“My hold on the past and the future is precarious and the future is precarious and my possession of my own time is always postponed until a stage when I may fully understand it”.[1] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1962.
Excavating the archive is 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.[2]
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. To mark the organisation’s 25-year anniversary d/Lux proposed a major project to catalogue and publish its history, drawing on its extensive archive of original documents. d/Lux had accumulated a significant quantity of information derived from programs and exhibitions presented over the past 25 years. This material 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. Excavating the archive draws on this archive, in writing a history of the first ten years of the organisation. This 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.
In 2007 d/Lux created a database listing all works presented by the organisation since its inception. Titled d/Archive[3] this online searchable database now contains over 1200 entries including artists, titles of works and still images etc. This dissertation project has significantly contributed to this electronic archive, already providing over 800 of these entries (for the years 1981-1990) and will contribute at least another 800 at its completion. The dissertation serves a primary objective of d/Lux by assisting in bringing the combined histories of the organisation, and the artists exhibited, back into the public domain thereby filling a significant gap in the Australian cultural history.
Excavating the archive attempts to present a ‘towards a history’ of an arts organisation, in relation to its primary referents: the funding bodies, the filmmakers, the film audience, the surrounding cultural landscape and most important of all, the films themselves. The format I have chosen for this mode of history construction is specifically modelled on Scott MacDonald’s innovative text Cinema 16: documents towards the history of a film society. This is a history of the Cinema 16 Film Society based in New York from the end of 1947 to mid-1963 of the Cinema 16 film society, funded by Amos and Marcia Vogel and responsible for the screening and promotion of experimental and avant-garde filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger, Hans Richter, Maya Deren and Lois Bunuel.
In Cinema 16 the ‘documents towards a history’ are divided into two main sections. The first section is an introductory essay outlining the background and formation of the society as well as its relationship to US cinema. The second section contains interview transcripts with the organisation’s founders; copies of every screening program, both in original layout and word format; and transcripts of correspondence between the society and the filmmakers being screened.
The first stage of the Excavating the archive project comprises this essay, entitled The Sydney Super 8 Film Group’s bohemian affair with bureaucracy: an age of magnificent obsessions and its subsequent lliberation of social memory; the second stage will consist of interviews with key founders and filmmakers, as well as transcripts (and digital scans) of the documents, files, photos, film records and artworks ‘excavated’ by the writer from a disparate collection of personal, organisational and institutional archives. These archives are primarily those of d/Lux, the Australian Film Commission and the extensive personal archive of Mark Titmarsh, the founding president of the Sydney Super 8 Film Group. The second stage, of this project also includes the digitisation of comprehensive series of articles published in the key arts magazines of this period, Filmnews, Art & Text, On The Beach and Tension as well relevant newspaper articles. These articles are crucial in revealing the heated debate around super-8 film culture during the 80’s, especially in regards to the concept of a ‘Super 8 effect’ that was promoted by a number of leading super-8 filmmakers. All these interviews and articles will be uploaded separately on the d/Archive website.
In this dissertation essay, a postmodern ‘towards a documentary history’ will be presented, rather than a conventional meta-narrative by the author. This history/ies will ‘refuse’ the two previous meta-narrative histories conducted on the Sydney Super 8 scene by Ben Crawford (1990)[4] and Barrett Hodson (2000).[5] In choosing this post-modern style, multiple histories can be created, each acting as an alternative pathway to view a particular social-historical scene. The inclusion of every additional interview and primary document correspondingly increases this democratisation of the history and subsequent liberation of its social memory – a history of ideas rather than just facts.
The history of the Sydney Super 8 Film Group is both an ‘institutional’ and ‘personal memory’[6] of an organisation and the loose collective of people who constituted it. These memories do not always coincide and that is precisely how history is shaped, through the inherent conflicts of the ‘politics of perception’.
In The visible and the Invisible (1962) Maurice Merleau-Ponty states, “It is a question not of putting the perceptual faith in place of refection, but on the contrary of taking into account the total situation, which involves reference from one to the other.”[7] The structure of the meta-narrative history relegates primary documents to footnotes and references thus limiting social memory to the single narrative being presented. The d/Archive[8] of dlux will, itself, act as an additional agent of social change in this democratisation of this history.
The Sydney super-8 filmmakers and their films constitute a construction of a particular social and political memory in a specific historical time period, 1980 -1990. The films of this period are a repository not only of the filmmakers’ knowledge but also the collective knowledge of the extent sub-culture being filmed. The films have the capacity to enable the viewer to ‘remember, witness and understand who we are and where we come from’.[9] These experimental films exist as eloquent cultural artefacts and political objects of a sub-cultural bohemian group, part of a Sydney underground that was not seen again. The films are not ‘mute’, they are chattering ‘pieces’ of post-modern ironic subjectivity with their own manifesto. The camera has been turned back on itself, on the artist, on the other who is usually not seen. The filmmakers are shouting, “this is my backyard – this is our life– what do you think!” Film is being turned back onto the streets and alleyways of radical lesbianism, gay politics and radically incompetent filmmaking.
This dissertation is an attempt to influence the way we, the public, choose to view and critically analyse these super-8 films in the context of film histories and its connection to social change. It can be argued that the super-8 filmmakers of this period, in having created their own histories and stories, were at the same time creating social change.
Just as the super-8 home movies of the 60’s and 70’s visited the exotic (overseas travel) and the everyday (summer camping holidays and amateur theatricals), so too do the Sydney super-8 films of the 80s engage in the mundane everyday college preoccupations of the student art world (spoofs, melodrama narratives and doll animations); the exotic theoretical world of deconstruction, post-modernity, formalism and sampling; and the world where art competes with artisan. These slices of super-8 film history span the 1980’s and act as a cultural snapshot and cinematic record of amateur auteur filmmakers living and formulating their art practice through super-8 film production.
A huge range of socio-cultural perspectives, histories and cultural codes are relayed in these films. Catherine Lowing’s films document the origins of the first rockabilly feminist culture in Sydney; other films document gay culture, the economic expansion and destruction of the city, post-modern appropriation and, when the camera is turned around, the filmmakers themselves doing super-8.
Sydney super-8 film history is a public, artistic and anarchistic record of 1980’s alternative Sydney, told using the anachronistic medium of 8 mm film. Each film relates a small vignette that flows through the cracks of our formal film history. Amateurish, bohemian, highly personal, and often radically incompetent, super-8 film history celebrates the artistic endeavors of art-school, production filmmaker and radical domestic filmmakers forming an eclectic archive of cultural and political cinematic viewpoints.
Many of these films have been seen as boring, self-indulgent, self-serving, incompetent and of limited cinematic value.[10] To go beyond this limited viewpoint one only needs to change the lens and to see not just ‘film competence’ but also cultural and historical relevance. Once this paradigm shift has occurred the viewer, when watching the films, may then be able to look past the competency of the film, and instead look at it as one looks an old home movie - a historical and cultural document, a signifier, of what has changed and what still remains, a documentary evidence of the filmmaker’s intention.
(1) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of perception, trans. Smith, Paul. London: Routledge and Kegan, 1962, p. 346.
(2) Website: http://dlux.org.au
(3) Website: http://archive.dlux.org.au
(4) Crawford, Ben. Making the scene: Super 8 from Melbourne to Sydney, unpublished manuscript, Power Research Library, 1990. 55 pp.
(5) Hodson, Barrett. Straight roads and crossed lines: the quest for film culture in Australia, Bernt Porridge Group, Western Australia, 2001. 205 pp.
(6) McMurchy, Megan & Jennifer Stott (eds). Signs of independents: ten years of the creative development fund, Australian Film Commission, Sydney, 1988, p.1.
(7) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The visible and the invisible, trans, Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968, p. 35.
(8) Website: http://archive.dlux.org.au
(9) Website: http://www.acmi.net.au/first_person.jsp First Person Conference
(10) Hodson, Barrett. Straight roads and crossed lines: the quest for film culture in Australia, Bernt Porridge Group, Western Australia, 2001, p.183.
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