Maidens is an extraordinary mixture of feminist and cinematic riddles…
while it is a very personal odyssey it is also a discourse
on independent feminist film practice in Australia.

― Lesley Sterne1

Maidens (1978) had its genesis when I made my first film in the 1974 Women’s Film Workshop.2 Immediately after the workshop I wrote a drama script on illegal abortion about a pregnant girl, her broken love affair and the police raids on the abortion clinics of the late 1960s. These were the times in Victoria: a police state, with the Catholic Church and its repressive policies denying women control over our bodies and our right to choose. 

By 1975 I had a grant from the Experimental Film Fund to make that film. It was to visualise the schizoid split between desire, the sensual and the police state, but I was simply unable to cope with it. I was numb with repressed trauma. Directing actors in the erotic lovemaking scenes and the emotional intensity of directing the brutal reality of an illegal abortion on film was just too confronting. So I changed tack. Over the next four years I instinctively gathered sequences from the 1970s films I had acted in – extracts from Film for Discussion (Martha Ansara & Sydney Women’s Film Group, 1973), Take Five (Marg Clancy, 1974), Woman’s House (Anne Roberts, 1974), Beach (Ned Lander, 1977) and Secret Storm (Martha Ansara, 1978). I was creating an “archive of the self”, weaving clips together with my own Super 8 home movies and footage I filmed during Journey Among Women (Tom Cowan, 1976), where I was Cowan’s camera assistant. I could then start editing3 along with family photographs, letters and poems, and tell the story of four generations of an Australian family – and its meltdown. This became Maidens. 

Around that time, exhibiting international women’s films at the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op Cinema and co-coordinating the first International Women’s Film Festival‬ (1975) was a revelation. I saw the potential of women’s filmmaking with its new forms, styles and genres. We curated a remarkable program of 20 features and 70 short films, previously not exhibited in Australia.4 Seeing films by Maya Deren, Yvonne Rainer and emerging 1970s filmmakers such as Jan Oxenburg and Carolee Schneemann alongside feature films by Agnes Varda, Mai Zetterling and Susan Sontag was a cinematic education.5 Many of the filmmakers were also recycling their own archives to make films with an intense female subjectivity. They gave me the courage to trust my impulse with this film. 

A revolutionary book about female desire, New Portuguese Letters, was further inspiration in both its collagist form and liberatory content. In 1972 the Portuguese government banned all copies and arrested its authors – known as “The Three Marias” – on a charge of “outrage to public decency”, their case becoming a cause célèbre for feminists across the world. l dedicated Maidens to them and used their letters to structure and narrate the film: “Suddenly it happened. The encounter became a family, passion a work of love.”6

But my intention was not clear to me at the time, apart from sensing my gathering method as an attempt to mend or reflect on the broken parts of my life. Later I saw Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland (Hitler: A Film from Germany, Hans Syberberg, 1977) and read Susan Sontag on the film’s aesthetics of repetition and recycling, noting that it takes time to work through grief. Gradually, I came to understand Maidens partly as a “work of mourning.”7

It was a period of intense personal crisis and social change: “free love”, the Vietnam antiwar movement, conscription, my brother’s death in a head-on car crash and my subsequent journey into psychoanalysis. Maidens was explosive back then, its bearing of family secrets in public partly triggered by the psychodrama of Film for Discussion and the impact of feminism’s notion that “the personal is political.”8 I was drawn back to the footage of that young woman and the split-self mirror shot in Film for Discussion which I then re-use in Maidens. Māori filmmaker Merata Mita says, “What you see when you look at an archival film are resurrections taking place. A past life lives again, and something from the heart and the spirit responds.”9 This resonates. 

Making Maidens became a way of finding that lost girl – navigating self and family, unravelling secrets and finding footage that viscerally expressed breakdown, revolt and transformation. From a filmmaking perspective I was developing an intertextual film practice, marking a dynamic shift from being the passive subject to becoming the agent of transformation. It was a manifestation of Frances Lionnet’s concept of the “space of possibility”, where the filmmaker sees her own personal history implicated in larger social processes.10 As well, juxtaposing excerpts from fictional films into the documentary mode produced intense affect: “the charge of the real.”11

The intention to look directly into the repressions of family life is well served by the personal essay mode. The very definition of “essayer”, “to try”, becomes a reflexive process. I wander inner and outer film landscapes, excavating the trauma buried deep beneath the performative surfaces of a “happy” family life, which implodes in the latter part of Maidens: my father, the successful film exhibitor, disintegrates with the arrival of television in 1956 as the “death of cinema” era proceeds apace.12 To expose his trauma in the public arena of cinema was an ethical minefield, and still is. I recently gave permission for several sequences from Maidens to be used in the documentary Senses of Cinema (John Hughes and Tom Zubrycki, 2023) and watching the sequence about my dad’s decline was challenging on so many levels.

During the making of Island Home Country (2008), on colonisation and growing up white in Tasmania, I reflected on making Maidens about my Tasmanian maternal family line three decades earlier. Back in the 1970s I had scant understanding of the attempted genocide in Tasmania, or my white convict ancestors’ role as tenant farmers near Turbuna Country (Mt. Ben Lomond). “Some filmmakers respond to the closure of past films by reactivating the filming process,” writes filmmaker and scholar David MacDougall; “Each new film makes amends for the portrayals and betrayals of past films.” I think that’s true. In Island Home Country I return to the island to uncover the “terranullius” mind of Maidens. By working Aboriginal protocols with Julie Gough (Trawlwoolway) and Jim Everett-puralia meenamatta (clan plangermairreenner of the Turbuna), I journey into the teachings of “deep history”, learning to understand how to come into Country the proper way.13

Maidens (1978 Australia 28 min)

Prod, Dir, Scr, Phot, Ed: Jeni Thornley Sd: Martha Ansara Archival Film extracts: Martha Ansara, Marg Clancy, Tom Cowan, Ned Lander,Jeune Pritchard, Ann Roberts Mus: Aurora Bell, Annie Bickford, Theresa Jack, Jen Short

Endnotes

  1. Lesley Sterne, “Independent Feminist Filmmaking in Australia,” Screening the Past, Issue 28 (Sept 2010).
  2. Jeni Thornley, “Looking at Women,” Peephole Journal, Issue 7 (March 2017).
  3. The16mm extracts were duplicated at a film lab (Colorfilm) and the Super 8 optically printed to 16mm.
  4. Sian Mitchell, “From the Director of the Melbourne Women in Film Festival,” Peephole Journal, Issue 7 (March 2017).
  5. Suzanne Spunner, “With Audacity, Passion and a Certain Naivety: the 1975 International Women’s Film Festival”, in Don’t Shoot Darling! Women’s Independent Filmmaking in Australia, Annette Blonski et al., eds. (Richmond: Greenhouse, 1987), p. 93-98.
  6. Maria Isabel Barreno, et al., The New Portuguese Letters: The Three Marias (United Kingdom: Paladin, 1975), p. 107.
  7. Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (London: Writers and Readers, 1983), p. 153.
  8. Carol Hanisch, “The personal is political: The women’s liberation movement classic with a new explanatory introduction,” Women of the World, Unite! Writings by Carol Hanisch, January 2006.
  9. Hepi Meta, “Merata – a son’s tribute,” Reflections, E-Tangata, (May 2019).
  10. Françoise Lionette, Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1989), p. 193.
  11. Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 258.
  12. Felicity Collins, “Memory in Ruins: The Woman Filmmaker in Her Father’s Cinema”, Screening the Past, Issue 13, (Dec 2001).
  13. Jim Everett, Respecting Cultures: Working with the Tasmanian Aboriginal Community and Aboriginal Artists (Hobart: Aboriginal Advisory Committee, Arts Tasmania, 2004).

About The Author

Jeni Thornley is a documentary filmmaker, writer and film valuer. Her poetic, essay documentaries are landmark films in Australian independent and feminist cinema. Her films explore personal and historical memory, using archival footage to deconstruct narratives. She writes about film regularly and is distributing her current film – Memory Film – with Antidote Films. She is a Visiting Scholar at University of Technology, Sydney.

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