I became involved in Film for Discussion1 (Martha Ansara & Sydney Women’s Film Group, 1973) after meeting American activist Martha Ansara at an anti-Vietnam War/Women’s Liberation meeting in Sydney in 1969.2 Soon after, some of us formed Sydney Women’s Film Group.3 We were part of a worldwide surge in grassroots women’s activism across culture, film, theatre, politics, equal rights, sexuality and reproductive freedom. 

In our filmmaking we aspired to collective ideals – no set roles, no hierarchy; the only credit on Film for Discussion is Sydney Women’s Film Group. UK feminist Claire Johnston’s essay, “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema,” was a key text for us as early women’s liberationist filmmakers.4 Johnston stressed the integral relationship between film development, production, distribution and exhibition, and that as activist women filmmakers we needed to work across all phases. Our film work at Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative was guided by this, too. Unsurprisingly, beneath our non-hierarchical filmmaking approach in Film for Discussion, there was a directorial and producer’s vision, expressed mainly by Ansara. She raised the modest budget of $1050 from the Experimental Film Fund (covering film lab costs) and held the reins of the shared filmmaking process over some years (1970-1973). She brought the crew together, framed the shots, created the soundtrack and cast most of the actors, including me. 

I had just arrived in Sydney in 1969, having run away from Melbourne with a broken heart, abandoning my MA thesis at Monash University on Edward Albee’s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Mike Nichols’ 1966 film. I so much wanted to be an actress. Soon we were workshopping what became Film for Discussion, an improvisational drama documentary about a young woman in a crisis of identity around her work, family and boyfriend. I play the young woman – or am I playing myself? Collectively we evolved an improvised approach to performance: there was no script, just broad ideas and a story unfolding with all the conflicts and contradictions coursing through our own lives. The film reflects these contradictions in women’s position in the early 1970s, and the impact of the women’s liberation movement.

Family Life (Ken Loach, 1971) had a strong influence on me at the time. I deeply identified with the main character’s crisis – her abortion, family abuse and breakdown; the parallels to my own life were stark. Loach drew on the “antipsychiatry” work of R. D. Laing in Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964) and David Cooper’s Death of the Family (1971). As well, Loach’s improvisational filmmaking – which included casting non-professionals and pursuing psychodrama and experimental modes – created naturalistic performances delivering potent emotional authenticity.5

The impact of performing this vulnerable, confused girl in Film for Discussion became transformative – learning to understand her (and her mind) through my subsequent filmmaking and a long psychoanalysis. It was “a truly transitional film for [me] as a performer.”6 I didn’t know it at the time of filming, but the shift from performance to direction was unfolding. Ansara was influential in my becoming a filmmaker, alongside my dad and grandad who were film exhibitors. The women’s liberation movement, which generated the practical reality of women making films, was also a potent force. It doesn’t seem that radical in 2024, but in 1970 it was! 

In Film for Discussion Ansara composed several shots in mirrors. The film’s closing image is an excruciatingly long three-minute mirror shot of the girl, just after a horrible family argument at dinner with an aggressive, drunken father, a submissive mother, and a boyfriend who just doesn’t get it. In fact, this mirror shot was emotionally too much for me to process at the time of filming, except on the level of “affect” in my body – an internal sensory fragility. It was traumatic. Even more destabilising was watching Film for Discussion in Sydney’s State Theatre during the documentary finals awards at the 1974 Sydney Film Festival; it was as if my own family crisis was playing out on the massive screen. It was a strange and deeply unsettling experience where, as the film’s subject, my own intention had not yet been fully realised as an integrated or internal process of the psyche. 

Later in 1998, when film scholar Felicity Collins wrote, “Thornley’s sustained cinematic work on the self, history and memory lies in the mirror shot in Film for Discussion,” the penny dropped.7 My subsequent autobiographical, “found footage”, essayist approach to filmmaking began to make sense. Later, I connected scholar Frances Lionnet’s insights on autobiography to the mirror shot; it opened a “space of possibility”, an “empowering potentiality” – emancipation from oppression.8

I certainly appreciate film producer Jan Chapman’s 2002 reflections on women’s filmmaking: 

“When I look back on the early days of the film industry – for me the ‘70s – and at the significance of women in film for me, I remember images of inspiration and power both politically and subconsciously and imaginatively…I remember Jeni Thornley’s performance in Martha Ansara’s Film for Discussion as she slowly awakened to the realisation that she couldn’t limit herself to domestic life with marriage as the only goal…I celebrate that fact that women were able to create those images.”9 

During Film for Discussion’s wide distribution, active debate was encouraged as part of the viewing experience. The SWFG worked hard to distribute the film: an estimated 20,000 women watched it in community halls and in consciousness-raising groups around the country.10 Working with Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative we “approached distribution in a grassroots way and took it to film societies, trade unions, schools, government departments and anywhere that the issue of women’s liberation was being discussed.”11

Paradoxically, “performing” that vulnerable young woman in Film for Discussion amidst the irruption of the women’s liberation movement (and my own therapy) helped me develop a certain spirit required to make the films I wanted to make. I made just one film a decade during 1978 and 2023, developing a contemplative filmmaking practice which acknowledged “the time and maturity to gain insight…a deeply internal process of the psyche”.12

Film for Discussion (1973 Australia 24 mins) 

Prod: Martha Ansara, Chris Tillam, Julie Gibson; with assistance from the Film Radio and Television Board of the Australia Council.

Cast: Jeni Thornley, John Brotherton, Deirdre Ferguson, Christina Ferguson, Jovana Janson

Endnotes

  1. Film for Discussion, Australian Screen, National Film & Sound Archive, 2024.
  2. Martha Ansara, Ballad Films, 2024.
  3. Jeni Thornley, “Sixteen Years of Women and Film Groups” in Don’t shoot darling! Women’s independent filmmaking in Australia, Annette Blonski, Barbara Creed, Freda Freiberg, eds. (Richmond: Greenhouse, 1987), p. 89–90.
  4. Claire Johnston, Notes on Women’s Cinema (London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1975).
  5. Tony Garnett and Ken Loach, “Family Life in the making,” Interview in Jump Cut, No. 10-11 (1976).
  6. I’ve borrowed Adrian Danks’ notion of “transitional film” from his essay “Yackety Yack, Don’t Talk Back,” CTEQ Annotations on Film, Senses of Cinema, Issue 109, March 2024.
  7. Felicity Collins, “The Experimental Practice of History in the Film Work of Jeni Thornley,” Screening the Past, Issue 3, 1998.
  8. Francoise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (New York: Cornell University Press 1989), p.193.
  9. Jan Chapman, “Some Significant Women in Australian Film – A Celebration and a Cautionary Tale,” Longford Lyell Lecture, Sydney, August 2002, Senses of Cinema, Issue 21 October 2002.
  10. Kath Kenny, “The Sydney Women’s Film Group,” The Saturday Paper, No. 216 (August 4-10, 2018).
  11. Pat Fiske, “Film for Discussion, Curator’s Notes,” Australian Screen, NFSA, 2024.
  12. Jeni Thornley, “The enigma of film: memory film: a filmmaker’s diary” Constructions of The Real: Intersections of Practice and Theory in Documentary-Based Filmmaking, Christine Rogers, Kim Munro, Liz Burke, Catherine Gough-Brady, eds (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2023), p.17.

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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