Holistic shoe shopping

I always find this kind of shoe shopping immensely appealing. All these shoes standing sentinel while the Cinderella process unfolds. Who will be the right fit? Will any box topple from its high perch and break rank?

They  patiently wait their turn to walk out the door with a new owner, rather than languish unseen in a back room. Their steady ‘presence’ makes shopping an immersive experience, rather than a clinical one. These old-style shoe shops, which abound in the suburbs, make you want to linger. They quietly demand your attention and your time. It’s just like being in a lolly shop – without the calories.

Footscray Market

After years of anticipation, I finally made my first visit to Footscray Market. I expected lots of colour, movement and a sense of ALIVENESS. Alas, it didn’t quite live up to expectations. Rows of vegetables, meat on hooks, people making a living, people saving money; it was all rather subdued. Preston Markets is more my style.

hangin’ with the latte set

We’d already had a delicious light-as-a-feather potato and leek omelette for lunch at Three Bags Full in Abbotsford, but our carousing in coffee shops was far from over. The weather outside was very Melbourne winter: grey skies shot through with bursts of sunshine, hail, biting wind and rain. The thermometer couldn’t push the mercury past 11C today. Lunch had been spent moaning about housemates and people that didn’t talk to their heater in winter (we could never figure out people who don’t talk to inanimate objects). Afternoon tea needed to be a salve to our guilty, bitchy lunch and an excuse to waste more time doing nothing more than perusing the dailies. Seven Seeds had been VERY NOISY. We jumped in the car and found Cipi Cafe, Keene St, Collingwood. It was very zen. It was what we needed. A  Japanese flavoured urban melbourne cafe. No signs out the front. No website. Relaxed. Locals. Awesome music. We barely even talked. You can keep your High Teas and fancy service. perfect winter’s day.

Wednesday night tea at Keith’s

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.

This blog is now taking a new tack.

The little people who you never hear about.

How they shape their lives.
Fascinating.

L’Arrivée d’un Train à la Ciotat (1895):The Lumière Brothers

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.

Iranian Home movie circa 1960s

Tacita Dean – Kodak: exposure in the dark

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

Emotional pictures – inner worlds: Giuliana Bruno

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!

DAVID LYNCH: INTERVIEW PROJECT

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.

People sharing their stories. Neat!

Home movies|modern memories

HOME MOVIES: REEL TIME

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.