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The Found Home Experimental Film and Merilee Bennett's A Song of Air
by Adrian Danks
Desire is an odd thing. If it can be called upon, even if it can be harnessed to consumption, it can also be unruly and many-sided. Just as there is more than one way of making photographs, so there is more than one way of making use of them. If my pictures and my stories, however commonplace, are not everybody's, my uses of the one and my methods of arriving at the other could very well be. (Kuhn, 20) Particular strands of the experimental practice that I am examining are intimately related to the changes in film stocks, technologies, industries and subcultures in the post-Second World War period (6). Nevertheless, the complex inter-relationships between documentary, domestic, amateur, experimental and fictional narrative cinemas that these changes occasion have an even longer history that may well date back to the birth of cinema. For example, several of the earliest films of Louis and Auguste Lumière, Repas de bébé (1895) for instance, document aspects of their family life and can be read as early instances of the home movie (7). This of course complicates how we might wish to categorise and consider these works. Experimental, amateur and home movie practices also share similar conditions, technologies and expressive spaces in, for example, the late 1920s and early 1930s (8). Yet it is in the period after the Second World War that this process of hybridisation and convergence comes most clearly to the fore. This seeming convergence of expressive modes is exemplified by a strand of American experimental filmmaking which emerges in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a mode that I call the home experimental film. Accounts of this movement invariably focus attention on a small number of filmmakers including Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, George and Mike Kuchar and Saul Levine (9). This concentration on a privileged collection of mostly male filmmakers masks what are actually more widespread and fundamental connections and convergences between experimental and home movie practice, aesthetics and technology. Although aspects and examples of post-war American experimental cinema are central to the practice and historiography of both the home experimental film and its 'found' footage counterpart, my analysis focuses upon several works produced in Australia from the 1970s onwards that are deeply indebted to this movement. During this period, a series of fascinating Australian films were made which blurred the borders between experimental cinema, documentary cinema and home movie and/or video practice (10). Many of these films can also be situated within a specific realm of feminist film practice that attempts to reorientate, recontextualise and to essentially interrogate the film and photographic records ceded from parent to child. It is the recontextualisation of these representational materials that predominantly constitutes the 'found' or collage aspects of these experimental films. As suggested by Freda Freiberg in her essay on Corinne Cantrill's explicitly autobiographical, photograph-driven film, In This Life's Body (1985), this type of cinema can be closely related to a more general feminist film practice: These 'filmmakers' also attempt to assert their own consciousness and difference by imposing their own manner of reading on these domestic images, even if this act ultimately leads to an acknowledgment of heritage, linearity and similarity, as it sometimes does in A Song of Air. This is connected to the cathartic processes and practices noted by Su Friedrich in relation to her film about her father, Sink or Swim (1990): In almost every case, these found home experimental films speak of a trauma and/or 'hidden' knowledge which the film inexorably and ominously moves toward (13). The use made of home photographic materials in these films is often three-fold. Firstly, to highlight the 'lies' these images attest to and then to uncover hidden truths not acknowledged in an image's initial context but which are revealed through slowing down, freezing, reframing and recontextualising elements such as facial expressions, gestures and bodily contact. Finally, these home experimental films aim to show a representational and domestic world to which one can never return. For example, Laurence Green's Reconstruction (1995) moves towards the revelation, both surreptitiously and overtly, that the black child the narrator believes is his adopted sister is in fact his half-sister (14). The film subsequently becomes a work of mourning for the half-sister that the narrator has lost, the half-sister who fled the family 'unable' to deal with the 'truth' of her parentage. The film becomes a mechanism through which to tell the family story, to reinvigorate the image of the 'lost' sister and to analyse the remnants of material 'memories' (such as home movies) to see whether they reveal some hidden or previously unseen 'truth'. This is, in many respects, a more radical and revisionist form of the activity that already defines many experiences of home photographic consumption and its representation in cinema. Thus, this ostensibly experimental practice often produces a 'doubling' effect in which the predominant activities of home image consumption and production are turned back upon themselves. This found home experimental film practice often focuses upon material which home photography conventionally but surreptitiously selects, orders, rejects or explicitly elides. The 'event' of, amongst other things, the home movie or family photo album experience is staged, but often within new contexts and from different perspectives. This shift in focus often constitutes a denial or significant reorientation of the family narrative conventionally produced by such discursive forms. For example, in her “Filmmaker's Statement”, Merilee Bennett, reflects upon the purposes of such a practice: The most interesting examples of the found home experimental film directly question the nature of home photography as a mode of representation. They are films that are reluctant to let home photographic materials 'speak', 'attest' and 'represent' for themselves. Distinguished examples of this type of work include the structurally fluid and hybridised films of New York feminist filmmaker, Su Friedrich. Friedrich's The Ties that Bind (1984) and Sink or Swim examine the images and languages of her mother and father. Both films interrogate the psychological, cultural, social and representational legacies imparted by Friedrich's parents. The structure of both films is also designed to rhyme with and simulate what is meant to be a therapeutic psychological process. Scott MacDonald suggests that “the making of The Ties that Bind was a process of psychic exploration for which the finished film serves as an index” (MacDonald, 1993, 103).
Kuhn produces a counter reading or history by inserting her own images and memory into their interpretation. In the photographs of her that have been carefully curated by her mother, Kuhn now 'sees' her father as an absent, haunting presence. Her analysis identifies the need to reinscribe and write over the photographs, and recognising their power as 'eternally' active, material and exclusionary objects. Kuhn reads her mother's own power struggle and insertion of 'presence' into the images. In the process, these photographs become a contested site and the meaning or reality they attest to is brought into question. This reconstructive use of family imagery is both rejected and repeated by the author/daughter: “In all of these struggles, my project was to make myself into my father's daughter” (Kuhn, 18). The most remarkable aspect of Kuhn's chapter is that it approaches these home photographic materials from an unusual perspective, in many ways an opposing position. The goal of her thoughtful analysis is to reincorporate the father back into the family picture or narrative, a narrative from which he has been excluded both figuratively and literally by the mother. I would argue that there are no real cinematic equivalents to this specific reiterative gesture. Nevertheless, in some respects, A Song of Air shares many of the goals and intentions of Kuhn's writing. The film is both implicitly and explicitly an act of love towards the father and a reiteration of the bond, read similarity, between father and daughter. At the same time, it is also a rejection of the period, ideology and patrilineal structures of the father and an attempt by the filmmaker to establish herself as separate from the representational frames that seem to constitute much of his power. In A Song of Air, this power is represented through the father's command and control of the means of domestic representation. Merilee Bennett makes this connection explicit throughout the film. For example, the photographic image of her father holding a camera is accompanied by the following voice-over: “He was our provider. His word was law. His power absolute” (21). Nevertheless, her film still seems to want to establish an equivalence or equality between father and daughter that the father's images are unable to accept. “To find my own vision I had to reject yours”. Thus, Merilee Bennett's refilming, recutting and recontextualisation of home movie footage shot by her father (Arnold Bennett) from 1956 to 1975 (which roughly coincides with the period of her life that she shared with her father) provides both a critique and acknowledgment of patriarchal structures. At the same time, it is a harsh but poetic examination of the “labyrinth of being father and daughter”. The film critically analyses, reconstructs and deconstructs the image of the family. In this sense it re-documents the representational history of a family. A Song of Air is, in many ways, a poetic attack upon home photography and the inherently conservative representational strategies this practice routinely reinscribes. In other respects A Song of Air is just another example in a long line of avant-garde gestures which regards its purpose as the critical questioning of established patterns, formal methodologies and discourses. A Song of Air emphasises Merilee Bennett's own subjectivity and gender, often in an extremely confronting manner. Her identity is seen in relation to a representational legacy that actively excludes the expression of heterogeneous personal experiences: “I'm not really here, my real life is elsewhere”. Fred Camper sees such a process as inscribed into the general practice of home movie-making: In many respects, Bennett conceives of her father as a consummate auteur, situating even the most banal and generic of his images within an articulated and consistent authorial worldview. By contrast, Kuhn can be considered to configure her father as something of a metteur en scene, an extremely competent imagist who is written out of this representational history by the tyrannical, auteurist mother (22). Bennett redirects her father's auteurism by seeing it as the outcome of ideological, representational and textual constraints, structures and roles that deny genuine individuality. She therefore sees her father's authorial role in relation to home image production, as the product of predictable and stereotypical modes of behaviour. Her found home experimental film, A Song of Air, is both an attack on the generational and gendered nature of auteurism and an investigation of the deeper 'rumblings' she discovers in her father's movies, such as the similarities between her filmmaking practice and that of her father. In contrast, it is possible to read Kuhn's account of her father's photographic practice in terms of how she attempts to resurrect the reputation of a much-maligned auteur. One can take this analogy further and situate the practice of Bennett and Kuhn and the relationship with their respective fathers in relation to some of the key counterpoints of classical film theory. In this context, Arnold Bennett may be conceived of as a master and engineer of mise en scène, continuity and something resembling classical narrative. His daughter counters (or compliments?) these qualities by adding and mastering those elements—montage, dialectics, sound, bricolage, ambiguity and self-consciousness—that are marginalised in Arnold's films. Merilee's film thus negates the father's former mastery and redirects the viewer's attention towards other elements in and between the images. She redirects and fractures the notions of continuity, family unity and ideological conformity that her father's films insist upon: “We acted our lives for the sake of his movies. The important thing was to be together and feel the same way about the world.” As Simon Cooper suggests, power and control are expressed and redirected through the acts of filmic direction and compilation: “Narrating about her relationship with her late father, she finally gets the chance to direct him in an in-the-family film” (Cooper, 47).
The home movies of Arnold Bennett have other unusual characteristics, including their intermittent construction of explicit narratives: narratives that beg specific questions. Why did the father construct them? Are they an attempt to stem or disguise loss and to emphasise continuity? Are they actually relics of the father's home movie practice or something surreptitiously constructed for A Song of Air? Merilee places one of these fragmented and hybridised narratives at the opening of her own film (23). Her father's 'found' practice is thus placed alongside her own. This placement indicates the complexity of Bennett's approach to her father and his representational politics. Ironically, the recontextualisation of images by both father and daughter have similar functions, imposing an individual vision onto what is conventionally regarded as collective material. This is true even if this individual 'vision' is in fact the outcome of established patterns and regimes of representation, as it is in the case of the father. This kind of rhyming is never coincidental in A Song of Air. Bennett utilises a series of contrasts, negatives, mirrors, and complimentary and contradictory practices to emphasise her connection to and difference from her father and his images. A Song of Air is a family narrative which is simultaneously similar to and yet distinct from that of her father. Several writers and filmmakers who use and refer to such photographic materials dedicate their work to their mothers. For example, books and films preoccupied with photographic materials by Roland Barthes, John Tagg and Nikita Mikhalkov include dedications to the writer's or filmmaker's mother (24). Atypically, the representation of Bennett's mother in A Song of Air seldom exists outside of rather conventional frames. The manner in which the filmmaker questions her father's representation of her mother locates this way of looking within broader ideological structures. At the same time, the film does not strive to find other images of the mother, but rather conceives of her as equally contained within particular representational and ideological conventions: “She was the personification of strong, calm virtue and the ideal against whom he judged every woman, especially his daughters”. Bennett foregrounds the fact that the camera her father used to produce these images of mother, daughters and family unity was in fact a present that he had given to his wife. The lack of control, or perhaps interest, that the mother exerted over 'her' camera is now redirected through Bennett's reclaiming and refilming of her father's images. A Song of Air nevertheless provides a valediction for and critique of her father rather than an approximation of the images that the mother never produced. This dedication is overtly stated in the opening credits of the film. The film also opens with a 'handwritten' statement that situates the origins of the film materials that Merilee Bennett has used: These materials may well 'become' or stand in for memory but they also activate it. Kuhn suggests that these kinds of representational materials provide a branching-off point for critical reverie by setting “the scene for recollection” (Kuhn, 12). This process is evidenced in almost every film within the field of the found home experimental film. A process of activation is created while the disturbing and often contrary memories evoked are laid 'over' the images. In the case of A Song of Air, Bennett's singular voice displaces and echoes other singular or multiple voices. Although we can only guess at what might have occurred in Bennett's family, Merilee does provide a limited description of the screening of her father's home movies. It is a description couched within the somewhat limited ideological framework that dominates the first part of the film and which centres on the 'containment' of the family through the conservative values and representational practices of the father. There is something within the practice of home photography which enables the kind of activity performed by Bennett in A Song of Air. This has something to do with its lack, in many cases, of a finished form. Thus, the physical state of most of these home photographic materials—silent, insufficiently edited, often fragmented—arguably encourages subsequent interventionist practices by filmmakers like Bennett, Citron, Friedrich and Green. In many respects, the voice dominates the image, guiding the spectator through a relatively selective, evocative, but not necessarily accessible set of visuals. Bennett reframes, speeds up and slows down and recombines images to emphasise different ideas, a manner of working that is also evident in her father's 'movie' that opens the film. However, these found home experimental films are almost always only ever singular readings of the images, readings which could conceivably be reorganised in any number of other ways. The content of the visual source material is aesthetically impressive (the colours of Kodachrome stock keep drawing filmmakers back to these found materials) but it seldom ventures beyond conventional subject matter. For example, footage in A Song of Air covers such subjects as holidays, performances for camera, weddings, newborn babies, Christmas, and relies upon the quite explicit fulfilment of conventional gender roles. Not surprisingly, Bennett returns to the home movie image of herself wearing her father's wig and aping his activities as a judge. The image of the young Merilee with a judge's wig invokes a complex series of associations: her aspirations for a role outside conventional gender restrictions; her connection with her father; images of a series of dress-ups which help 'unify' the film. Nevertheless, one must consider who shot these images and allowed such an open, playful, form of mimicry. It is in many respects, the kind of mimicry of the father that is central to A Song of Air itself. The irony of this encounter between home photography and the experimental film is that often it is this second gesture—let us call it the avant-garde one—which ultimately, tends to fix the meanings and the form of these materials. Bennett's poetic audio-visual letter to her father is, in effect, both a revision of her father's own activities and a kind of full-stop to a rather long, rambling and heart-breakingly non-communicative discourse or dialogue (26). A tension between order and chaos informs these found home experimental films, reordering and recontextualising images and in some cases sounds, while at the same time refuting and rejecting any such order. A Song of Air relies upon both chronological ordering and a less schematic structure. It follows the narrative of a life—the father's—but complicates this account through its off-hand observations, non-chronological imagery and occasional epiphany. The structure of A Song of Air can also be seen both to reiterate and to reject the structure of Bennett's father's films. Bennett overtly recognises the trace of her father in her own take on the world, “I wanted to be you, father”, and, less self-consciously, in her chosen artistic activity as a particular kind of filmmaker (27). In many respects, A Song of Air is both a cathartic work and a work of mourning: “The loss I was feeling, of you, and my lost childhood”. It is a mourning-work which both accuses and forgives, erases and incorporates. The found home experimental films that I have discussed (for example, Reconstruction) take time to reach a kind of critical mass, a point where the perceived representational strategies of the home photographic materials they are re-presenting start to fall apart. This falling apart is expressed in multiple ways: as an absence of photographic materials at pertinent points; as information delivered on the soundtrack which counters what we are seeing; in the slowing down and step-printing of footage; and in the eventual or persistent return to a particular image or sequence of film. The eventual fixation upon a single or connected set of images that stand out in their generalised 'unknowability' is emblematic of A Song of Air. As with Roland Barthes' remarkable Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, the film gradually moves towards a central, 'impossible' and unreadable image of a parent. In the process, it provides a fascinating insight into the representational conventions that helped define a particular period (the 1950s and 1960s), place (Brisbane) and ideology (religious, puritanical and patriarchal). For Barthes, the central image is a photograph of his mother taken before his birth and which best represents for him her essence. For Merilee Bennett, the more quixotic image of her father swimming, captured in a home movie which predates her birth, is also such an image. The difficult, personal and cathartic work of filmmaking enables her to graft this footage of her father as a young man onto her film; for these images to find their 'place', as it were. The images are introduced as being produced by another camera operator long before her father owned a movie camera and before Merilee's birth. This footage reveals the image of the father as a subject without the accompaniment of Bennett's recontextualising voice-over narration. These final, touching moments are both a gift to and of the father and return us to the 'conditions' of the home movie that preceded Bennett's reworking (28). This home movie footage, unlike the photograph of Barthes' mother in Camera Lucida, is 'outside' the discourse that frames the film and qualifies the dominant image of the father we are shown elsewhere. Its placement here, at the end of A Song of Air, as if the director did not know how, or indeed did not want to integrate it neatly, illustrates the power and disruption that such an image or set of images can produce.
The found home experimental film is ultimately a lament, a song and a search for meaning amongst the indecipherable and troubling images of the past. It is this poetic undecidability that the 'air' and 'song' of Bennett's title implicitly refers to: “I look at these pictures of my father in 1937, I don't recognise him. There is only a young man I never knew”. In these final lines, Merilee recognises the abstruse nature of the processes she is analysing. She sees the image of a man (her father) that she does not recognise.
© Adrian Danks, November 2002 This essay was refereed. Endnotes:
Blonski, Annette, Creed, Barbara and Freiberg, Freda, eds, Don't Shoot Darling! Women's Independent Filmmaking in Australia, Australia: Greenhouse Publications, 1987: “Time's Relentless Melt: Corinne Cantrill's In This Life's Body” by Freda Freiberg Camper, Fred, “Some Notes on the Home Movie”, The Journal of Film and Video, 38.3-4, Summer-Fall 1986 Cooper, Simon, “Autoportrait”, Filmviews 33.136, Winter 1988 Holland, Patricia and Spence, Jo, eds, Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography, London: Virago, 1991: “Consuming Kodak” by Don Slater; “My Life in that Box” by Jeremy Seabrook Kuhn, Annette, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, London: Verso, 1995 MacDonald, Scott, A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992 MacDonald, Scott, Avant-Garde Film: Motion Studies, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993 Robson, Jocelyn and Zalcock, Beverley, Girl's Own Stories: Australian and New Zealand Women's Films, London: Scarlet Press, 1997 Sitney, P. Adams, ed, The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1987: “Autobiography in Avant-Garde Film” by P. Adams Sitney Turim, Maureen, “Childhood Memories and Household Events in the Feminist Avant-Garde”, The Journal of Film and Video, 38.3-4, Summer-Fall 1986
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