Hey Al Baby

The below is based on an account of the making of Hey Al Baby by David Minter published in Issue 2 of the Melbourne Film Bulletin, April 1968.

In the 1960s, members of the Melbourne University Film Society (MUFS) found inspiration in the French New Wave in what was a spontaneous outbreak of filmmaking. Occupying a space between the fully amateur and the commercial feature film, they took advantage of lightweight 16mm cameras and synchronised sound equipment which was then becoming available. For most of the MUFS filmmakers, commercial validation or film festival screenings were never an overriding consideration; they were making films more or less to please themselves within the loose parameters imposed by funding from Unifed and University Union Councils.

Hey Al Baby (David Minter, 1968) centres around Al (Alan Finney), who is temporarily left alone as the sole man in a Carlton flat with four women flatmates, generating a certain amount of tension partly attributable to Al’s edgy response to the situation. Biographical threads structured as seven dialogue sequences vary from about three to ten minutes in length, in what David Minter called “dramatically small” situations played with “extreme naturalism” comparable to Jacques Rozier’s Adieu Philippine (1962) and the films of Czech New Wave directors Miloš Forman and Ivan Passer.¹ Hey Al Baby, in Minter’s words, “is an attempt to concentrate attention on the tiny details of behaviour – glances, little gestures and modifications of these with company.”² Minter further describes the initial concept as an experiment in how little stylisation of framing, lighting, acting style and narrative construction is necessary to establish character on screen – what Roland Barthes called “zero style”.³

Minter had initial problems with the cameraman over the requirement for improvised movement, insisting that the actors be lit in pre-planned positions. At the same time, it became obvious that extended improvisation with inexperienced cast members was not feasible as they became tense trying, within the lighting field, to remember their placement directly to meet plot requirements. Minter worked with a new cameraman to tighten up the framing, camera movement and dialogue within which the actors could improvise. Sequence shots were broken into still relatively long 30 to 40 second shots requiring only unobtrusive editing. More flexible lighting set-ups allowed the actors greater freedom of movement. To achieve this, the director broke down his original conception of the film, which took the form of a reconstruction of past events with people onscreen as their original selves rather than actors in a role.

Minter found that, in his view, the film’s best sequence is the one in which the players came closest to being screen actors: the scene in a bedroom between Alan Finney and Chrissie Loh, “the one where Finney’s humour does not dominate.”⁴ As Minter describes it, Finney’s performance is the result (one might say a dialectic), between the director’s intentions for the lines and their own delivery, which Finney repeatedly resisted in rehearsal as “unbearably sentimental.”⁵ Finney decided without forewarning to deliver the lines as the director had intended, in order to “send them up.” This meant that Finney’s acting was then fused with Loh’s who, unlike the others, was at no point attuned to the idea of playing her “real self”.

Minter concludes that, as a result of this relationship emerging fortuitously on screen, he intended to further expand it and continue in this style. However, filming was tragically cut short when Loh, playing one of the women with such camera presence, died in a car accident before filming, as then envisaged, had been completed. 

Hey Al Baby (1968 Australia 34 mins)  

Prod Co: Unifed Dir, Ed: David Minter Phot: Bern Hunt, Dug Hobbs Sound: Lloyd Carrick  

Cast: Alan Finney, Chrissie Loh, Eleanor Wilson, Blossom Walker, Anna Raknes, Chris Maudson, Peter Carmody

Endnotes