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!

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.

Shooting through like a Bondi tram (but at Randwick)

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!

John Brack – faces and places

The Car (1955) by John Brack

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

nun dolls & polio

I’m researching memory. I’m watching home movies. Not surprisingly, this seems to trigger sudden images in my head and flashes of my childhood. Just watched a ‘educational film’ about children with polio (on the wonderful Australian Screen website). I remember hearing about the devastating effect polio wrought on 70,000 Australians (mostly children) between 1930 and 1950 and remember seeing people walking around with calipers on their legs. This was a common sight for those affected by polio and I always remember being gruesomely fascinated by their legs banded in steel. Somehow this memory lead to Nun Dolls. Go figure!

I had a nun doll in primary school; dressed in black. Don’t know what happened to her. Maybe she threw the Habit and turned into a Barbie Doll (or Cindy), while I wasn’t looking.

Check out the Nun Doll Museum or better still, find some of your own memories on Australian Screen online.

The age of historical mythology

Whichever way I turn in my home movie research, I keep bumping up against ‘memory’. Recently I’ve been reading an essay written by the historian Inga Clendinnen called “The history question: who owns the past?”, which was published in The Quarterly Essay.

I’m interested in the history wars and Clendinnen’s illuminating argument about national identity, myth, fiction and history. In a nutshell, her essay questions ‘how we should record and regard the nation’s past’. Clendinnen quotes Milan Kundera, who famously declared that “the struggle of men against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” What we remember, what we forget. How do we remember what we forget? Why does it matter anyway?

Clendinnen’s essay dovetails nicely with research I did recently while visiting Sydney. Ten years ago, an installation Places of Memory was exhibited at the Museum of Sydney. It was created by the screen-based artist Virginia Hilyard and explored the private and collective memories of Sydney through home and amateur movie footage. It included archival and contemporary footage – the latter being shot by Hilyard.

I spoke to several people (curatorial staff at the Museum, access officers at the National Film and Sound Archive, etc) involved in organising the exhibition. During a conversation, one sentence really stuck in my mind. “This (use of home movies) is quite commonplace now, but what Virginia was doing back then had never been done before – it was quite extraordinary”.

This casual remark proved to be the tipping point in my research. An installation I’d never seen, comprised of home movies of people I didn’t know. Where’s the interest? What’s the point? I’ll let Virginia explain in her own words:

Memory can come from the images of others. I was born a quarter of a century after the completion of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, yet I have memories of it during its construction. I can picture the incomplete arc of the bridge even though it is impossible for me to have physically experienced this. Modern memories of a city are found within a living archive – its people and the ways in which they interpret their lives through stories, writings, snapshots and home movies. These provide a place where their private and public experiences converge.

Our memories aren’t necessarily our own, nor are they 100% accurate. Sometimes, we are trying to remember a scene, while on other occasions we try to remember an experience. Home movies are the documents of history. They trigger memories of people, places, experiences (both our own memories and our stolen memories).

Peter Emmett, the senior curator at the Museum of Sydney (circa 1998) argues:

What we call History has established itself as the guardian of an ‘objective past’, but it really dwells within an archive of pictures and text from which to erect a summary vision of the past. It has banished subjective storytelling and lived traditions, the stuff of memory, substituting a fictional order of time progressing towards a future, ever improving on the past. It has severed the present from the past, imposing myth over memory. Have historians and museologists become the guardians of forgetting rather than agents of memory?

So, with Hilyard as my starting point, I’m curious to explore how home movies have been incorporated into screen-based art and documentaries since 1998. I hope to do this by interviewing filmmakers, visual artists and those working in screen culture. I want to see how home movies have managed to ‘leave home’, found their place in the world at large, made friends and are now doggedly challenging historiographic practice.

Cited Works
Clendinnen, Inga. “The History Question. Who owns the past?” Quarterley Essay, Black Ink. Melbourne. Issue 23 2006.

Virginia Hilyard and Peter Emmett essays in “Places of Memory: Sydney Home Movies”. Exhibition installation at the Museum of Sydney. Monograph published by Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, Sydney 1998.

Yayoi Kusama

I was in Sydney last week and went to the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I entered a surreal world filled with organic shapes and lots of polka dots. Yayoi makes large paintings, soft sculptures and environmental sculptures. As a child, she suffered from hallucinations and began seeing dots – lots of dots. They have become a lifelong obsession.

Art makes me think in different ways; it gives me the ability to view the world through someone else’s gaze. I assume this is the case for most people. What I got from Yayoi’s vision was a sense of boundlessness – freedom from space, time, gender, location & ‘normality’.

Entering her Infinity Room initially takes your breath away. You walk through a door into a room. You know you are in a tiny room, but you feel suspended in a space that has no walls, floor or ceiling. Through lights and mirrors, I could instantly suspend believe and simply float in infinity. You become a small part of this silent, colourful, magical, timeless cosmos.

It’s an exhibition I wanted to immediately revisit and explore in greater depth. I returned to Melbourne without doing so. Hopefully I’ll get back to Sydney before the exhibition closes in June.

Yayoi Kusama Dots Obsession

Indigenous Australian artists

Christian Thompson Bidjarra/Kunja people Black Gum 2 (from ‘Australian Graffiti’ series) 2008 Purchased 2008. The Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant Collection: Queensland Art Gallery

I love this photo. I find it evocative and quietly unsettling. Black Gum 2 (from ‘Australian Graffiti’ series 2008) is part of the “Breaking Boundaries: Contemporary Indigenous Australian art from the Collection”, on show now at the Queensland Art Gallery: Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane.