This history of the Sydney Super Eight Film Group was initiated as a response to the commissioning of an organisational history by d/Lux/MediaArts (d/Lux), a screen and media arts organisation committed to supporting the development, engagement and experience of Australian screen and digital media culture.
The organisation was founded in 1982 as the Sydney Super 8 Film Group; in 1990 it became the Sydney Intermedia Network and finally, in 2000, d/Lux/MediaArts. The history draws on an archive of material that existed as printed ephemera, publications, artwork, diaries, photos, super 8 film, video and digital media, which together tracked the development and evolution of experimental screen media in Sydney dating back to 1981. The history examines the screening, production and promotion of amateur art-based super-8 filmmaking in Sydney from 1981-1990, with primary reference to the Sydney Super 8 Film Group.
**********************************
“A post-modern ethnography is a cooperatively evolved text consisting of fragments of discourse intended to evoke in the minds of both reader and writer an emergent fantasy of possible work of commonsense reality”.[11] Stephen A. Tyler, 1986.
Launching towards a history – the Sydney scene
The Sydney Super 8 Film Group, its filmmakers, and their films, constitute a particular social and political memory in a specific historical time period between 1980 and 1989. The creation of this history could start in many ways, within a number of chronological launching sites and from a variety of locales. The historical and ethnographical memory is partly lost and shifts with time. To reflect the post-modern discourse of this historical and cultural era this history will foreground ‘discourse and dialogue’ over ‘text and monologue’.
Launching pad one: 67 Surrey Street, Surry Hills, Sydney
It is mid-1980 in Sydney and Kate Richards, a student in Communications at the Institute of Technology,[12] is squatting in No 67 Surrey Street, Surrey Hills. Across the road in a conglomeration of funny old squats and enormous mansions[14] lives a close friend and fellow amateur super-8 filmmaker Deb Collins. Kate had started making super-8 films at high school and had met up with other art college students, such as Allan Jefferies, Kurt Brereton and Damien Minto who also, completely enamoured of film, picked up discarded Super 8 cameras and started shooting. The Sydney sub-cultural scene was anarchic and bohemian with a post-punk energy that heralded an end to modernist restraints:
“It was a big new era for Sydney - there was definitely a sense of cultural sophistication - there was a debate going on - there were all those people around like the Prisoner’s Action Group - there was the very strong politicised gay culture, Dennis Altman - the theoretical intellectual vanguard, Meaghan Morris - and Ted Colless and Alan Cholodenko and some of the other academics at UTS - and that fed into the idealized open university at SideFX which was a large old catholic school in Liverpool street in Darlinghurst which had become artist squats - there was a lot of idealism about sharing knowledge and sharing information - almost like a proselytising idea about ‘we understood everything about discourse’ and you thought that if you knew discourse you knew everything - it was an exciting time”.[14]
Kate Richards, 1990.
Super 8 had a downbeat reputation and its users were driven by the new French cultural theory that was beginning to permeate into the Sydney educational institutions. There was a crisis in the academy. This hostility to super 8 was evident amongst the feminist ‘creative ground’[15] of the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op, which had firmly established its headquarters at St Peters Lane in Darlinghurst, and more generally by those 16 mm filmmakers being sustained under the recently established Creative Development Fund.[16]
A venue was needed for screening and the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op was deemed the most suitable. Fortuitously Deb Collins was a good friend with Margot Nash, an influential person at the co-op. She rushed back with the good news, "I’ve got them to do it at the co-op". Despite their initial resistance Collins had managed to talk them into it.
There were no phones in the squats, but with the help of posters and word-of-mouth, the message got out and the loose collective were literally flooded with submissions (including Sydney Girls High and many sources unknown), for what was to become the first Sydney Super 8 Film Festival. Every film submitted was shown; the program had minimum quality control (the main criticism levelled at the festival) and screened over a whole weekend. The curating was informal:
“There was no real form for it … films were strung on big reels with the Kodak leader in between so it was unclear to people whether they should clap or the lights should go up”.[17] Kate Richards, 1990.
Despite its anarchic democracy the first film festival was a huge success with packed houses crammed into the old plush seats of the evocatively smelly co-op[18] [unfortunately no film program exists for this first screening nb: this program was found]. Gathering together a broader and hardier group of supporters, a second festival was held a year later, again at the co-op, on the weekend of 9-10 October 1981, and again organised by Collins and Richards.
This time the films were chosen in a more selective manner. The films were still experimental, underground and avant-garde; films firmly outside mainstream film practice. Racist and sexist films were rejected and films by women were still in short supply. Despite being regarded by some as ‘wanky art films’ it was still believed that super-8 had the power to intervene; even conservative super-8 documentaries were believed to have consequence.[19] A brilliant stream of consciousness summary of the first two festivals written by Richards the night before she left for Bristol and was published in Filmnews as, ‘Some comments on two super-8 film festivals’.[20]
Launching pad two: Mama Maria’s Restaurant, Kings Cross
The concept of holding a festival was thought to be an incentive to production for filmmakers, and despite the fact that Richards and Collins vowed never to do another festival, it was declared open for anyone else to take up the mantle, “We don’t have a monopoly on the film festival, we swear we’ll never do it again, it would be very easy to have showings every, say, three months — get the message?”[21]
In late 1981 Mark Titmarsh and Ross Gibson have arranged a meeting with Kate Richards at Mamma Maria’s restaurant in the heart of the Cross, after she had contacted them to do a handover of the festival.[22] Gibson had done a PhD in Literature and History at Kings College in London followed by a Diploma of Filmmaking in London, and Titmarsh had studied an St Martin’s School of Arts in London under structuralist film teacher Malcolm Le Grice. He was now studying postmodern film theory and philosophy at Alexander Mackie College.[23] Both were very keen to put their ideas and experience into practice. Their thinking was a synthesis of 1970’s structural/post-structuralist theory and new French post-modernist theory, all situated within an art college context.
Dialogue one: Radical politics and radical incompetence - evoking the new spirit of independent filmmaking
When Titmarsh made a declaration towards a specific ‘super-8 effect’ in his seminal Filmnews article, ‘Super 8; the unconscious of film’[24] [and his 1983 postscript article ‘Super 8: from Poseidon adventure to Atlantis effect’[25] ] he was deliberately provoking those from the theoretical film left whose stronghold was the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op (represented by filmmakers such as Margot Nash and Susan Lambert).[26] He was also flaming established screen academics such as Barrett Hodson, influenced in the 1970s by Christian Metz and Raymond Bellour and British film journals Screen and Framework.[27] Kate Richards remembers this crisis in the academy culminating in a meeting at the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op:
“I remember Jenny Thornley saying ‘feelings are the most important things’ and Megan Morris saying ‘well to me an idea is a feeling’. I think the old guard were still dichotomising. And we were very intellectually driven so we weren’t right either. But I could see that Megan understood more than we did, coming at it from analysis and theory, so that you actually had a theoretical premise and you explored that. But without a strong studio practice that falls over”.[28] Kate Richards, 1990.
Titmarsh and the Collective were evoking the artistic right for an independent manifesto that could both liberate cinema and its filmmakers from the theories of Marx, feminism and American sociology. These theoretical discourses had become a reductionist death trap to the new breed of college students now being taught French film theory, psychoanalysis, Lacan and Althusser, at the Institute of Technology and Alexander Mackie College. The new wave was replacing the old wave. It was a postmodern call to arms for all those filmmakers who were either shackled by structural film theory or disinterested in its unemotional reductionist message. The communalism and imposed worker’s brotherhood of Marxism, reinforced with a heavy dose of Heideger and Hegel, were being replaced by a need for deconstruction, freedom and a new paradigm. In a postmodern irony the super-8 camera was a cheap and disposable product of capitalist consumerism that could now act as a new lens to view the society that had spawned it:
“For $100 in those days you could have bought the lot and made the film. So it was radically available to everyone, to do whatever you wanted to do. There was a super 8 technology, at that particular time, where in one cartridge the film came ready-loaded with a sound stripe and you just dropped the cartridge like a video-tape into your camera and it was ready to go. This was nothing like the demanding dexterity of loading a 16mm film camera in a black bag in the darkness without looking. It had all sorts of legal ramifications as well. You could move across international borders with a super 8 camera and the customs officer didn’t care”.[29] Mark Titmarsh, 1990.
The Super 8 effect, and its resultant phenomenon, was radical in its politic, aesthetic and way of life. Meaghan Morris had actually cited the neo-narco hedonists of Sydney and the super-8 festival scene as the first waves of post-modernity in Sydney.[30] Titmarsh encapsulated this expression of post-modernity with his concept of ‘radical incompetence’.
“The thing I liked to talk about in those days about super 8 film was the idea of ‘radical incompetence’ – you could be a fool and want to make a sci-fi feature film, and you could do it in super 8. If you set out to do it in 16mm you would be destroyed on the rocks of money and having to have a crew and so on. With Super 8 you could do it yourself. People came up with other ideas for absurd feature films or crazy, obsessive who knows what, artistic aesthetic ideas, and they just did them. You could do them in an afternoon and have the film ready to go the next day; you could shoot from the hip with Super 8. An unusual mix of production realities and aesthetic ideals, that could be realized very quickly”.[31] Mark Titmarsh, 2007.
Dialogue two: The Super 8 Scene & Hodson’s critique of cruelty
The scene that the Super 8 Collective was promoting was of course not without its critics. The negative criticism, in this debate,[32] was emphatically expressed in Barrett Hodson’s essay, ‘The 80s: The Super Scene: The Age of Cultural Abundance – Signs Without Meaning’.[33]
Hodson describes the Sydney scene as gauge ghettoism, full of hype and an exercise in cultural opportunism. He cites Titmarsh as its ace proselytiser who makes grandiose claims for revamping popular culture. To Hodson the scene was focused on a cell of art school people, urban groovers with a surfeit of critical and theoretical discourse. To Hodson it was a scene that fortified itself with a postmodernist cultism that, at every level became a conscious assemblage of itself. If that wasn’t enough, in conclusion, he summed up that the Super 8 scene was pseudo-intellectual cruising, a mere cultural dabbling and a symptomatic marginal phenomenon congruent with hip-hop culturalism.[34]
It is interesting to note that, apart from those published articles of the day; the only other source that Barrett footnotes is Bill Mousoulis, President of the Melbourne Super-8 Film Group and leading critic at the time of the Sydney scene. Mousoulis’ films were often at the receiving end of the Sydney Super 8 festivals’ ‘theatre of cruelty’ where films, especially those of Mousoulis , were laughed at and derided loudly and mercilessly during screenings. The agenda of Hodson’s critique though surely belongs to Hodson himself, who though well respected as a film writer and critic, is firmly positioned in the modernist film tradition of the 70s (one could say a John McDonald[35] of film culture).
Film Cultureshot One:
The Coal Cliff
Kate Richards and Kurt Brereton
(1981) Colour Sound 17 mins
The Coal Cliff is early art-student amateur film that directly references the Super 8 tradition of the home movie. The subject matter retains a classic holiday / share living situation with friends. The film attempts to span across theoretical divides, at once referencing Hollywood narrative genre but also the cliché of home movie and its signifiers. The Super 8 camera acts as a cultural artefact in transmitting its historical articulation, of home movie making, on to the next generation of artist users. This historical articulation is reliant on the personal and public memories of what Super 8 had been traditionally used for. In this regard there is a Super 8 effect. If an artist or amateur filmmaker acquired a 35mm camera it would be very unlikely that they would innately referencing their parent’s home movies! Super 8 filmmaking was in the unique position of being able to reference Hollywood (popular films), TV (popular moving image), and the amateur home movie (popular technology).
“A non-linear narrative that tracks the everyday mundane dramas that makes up relationships in a squat-house at Coal Cliff on the south coast of NSW.[36] This film contains three parts, all constructed from footage shot as a 'home movie' document, i.e. at the country house of a sibling, the first part is an attempt to construct the footage into a heavily coded (hollywood) narra¬tive, complete with titles and tension; it is about the (kodak) intention of Super 8 ‘hollywood-ising’ our lives, about how we see ourselves and situations as film. The second part is bordered by bits of kodak leader; the footage is 'classic' home movie stuff, the cliché of a cliché, film in which the familial relationships are forefronted, the notion of capturing vistas is there, little bits of fun to trick the audience, etc. the third section is an attempt to analyse the processes of signification acting in home movies, and, further, the processes involved in analysing our own analysis, phew”.[37] Kate Richards, 1981.
1980-1981: Australian Super 8 films in Sydney at Sydney Super Eight Film Group screenings
(only first screenings listed)
The First Sydney Super 8 Film Festival
Sydney Filmmakers Co-op
St Peters Lane, Darlinghurst
21 November 1980
dear terry(1980) laurie kirkwood
urban tracks (1980) liz rust
1 + 1 = 3 (1980) geoff adlide
nondescript (1980) gabrielle finnane & renee romeril
abused (1980) milton reid
self-perpetuating master (1980) sue mannigan
space (1980) deb collins
film as poetry (1980) ian adkins
brisbane home movie 1977 (1980) james kestevan
greetings from sydney (1980) bruno danatello
father & son (1980) matthew buddle
in the bush (1980) r.moore
it’s a dog’s life (1980) nicky myers
a b/w film (1980) david ayres
camarade (1980) annabelle shehan & geoff adlide
no news is (1980) bronwyn wolfe
six million wasn’t enough (1980) bill posters
parsley & jigs (1980) kris sherwood
images 75-80 (1980) john gilberg
trapped (1980) peter ryan
a dream/film (1980) mick halford
falcon street (1980) margaret smee
buffalo heat (1980) jamie leonarder
super yutsako (1980) sean o’brien
da da ha ha (1980) decay house films
slack vanguard (1980) oliver robb
my survival as a deviant part 1 (1980) toby zoates
conadatta (1980) sally wiadrowski
The Second Sydney Super 8 Film Festival
Sydney Filmmakers Co-op
9-10 October 1981
Exploration of a candle (1981) Marie Larkin
Sawdust Caesers (1981) Bill Posters & Ben Evison
The Coal Cliff (1981) Kate Richards & Kurt Brereton
Left handed woman (1981) Mark Titmarsh
Untitled (1981) David Nerlich
Captain Willard, are you there (1981) David Nerlich
Iteth: Bound to be: Bathkerrilleth (1981) Stephen Harrop
Collection of thoughts (1981) Warwick Page
Boom boom (1981) Deb Collins
Lolly house (1981) Bronwyn Nicholls
Party tricks (1981) John Dory
Blossoming war: flower and song (1981) Stephen Fearnley & Lucy Torres
Son of Apocalypse returns (1981) David Nerlich
Brisbane home movie 1977 (1981) James Kesteven
Blind (1981) Stephen Harrop
Arabic welding in the Bronx (1981) Jamie Leonarder
The kitchen table at Glebe (1981) Marg Clancy
Untitled (1981) Wendy Chandler
Die young, stay pretty (1981) Leanne Waters
Silk purse and a pig bag (1981) Nicholas Housego
Inducing movement (1981) David Nerlich
Mute 44 (1981) Alan Jeffries
View from Coca Cola Flats, East Fremantle (1981) Anne Artemisia
Today I sat looking out my window (1981) Peter Gummer
Greetings from Sydney (1981) Bruno Donatello
Sydney diary (1981) Toby Zoates
Too S/M (1981) F.G. Lewis
PrimetTime (1981) Chris Newman
Revolving door (1981) Mick Halford et al
doo dah doo (1981) Michael Hill
In the bush (1981) R. Moore
Vital organs (1981) Duncan Anderson
The game (1981) Laurie Beisler
The wedding (1981) Alan Jeffries
Lillian the dragon (1981) Ian Williams
Culture Line of Events, Films and Publications
1980
October
The First Sydney Super 8 Film Festival,
Sydney Filmmakers Co-Op, Darlinghurst.
Exploration of a candle,
Marie Larkin
1981
‘A film in which the flame could be the ultimate signifier of female sexuality, flailing in some dense background, yet this is undermined as the image is blurred and relentlessly denied any specific meaning, any relation to previous discourses from which meaning can be traced eg flame as a standard signifier of desire’. The Second Sydney Super Film Festival, Kate Richards, 1981
3 views of t.v. (three views of television),
Philip Brannigan
1981
‘18 hours of broadcast television is reduced to 10 minutes by the camera’s single frame facility. Changes in advertising strategy from morning/housewife, afternoon/children to evening/adults, serial signatures and so on remain recognisable despite the extremely telescoped form.’ Independent Super 8 Films From Australia, Touring Exhibition Program, October 1983.
1981
9 October
The Second Sydney Super 8 Film Festival,
Sydney Filmmakers Co-Op, Darlinghurst.
Collection of thoughts,
Warwick Page
1981
‘An interesting counter to the previous films, partly in its attempt to evolve and pursue three characters and the complex¬ities of their relationships, something very rarely attempted in S8, largely, I think due to Kodak's marketing of a 2.5 min package along with how to . . . books which extolled the ultimate 2.5 min, edit in the camera’. The Second Sydney Super Film Festival, Kate Richards, 1981.
Mr. Tsuzuki comes to Australia,
Paul Fletcher
1981
‘Mr Tsuzuki comes to Australia to work for Sarba Enterprises with John Smith who lives next door. They go to work from Monday to Friday and play golf on Sunday ... Doll, interior and exterior sets, plus real locations, objects and TV film make up the world represented in the film’. Te Ve Tabu Program, April 1982
1981
November
Kate Richards, ‘Some comments on two Super 8 film festivals’, Filmnews Nov/Dec 81.
Inducing movement,
David Nerlich
1981
‘An amusing film (well, people laughed) through which a ken doll is disembodied in a coloured landscape, and reconstructed, and deconstructed’. The Second Sydney Super Film Festival, Kate Richards, 1981.
Frank Birrell – the movie (The Frank Birrell Story)
The Marine Biologists
1981
‘Filmic adaptation of the famous tome, ‘Frank Birrell: The Novel’, by Frank Birrell, in which it is revealed that – Frank Birrell is Rondo!’ Follow The Sun, Touring Program, January 1986.
Sydney diary
Toby Zoates
1981
‘The pun on acquiring and containing views … the standard 'gutter' documentary operates as a device for appropriating several sydney sub-cultures.’ The Second Sydney Super Film Festival, Kate Richards, 1981.
Room to romp
Stephen Harrop
1981
The Second Sydney Super Film Festival
Death by drowning
Debra Petrovitch
1981
‘Art is the exposure to the tensions and problems of the false world such that man may endure exposing himself to the tensions and problems of the real world (Morse Pickham).’ Te Ve Tabu program, 1982.
Sawdust Caesers
Bill Posters & Ben Evison
1981
‘A doco in the classic sense, with all the assumptions of a 'reality' pre-existent and ready to be absorbed, incredulous, strung out mods hit Melbourne to rousing, sub-cult music.’ The Second Sydney Super Film Festival, Kate Richards, 1981.
Space Face,
David Nerlich
1981
‘A spectacular animated journey through the glossy pages of science fiction magazines and ‘Heavy Metal’ illustrations. A miniaturised version of ‘2001:A Space Odyssey’ and Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’. Independent Super 8 Films From Australia touring Program, 1983.
Notes:
[11]Tyler, Stephen A. ‘Post- modern ethnography’, 1986, in Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton (eds) (1977) The Subcultures Reader, London, Routledge, 1977. pp. 254-260.
[12] Now known as the University of Technology, Sydney
[13] Richards, Kate. Unpublished interview by the author, 2007.
[14] Ibid.
[15] McMurchy, Megan & Jennifer Stott (eds). Signs of independents: ten years of the creative development fund, Australian Film Commission, Sydney 1988, p.11.
[16] Ibid, p.1.
[17] Richards, Kate. ‘Some comments on two Super 8 film festivals’, Filmnews, Nov/Dec 1981.
[18] Richards Kate., Unpublished interview by the author, 2007.
[19] There were films by David Nerlich, Stephen Harrop, David Nerlich, Jamie Leonarder, Toby Zoates, Bill Posters, Mark Titmarsh, Deb Collins and Kate Richards and Marie Larkin.
[20] Richards, Kate. ‘Some comments on two Super 8 film festivals’, Filmnews, Nov/Dec 1981.
[21] Richards, Kate. Unpublished interview by the author, 2007.
[22] Kate Richards does not remember this meeting but both Mark Titmarsh and Ross Gibson do. Kate left the country for Bristol in England just after this meeting and did work with the Bristol Filmmakers Co-op.
[23] Now known as NSW College of Fine Arts (COFA).
[24] Titmarsh, Mark. ‘Super 8 - The unconscious of film’, Filmnews, October 1982.
[25] Titmarsh, Mark. ‘Super 8: From Poseidon adventure to Atlantis effect’, On the beach No. 1 autumn 1983.
[26] Richards, Kate. Unpublished interview by the author, 2007.
[27] Crawford, Ben. ‘Making the scene: Super 8 from Melbourne to Sydney and back again’, Australian Super 8 Film: 1981 – 1986 [video compilation for NFSA, 1989.
[28] Richards, Kate. Unpublished interview by the author, 2007.
[29] Titmarsh, Mark. Unpublished interview by the author, 2007.
[30] Richards, Kate. Unpublished interview by the author, 2007.
[31] Titmarsh, Mark. Unpublished interview by the author, 2007.
[32] Tina Kauffman, from the singularly influential screen magazine Filmnews was very supportive of the Super 8 screenings and would continue for the rest of the decade to publish regular articles on Super 8 filmmaking, establishing and promoting a critical debate that would be crucial in the development and promotion of the Super 8 phenomenon.
[33] Hodson, Barrett. ‘The ‘80s: The Super Scene: The Age of Cultural Abundance – Signs Without Meaning’ in Straight Roads and Crossed Lines: The Quest For Flim Culture in Australia, Bernt Porridge Group, Western Australia, 2001.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Conservative art critic of the Sydney Morning Herald, well known for his love of ‘painting’ and antagonism towards post-modernism.
[36] Super 8 Effect program presented by d/Lux/MediaArts, Chauvel Cinema, Paddington Town Hall, Sydney, 23 December 2007.
[37] Richards, Kate. ‘Some comments on two Super 8 film festivals’, Filmnews, Nov/Dec 1981.
No comments:
Post a Comment