Review: Artist Film Workshop open screening
Photo by Marcia Jane
The Artist Film Workshop screening I went to in March was a bit of a cinematic revelation to me. Melbourne’s AFW – currently run by Dianna Barrie, Marcia Jane and Richard Tuohy – show Super 8, Standard 8mm and 16mm films. As such, their screenings are like live art performances. The immersive illusion of cinema projection is entirely compromised, intercepted noisily by the loose, dexterous mechanisms of the old-school projectionist working closely behind the audience. Reams of manhandled films hang from temporary nails in the roof, fed rattling and flickering through a line-up of five or six whirring, archaic but well-tended projectors. The material reality of film stock is hard to ignore in this setting: digital media allows for film communities to be virtually connected via videos, commentary, sound bytes and imagery; but to watch and discuss a (non-digitised) Super 8 film, everyone interested has to be in the same room.
Though films from recent workshops were shown and people were invited to bring their own films for screening, the highlight of the evening was a selection of old Super 8 films by Pete Spence and Norma Pearse, two filmmakers involved with the Melbourne Super 8 Group which was active throughout the 1980s and 90s. Both were in the audience holding forth from a sunken old couch, reminiscing about their films as they screened. During one beautifully diseased-looking film, Spence could be heard muttering something about hating the way the original stock turned out so much that he dumped the negative in a bucket of Napi-San – and he preferred the final version much better.
Both artists ruminate on philosophical concerns in their experimental films, but have very different concerns and styles. Norma Pearse brings her art practice directly to her films. In Ficheing, she has painted directly on the film stock itself so that each frame is a small artwork and the finished piece screen like a running canvas. Portrait presents a male figure, his body painted, his face a mask and his body manipulated into a nymph-like pose. She uses the camera in a traditional way to create a scene as a canvas on which to render a painterly arrangement that expresses ideas about the tensions and mysteries between the spirit and the body, as expressed in an interview with Pearse featured in Cantrills Filmnotes:
I think that ‘abstract’ filmmakers are afraid of being informed by the trivial in a storytelling sense – although they use the trivial in many ways to work their films. They are reticent about including their body. Plenty of mindful explorations. But no hint of a self-reflection. (from Cantrills Filmnotes Numbers 77,78 June 1995.)
Photo by Marcia Jane
Pete Spence’s films seem to engage more with the filmmaking process, and he used editing as a tool to experiment with repetition and the expectation a viewer might have of the moving image. His works are visual poetry pieces with fountains of words and scraps of information falling rapidly through the frames. His film Diction, influenced by the imprints of people left behind in stones and surfaces by nuclear bombing in Japan was the most striking and beautiful with a skillful layering of imagery, chemical manipulations, editing, timing and sound. His approach uses technique to create a mess of meanings rather than a focused one:
I]n all my work I have tried not to say anything or as little as possible (having little to say), a tall order given poetry/visual poetry/film are linguistic and hence communicative. I’d keep questioning the idea of communication where I see enormous energy loss to exact an exchange. The best things look at the detritus, not the meaning. (from Cantrills Filmnotes Numbers 67,68 July 1992.)
Hiroshima Shadows, which may as well be the script for the film Diction (image from Cantrills Film Notes.)
In a 1992 interview, Pete Spence acknowledged the longevity of the Melbourne Super 8 Group as a source of support for directors seeking different directions in their practice. Despite the usual politics and in-fighting that tortures all organisations everywhere, the group was a productive and effective means for filmmakers to practice and show their work regularlyand receive feedback from their peers; and hence, provided an invaluable space for artists to develop.The possibility that there is some kind of direct historical continuity in Melbourne film culture that is still alive and kicking is a very appealing one. That the Artist Film Workshop is co-organised by one of the former members of the Melbourne Super 8 Group and features the works of former members in their programming certainly represents the possibility of building on a proven screening/workshop model. Even more promising is that the AFW runs workshops to teach artists – and anyone else who is interested – on how to work with various gauges and manipulation techniques on film.
Photo by Marcia Jane
Though some might accuse AFW of ignoring the widespread democratisation of super-cheap, readily available and easily distributed digital video, Tuohy says, “A very important factor for AFW is that while digital is everywhere and anyone can shoot and edit on their own computer, film requires a bit more effort…We want to make it possible for artists to work with film. And we want to create a context where work made on film is prioritised.” This group are clearly not trying to turn back time or kick against the contemporary situation of experimental film; rather, they want to use film stock and analogue equipment as a forum for expanding the potential of film for art practice and help build a participatory community around it.
Learn more about AFW with this interview at Check Your Tension with Richard Tuohy and Marcia Jane.
