Monash ’66 – A Short Annotation on Some of its Making

I have not seen a print of Monash ’66 for more than 50 years and my memories of the film have a quite a few gaps. Here is what I remember.

In 1966 Chris Maudson and I were members of the Melbourne University Film Society (MUFS), and I was President. MUFS was an intellectual and creative hotbed, showing films from the French New Wave (Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Agnès Varda), Eastern Europe and Japan (Akira Kurosawa, Yasujirō Ozu), along with rather unpopular weekends of US auteurs Sam Peckinpah and Douglas Sirk, John Ford and Howard Hawks in the fabulous Carlton Bughouse on Faraday St. There was a creative blossoming stirring: Brian Davies was doggedly making Pudding Thieves (1967), a self-funded 16mm feature.

Monash University started in 1961 with 363 students. It was only the second university in Melbourne apart from that bastion of empire, Melbourne University. It was an era of anticolonialism and great interest in other cultures and possibilities. We were looking for our own voices, accents, stories and cultural histories. 

By 1966, Monash University had graduate and postgraduate students. The Monash Post Graduate Students Society approached MUFS to make a film elucidating the differences between school and university for students unfamiliar with the transition. In the 1960s, many students who were the first person in their family to attend university were starting tertiary study. All students needed to structure many aspects of their own learning including skills of note taking and using the library, friendship and study connections, and the existence of various clubs for specific interests.

Chris Maudson and I put our hands up to make the film. Nigel Buesst shot it and Dave Minter edited. Chris and I had seen the French documentary film Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961), made by anthropologist/filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin. They were interested in French social structures – at that time under pressure from the brutal war for independence in Algeria – and in what creates happiness. They also coined the term cinéma vérité. 

Chris and I really liked Chronicle of a Summer’s placing of participant discussions throughout the city. They’d taken their interviewees and situated them in well known, familiar places around Paris: like walking and talking through Les Halles (the central market) and specific streets. They had groups sitting in popular cafes discussing issues. We witnessed the contexts where people were living.

In Monash ’66, we attempted to duplicate aspects of Chronicle of a Summer’s structure: we walked some of the participants around the Menzies building and across the square as they talked; we sat groups of students in different contexts and spaces. People seemed to feel more relaxed in environments they had some familiarity with and where extra lighting wasn’t needed. Some places were chosen as they opened up specific aspects of discussion: lecture theatres and taking notes, socialising in Notting Hill pub beer garden and the café, the library’s private work spaces, catalogue references and assistance. This meant we got not just verbal ideas and responses but images of student contexts and spaces, scale and range.

On the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) website, I am credited as actor/interviewer. Jean Rouch would be turning in his grave. Why? Because one thing he and Edgar Morin were very interested in when they made Chronicle of a Summer was whether any documentary film could manifest truth with a capital T. They insisted that everyone in the film perform as themselves: no actors allowed. The participants then viewed the final footage and commented on what they saw.

From memory, we weren’t as obsessed as the French directors with what was Real or True and what wasn’t. We assumed if our interviewees were comfortable and our questions were engaging and exploratory enough, we’d get some interesting responses, some veracity. We also liked the idea of a chronicle, an unfolding story, and the specific timing of that summer. Time and place pinpointed: Monash University in 1966.

Monash ’66 (1967 Australia 31 mins)

Prod: Geoff Gardner Dir: Chris Maudson Ed: David Minter Phot: Nigel Buesst Sound: Lloyd Carrick

Cast: Robin Laurie, Chris Maudson