Author Archives: Bradley Dixon

Honours

Thursday 28 March

This morning I presented my Precursor assessment to the Writing as Researchers lab, in which we were to take a “slice” of our research question and interrogate it with regard to one of the lab’s themes (praxis | risk | resistance | obligation | ethics).

I decided to explore the character archetype of the Bloke through the lens of political resistance and national identity.

Much of Australia’s national identity — or “national character” as Russell Ward called it in his influential 1958 account — corresponds to the Bloke archetype, and is defined in terms of its resistance to the social norms of the city-dweller.

Ward posits that the Australian national character was forged by two things: our convict past (which accounts for the swearing, independence and suspicion of authority) and the landscape (which accounts for the physical toughness, as well as a pervasive insecurity that has been explored in media throughout our history).

The Bloke has been portrayed in cinema for at least 100 years, going back to Raymond Longford’s The Sentimental Bloke (1919). Filmmakers have explored the various dimensions, expressions and limitations of the character in the time since, but resistance has remained a consistently important attribute.

One Night the Moon (2001, directed by Indigenous woman filmmaker Rachel Perkins) is a particularly interesting example as it both deeply critiques the character archetype while also giving a pretty classical, accurate portrayal. Perkins explores the negative side of the resistance that is usually cast as a positive.

Zooming out, much of Australian cinema (and, even further out, Australian culture at large) is defined by its resistance — to the British empire, to American cultural influence.

But there are some very obvious problems with the Bloke archetype as the standard expression of Australian national identity — namely, that it is a very narrow, specific character that increasingly doesn’t actually exist in society in great numbers.

And the Bloke archetype itself has so many inherently negative attributes associated with it that it could be argued that it bears some small responsibility for current social and political problems.

Although this exercise was a bit of a distraction from my main research topic, resistance seems to be central to much of Australia’s national identity (and therefore much of Australian cinema), so it’s something I will need to continue researching.

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Honours

Friday 22 March

(White) Australian identity is always uncomfortable, under perceived threat. Permanently displaced. It’s not our land, but we have to live on it, so we try to conquer it. First the Outback. Then the suburbs. It’s all someone else’s land.

I should also explore how limited the idea of national identity expressed in these films is. How much do they embrace non-white, non-working-class, non-suburban, non-cisgendered, non-heteronormative Australia? Not at all, is my estimation. What does that say about our formulation of national identity — and who gets to decide on that formulation?

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Honours

Friday 22 March

Well, it was bound to happen. I knew I’d struggle to keep up this journaling practice.

Now in addition to feeling like I’m drowning in my own inadequacy, I feel bad that I haven’t done something as simple — and yet, according to all of our readings so far, absolutely crucial — as journalling.

Anyway, putting that aside…

This last couple of weeks have been spent collecting as much material as I possibly can.

I discovered an academic at Charles Sturt University who has written on Australianness, bloke-ness, and suburbia — her name is Kristina Gotschall, and since her biography says that she plays the ukulele I’m going to assume she knows my aunty, who also works at CSU. Small world.

Anyway, after reading Gotschall’s work my thinking around my research topic splintered off into three areas in Australian cinema:

  1. Masculinity / blokeness
  2. The family unit
  3. Suburbia

This is the rough order in which I came upon these topics as potential research areas — and I think with each step I’ve come closer and closer to discovering what I’m really interested in, and what speaks to me most directly. Families and suburbia are interesting to me because of my own personal background.

For now I’m proceeding on the assumption that my research topic will be, broadly, the use and function of suburbia in Australian cinema, with a particular focus on the “suburban grotesque” films such as Sweetie (Jane Campion, 1989), Muriel’s Wedding (P.J. Hogan, 1994), The Castle (Rob Sitch, 1997) and The King is Dead! (Rolf de Heer, 2012).

I have to say the prospect of closely studying Muriel’s Wedding or The Castle has 13-year-old me extremely excited.

I’m not sure when I first heard the term “suburban grotesque”, but I have always assumed that it was a legitimate — if perhaps not widely known — descriptor of those slightly cartoonish 90s Australian films set in the suburbs. But in discussing it with others, including my supervisor, I was surprised to learn that perhaps it’s not as much of a “thing” as I assumed.

There’s a reference in a 2004 article in The Age to “film critic Adrian Martin calls the ‘suburban grotesque’ in Australian cinema”, but I’ve never been able to find a record of Martin ever actually using the term. Alexia suggested I just email the man himself and ask, which seemed a preposterous notion to me to begin with, but I was convinced that he wouldn’t mind — and so I did. Within an hour he’d responded with a breakdown of his own personal history with the term, as well as other terms in which people have described this movement. He said that while he didn’t coin the term himself, he pointed me in the direction of who he thinks did: Karl Quinn, then an undergrad and later to be The Age film critic. So many new threads to unpick.

Related terms: suburban gothic, suburban surreal.

 

This weekend will be spent polishing my research question and deciding what the hell I’m going to do for my Writing as Researchers precursor. Anxiety.

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Honours

Tuesday 19 March

Something I want to keep in mind is to continue my regular viewing practice. I need to stay plugged in. I have to watch as many new-to-me films as I possibly can, even though university work is currently completely overwhelming me.

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Honours

Wednesday 6 March

My first research journal. Not sure this will last, but I’m going to give it a go.

I hope that journaling will help me in a few ways:

  • By keeping me engaged in my research practice from week to week, so I don’t have to do the cognitive work of picking things up after a long break if there are any gaps in my time spent researching.
  • By helping me think through and clarify my thoughts by having to write them down. “You don’t know something until you can teach it.” (Einstein, allegedly — though probably not.)
  • By allowing me to go back over my notes and “re-trace the steps” of my thinking, if I ever want to understand how I came to a particular understanding or want to go back and change my process.

As it’s only Week 1 I haven’t got much to report, though I have found one interesting idea. In Utopia for Realists (Rutger Bregman), in the chapter about Universal Basic Income, Bregman quotes Bertrand Russell about utopia:

“Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change,” the British philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote. Elsewhere he continued, “It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.”

Could ideas of utopian society be a framework in which to analyse the family unit in Australian cinema?

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They Film People Don't They, Thoughts

On reflection

She Drives lives! Making this film has been a really valuable, rewarding experience and I’m really proud of how my group worked together to achieve what I think is a pretty high quality finished product. It’s the first short film I’ve made during my degree that I would be happy putting in a portfolio.

I’m especially pleased with how we navigated the creative process together. Collaboration is obviously an all-too-common sticking point for a lot of people, but for me it’s actually the best part of the filmmaking process because, most of the time, working to each other’s strengths results in a better product. I don’t have a digital SLR camera and couldn’t have achieved the kind of cinematography that Anna, Izzi and Zitni were able to achieve if I was on my own, so I was very happy they took on those roles… and She Drives looks incredible because of it. Likewise, I took on the challenge of bringing those shots to life through sound, and though I’m not 100% happy with the quality of the interview audio I am happy with how lived-in the film feels now that there’s a bed of atmospheric car noise deep in the mix.

(Note for the future, though: when shooting, SHUT UP ON SET. You never know what audio you’re going to end up needing, and a lot of our B-roll had people (especially me) talking and chatting all over it. I was able to piece together enough atmosphere from what we had plus some stock sounds, but it would have been much easier if I could have used the sound from our B-roll even just as a starting point.)

We did, as is always the case, face some challenges in getting She Drives finished. The most significant challenge was that we lost a lot of time waiting to set up an interview with a Shebah driver that ended up not happening. This was a major frustration because the Shebah driver was originally a core part of the idea we pitched, so without her we had to reconfigure our film into something different. It all ended up being fine, of course, and I’m happy with the film as it stands, but Izzi spent a lot of time going back-and-forth with Shebah when, in hindsight, that time was wasted and could have been better spent on something else. But even without saying anything, I think the group naturally understood that it’s better to move forward with the material you have (even if it’s not exactly what you first imagined) than to hold up production for an indeterminate amount of time while you try to get everything exactly as it was in your proposal. So we quickly moved on without a Shebah driver, and changed our film around to accommodate the loss. Through the whole production process, Izzi and Alice (who found our taxi driver, Elizabeth, and organised an interview with her) were both really great at keeping us all informed, and any lost time was really down to people outside of our group.

Other than losing our Shebah driver, we really didn’t have too many problems — or, I guess, any problems we did face were easily overcome, because we were quite harmonious as a group. We easily slipped into our roles, kept each other accountable, had no trouble asking each other to do things, and we all volunteered to help each other out when needed. I have to admit I was worried that a group of five might lead to some group-dynamic issues, but there were none at all.

Often, at least for me, these reflection exercises end up being a long list of problems large and small, with notes and ideas on how to avoid or deal with them in the future. It feels so refreshing that in my final studio, my reflection is full of nothing but positivity.

 

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Assessments, They Film People Don't They

She Drives

Elizabeth became a taxi driver in the 1980s, Marz started driving for Uber in the 2010s. Though separated by a generation, these two women share more than just a job.

Synposis: When Elizabeth starting driving her taxi in 1982, she was told it wasn’t the job for a woman. Over the next three decades she proved her critics wrong, built a fleet of female drivers and changed the industry from the inside. Marz began driving for Uber to make some extra cash. Though she expected it to be a challenge, she quickly discovered that there is more to being a driver than just driving.

Produced, Directed & Edited By: Alice Fairweather, Anna Miers, Bradley Dixon, Izzi Hally & Zitni Putriadi
Cinematography: Anna Miers, Izzi Hally & Zitni Putriadi
Supervising Producer: Rohan Spong

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They Film People Don't They, Thoughts

Consultation and paper edit

Today’s consultation session with Rohan was extremely helpful. We’re slightly behind the rest of the class in terms of our timeline, because we had to wait until Marz, our Uber driver, was available to shoot her interview and then Anna had issues working on the rough cut. So instead of giving us pointers about how to put the finishing touches on our film, Rohan led us through a paper edit of the material we’ve shot, which is really step 1 of the editing process. This is what we ended up with:

And this is what it became after Alice cleaned it up (thx Alice!):

 

Laying it out like this, there are some clear thematic convergences between the two interviews, and I think intercutting between them will make for a dynamic and (hopefully) interesting film considering our interviewees have pretty strong and likeable personalities. It’s unfortunate that we don’t have any real narrative conflict or a clear beginning, middle and end, but we’ve fashioned something of a three-act structure by separating the topics we got Elizabeth and Marz to speak about.

We’re using this paper edit as a way to get our structure into shape first, before we mess around with anything like integrating B-roll, colour grading and other post-production processes.

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They Film People Don't They, Thoughts

Wild Wild Country and framing talking heads

I’ve been hearing a lot about the new Netflix documentary series Wild Wild Country, so tonight I decided to start watching it. It’s about a pretty remarkable story that happened in the 1980s, when an Indian guru (and/or cult leader) and his followers attempted to take over a tiny Oregon town to create a commune, but within a couple of years had been charged with committing a mass poisoning attack and an attempted assassination.

I’ve only watched the first hour-long episode, but I was so struck by the cinematography of the talking-heads sequences that I just had to post about them. Just look at these shots:



The subjects are all situated in their own homes, roughly centred in the frame, and at quite a distance from the camera. They’re practically engulfed by the photographs and books on the walls behind them, and you really get a sense of who these people are just from the environment they’re captured in.

I think it’s also notable that each person is framed with their head and body inside a doorway or window. I haven’t watched the whole series yet so I don’t quite know where it’s going, but I’d be surprised if this wasn’t subtextually significant. At the very least it makes for a visually striking shot.

The main character (of the first episode, at least) is Sheela, the guru/cult leader’s personal secretary and one of the people charged and found guilty of attempted murder for the poisoning attack. This is how her interview’s master shot is framed:

Firstly, she’s much closer to the camera than any of the other subjects, and it’s a much more intimate shot. Where the other talking heads are engulfed by their environment, Sheela completely stands out. Also, because the camera is so much closer to her the low angle is strongly accentuated; she completely dominates the frame and almost talks “over” the camera to the off-screen interviewer. It puts her in quite a powerful position, which contrasts strongly with her kindly old-lady demeanour and might hint towards her unreliability as a subject.

I found all of these choices quite interesting and informative. The project we’re working on at the moment, She Drives, is obviously much simpler in comparison, but it’s good to know that there’s such a wide spectrum of possibilities for future reference.

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