On Reflection #1

It's the end of week one of the official pre-production of Galore.

Here's what happened, in a nutshell.

People were hired.

Locations were scouted.

I saw some spiders:

And visited one of our locations to discover that every room was full of books.

I cast some of the roles and agonised over some others.

I showed films to the cinematographer and images to the production designer.

I visited, while location scouting, the childhood home I lived in with my Dad after my folks split and discovered that the tiny place seems even tinier and is now the home of a whole bunch of migrant workers.

I took a bunch of photos in some of our other locations and tried to imagine shots, scenes and sequences.

I spent a lot of time thinking about bushfires and fistfights and fireworks. 

I ate out almost every night and spent a ridiculous amount of money on cabs while rushing from place to place and meeting to meeting. 

I watched films by Lucrecia Martel, Alma Har'el and Nikola Lezaic for inspiration. 

I terrified myself before bed every night by reading Misha Glenny's McMafia, and then tried to console myself by reading Junot Diaz' beautiful new short story collection This is How You Lose Her ("the half life of love is forever").

I scraped in some time to finish an episode of a TV series I've been writing. 

And I freaked out about my bank balance. 

Then I watched the AFL grand final, got stupidly, breathlessly drunk and tried to dance salsa until dawn.

So, all in all, a successful start to pre production. On to week 2.

Digital Memory

So, a recent visit to my Mum's house offered up a strange burst of memory. In a small pencil case, she had gathered together a bunch of the hand held 'game and watch' consoles we had all played as kids and stored them in a drawer where they lay untouched. My brother and I found some old batteries and charged them up. I played a few of them - 'Fire', 'Donkey Kong Jr.' were alway my favourites - and immediately my fingers remembered what I had not. My fumbling mansize digits aced the games as if a day hadn't elapsed in the decades since I last held them in my hand. Bodies can always compress time, senses allow the years to collapse in ways that our minds refuse to, no matter how strong the desire. Of course, like any burst of childhood memory, the warmth and terror of a crippling man sized nostalgia followed. So I buried it the way I normally do. I took a photo to kill and then falsify the real world emotion. In any case, thanks Mum.

The Past

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

William Faulkner. 

I watched a conversation two nights ago between Javier Cercas and Juan Gabriel Vasquéz at the pretty damned fine Wheeler Centre for Writing, Books and Ideas. The conversation, like their respective novels, revolved around the meeting point between history and memory and the role of the novelist in unravelling what we believe to be true and historical, and what we believe to be subjective and remembered. Vasquéz and Cercas both talked at length (ruing their agreement on ideas and approaches, as they would have preferred to disagree and make the 'show' more fun) about the notion that 'remembering is a moral duty' for a writer and how a novel that treads the path between fiction and non fiction can provide an alternative to the implicit objectivity of official history. Truth and cultural history, they said, can be found in fiction as much as falsity in service of power can be found in non fiction.

Although they explored these ideas by way of Cervantes, Bellow, Stendhal, Roth and Aristotle, for these two writers, their main literary obsession is the landscape of their own country's memory. And, like many countries with turbulent recent histories, the role of remembering in their homelands is intricately intertwined with the practise of making art. In Cercas' Spain and Vasquéz' Colombia, the shadows of civil war, of dictatorships, massacres and violence are heavy shadows that loom over the creative act. It made me reflect that, strangely, in a country such as Australia, where our violence has been carried out, often without military uniforms, without formality, and in the sanctioned space of language, governance, bureacracy, and out of the eyes and minds of the majority of the populace, our creative lives are more often occupied with forgetting than remembrance.

It was Vasquéz, though, that reminded me of the Faulkner quote above from Requiem for a Nun. That "the past is never dead. It's not even past." And these words echo as much for the concerns of the historical novel as for a chump like me interested in the spaces and abysses between humans as expressed in cinema. The ways we continue to live the past - and the echoes of personal and cultural history - in every moment of the present are the greatest complications for our movement into the future. The more we continually revive and resuscitate what has passed - in both shadow and light - the more we see how the past distorts our perception of the lived present. In Australia, a country that fights to live only in the present or in a falsified and nostalgic myth of what we wish we might have been in the past, this act of resuscitation becomes a necessity. There will always be a quiet violence when we try to forget or allow forgetting to happen and it was a small, good thing to be reminded of it by these wandering writers.