Don’t look now, we’re in a recession

NZFA Media Release
For Immediate Release

Don’t look now, we’re in a recession

Click for big version

Click for big version

Click for big version

Hold Still - a video installation by sound and visual artist Rachel Shearer points a sharp light on the work of amateur female film makers during the Depression in 1930s New Zealand.

Shearer describes Hold Still as "An installation of fragments from three women in 1930's New Zealand using 16mm film cameras to document their lives and surroundings.” The artist approached the exhibition as a collaboration with the women almost 80 years later. “I decided not to work from a documentary point of view. Rather I have been drawn to their artistic images but of course, the films can’t help bring in aspects of their lives and experiences.”

Ethel Garden, Violet Winstone and Lucy Mills were all upper middle class women making “home movies” in the 1930s. In 2006 Shearer created a live soundtrack for a film shot by Ethel Garden entitled Paritai Drive (1937) which was performed at the annual Film Archive event SoundTracks. Moody, dark and filled with David Lynch-like psychic energy, Paritai Drive was an unusual film for a home movie maker.

Two years later NZFA researcher Kathy Dudding presented a paper at the 2008 FHAANZ (Film and History Association of Australian and New Zealand) conference entitled Tracing the Flaneuse: On early women amateur cinematographers. Dudding noted a number of female home movie makers whose films she observed “depict a female psychic space” and “add a moving visual voice to women’s social history”.

When Shearer subsequently took up an offer by Film Archive Exhibitions Project Developer Mark Williams to turn her SoundTracks piece into an installation, she embraced the opportunity to incorporate Duddings’ discovery of films shot by women of the era.

"The three women have styles of film making that are distinctly different. Ethel Garden has the most extensive writing about her and was the most experienced. She used in-camera editing and was from quite a creative family of strong women. Creative experimentation was encouraged in the family although once she got married she seems to have made fewer films."

Lucy Mills was born profoundly deaf. She immigrated to New Zealand in the 1920s from England with her 'companion' (she never married) who was paid a stipend. She bought a sheep station at Lake Tekapo with no prior knowledge on how to run such a business and her films depict herself and her companion working on the farm and engaging in leisure activities such as ice skating. "She was very adventurous" says Shearer. "Her films include aerial footage from planes, car races and life on the farm."

By contrast Garden’s Paritai Drive (1937) features domestic images that would not be out of place in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980); a large empty house, a suit of armour, a sudden cut to an image of a small child shaking her head - eerie images of emptiness amidst luxury.

"So much of the footage is really beautiful and inspired me in some way," Shearer explains. "There is a definitive quality and texture that 16mm allows. Some of the footage is slightly degraded, but not only because of the actual images, the films document the experiences and history of this country. These women were able to put themselves in these landscapes in their own unique way."

In the course of her research Dudding discovered that like Garden, Violet Winstone also filmed images in Paritai Drive, a remarkable co-incidence that pointed to the possibility of Garden and Winstone exchanging thoughts about film-making. If so, Winstone’s films in Hold Still are remarkably different to Garden’s, revealing a sunny vision of family life on the lawn with baby and family.

Rachel Shearer has previously worked as a sound designer on a number of short films. She has also recorded and released a number of records under the name Lovely Midget. Her music has been described as "a transcendent world of shivering ambient sounds, distant ruptures and warm washes of analog sheen". Her 2006 SoundTracks performance reworked a number of amateur films from the New Zealand Film Archive collection into a single unbroken 20 minute moving image presentation. Shearer quotes Duddings' observation that “a psychic tracery is drawn” and adds “the installation touches on this fine and broken line to feel out a network of simultaneous moments".

None of the three film-makers who created the original images in Hold Still are still alive. Outside of Duddings conference presentation their films have only previously screened as silent movies for friends and family. Shearer's installation reminds us of the intimacy of home movie making, and leaves us to wonder at the mystery of films that outlive their makers.

The New Zealand Film Archive has an extensive collection of home movies or "amateur footage" with over 30,000 individual titles collected since the Archive was established in 1981. The Archive is always interested to hear from anyone with material available for deposit. Items are stored in secure, climate controlled vaults and are preserved with a duplicated master if the material enters the collection. All material deposited with the Archive remains the property of the depositor.

Please contact deposits@nzfa.org.nz for more information.

EXHIBITION DETAILS:
Opening Function 5:30pm Wednesday 24 June at the Film Archive mediagallery.
Hold Still runs until Saturday 1 August.

FREE ENTRY
Rachel Shearer will be giving an artists talk at the Film Archive at 12.15pm, Thursday 25 June.

ENDS

© Scoop Media