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…

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

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.

John Foxx – Smokescreen

Back in May 2008, I blogged about John Foxx. Here’s a quietly, compelling example of his work.

San Francisco Emotion Map

This is what I like about the world today. A lot of information presented in one layer…but on closer inspection is densely multi-layered. Simple complexity. This biomap was created by Christian Nold. Somehow I want to incorporate these ideas into my Honours project. I like the idea of ‘tracking’ home movies to see what type of pattern takes shape and meaning is revealed.

Christian Nold is the creator of this biomap.

The San Francisco Emotion Map is the culmination of Christian Nold’s five-week residency and participatory art project that involved a total of 98 participants exploring San Francisco’s Mission District neighborhood using the Bio Mapping device he invented. During his residency at Southern Exposure, Christian Nold worked in the organization’s Mission Street storefront gallery encouraging visitors to stop by and use the devices during the weekdays and on Saturdays when he conducted intensive workshops. The project invited the public to go for a walk using the device, which records the wearer’s physiological response to their surroundings. The results of these walks are represented on this map using colored dots and participant’s personal annotations. The San Francisco Emotion Map is a collective attempt at creating an emotional portrait of a neighborhood and envisions new tools that allow people to share and interpret their own bio data.

Internal Montage

Although I’m primarily investigating ‘film‘, I read an article today by Scott McQuire called Videor-Video Theory. Although this 1999 article has a focus on video, it was interesting to ‘re-think’ the impact of image de-composition and the function of the frame afforded by video.

McQuire writes about the problematic relationship between video and theory, suggesting that ‘[o]ne of the problems, even for those theorising video as a ‘specific signifying practice’ was that, while it was clearly different to photography and cinema, it was not entirely new. Moreover, I would argue that the arrival of video around the 1970s didn’t make nearly as radical a break or cultural rupture as photography had in the 1840s or cinema in the 1890s. Nevertheless, it did stretch existing paradigms in a number of ways’. He traces this impact under three headings:

1) instantaneity
2) architectonics
3) plasticity

Plasticity was what I found of most interest.

What I wanted to talk about briefly is a shift in the aesthetics of the image: its increasing density and malleability. I wanted to approach this by considering the changing function of the frame from painting to photography to cinema to video. The frame becomes crucial in painting around the same time that painting begins to detach itself from architecture; it corresponds to the moment in the Renaissance when painting is being reconceptualised by those such as Alberti as a ‘window to the world’. The function of the frame is firstly to demarcate the inside of the image from its exterior; but the stability of the frame also serves as guardian of the stable and centred position of the spectator.

This system continues in photography, with its inheritance of painting’s visual language and its aspirations to be considered an art. But it does so with difficulty. The crux of the matter is that, with the number of ‘views’ which begin to be made, the authority of the one ‘ideal’ view which painting represented becomes increasingly tenuous. The shift towards an active frame, and by implication a mobile, decentred spectator, becomes more explicit with the arrival of cinema, and more, particularly, with the development of a cinematic language based around camera movement and montage. From this moment on, the frame delineates a point of view which is inherently unstable, shifting and highly mobile. The philosophic, political and social ramifications of such a shift are still being felt.

What happens with video belong less to this external axis of framing than to its internal dimensions. As the interior of the image becomes increasingly fluid, there are new possibilities for what might be called ‘internal montage’. One aspect of this is the proliferation of internal ‘windows’ — frames within frames — which can be seen in the work of a film maker such as Peter Greenaway.

This idea of internal montage set my heart aflutter! McQuire concedes that although the plastic possibilities are not unique to video; you could do similar things with film but it was a more laborious and expensive process. He argues that, ‘it is interesting to speculate on video’s role as screen technologies moves away from purely visual concerns to become a combination of image and text — a data screen for the information society.

Aesthetic shifts, fluid frames, overloaded images, montage. It sort’ve fits in with my hazy ideas of re-interpreting home movies/found footage and discovering what’s NOT shown in them and I constantly keep thinking of the wash of amateur film, photos, words on the Web today…am looking for connections…what is this identity thing all about?

‘Video theory’ Globe (1999)
Scott McQuire
www.artdes.monash.edu.au/non-cms/globe/issue9/smtxt.html
Accessed 20 August 2008

The Danube Exodus – Film by Peter Forgacs on Vimeo

The Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács is one of the most prominent so-called found footage filmmakers. In particular home movies and amateur films serve as the basis of stories he reveals and compose by using recovered personal and historical events.

He is primarily interested in the way in which these films seem to depict only happy moments, but on closer consideration they also appear to tell a hidden history, which can be brought back to the surface by the recycling filmmaker.

In the travelogue The Danube Exodus, he documents the Jewish exodus from Slovakia just before the beginning of World War II. In two boats, a group of nine hundred Slovak, Austrian Jews tried to reach the Black Sea via the river Danube, in order to get to Palestine from there. Forgács based his film on the amateur films of Captain Nándor Andrásovits, the captain of one of the boats.
He filmed his passengers while they prayed, slept and even got married. At the end of this journey, it is clear that the boat will not return empty: a reverse exodus takes place, this time of repatriating Bessarabian Germans, fleeing to the Third Reich because of the Soviet invasion of Bessarabia.

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Mining the Home Movie

I’ve recently finished reading the book Mining the home movie, which is the first international anthology to explore the historical significance of amateur film. These essays are written by filmmakers, film theorists, moving image archivists and preservationists. All authors are passionate about home movies as vital methods of visually preserving history, and see them as an important genre of film studies.

I was interested to read about the wide range of amateur film/home movie collections around the world and somewhat surprised that the National University of Mexico (UNAM), has one of the largest film archives in Latin America – Filmoteca UNAM.

I keep stumbling across the word historiographic and discovered it examines the writing of history and the use of historical methods, drawing upon such elements such as authorship, sourcing, interpretation, style, bias, and audience.

Hayden White argues that ‘history is an imaginative and transformative act, one in which fiction and fact endlessly flow in and out of each other…[and] that historiographic practice needs to be reimagined: “I think the problem now, at the end of the twentieth century, is how we re-imagine history outside of the categories that we inherited from the nineteenth century” (16).

Peter Forgacs is a media artist and independent filmmaker based in Budapest, whose work has been exhibited worldwide. He’s made a series of award-winning films based on home movies from the 1930s and 1960s, which document ordinary lives ruptured by extraordinary historical trauma that occurs off-screen. He tries to ‘see the unseen, to de-and reconstruct the human past through ephemeral private movies’ (47).

I was also intrigued by the definition of trauma by Michael S. Roth. He argues that ‘the modern concept of trauma points to an occurrence that both demands representation and refuses to be represented. The intensity of the occurrence seems to make it impossible to remember or to forget’ (67).

Tzvetan Todorov says that:

totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century have revealed the existence of a danger never before imagined: the blotting out of memory. These twentieth century tyrannies have understood that the conquest of men and territories could be accomplished through information and communication and have created a systematic and complete takeover of memory, hoping to control it even in its most hidden excesses (p17).

Quite a bold statement, but it made me think…

Finally, Roger Odin discusses the family home movie as a document. He argues that ‘family productions are deployed for a local or identity claim context. The rising interest in amateur productions is one symptom of micromovements fighting for identity and the dissolution of a structured public space. Although these movements can be read as a reaction against globalization, there exists a dangerous corollary in the rise of tribal identifications and mobilizations (267).

There are many other worthy essays in this book, including a selected filmography, videography and bibliography that will have me reading and viewing for many months to come!

Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories
Editors: Karen L. Ishizuka, Patricia R. Zimmermann
Published by University of California Press, 2007
ISBN 0520230876, 9780520230873
360 pages

Peter Forgacs

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The first episode of the Private Hungary series tells the Bartos family Saga: a talented amateur filmmaker Zoltán Bartos, a chanson composer and lumber businessman made more than five hours of 9,5mm amateur film from the late twenties until the mid sixties. In 1944 the Hungarian “Quisling government” plundered the half Jewish Bartos family. Following the Nazi period, surviving the war in a Forced Jewish Labor unite, Zoltán divorced and remarry. Later the Communists rage the Hungarian citizen’s life; in 1949 his plant was nationalized and lost everything again, except his humor.