Telescope

There is nothing here

In cinema, the suburban milieu is an often-repeated symbolic environment. It can be framed as utopian where belonging and success are etched into white picket fences, rose trellises, and well-manicured and orderly lawns and garden beds. The suburban garden can also be a place of dread, made from a mixture of banality and an oblique or erased violence that nonetheless powerfully registers as an affecting presence. When weeds are seen to grow and lawns remain unkept and unkempt, the metaphor being materialised is that danger lurks in the shadows, behind the net curtains or wooden shutters. In the suburban garden, something is always being kept out and something is always being kept hidden. 

Of course, when it comes to Australian films, the violent erasure found in the suburban garden is connected to two overlapping histories: the colonisation of Indigenous peoples and land and the related coloniser’s claim of terra nullius; and the migration story through which Australia becomes a place to settle, to build new multi-racial community. 

In Dirk de Bruyn’s remarkable feature length time-lapse film, Telescope (2012), assembled over 20 years, we see the suburban backyard caught in this state of tension: as light-filled and radiant, and as a wildly cultivated bush that buries the stories and denies its ownership by Australia’s first people. For Dirk, the backyard is an emblem of a white Australia that hit its highpoint in the 1950s. As he observes in the film,

Australia is a migrant culture settled by waves of newcomers escaping, running away from somewhere else, leaving to forget. Another story concerns the continued invisibility of the Indigenous people. When the British first planted the Union Jack on Australian soil and said “there is nothing here” they set up a tradition of denial as our founding principle. This still plagues us. What is festering in Australian backyards are these denials and erasures.

These denials and erasures are powerfully found in Telescope through the way the suburban backyard refuses to be tamed; the domesticity found in the fleeting but returning footage of washing and weeds; and through the way sound undercuts and re-expresses or re-signifies the agricultural images.

There is something here

The time-lapse photography of Telescope, filmed initially in Super 8 and ending with digital video, captures the fluttering materiality of the moving image. We see the arc of the sun, its pools of light, and the fingering shadows of the day run across the image’s skin. Brick, grass, tree line, clothesline, deck and glass are caressed by this light and shade. The rotary clothesline is in fact a repeated motif: we return to it rotating and circling in the wind with its faded washing waiting to be dried. Grass and weeds, sod and soil are given a life of their own. For much of the film the images are linear, time moves forward, but then in a montage sequence we return to these images, see them recycled, see them turning in on themselves. This aperture of sorts ruptures the flow, slices the light, and invites ghosts and traumas into the backyard. On their own, the images deny colonisation and erase the violence of the past, and yet these histories force their way into and out of the soil and the soundbanks. 

Dirk becomes a reflexive character in Telescope. We see him tend to the garden; he is caught in reflections on the windows of the house; and we find him sitting on a deckchair in a classic white Australian summertime pose. As a child of Dutch migrants, Dirk’s authorship problematises the process of denial and erasure; and brings into the frame a critique of the settler-colonial imagination. Subtitles written in Dutch, appearing from approximately the 8-minute to the 28-minute mark in the film, provide a third space or ‘foreign’ language with which to further unsettle or confound the Australian suburban garden’s mise-en-scène. As Dirk’s translation of these subtitles reveals:

My parents performed a critical act of abduction from the Netherlands on me in 1958. An unspoken split was imparted on the body and psyche of an eight-year-old boy, creating a gap of language, distance and location. It is a moment of loss and rejection in relation to this land.¹

Dirk appears as an outsider figure: at one point in Telescope the camera turns to record the domestic interiors of the house but never feels at home there, shifting its sightlines, somehow removed from the domesticity, metaphorically capturing how the author feels about his own migration story to Australia – a sense of never-quite-belonging. Dirk’s authorship also challenges verité footage, the impulses of the documentary and its own version of western-centric truth telling: we see animated figures and drawings assault the image, denying or ironizing the verisimilitude or accuracy of what is being filmed or spoken.

There is sound here

Telescope’s audio track is like a fever dream radio broadcast composed of fragments of sounds: historic speeches and declarations, television interviews, adverts, sporting events, jingles, pop songs, poetry and birdsong. The impression is that a phantom radio dial is being turned, allowing us to chart the trauma of arrivals and the critically nostalgic sentiments of settlement and Australian nationhood. As Dirk beautifully expresses: 

Speeding up the image brings to the surface shadow and light’s relation of the suburban backyard’s acoustic space. Sound expresses this in-between that seeps, like water, through everything. I have always wanted my films to flow through an in-between where trauma often survives as an invisible presence.²

Sounding trauma in Telescope is a polyphony, a collision of auditory registers. For example, Dorothea Mackellar’s poem, My Country (1908), is heard at the same time as a radio program discussion about the home loans market (“banks are like mausoleums”), before a nameless voice tells us how “Aboriginal deaths have increased in custody since 1989,” and another that Indigenous people are “good thieves”. As the poem continues to be read, birdsong is heard before a melodious tune plays over these spoken lines:

her beauty and her terror –
the wide brown land for me!

As these sounds and voices co-mingle and contradict, the images also falter: the garden’s greenery grows exponentially, as plant, root and weed shimmer in the sunlight, a fecundity bordering on obscenity; the rotary clothesline rears into view, spinning in its own lonely orbit. The word “survival” becomes a fleeting animation on the screen, and as the two lines quoted above are spoken, we see a string of iconic Australian food items – such as vegemite – take over the screen. What we have, then, is an audio-vision that entangles the continuing colonisation of land and culture and the ironizing of what Australia has become. The sound-images are a mausoleum and a living history of encultured and cultivated trauma – beautiful and terrorising at the same time.

There is here

Telescope is also about European migration and the racism it produced, although this theme is doubled with violence toward and negation of Indigenous peoples. The film draws into its multi-media images and sound registers the way otherness manifested to those newly arriving, which is set alongside racialised eugenics. In an incredibly powerful audio-mix of sound grabs from documentary film and Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, 2002), we hear a group of children discussing their ancestry (“you don’t even know where you come from”); how terra nullius was a “shameful act, an unspeakable crime”; and the cleansing lines delivered by Mr Devil, ‘Chief Protector of Aborigines’ (from Rabbit-Proof Fence) on whether

…we are to allow the creation of an unwanted third race…should the coloureds be encouraged to go back to the black or should they be advanced to white status and be absorbed in the white population…the continuing infiltration of white blood finally stamps out the black colour. The Aboriginal has simply been bred out.

These eugenic lines of erasure are accompanied by a separate audio track that explains how difficult it is for European migrants to settle because of language issues, the toil of low-paid labour and the lack of connection they have on arrival. Racism and belonging are vexedly, complexly enunciated over images that leak, sprout, and return, haunted by their own reflections and imperfections, by their disassociations and disavowals. It is hard not to watch Telescope and think of other erasures happening in the world today, most notably in the killing fields of Gaza.

Telescope begins with Maya Deren’s quote, “slow motion is a microscope of time,” with a rejoinder that if this is the case “then Telescope =.” This provocation is never directly answered: it is through the time-lapse images and sounds that the thematics come into clearer view. A telescope is an optical instrument that enables us to view distant objects as if they are within reach; while to telescope refers to the act of shortening or condensing some event or issue that temporally lasts for a much longer time – such as telescoping the events of nearly 200 years of Australian colonial history into one film. Telescope embraces and enacts both definitions: through its suburban garden milieu and acoustic registers, the erasure of Indigenous people calls out, slamming straight into the film’s fecundity; while Australia’s migration story becomes a banquet of images and sounds that refuse to be linear or simply progressive. As the film’s ending proclaims through its “land rights now” chorus, nothing has been resolved. The rotary clothesline is still turning.  

Telescope (2012 Australia 78 mins)

Dir: Dirk de Bruyn

Endnotes