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

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!

Sonja Henie and Australian home movies.

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…

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.

Terence Davies – cut it like fiction

I saw Terence Davies‘ film “Of Time and the City” (2008) on the weekend.  While watching the film, I scribbled down lots of pertinent notes in the dark.  I have since lost my notes!

This is Davies’ ode to his hometown, Liverpool, England. It comprises mostly archival footage from a variety of sources and the mood is metered by elegiac, classical music.

I was interested to see how Davies grafts his memories on to archival footage. I particularly liked the editing; Davies’ voice-over commentary about his childhood, snatches of verse, disembodied voices and snippets from radio shows of the past, added to the aural blanket draped over the (mostly) black and white moving images.  The film was often slowed down, blurred and included stills.

Constantly throughout the film, all ‘voices’ become mute and the viewer is left with a montage of images that clearly speak for themselves.  It was a beautiful film and a wonderful way to ’step into’ someone’s life.

In a recent interview about the film, Davies says

if you cut it like fiction, then it [the film] has a emotional subtext…you go on a journey with film…

Quite so! This is not a documentary, it’s a lovingly kept diary about a boy and a place. Both growing up and changing.

Rosalie Gascoigne – vitality: the source of life

Rosalie Gascoigne Sweet lovers 1990 Collection of Christopher Hodges and Helen Eager, Sydney © Rosalie Gascoigne Estate, administered by VISCOPY, Australia

I’ve been a fan of the contemporary visual artist Rosalie Gascoigne for many years and was keen to see the current exhibition of her work at The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, located at Federation Square, Melbourne.

Rosalie’s creative inspiration came from her immediate surrounds where she lived: the sparse ‘Monaro country’ bordering Canberra. She was a scavenger, who collected odd, weathered bits of galvanised iron, wood, enamelware, linoleum, feathers and cupie dolls and turned them into whimsical, experimental works of art, which evoke a unique sense of Australian landscape.

I like the way Rosalie breathes life into discarded material to create something anew. Her feathered fences, faded lino ’stepping stones’ and artworks created out of yellow and orange road signs are compelling. The associative memories that her work triggers in the viewer offers endless possibilities in framing ideas about landscape, memory and history.

I was interested in the connections between her oeuvre and my research into home movies. In particular, her preference to work with style and form over colour. The power in her work is often due to the repetitiveness within the artwork.

I think home movies are just the starting point to examine a whole range of possibilities – social history, history of cinema, Australian identity, materiality, etc. The exhibition also made me reflect on the connection between landscape and identity and how that influences filmmakers.

I’m back in research mode and ready to tackle my Honours project.

Hooray!

Go see the exhibition. It closes March 15.