30x30

Part of the purpose of small, weightless projects like the films and videos in the Buoy Archives is coming up with excuses to keep filming something, anything, during the months and years of battling with scripts and funding bodies and distributors and apathy and wages and rent and the allure of bars. Sometimes, it's a flare of energy, or a challenge to inactivity, or a camera appearing at hand, or boredom at dawn, and sometimes it's giving yourself an excuse to hang around while other people just do their thing. Sometimes, also, it's an emotional or formal challenge to yourself. In the case of 30x30, it was thirty 30-second shots taken while compañero Glendyn Ivin made his music video/film 'Paradise' for Magic Dirt's noise project Roky's Room.

Paradise, a pretty damned fine piece of noise vs beauty can be viewed, in part, here. The rest, which is mostly made up of close ups of centrefolds on fading magazine pages is a little bit too genitally raw for vimeo but word has it that Glendyn is going to do a DVD release at some point.

Okay, so filming a friend filming their own film might not be earth shattering, but, it's not the first time it's been done and, for a moment, we can all just pretend I'm Chris Marker and Glendyn is a music-video-Tarkovsky and that people love observing the drama of stillness and shadows and silence and that all is right and good with the world.

30x30 from Daybreak Films on Vimeo.

The Buoy Archives #19

I hid this Buoy Archive deep in another post. Here is a reposting of this little handmade romance put together with a treacherous Bolex and some dodgy audio recordings.

Happiness #3

Apichatpong asks: "Are we drunk on something?"

Yes.

The opening shot of Millenium Mambo.

The final shot of Chop Shop.

Just about every moment of Isaki Lacuesta's La Leyenda del Tiempo.

Any and every page of Barry Lopez' Desert Notes.

The final passages of the Raymond Carver short story Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes.

The opening chords of 'U-Mass' by Pixies.

The fact that a bigrecordcompany allowed me to use the opening chords to 'U-Mass' by Pixies in one of my little flicks.

The final resound of Skull by Sebadoh.

The Tim Rogers lyrics: 'you woke me up just to check that I'm alive, we talk to each other as if we're five'.

The sound of just about any g-funk track coming from a passing car.

The thought of my old '82 Urvan - the red curtains and brown vinyl seats, the dodgy wiring and switch ignition - wherever it has ended up in the world.

The madness, humanity and audacity of Danish screenwriters.

This scene.

This movie.

This fragment of Eduardo Galeano's writing:

The Function of Art / 1
Diego had never seen the sea. His father, Santiago Kovadloff, took him to discover it.
They went south.
The ocean lay beyond high sand dunes, waiting.
When the child and his father finally reached the dunes after much walking, the ocean exploded before their eyes. And so immense was the sea and its sparkle that the child was struck dumb by the beauty of it.
and when he finally managed to speak, trembling, stuttering, he asked his father: "Help me to see!"*

The mix tapes a friend of mine gives to me at my birthday, year after year.

The fact that only recently have his mix tapes become mix CDs.

The single annual email a long lost friend sends to me that arrives on the morning of my birthday every year without fail.

The handful of pubs and bars that surround my studio that are full of good folks and cheap booze.

The thought of all the unmade and unwatched films, unwritten and unread books and unrecorded and unheard records.

The memory of the mayhem that comes with shared listening sessions of The Shape of Punk to Come by Refused.

This fragment of writing from Walter Benjamin's 'One Way Street':

Ordinance
I had arrived in Riga to visit a woman friend. Her house, the town, the language were unfamiliar to me. Nobody was expecting me, nobody knew me. For two hours I walked the streets in solitude. Never again have I seen them so. From every gate a flame darted, each cornerstone sprayed sparks, and ever streetcar came towards me like a fire-engine. For she might have stepped out of the gateway, around the corner, been sitting in the streetcar. But of the two of us I had to be, at any price, the first to see the other. For had she touched me with the match of her eyes, I should have gone up like a magazine.**

This photo.

The absent-minded habit my 4 year old nephew has of running his hand across the stubble on my chin when he is talking to me.

The stretch of road from the Hume Highway through the rainforests of the Burrawang pass down to Jamberoo and on to the coast.

The view walking down Rucker's Hill at dusk.

The memory of an abandoned week long trek through the Alpujarras that came to a halt in a small village that was almost impossible to leave.

And this Buoy Archive I made when I first fell in love with T.

*From 'El Libro de Los Abrazos' - Eduardo Galeano
**From 'One Way Street' - Walter Benjamin

On Gifts #1

Many years back I made a small Buoy Archive (which shall forever remain hidden) with a one chip video recording of a high school performance by a punk band that my brother had formed which was killing it in the youth clubs around Canberra. They were having so much fun just creating together, as kids, as fellow musicians and playing to other people as a gift, expecting nothing in return, that I was completely reinvigorated and inspired. It felt, in that high school moment, something like this overused old quote from Lester Bangs:

"Good rock 'n' roll is something that makes you feel alive. It's something that's human, and I think that most music today isn't. ... To me good rock 'n' roll also encompasses other things, like Hank Williams and Charlie Mingus and a lot of things that aren't strictly defined as rock 'n' roll. Rock 'n' roll is an attitude, it's not a musical form of a strict sort. It's a way of doing things, of approaching things. Writing can be rock 'n' roll, or a movie can be rock 'n' roll. It's a way of living your life."

It is so incredibly hard to find this attitude in filmmaking, and in Australian filmmaking specifically. There is so much expectation of what the film (the product, the content) will bring back to the filmmakers that the actual act of offering up a joyous creative experience as a gift to your audience has been deadened. Why can't a film be an immersive sensory or pleasure based experience in the same way as seeing your favourite band in your favourite venue is? Why can't there be enough attitude, joy and generosity in the act of making the film that the audience can't help but be buoyed by the experience of watching it? Instead, we strategise how a film will take us, the filmmakers, somewhere else - status, reputation, critical acclaim, Hummers. What the act of making the film will return to us. It is no surprise that the local discussion of film has become totally hijacked into a discussion of financial 'returns'.

On the other hand, there is another approach to film, which is all about giving. I don't know if generosity is necessarily Bangs idea of rock'n'roll but, strangely, in this day and age it feels like it. What if you make something in that spirit of offering up an experience for the joy of the people sitting in the room with you... the room being any audience and you being the film itself. I love to watch a band play and love those moments when you know that they are sharing the experience as intensely as the audience is. Their songs come alive in the eyes of the people who love to experience them in the flesh. Films don't often give you that buzz that comes from a filmmaker knowing they are giving it up to you, inviting you in, letting you be a part of the creation. Instead films are bigger, flashier and smarter (or dumber) than us and we can't give them anything back except for a ticket price. We certainly can't give them our fanaticism or our hearts.

I loved the anthropologist Marcel Mauss' book 'The Gift'. In it he explored the ways that many preindustrial societies relied on the gift as a form of expanding their social and intercommunal relations. A gift given was a complex thing which metonymically embodied social, communal, emotional, spiritual and economic relationships with the recipient. The gift encouraged reciprocity which strengthened the ties between the giver and the recipient both individually and culturally.

Apologies to Mauss and anyone who has studied ethnography but, to my mind, the communal arts like music and film can and sometimes do work in this way. Of course, commercialism kills this, but so do filmmakers who don't think of what they do as offering a gift to their audience. A film can be an offering of enormous complexity that invites the recipient to reciprocate, either through inspiration, through high expectations, through inserting themselves deep within the film experience, through love of the experience or through taking the film out into the world with them. It communicates something of the world it comes from and embodies values and experience and philosophy as well as the emotions, narrative and character insights that sustain any storytelling form.

It would be a beautiful thing to see a film and feel it is a gift. Recently, in domestic cinema Samson and Delilah felt like this. Bastardy, too. Internationally? 35 Shots of Rum. Ballast. I'm struggling here.

One of the reasons T and I have spent much of the past few years making two enormously demanding feature music docos is to extend the gift of what the music and the musicians give to us. I sometimes think I should be spending more time on writing and making fiction but it is so hard to resist making these flicks when there is so much joy to be had in them. I am kinda snobby about the music I listen to but I have a much looser love of any music that is made with generous creativity. One of the reasons we made Words from the City was that, at the time we made it, Australian hip hop MCs were in this incredible period of making music that was an open, evolving form. It had more punk attitude than any of the punk I was hearing but also expected the audience to give back, to demand more, to expect more. Likewise, we have spent three years making Murundak after first seeing the Black Arm Band play together and realising their gathering, their songs, were an invitation to be a part of something. Those songs were a gift. We hope that the film will be our reciprocity.

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:

The Buoy Archives #11

This one is called Favourites. To their great credit, a film festival showed this and another Buoy Archives piece in 2001 or 2002 - a buhzillion years ago in any case. It was a thrill to show something this tiny (in a figurative sense) at a festival. At the time I was labouring over a couple of 16mm shorts and it was blissful to have this up on the screen.

The Buoy Archives #11: Favourites

The Buoy Archives #15

to ensure maximum vulnerability I am digging through the tape drawers to fish out the early Buoy Archives stuff (possibly because I got a bit distracted by longer/better/faster/stronger films in recent years and left the small, breakable, scared stuff alone).

this is The Buoy Archives #15

confession: I have a small obsession with filming apes on super 8. I have a terribly sad 15 minutes of an orangutan in the Melbourne zoo draping his head with a potato sack so he can't see the zoo-goers looking at him. every now and then he looks out with a small glimmer of hope and expectation, sees the zoo-goers gawking and waiting, in their colosseum like anticipation for him to do something, and he drapes the sack back over his head again with an audible sigh. heartbreaking. i did make this into a small flick but it was really too depressing to finish. one day...

so, in the spirit of sketches and drawings and things incomplete and half formed... The Buoy Archives #15: Meditation

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.