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.
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.
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.
Heat maps are cool. You can play with the interactive version of this map, by clicking the link below.
McKinsey and Company ‘partnered with the World Economic Forum to create an “Innovation Heat Map,” by identifying factors that are common to successful innovation hubs’.
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.
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.
Yesterday I attended a one day forum “New Directions in Film Research“, run by Cinema Studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne. I thought it time to re-engage with ‘all things cinema’ and start to flesh out ideas for my Honours project for 2009. New Directions sounded ideal!
Although I felt rather intimidated by the presence of a battalion of erudite cinema academics, of which I am patently not, I’m pleased I attended. There were three speakers, but my main reason to attend was to hear Deb Verhoeven speaking about how research technologies, new to Screen Studies, can contribute to and expand the type of discovery and articulation within the discipline. Her particular focus, in this instance, was on the use of databases and maps in key screen research projects. And I thought I was the only one interested in mapping cinema…go figure!
Deb spoke about her project ‘Greek and Italian Cinemas in Melbourne’ and the cultural mapping it involved. Her project examined audience experiences and business practices of the independent Greek and Italian cinema chains that operated in Melbourne, Australia from the late 1950s until the late 1970s. This project raises questions about National cinemas in relation to diasporic communities, itinerant cinema and indeed, cinema’s place within the wider social milieu.
What was fascinating was the way Deb has been working with geo-spacial scientists to create maps and databases to track Greek and Italian cinema in Melbourne. This included population location (and movement over time), cinemas opened and closed and exactly where Italian and Greek films were distributed throughout Australia. These visualisations provided a lot of information in a short period of time. Now I just need to focus on narrowing my field of exploration.
Geoff Cox is an artist, teacher and organiser of events connected with digital experimentation in the United Kingdom. Within his curatorial route for Arnolfini, an organisation dealing with contemporary art, he developed an interesting project whose topic is the intersections between critical theory of social networks and critical practice of the world of art.
Geoff’s developed an interesting project called Antisocial notworking. These are the notes about the project and an interview with Geoff talking about social networks. Fascinating stuff – just make sure you’ve got a clear head when attempting the Notes…there’s a lot to take in, but it’s worth the effort.
Also see Art & Social Technologies, which is a research group in the UK that examines creative practice at the intersection of art, technology and society.
We live in a society of cut-up words; I’m interested in the aesthetics of data visualization and what we can make of fragments…made even more interesting when combined with social networking and powerful databases. Check out:
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. 
