Memory Film: A Filmmaker’s DiaryMemory Film: A Filmmaker’s Diary Janice Loreck October 2024 CTEQ Annotations on Film Issue 111 Memory Film: A Filmmaker’s Diary (2023) is, according to Australian filmmaker Jeni Thornley, her last film. Moments into the film’s opening, an intertitle declares that what follows is a “farewell film poem to life.” Memory Film is inspired by jisei, a form of Japanese poetry bluntly known as “death poetry” in the English-speaking world. However, it is better described as poetry written by those nearing the end of their life as a reflection upon the life they have lived, a sharing of wisdom and a gift to those who remain. Memory Film is therefore not a film about the process of dying or death itself. Its subject is life. Memory Film got its start when the National Film and Sound Archive acquired and digitised 137 rolls of Thornley’s personal film archive in 2015-16 – including composite rolls of Super 8 that she had used in previous films – and Thornley took up the project of weaving this material into a movie. In simple terms, the film consists of a poetic montage of footage shot between 1974 and 2003. The images capture Thornley’s life and career as activist, feminist and filmmaker – she was a founding member of the Sydney Women’s Film Group and her documentaries have addressed feminism and the legacies of colonialism, among other topics. Memory Film therefore shows footage of anti-war protests, film sets, Indigenous ceremony and activism and radical communes. It also includes children’s parties, selfies, inner Sydney neighbourhoods, family trips and household pets. Eschewing voiceover, Memory Film relies on the associative power of montage and supporting excerpts of poetry from Rumi, Matsuo Basho, Sylvia Plath and others. The film is also accompanied by a remarkable score of oud, piano and percussion by Egyptian-Australian composer Joseph Tawadros. Shifting from energetic to solemn, whimsical to reflective, Tawadros’s score both complements and intensifies the emotional charge of Thornley’s images. Time is intrinsic to Memory Film, both in the work itself as a kind of memoir but also its realisation. The film took about ten years to make, and one reason why Thornley describes Memory Film as her last is because of the realities of independent filmmaking: it is simply too lengthy and expensive a process to consider making another movie at this point in Thornley’s career. “You put so much of your own finances in,” Thornley says, “one of the reasons why I don’t think I’ll make another film is, I can’t economically afford to keep putting my own money into films, at my age.”1 Thornley also sought the permission of everyone depicted in Memory Film to use their image, provided they were still alive and could be located – a labour-intensive process of personal and professional documentary ethics. Memory Film is part of a tradition in Australian cinema of poetic autobiographical filmmaking. This includes autobiographical documentary as well as films à clef or fictionalised biography (all of which have been explored in a recent issue of Senses of Cinema under the title of Australian autofiction2). Women are key practitioners of this trend. Examples include Corinne Cantrill’s important work In This Life’s Body (1984), Gillian Leahey’s fictionalised essay film My Life Without Steve (1986), Margot Nash’s The Silences (2015), as well as Thornley’s other films Maidens (1978), To the Other Shore (1998) and Island Home Country (2008). This tradition of women’s memoir and autobiography stands in important, and indeed feminist, contrast to the male-dominated strand of biographical storytelling that remains so ubiquitous in contemporary cinema. “Biopics”, as they are commonly known, have been a staple of Hollywood production since the silent era and continue to serve a role as prestige pictures and Oscar-bait. In their classical iteration, they are a hagiographic genre that commemorates the “extraordinary lives” of significant people –usually men.3 Biopics understand the movements of history as the result of individual male action, like Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) or Napoleon (Ridley Scott, 2023). While this tendency has been challenged by filmmakers within Hollywood itself, women’s biography and autobiography serve a feminist purpose of inserting women into public histories, both noting their contributions and challenging simplistic demarcations between public and private life. Memory Film accomplishes both of these interventions, containing scenes of extraordinary feminist and anti-racist activism that shaped Australia in the latter half of the 20th century, as well as personal images of the individual amongst these currents of social change. Politics, history and intimate life are connected. Memory Film is also notable when compared to the classic biopic – and indeed Thornley’s own oeuvre – in terms of how little it appears to be an inward interrogation of the psyche, at least in an overt or explicit sense. Selfhood has been a central aspect of Thornley’s work since she first appeared onscreen in Film for Discussion (Sydney Women’s Film Group, 1973), her character gazing into a mirror while experiencing an internal crisis. Moreover, according to Felicity Collins, in Australian independent cinema “Jeni Thornley is the filmmaker who has been most preoccupied with the reconstruction of her own history.”4 In earlier works like Maidens, To the Other Shore and Island Home Country, Thornley investigates her identity as a daughter, parent and an inheritor of Australia’s colonial legacy. To be sure, Thornley and the life she has lived is vibrantly present in Memory Film. Yet unlike the classical biopic, Thornley’s film does not contain a forensic drive to investigate the individual and what “makes her tick”. Instead, one realises it is a film about the quickened, animated experience of life rather than an interrogative look at an inert biography. As one intertitle suggests, Memory Film is filled with images that “quicken the heart”. In its older meaning, “quicken” means “movement” as well as “to give life”. And this is what Memory Film does, even as the lively moments are fleeting. As Thornley notes: “Film, unlike other creative forms such as painting, sculpture or writing, is ephemeral . . . The movement of film through the gate of the camera or projector parallels the movement of life – its transience, its flow.”5 Yet in this transience there is also a possibility of immanence: an unselfconscious aliveness to the present moment. To quote another poem that appears in the film: “All that’s important is the ordinary things / Making the fire to boil some bathwater, pounding rice.” The point is well-taken. Memory Film is about the remembrance of moments past; a film that farewells the ordinary things by quickening them, bringing them to life. Memory Film: A Filmmaker’s Diary (2023 Australia 85 mins) Prod: Tom Zubrycki, Jeni Thornley Dir, Scr: Jeni Thornley Ed: Lindi Harrison Mus: Joseph Tawadros Sound: Tristan Meredith Endnotes Grace Boschetti, “Memory Film: a Filmmaker’s Diary: In Conversation with Jeni Thornley,” Melbourne Women in Film Festival Critics Lab Blog, 5 April 2024. ↩ “Australian Autofiction,” Senses of Cinema, Issue 99 (July 2021). ↩ According to George F. Custen, 35 per cent of biopics produced in Hollywood during the studio era (1927-1960) focused on women subjects, increasing to only 39 per cent in the post-studio era. Carolyn Anderson’s survey of biographical films from 1929 to 1986 found that only 28 per cent of these films focused on the lives of women. George F. Custen, Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 144; Carolyn Anderson, “Biographical Film” in Handbook of American Film Genres, Wes D. Gehring, ed. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1988), p. 336. ↩ Felicity Collins, “The Experimental Practice of History in the Filmwork of Jeni Thornley,” Screening the Past, Issue 3 (May 1998). ↩ Jeni Thornley, “The Enigma of Film: Memory Film: A Filmmaker’s Diary,” in Constructions of The Real: Intersections of Practice and Theory in Documentary-Based Filmmaking, K. Munro et al, eds. (Bristol: Intellect, 2023), p. 9. ↩