Oceanic Confessions

Confession: back in the day, I used to plaster up photocopies of shipwrecks and my own mediocre oceanic poetry on the city walls at night. I think, for a moment, the empire literally shuddered as I smashed the state through my images and words of maritime disaster. Heaps punk. Or not, depending on how punk you think oceans and shipwrecks are... but, damn, for a period that was what it was all about for me. People dragging themselves from the ocean. Survivors. Immensity. Around this time June of '44 were releasing oceanic themed albums, the Shipping News formed from June of '44 and released two epic seafaring records, and Dirty Three's Ocean Songs and the Boxhead Ensemble soundtrack to Braden King and Laura Moya's Dutch Harbour could be heard burbling away in the loungerooms of inner city Melbourne. Now it's all cowboys or discos with the kids, but since my heart is still verging on the oceanic, and, again, in the spirit of excess, I thought I'd leave out one of my old posters...

Mix Tape '99

I saw that MYC are reforming to do a gig at the Arts House in Melbourne this week... reminded me of the old zine mix tapes. Here is another one...

The Buoy Archives #1

The Buoy Archives #1
'Signs of Symmetry'



This fragment is, in fact, the first Buoy Archives piece I completed in it's entirety. I have to confess to leaving the temp track that I edited the piece to in place - it's an amazing lingering atmos track by Sonora Pine, the super group made up of members of Rachels, Rodan and June of '44 (who along with The Shipping News and, of course, Slint, inspired much mediocre sea-faring poetry/writing/film stuff on my part). As is often the case, it is hard to abandon the temp track, even in a sketch like this, once the edit is over. I was unable to part with this amazing, haunting piece and hope that Sonora Pine forgive me... They should of course, immediately tell me to fuck it off if they ever chance across it and find it offensive. I am at your service, Sonora Pine.

This piece came about through three strange events. Two were witnessed from the rooftops of the city in which people were seen, alone or as satellites to each other, within the geometries of their own lives. The third was witnessed suring the September 11 (2000, before the date came to have a semiotic life beyond definition) anti-globalisation protests in Melbourne. Over the 3 days of the stand off (and subsequent police brutality, media spin etc. etc.) I was able, at one point, to clamber up to a point, with my Canon814, and film the strange, static stand off between the protesters and the police. A geometry of opposition. There was some later excitement as I was pursued from my position several blocks by some angry cops when, for some retrospectively amusing reason, I fled with defiance, sure I had 'captured' something. They must have been having Zapruder flashbacks watching me film with the super8 while everyone else around was filming the movement of police in the flurry of miniDV cameras that is now the landscape of protest.

I still have a lazy obsession with taking photographs of the ways people inhabit space in solitude. I always think of these clusters of photos as 'geometries' as the subject is usually the arrangement of dead space rather than the subject themselves. Maybe my interest in this also comes from a cowardice or voyeurism that makes it easier to photograph people in these dead moments, or to photograph dead space without humans, rather than look someone in the eye and exchange something meaningful as payment for an image.

Some geometries from recent years:

Origins

Originally, in a break from the furious and usually misguided and occasionally terrible short filmmaking of my early 20s, I started the Buoy Archives, a series of small film and video sketches as a form of consolation for inactivity and a yearning for that elusive something - voice?- that I didn't seem able to quite find in the films I was making. I kept wanting to make films that somehow had in them a swagger, a vulnerability, a musicality, a restraint and a deep sense of the human that I didn't seem able to harness. Possibly this was and is because these things are often contradictory and probably it was and is a matter of craft. In any case, I came close to finding that elusive thing in a half hour 16mm film called 'Charm' - which had a humanist storyline, a musical swagger (in as much as the soundtrack was courtesy of Yo La Tengo, June of 44, Chavez and Blue Tile Lounge) - and with some later shorts and documentaries. But the way that I dealt with performance and visual style in the beginning was far too interested in it's own cleverness. And therefore the balance between vulnerability and strength in a human sense dissolved in the face of self-conscious style. It was a visually self aware approach to the form rather than an emotionally responsive approach. That is, each moment of emotion, performance or action emerged from a desire to stage for the formal elements. What I wanted and what I saw in the films I loved, was a form that emerged from a more intuitive grappling with human interaction and human emotion and a visual and formal approach that read like an evolving curiosity rather than a predefined realisation of something already established in the filmmakers mind. At this time, I became inspired by the ideas that I heard articulated by filmmakers who made films without necessarily knowing how or why the film would take the narrative or formal or stylistic course that it did. Of course, this is an almost impossible path to justify in making films here and now, where market end points, targeted narratives and broad appeal seem to be the main concern.

So then, the sketches of the Buoy Archives, as clumsy and brief as they are, are safe in their role small moments of curiosity. Moments in which an image suggested an idea without a place, or a narrative without a scenario, or an emotion or impression without any sense of context. As I worked on them in spare hours, they were forming a dialogue with the photos, notes and fragments of writing that were emerging alongside any longer pieces of film writing or any other films. These were the bits that slipped into the cracks. Some will always remain unseen. Some I'll post up here as I get to them.

In beginning this page, though, I am trying to reinvigorate myself into working on them again and into approaching my other work with their intent in mind. At it's heart film is a yearning art. An art fixed on desire and the need to connect... mostly with our inner lives, sometimes with others, sometimes with the world. But the process of trying to make or successfully making films is also one of yearning. When I look at the images or fragments that hang around the edges of my studio, they do all speak of yearning... trying to intellectualise beyond that is difficult. But I do think they all strive, whether unsuccessfully or not, for the cinematic - where yearning is made active, where stories are propelled by desire, images by beauty, sadness, seductiveness or thrills, performances by human connections or moments of transcendence. How to make sense of all this? By archiving and looking for patterns or trends or signs as the work progresses.