did live ice-skating shows (a popular new entertainment) and become an extremely successful Hollywood actress.
Sonja was an international star. Without a doubt, the Lake Catani figure skater knew of her too…
What I paint most is what interests me most, that is, people; the Human Condition, in particular the effect on appearance of environment and behaviour … A large part of the motive … is the desire to understand, and if possible, to illuminate …
The other day, I went to the John Brack exhibition which has just opened at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Gallery, Melbourne. This retrospective, showcasing paintings and drawings made throughout Brack’s lifetime, is grouped into several series: Scenes of urban life, Racecourse, Ballroom Dancers, Nudes, Pencils and Pens, etc.
The Bird Lady (1958)
I particularly like the way Brack captures people; stripping them bare and giving them angular, gauche, (often) mechanical faces and bodies. They usually possess quizzical, shy, secretive or blank looks; awkward postures and a sense that they really don’t have time to be in the painting, but will ’stay still’ for a minute.Brack paints everyday people and places – suburban scenes, family life, relationships, appearances and behaviour. He captures their essence, rather than a just a fleeting mood or emotional state.
Third Daughter (1954)
His oeuvre displays scenes of the moment, but not defined by that moment. I get a sense of what the subject’s life is like, once this ‘composed’ moment passes and they walk out of that particular ’scene’.
Eventually Bracked stopped painting people and started painting pencils, which represented people. I’ve seen a couple of these paintings at various galleries, but didn’t quite ‘get’ Brack’s change of direction. That is, until I saw his drawing of pencils dancing on a marble table at this exhibition and felt as if the blickers had been taken away and I could see the people…in the pencils!
The exhibition runs from 24 April–9 August 2009. I’ll definitely be going again.
John Brack Australia 1920-1999. Latin American Grand Final 1989. National Gallery of Australia. Canberra
