WIZARDS OF OZ: 

INTO THE 90s BETWEEN DOCUMENTARY AND FICTION 

by Freda Freiberg, May 1995. Edited version published in ARTLINK.

In the incredible shrinking space between 1984 and 2001, the distinction between social-issue documentary and surreal fiction is collapsing - almost as fast as Australian capitalism or Soviet communism. This is nowhere more evident than in that genre of filmmaking that has variously been called the experimental documentary, the non-fiction or essay film. The borders of this genre have always been less distinct, more shadowy, than those of other genres of film. Its exponents have typically been free spirits, nomadic types, no respecters of borders and boundaries. They are the men and women with movie cameras who traverse cities, continents, oceans and skies, reading letters to and from home, experiencing vertigo, exploring the inner and outer, higher and lower worlds. 

Into the 90s, the non-fiction film in Australia remains haunted by the shadows of the destruction wrought by Nazism, Stalinism and the Bomb, in Auschwitz, the Gulag and Hiroshima half a century ago. There are good reasons for this, principally the presence in our midst of migrants scarred and haunted by these events, people with dramatic stories to tell, supplying the documentary filmmaker with a rich source of oral history. There is, too, a tradition of social-issue documentary filmmaking in this country, committed to exposing injustice and arousing our social consciences on serious issues. Many filmmakers see a continual need for cautionary tales about the devastatingly destructive potential of ideological purity and scientific technology, especially when the latter is used in the service of the former. But when these issues are presented in over-familiar formats, viewers tend to switch off. 

Both Eclipse of the Man-made Sun (Amanda Stewart & Nicolette Freeman) and The Sleep of Reason (Peter Jordan) try to take a new tack on the nuclear issue. Rather than lecture us about the horrors of nuclear war, they deconstruct the language of nuclear power and analyse the imagination of disaster. The Sleep of Reason begins with a vertigo-inducing roller-coaster ride on the big dipper at Luna Park, promising a dare-devil encounter with the imagination of disaster, but somehow fails to engage with it. The apocalyptic imagination is explicated by four articulate, self-assured talking heads, mostly American academics, whose mini-lectures are illustrated by a montage of disaster movie clips, Breughel and Bosch paintings, newsreels of the atomic research conducted at Los Alamos and, finally, a long sequence of actuality footage shot in contemporary Hiroshima, a modern metropolis seemingly unaware of its symbolic importance and history. Eclipse also employs monologues by experts, but confines them largely to the sound track, as voice-overs to accompany a dense montage of fascinating archival footage - newsreels, fiction films, documentaries and advertisements from the late 40s and 50s. With more of a local focus than The Sleep of Reason, it demonstrates how nuclear energy was sold to the Australian public in the 1950s, through processes of domestication, indigenization, abstraction, and consumerism, and thus rendered peaceful and benign. But, although we are here in Australia, it is not now but the 1950s, and we all know that the past is a foreign country, they did things differently then. It is so easy to laugh at the dated fashions, the blatant gender stereotyping, the hard sell of the ads and the transparent rhetoric of the official whitewashers. The intellectual dissection of the visual and verbal rhetoric of nuclear power contributes to the distancing effect, so that we remain finally, here too, detached, uninvolved, above it all. 

Both of these films are more readily identified as documentaries than essay films, not only because they rely on the analytical voice of the expert and the testimony of archival footage, but also because they lack signs of the subjective. They present historical discourses and discursive histories as objective processes. A muted unidentified female voice in Eclipse... suggests a personal view of events that differs from the experts, but unlike the strong voice of the filmmakers in Landslides, and their markedly sceptical, laconic and self-mocking tone, it remains too sombre and shadowy. In contrast, Breathing under Water and The Refracting Glasses are immediately identifiable as essay films in which a subjective account of events is presented through a thinly veiled fictional version of the authorial self who narrates and/or performs the role of protagonist. In the case of David Perry's The Refracting Glasses, the fiction is thin indeed, restricted largely to a change of name for the filmmaker as protagonist, but his self-mockery and self-deprecation are both seductive and a sly means to avoid the charge of intellectual thinness. Susan Dermody's Breathing Under Water is a more ambitious experiment with the essay form, in which different actors perform and narrate the authorial self. Its verbal narration is impressively dense and lyrical, but this is not matched by the visual narration, which somehow fails to rivet the viewer. Ironically, Perry's film, though essentially more banal and less marked by verbal or intellectual ingenuity, achieves more filmic power. It's a nice blend of the anecdotal and the observational, the lofty and the mundane, with two inspired fictional moments: a surreal dramatization of a meeting on an outback railway journey between the author's youthful alter ego and the fictional Ern and Ethel Malley; and an animated sequence of a man flying past the Kremlin in Tatlin's flying machine. The latter sequence is wordless, accruing its complex metaphoric power through a combination of `natural' sound (the slow heavy rhythmic beat of the pedalling), silence, the symbolism of the backdrop (red star and Kremlin spires), subdued expressive music (a Shostakovitch composition), and the mythic associations of the Icarus-like figure. The Ern Malley sequence is performed in high melodramatic style with distortions of image worthy of Jane Campion. Dramatically rivetting yet intensely absurd, it embodies Perry's idea that the surrealist impulse, that which was created accidentally, fortuitously, through a hoax, a fiction, produced more inspired `true' poetry than the `real' poets did. (One might add that the fortuitous and the fictional often resonate more deeply than the pre-scripted and the real in film as well as poetry.) 

Like Perry, John Hughes travelled far afield, from New York to Moscow, for his film, One Way Street, to interview people who could shed light on the life and work of his hero, Walter Benjamin, (v. Tatlin and the Surrealists) and to visit his sacred sites (Benjamin's places of birth, exile and death, v. MOMA and the Moscow Air Force Museum). This film also includes some dramatized sequences, but these tend towards the grotesque rather than the surreal, and were perhaps designed to undercut, rather than endorse, the heroic status of Benjamin. Certainly, the prominent placing within the film of an extract from the surrealist film, Entr'acte, in which bourgeois dignitaries skip behind a hearse, suggests some cynicism about the Benjamin industry and the academic wars waged over the author's dead body. 

Clips from old movies figure prominently in recent non-fiction films. Old newsreels and documentaries have always been popular with documentary filmmakers, as testimony to the real, as evidence. In a similar way, the disaster movie clips in The Sleep of Reason are used to illustrate the academic monologues. The clips from Man with a Movie Camera and Entr'acte in One Way Street are used analogically rather than illustratively, to suggest unspoken associations and implications. A more critical approach to the primary source is evident in the use of the Back of Beyond clip in Ross Gibson's Wild, and The Thief of Baghdad clip in Laleen Jayamanne's Row Row Row Your Boat, where the clip is made strange, distanced and interrogated. 

What we are witnessing today in the non-fiction film is a new recognition of the power of the fictional to invest human experience and history with weight and significance, irony and pathos. Formerly the non-fiction filmmaker displayed a haughty disdain for film fictions, seeing them as betraying the cause of documentary truth, as distorting reality, rather than enhancing our understanding of it. 

Formally, intellectually and emotionally, the most complex use of the movie clip is to be found in Jackie Farkas' short film, The Illustrated Auschwitz. The film's basic documentary source material is an oral account on audio tape of one Hungarian Jewish woman's experience of the Nazi Holocaust. The film poses the question - it is already implicitly there in the title - of how to illustrate such experience. Haltingly, falteringly, diffidently, it begins to try. We see faint images in a small frame inside a black screen, flickering on and off, just discernible. Some images illustrate the verbal narration literally: a child's hand draws and erases a picture of a child, illustrating the woman's account of her understanding of the concept of erasure as a child. Others are analogical, such as images of animal slaughter in an abattoir (possibly from Franju's Sang des Betes); others still are abstract or symbolic images: a hand in a pool of blood, a fragment of a picture of a chimney. But then we start to notice the incongruous inclusion of frames of Dorothy and her companions from clips of The Wizard of Oz. These initially brief interjections are perplexing. What are they doing here in this context? Is it a comment on the unbreachable gap between filmmaker and subject? On our inability to face terrible reality and consequent flight into escapist fiction? On the distance between documentary realism and Hollywood fiction? On our inability to comprehend the Auschwitz experience? On the postmodern tendency to reduce the horrors of the 20th century (Auschwitz, Hiroshima) to pastiche? All of these explanations seem plausible and relevant. 

Gradually, the clips become longer and more sustained, taking over the visual track almost completely. The earlier attempts to illustrate the voice-over narration of a survivor's experience give way to, are drowned out by sustained sequences of a Hollywood musical. The juxtaposition seems so ludicrous, so absurd. Until the end of the film, when the voice of the narrator, which has remained matter-of-fact through an account of the incineration of her parents and the loss of her sister, finally quavers and cracks when narrating her feelings on liberation, her return to no home - recalling an earlier clip of Dorothy saying `There's no place like home', the sentence interrupted and repeated to form; `There's no place... there's no place .... like home'. The ironic juxtaposition of the sound track, on which the survivor tells of her emergence from her nightmare, with the visual image of Dorothy's awakening from her nightmare at home, surrounded by a loving family, is heartrending in its pathos. And then, at the very end of the film, a literal link between this particular narrator's experience and this particular Hollywood film is revealed. As the final credits roll and Judy Garland's cracked voice belts out `Somewhere Over the Rainbow' on the soundtrack, the life force battles against despair in a finale that is more moving and more productive than thousands of reels of left pessimism. The borrowed words of a popular song that expresses yearning and utopian longing (`Somewhere, over the rainbow'), self-assertion and protest (`Why, oh, why can't I?), and the emotional power of the voice of Judy Garland, wage a war against the unacceptable and the unbearable, the dreadful loss and the unutterable sorrow. 

This film struggles valiantly to represent the unrepresentable through its juxtapositions of documentary voice with fictional voice, and through its visual and aural gaps. Its pauses, silences, empty frames speak of the struggle to surmount an inability to find the right words and the right images; of the struggle to adequately illustrate or represent. This struggle is experienced by all conscientious filmmakers who care about the issues and the people in their films. The Illustrated Auschwitz demonstrates that it is still possible to touch and move an audience sated with horrors. But this is achieved, I believe, not just as a result of an informed and intelligent manipulation of the film medium, not even of an inspired filmic imagination, but as a result too of a genuine respect for, humility towards and empathy with its human subject. 

Note:  See article by Freda's grand-daughter, Stephanie Tell on The Illustrated Auchwitz here: http://www.screeningthepast.com/issue-42-first-release/flesh-memories-embodying-personal-trauma-through-the-illustrated-auschwitz/