Common Ground: A Place to Stand – Together

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2020.29 | Issue 6 | May 2021

Mairi Gunn (University of Auckland, New Zealand)

Abstract

The immersive video installation, Common Ground, seeks to establish commonalities across racial boundaries based on cultural attitudes and grounded experience, including attachment to place, eviction from ancestral lands and enduring struggles for self-determination. Three stories (16:9) about connection to place, supported by massive ultra-widescreen 48:9 video landscapes, are told by Highland Scots (Gaels) from the very north of Scotland, ancestral homeland of the author, and three Māori from Te Tai Tokerau (Northland in Aotearoa New Zealand, current home of the author).

Writings by radical human ecologists describe as a triune the three-way relationship between land, people, and the unseen realms. The short stories that comprise Common Ground reveal a history riven when servants of capital intervened in the traditionally collective lives of people who had been cleaved to the land for millennia. The human ecologists call this enclosure as an ontological split. What affect does such a schism have on the psyche of the colonised… and, one wonders, on the colonisers and their offspring? As a settler living in an uncomfortably colonised reality, the author is drawn to Māori because their values are often ordered similarly. The way the stories are presented in Common Ground, is based on the Māori ritual of encounter within a meeting house (whare tupuna) where speakers take the floor un-interrupted and speeches are embellished by a song, be it a psalm, a waulking song, a Gaelic ballad or a prayer.

The immersive installation brings viewers together in a darkened space where they experience connection that may serve to remind them of the potential for the commons and commoning to be a salve for our grief.

Research Statement

The immersive video installation, Common Ground, is designed to highlight commonalities across racial boundaries based on cultural attitudes to land, connection to place, eviction from ancestral lands by enclosure and enduring struggles for self-determination. This work was driven by the following research question: Can audio/visual media help overcome cultural/social division by bringing people together in the dark to hear each other’s stories?

I am a white settler (Pākehā) born in Aotearoa New Zealand. My background in the film industry brought me into collaboration with indigenous Māori filmmakers and the Māori subjects in our films. Because it runs counter to my lived experience, I find interracial conflict disturbing and most often counterproductive. Therefore, when I began to direct my own films, I sought to enter the rocky terrain of intercultural relationships.

I had considered using the lens of the gift economy (Hyde 2006) as a way of identifying any mutual benefits brought about by Māori/Pākehā contact. However, in 2012, I was fortunate to land a driving job in Scotland, so was able to dig deeper into our family history and locate some of the pertinent landmarks. One sunny day, I chanced upon a pile of bright orange books, fresh from the printer, stacked on a friend’s coffee table. Upon enquiry, I was offered a copy. As the author, redoubtable land reform activist Shirley-Anne Hardy, lived within a stone’s throw, a visit was in order. Gifts and embraces ensued. The book (Hardy 2011), is about what she calls ‘the land question’, meaning how our birth right has been stolen from us to be replaced with indebtedness. In a moment of electric clarity, I could see that the conversion of land into private property was a tragedy common to both the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (my people) and to Māori. Although our ways of dealing with this sleight of hand is different, we have a great deal to share and learn from each other. This was to be the focus of my research and filmmaking practice.

Academic research allows us to ignore commercial imperatives. After many years of shooting for television broadcast and film festivals, I took the opportunity to step into an art gallery environment where designer/artists can make our own rules. I could honour both people and the land by framing the subjects traditionally, while allowing the land to stretch out, as it does, in a longitudinal way. Even favoured films that use nothing wider than a 2.35:1 ratio to depict landforms appear curtailed, dissected and claustrophobic. I had seen real life panoramic depictions of battle scenes and still panoramic photographs of the land and they provided evidence that ultra-widescreen was a wise choice. This coincided with the discovery of PanOptica software that was made available to me by the developers for experimentation. The decision to opt for an aspect ratio exactly three times the width of a 16:9 frame was arbitrary, although it occurred to me that instead of projection, perhaps three large monitors might provide a future screening solution.

Three of the short stories in the film (16:9) about connection to place are told by Highland Scots (Gaels) from the very north of Scotland and three more by Māori from Te Tai Tokerau (Northland in Aotearoa, New Zealand). These are accompanied and supported by massive, mute, 48:9 video landscapes, built using PanOptica software.

Radical human ecologists prioritize indigenous worldviews (Williams, Roberts & McIntosh 2016). They are activists who currently work in fields of food sovereignty, indigenous rights, farm machinery hacks and writing as academics and independent scholars. They honour a fundamental set of relationships as a triune; a three-way configuration of land, people, and the unseen realms. This can be expressed variously as the planet, all creatures who live thereon, and the numinous/the divine/culture/language/communication and so on. For Māori, this is whenua/tangata/atua, or land, people and god. Common Ground addresses the fundamental relationship between two of these - people and land. As the Borromean Rings demonstrate (Figure 1), if one element of the triune is missing, the other two can no longer hold together.

Figure 1. Weyland’s Knot. AnonMoos, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

(Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License)

Bonding/binding/connecting is of utmost importance to Gaels, expressed by their ceilidh culture, and to dedicated commoners who must have a place to common on in order to develop commoning relationships with each other. For Māori, the value of connection is regularly reaffirmed by the recitation of an ancient chant (below) often used in formal oratory to mark important occasions.

Tuia i runga Tuia I raro

Tuia i waho Tuia i roto Tuia i te here tangata

May it be woven above

As it is below

Woven without

As it is within

Interwoven within the threads of humanity

One such occasion was the anniversary of the arrival of explorer Captain James Cook to these shores over 250 years ago. Sadly, the aspirational proposition that, in 2019, ‘Tuia 250’ should celebrate this event, illuminates the disconnect between Pākehā, the European settlers/immigrants’, naivety/ignorance and Māori trauma/grief. Have Pākehā, forgotten our own traumatic backstories?

The short stories that comprise Common Ground reveal a history riven when servants of capital intervened in the formerly collective lives of people who were cleaved to the land. In Scotland, this took place during the Highland Clearances (post-Culloden and up to the present day). It neatly delivered evicted peasants to mines, factories and the colonies to work in service to the monied and land-holding class. It has recently been revealed that many of those who sought to clear the former clan lands of its people were financed by wealth gained from participation in the slave trade (Mackinnon & Mckillop 2020). In Aotearoa, the introduction of iron, muskets and title deeds had this exact same result; that is, the creation of the landless poor, dispossessed and disenfranchized, who migrated to become factory workers in the towns and cities. Human ecologists call this upheaval an ontological split because, simultaneously the people were deprived of their nurturing Mother, prohibited from speaking their own languages and practicing their formerly collective way of life. My intention, while making Common Ground, was to disrupt stereotypes of white people as domineering capitalists and Māori as victims. while highlighting the ways in which traces of human lives are held then offered up by the land.

The six stories were filmed as mid-shots of people standing in their landscape, in the places they call home, as a face-to-face encounter (Figures 2-7). When projected, the subjects were a little larger than life and elevated somewhat and addressing the viewer directly. Transcripts of their stories and accompanying video files were sent to each subject for approval. Filmmaker Kat Cizek, in conversation with documentary producer and media theorist Mandy Rose, discusses the distinction between participatory and co-creative documentary making and describes the latter as ‘a collaboration with the intent to make quality media with partners instead of just about them, to make media … with people that aren’t media-makers’ (Aston, Gaudenzi, and Rose 2017: 39). All of the subjects in Common Ground are experts in their own areas and have contributed to this work in their own ways. My expertize is filmmaking. It is what I contribute in the same manner as someone who turns the heels in a sock-making knitting circle – because the others trust them to do that job, and because they are present and willing. I continue a friendship with all but one of the storytellers and one, darling Iri, has tragically since left the land of the living. They are repeatedly invited to go where the installation goes in accordance with the Indigenous mantra ‘Nothing about us without us’ [1].

Figure 2. Environmental expert Irihāpeti Morgan introduces us to the maunga, the mountain, Whakarongorua.

Figure 3. Master carver and musician Nōpera Pikari describes an experience of climbing Pukenui, or Te Ahuahu (to his left).

Figure 4. In Motukaraka, weaver Reva Mendes shows us the road leading from the church to the cemetery that her uncle maintained by hand.

Figure 5. Historian Sandra Train (née Macdonald) from Strath Hallidale, describes her childhood visits to the Iron Age broch in her background.

Figure 6. Poet and author George Gunn stands on Beinn Freiceadain on the north coast of Scotland, from where we can see the Dounreay nuclear powerplant and numerous wind generators.

Figure 7. Farmer and archivist Neil Macleod tells of ‘old foundations and stones in the ground’, remnants of a collective life, near his croft in Caithness, Scotland.

As a white settler (Pākehā) living in an uncomfortably colonized reality here in Aotearoa New Zealand, I am drawn to Māori because, broadly speaking, our priorities and values are often ordered similarly. As a mark of respect for Māori wisdom and deep psychological understanding expressed through their cultural practices, the way the stories are presented in Common Ground, acknowledges Māori rituals of encounter that often take place within meeting houses (tipuna whare) where speakers hold the floor un-interrupted and in turn. Speeches are embellished with a song. In the installation, this may be a psalm, a waulking song, a Gaelic ballad or a prayer. All Māori subjects sing their own…

Alongside the human stories, the land (Papatūānuku) ancient Mother to all, speaks for herself. She discloses the presence of absence (Whelan 2004), the ‘where is everybody?’ epiphany. She holds remnants of lives lived in former realities, and commands awe and respect as the sentinel representing eternity and forbearance. She may also reflect back to us our mistaken endeavours as we go about polluting, denuding and despoiling our environment. During earlier projects, such as the feature-length documentary Restoring the Mauri of Lake Omapere, (Browne, Gunn & Marler 2007), interview subjects remarked on how they ‘speak with the mountains’ and how the birds farewell then greet them on return to their home valleys. They asked for those comments not to make the final cut. Perhaps this was an acknowledgement that Christianity displaced earlier practices and beliefs that were subsequently viewed as pagan or savage and even outlawed by such legislation as the Tōhunga Suppression Act of 1907. (NZ Government 2007)

Figure 8. An outsized Celtic cross stands on the shore of the Hokianga Harbour at Māngunu to mark the Andersons, Anihana, who were Irihāpeti’s ancestors.

Figure 9. Native forest has been felled to create grazing land for agriculture on Pukenui (Te Ahuahu).

Figure 10. The Hokianga Harbour is at the heart of Reva’s ancestral lands.

Figure 11: The Strath of Kildonan, whose people were evicted during the Highland Clearances.

Figure 12. Dounreay nuclear power plant is a relatively recent addition to a landscape that holds burial mounds and slate walls, as seen from George Gunn’s viewpoint.

Figure 13. A panoramic image of Braemore, Parish of Latheron, home of my forbear Elsebeth Gunn b. 1788. Cleared in 1793.

In the exhibition of Common Ground, the huge rectangle of screens describes a place where visitors stand together in the darkened space. In the blacked-out studio, two 3.2 metre-wide screens at each end of the rectangular array display the human stories. Two 10-metre-long screens reflect the silent landscapes that support the storytellers. (figures 8-13) The place in between is the common ground in which visitors to the installation stand together, immersed in the imagery and soundscape. (See figure 14).

Figure 14. Four screens and six projectors describe a central shared area for the audience to watch/listen together. This is the common ground. (Diagram by Mark Schafer)

Although standing together in a temporary space – a gallery in a First Nations reserve, university or art gallery – the people gathered there felt real human emotions in a real place. Scots Gaelic author, Iain Crichton-Smith alluded to this fundamental aspect of the indigenous experience in his essay ‘Real People in a Real Place’ (Crichton-Smith 1986). The audience was charged with energy and power. That power was grief, awe and love. In the face of top-down governance that has overseen world-wide destruction and havoc, what does one do with this force of emotion? Australian scholar in political science and philosophy, Mary Graham from the Kombumerri Mob of the Yugambeh language group, explains that ‘Despite the coming of colonializm with its state violence, the resulting social dislocation and lack of formal respect for Aboriginal people, they still don’t formalize or idealize conflict with the state’ (Graham 2014: 20). Therefore, perhaps we might consider that ‘The challenge rather is to build up a more just and sustainable society from the bottom up’ (Dirlik 2011: 54). This chimes with Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash in Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures when they urge their readers to work from the ground up, so as to avoid power struggles with dominant constructs, that might have the unintended consequences of strengthening such structures.

Seeking to go beyond the premises and promises of modernity, people at

the grassroots are reinventing or creating afresh intellectual and institutional

frameworks without necessarily getting locked into power disputes. Ordinary

men and women are learning from each other how to challenge the very nature

and foundations of modern power, both its intellectual underpinnings and its

apparatuses. Explicitly liberating themselves from the dominant ideologies,

fully immersed in their local struggles, these movements and initiatives reveal

the diverse content and scope of grassroots endeavours…

(Prakash and Esteva 2014: 1)

My work is practice-led, post-positivist and subjective. At the time of making Common Ground in 2014, the methodology (Gunn 2015: 70) referenced palimpsests that are ancient parchments on which layered writings suffer erasure and revelation by turn. This reflected the way in which images are captured, selected, edited, composited and refined over time. It responded to physical encounters in the land with rocky remains, telltale signs of surplus and ill-gotten wealth and colonization connoted by demolition or burning of people’s homes and construction of foreign cultural edifices, be they religious or industrial. The small groups of people who sat together after viewing Common Ground to share their observations and to console each other was unexpected and remarkable. In addition to this, quite late in the research process, I discovered the pre-private ownership concept of the commons, that sits outside the market and the state. It is more than likely that Dirlik was aware of the commons when he wrote:

Despite social and cultural homogenization under the double forces of the market

and the nation-state, places are marked by ecological and social differences that call for a different kind of thinking than the universalist instrumentalist rationality

that Max Weber identified as the driving force of the modern state under

capitalism, which also informs contemporary education and scholarship both in

their goals and their methodologies […] indigenism offers an indispensable critical perspective on the hegemonic assumptions that inform globalization (Dirlik 2011: 4)

And so, subsequently my research moved away from a close consideration of the brutal enclosures and towards the healing and transformational paradigm offered by the commons and practices of commoning. This involves relationship building, eschewing competition, bridging silos and bringing together atomized individuals to co-design artistic endeavours. A useful umbrella term for my new, commoning methodology could be post-capitalist or even a rudimentary or aspirational decolonizing methodology because it prioritizes local people and their relationships with each other and their immediate location. Social and environmental health trumps profit. We can enact change from where we stand. At least then we can be sustained and steadied in our strategies, activities and endeavours by our Mother Earth and fellow countrymen and women.

Land is the great life force that both created and further enables the continuation of all species including humans, providing for our nourishment, shelter and social organization and informing us of meaning and purpose in human life, in particular, and all of life, in general. […] The intrinsic part of this understanding is expressed as the sacralizing of the relationship between Land and human beings which, in turn, led to the fundamental principle of custodianship or a permanent, standing obligation to look after Land, society and social relations – the Law. (Graham 2014: 18)

Contrary to these values, in The Sovereign Individual penned, with James Davidson, by English aristocrat and brexiteer Lord William Rees-Mogg, it is suggested that the time has come ‘to realize complete individual autonomy and independence’ […] ‘In the new age to come, communities and allegiances will not be territorially bound’ (Davidson and Rees-Mogg 1997: 252). If the ultra-rich can plug in their headphones and access wifi in their palatial accommodations like astronauts, they can avoid contact with the earthy realities of the great unwashed and the ‘tyranny of place’. Author and political columnist George Monbiot quips that ‘People who would consider living in the Gobi Desert intolerable […] rhapsodise about living on Mars’ […] ‘This belief is the ultimate negation of belonging’. (Monbiot 2017: 118)

While looking at today’s late-stage capitalist narrative, Monbiot is determined to write a new story, to lead us out of our current crises. In this he echoes John Ralston Saul’s observation in The Collapse of Globalism, that ‘Most of us just seem to be disconnected, waiting for the wave to crash. We are waiting with the cruel, experienced eye of a citizenry that has lost respect for its leadership in general, yet hasn’t quite worked out what to do about it and so waits for them to self-destruct.’ (Saul 2005: 13) Climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic have given new meaning to that wave. Saul insists that what we need now are ideas, before the wave crashes. It appears that, just over a decade later, Monbiot has come up with a new narrative that is full of ideas. He says our work is to ‘reach across the divides and find common ground, however unlikely this might at first appear.’ (Monbiot 2017: 27)

Australian Aboriginal Mary Graham, in her crystal clear exposition of indigenous values, insists that relationships foster stability and are therefore of utmost importance and that our relationship with land is one of our core relationships, the other being our relationships with each other, with the latter being contingent on the former. ‘There is no Aboriginal equivalent to the Cartesian notion of ‘I think therefore I am’ but, if there were, it would be – I am located therefore I am. Place, being, belonging and connectedness all arise out of a locality in Land.’ (Graham 2014: 17)

References

• AnonMoos ‘The Weyland Knot’ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Weylandknot.png

• Retrieved 29 March 2021.

• Aston, J, Gaudenzi, S., and Rose, R. (2017). I-Docs: The Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary. Nonfictions. London: Wallflower Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/asto18122.

• Bridges, D. (2003). Fiction Written Under Oath?. Philosophy and Education (10). Dordrecht [u.a.]: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

• Browne, K, Gunn, M. and Marler, S. (2007). Restoring the Mauri of Lake Ōmapere. Directed by Simon Marler. Te Mangai Pāho. https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/restoring-the-mauri-of-lake-omapere-2007/background

• Davidson, J. D., and Rees-Mogg, W. (1997). The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive the Collapse of the Welfare State. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

• Dirlik, A. (2011). ‘Globalization, Indigenism, Social Movements, and the Politics of Place’. Localities (1): 47–90. https://doi.org/10.15299/local.2011.11.1.47.

• Graham, M. ‘Aboriginal Notions of Relationality and Positionism: a reply to Weber.’ Global Discourse (4: 1) (27 May, 2014): 17-22. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23269995.2014.895931?journalCode=rgld20.

• Gunn, M. (2015). ‘Common Ground: A Creative Exploration of Narratives of Connection between People and Land in Scotland and Aotearoa / New Zealand.’ Auckland University of Technology. http://hdl.handle.net/10292/8427.

• Hardy, S. A. (2011). Stolen Land - Stolen Lives and the Great Con Trick of Debt! . Pitlochry, Scotland: Peregrine Press.

• Hyde, L. (2006). The Gift. Edinburgh: Canongate.

• MacKinnon, I. and Mackillop A. (2020). ‘Plantation Slavery and Landownership in the West and Islands: Legacies and Lessons.’ https://www.communitylandscotland.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Plantation-slavery-and-landownership-in-the-west-Highlands-and-Islands-legacies-and-lessons.pdf. Retrieved 25 March 2021.

• Monbiot, G. (2017). Out of the Wreckage. London: Verso.

• Prakash, M. S., and Esteva, G. (2014). Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures. The Critique Influence Change Series. Zed Books.

• Smith, I. C. (1986). Towards the Human: Selected Essays. Edinburgh: Macdonald Publishers.

• Williams, L., Roberts, R. and McIntosh, A. (2016). Radical Human Ecology. London: Routledge Ltd. doi:10.4324/9781315603476.

• Whelan, K. (2004). ‘Reading the Ruins: The Presence of Absence in the Irish Landscape.’ In Surveying Ireland’s Past: Multidisciplinary Essays in Honour of Anngret Simms, edited by Simms, A., Clarke, H. B., Prunty, J., & Hennessy, M., Dublin: Geography Publications, 2004. 297-322.

• ‘13 Tohunga Suppression Act 1907.’ 1907. http://api.digitalnz.org/records/30023894/source.

• Retrieved 29 March 2021.

Notes

[1] See ‘Nothing About Us Without Us: The ethics of outsider research’ (Bridges 2003: 133), in which Bridges links this mantra to the ‘By Māori, for Māori’ bottom line of many contemporary Māori academics. Interestingly, Bridges tempers this line by quoting Scottish poet Robbie Burns ‘O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us’ (Bridges 2003: 136) and therefore acknowledges that outsiders can have a contribution to make.

The River and the Filmmaker: A Journey towards a Meeting Place

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2020.30 | Issue 6 | May 2021

Dungala-Baaka River & Catherine Gough-Brady (RMIT University, Australia) [1]

Abstract

Agnès Varda’s idea of cinécriture opens up an understanding of the myriad of influences on the creation of a documentary, and its combination of malleability and certainty. For her, film is a product of exploratory walks and seemingly unconnected choices as well as the scripting, shooting and editing.

Michael Renov suggests there are four desires that influence the way a documentarian creates a film, one of them is ‘to express’. When I set out to film Rivers (2019), I was expressing anger and outrage at destruction taking place. For Donna Haraway, this ‘urgency’ arising from destruction does not create despair, rather it inspires action in response to the crisis. Thus the film became an action in response, both to the crisis the Murray-Darling river faced, and crises in my own life.

Through interviews I conducted, this article compares my own filming journey with that of two award winning filmmakers: Nicole Ma and Sabiha Sumar. I find that filmmaking involves locating a meeting place between the filmmaker, the filmed subject, and the audience.

How It Began

In an interview with Martha Kenny, eco-feminist Donna Haraway states: ‘We live in a time of mass extinctions and exterminations, including the genocides of other critters and of people…. Things can be very gradual, and then boom— systems changes mutate life and death radically and suddenly. Understanding that in the tissues of our flesh seems to me really urgent.’ (2015: 256). Understanding my own life to be a ‘system’, was indeed a ‘gradual’ realisation, leading up towards the ‘boom’. In February 2019 I looked around me and for the first time I felt witness to the apocalypse that is caused by humans. It felt, as Haraway suggests, ‘really urgent’, and this destructive relationship between humans and nature became the impetus behind my next experimental film, Rivers (2019b).

The gradual lead up began in November 2018 when my own personal eco-system was challenged. I came face to face with the cold uncaring nature of the bureaucracy of an institution, and was deeply shocked as I became nothing more than a line in a spreadsheet. It was a dehumanising experience. The polite neo-liberal illusion that I had power to control my environment dissolved. Then on my birthday the following month, my neighbour sabotaged a vine that surrounded my balcony, an important connection to nature when living in a city, one that was much needed. Watching the vine slowly die depressed me. These seemingly trivial things in the scheme of large scale tragedies that face the world were strangely affecting and important to me. I was losing my sense of agency.

As I was facing these personal disruptions, bigger problems were emerging. There was a recurring news story, below the fold, that our main river system in Australia, the Murray-Darling, was dying. Millions of fish were floating to the surface dead, and yet again the Darling River would stop flowing over summer. This disaster can be understood as largely due to human mismanagement. I became angry with people for how they were treating the world, and me.

My emotional experiences and the films I choose to make are linked. Agnès Varda’s concept of cinécriture provides a mechanism to view these seemingly personal and emotional experiences as mortice and tenoned to creative practice: ‘Cinécriture isn’t the scenario, it’s the ensemble of exploratory walks, the choices, the inspiration, the words one writes, the shooting, the editing: the film is the product of all of these different moments.’ (2014: 124). Varda’s idea of cinécriture opens up an understanding of the myriad of influences on the creation of a documentary, and its combination of malleability and certainty. Varda recognises that the film is made by humans, with all of their preoccupations, biases and needs. That these humans exist in a body located in a time and a place, and that this affects what a filmmaker creates. Cinécriture can be viewed as a new materialist idea because Varda speaks about the relationship between her filmmaker self and the world of things around her. She explores the effect those relationships have on the formation of her films. This fluid and relational quality corresponds to Karen Barad’s claim that ‘Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world’ (2003: 818).

Implied in Varda’s cinécriture is the fact that a person has the ability to creatively act on their life experiences; for instance, that I can convert my anger into affirmative action. Varda allowed her emotion to guide her filmmaking. She states in The Beaches of Agnès (2008), ‘I wanted to be a happy feminist. But I was very angry’ (1:26:41). Varda used this emotional state of anger as an impetus to create. Like Varda, I am an educated white middle-class woman living in an inner urban area. Like Varda, I have also experienced privilege. This position of privilege means I have the ability to take action. As dehumanised as I felt, this was a new feeling, not one repeatedly thrust on me, and so I still had the energy to convert the oppressive feeling into creative work. I believe I can develop a relationship with what is going wrong, and then develop a relationship with an audience, via the film, to share some solutions—or at least an understanding of the problem. At times I feel this is a compounded delusion that comes from being entitled and an artist, but I can’t shake the arrogance that this is possible. The film becomes a way of inhabiting the emotion and taking action, or what Haraway calls ‘response-ability’ (D. Haraway and Kenney 2015: 260).

So, to return to February 2019, as I walked away from a local beach on a hot evening, [2] I decided I should travel to the Murray-Darling river system to experience it first-hand and communicate my reflections via documentary film. However, it would not be a film about people living on the rivers, but rather about the river system itself. I wanted to ask the river system: ‘who are you?’. My research process and lived experience as part of my PhD journey was leading me down a post-humanist path, into my little Hyundai and out into the red dirt of the Australian outback.

The central research question for the experimental film was: how could I create a relationship with a non-human entity, such as a river system, and share this connection with a human audience using video? It felt important for me to exclude people from the frame, to allow space for the river to become the central character. At this point I had not even considered the impact that my colonial heritage or my wholly urbanised life would have on how this relationship with the river as a character could form. What I did understand was that this creative decision had the potential to establish a false dichotomy between humans and nature. Haraway wrote about this separation as the ‘discredited breach of nature and culture’ (2016a: 10). I share these sentiments, but at the time I felt that people were silencing our ability to listen to the river system. Viewers would benefit by understanding the river system as something other than being explained in relationship to people. On deeper reflection, it was also the intention to provide this river system with the agency I felt I was losing in my own life.

In the Breach

As a documentary filmmaker, I am confronted by a different breach alongside Haraway’s breach in nature and culture. I live in a blurry dichotomous state between my world and the world I film. For Haraway, ‘urgency’ involves action arising from ‘inhabiting’ [3]. As a documentary filmmaker I exist partly inside, but also outside what I film. I am not convinced that I fully inhabit the worlds I film, because inhabiting them would require a lived experience which I do not have. Instead, I aim for being in that world. David MacDougall writes about how, as a filmmaker:

The subject moves in and out of the miniature frame of the viewfinder, breathing the same air as the filmmaker and surrounded by the same objects and sounds. They await the same things — a door opening, unexpected arrivals and departures, the coming of night. In these moments, the subject's existence and the filmmaker's are closely interwoven (1998: 29-30).

MacDougall makes a good point here; there is indeed a strong bond and shared experience that develops when filming a subject over a period of time. I would go further and argue that there is even a desire on the part of the filmmaker to understand on a deep level what it is like to inhabit the subject’s world. This is so that the filmmaker can then share that understanding and experience with the audience. But, as the filmmaker, I have not lived the filmed person’s life; I have not had the experiences that led them to the point when I started to film them. I go home and live my own life as well. I am not the writer I film, nor the philosopher, nor the visual artist, I am not an Indonesian community worker, I am not a person undergoing a legal experience, I am not a lawyer, I am not a professional cook, nanny, gardener, road worker. I am not a river. I am nearly always not what I film.

Because I do not fully inhabit the world I film, at the beginning of the process I need to locate a point of similarity between myself and that which I film. This is how I tentatively narrow the breach. Post-humanist philosopher Rosi Braidotti states ‘‘We’-who-are-not-one-and-the-same-but-are-in-this-convergence-together’ (2019: 182). Braidotti is implying that points of connection can be found between all things, no matter how different, even a person and a river system. In my film projects, this point of similarity between myself and what I film is also a connection point to a potential audience for the film. In the case of the rivers, the initial connection was a need for agency—for me to find the rivers’ agency, and for the audience to view this finding as an affective filmic experience. What I was seeking in my own life, I sought for the rivers as well. But if I am to understand what I film, I need to be open to the way that the filmed subject sees the world, which will often not be how I see it. Narrowing the breach is not about imposing my preconceptions on the other.

When travelling up to the river system I thought its true identity would be wild and unruly, with unmediated control over the river's destiny. A romantic and simplistic notion, since it has been tens of thousands of years since the river system was wild. Upon arrival and further investigation, I found that the identity of the rivers included being managed, or mismanaged. They were used by people and by animals, who were also part of the river system. My relationship with the river system had to be open to what it showed me about what it was. To be in the world of the rivers I needed to understand their world view, not just impose my own. Therefore the footage I planned to shoot changed to include imagery of dams and regulators, as this was part of what makes up the system. And yet, my initial connection point of agency meant that I continued with the idea of not including people’s stories about the river in the film, instead focusing on the river itself, ‘speaking’ directly to the audience.

Emotional Connection

A documentary can be understood as resulting from a set of relationships. Therefore, in this film about the river system I was setting out to cross the breach and establish a relationship with nature. As predominantly a city-dweller, my existing relationship with nature is via my local park, the beach—and of course my balcony vine. On Saturday mornings I head to the park for my first coffee, sit on a shaded bench and open a literary fiction novel, glancing up every now and again at the ducks on the pond. I relax into the space for a limited period of time before heading on to the shops to buy my weekend treat of bread and cheese. My relationship to nature is a reward I give myself on the weekend, like cheese and literary fiction. The Rivers film shoot was nine days. Four of them were spent driving, so the shoot was to last five days. That is not enough time for me to break habits or disrupt existing patterns. I still felt most at ease with the river system when sitting on a bench under the shade of a river red gum (one that didn’t squeak too much as I have seen them drop boughs without notice). I had a not-very-good-but-still-it’s-caffeine home-made Turkish coffee in one hand and a Booker Prize-winning novel in the other. Every now and again I glanced up at the river. While I took my city ways with me to the river system, at a subconscious level my relationship with nature did begin to change once there. I was beginning to notice nature more frequently and therefore interact with it differently, but at this stage that change was slight.

For me, stories and myths are a shortcut for how to relate to the world. As Tim Ingold wrote, ‘Telling a story is not like weaving a tapestry to cover up the world, it is rather a way of guiding the attention of listeners or readers into it’ (1993: 153). I understand that my colonial origins mean that I hold a significant void when it comes to connecting with Australian nature via culture. There are existing stories that have tens of thousands of years of relationships with Australian nature, but they are not the stories that belong to my family. Métis scholar Zoe Todd expresses this familial and cultural connection to Canadian river landscapes beautifully when she writes ‘My stepfather gifted me the language of fish’ (2020). I had no language or story structures to translate what I saw. Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena describe the colonial realising the limits of their entitlement: ‘The world of the powerful is now sensitive to the plausibility of its own destruction in a way that may compare, at least in some ways, with the threat imposed on worlds sentenced to disappearance in the name of the common goods of progress, civilization, development, and liberal inclusion.’ (2018: 3) The destruction described above was not just my role in the apocalypse I had set out to film, nor even my lack of agency, but rather it included the realisation that I had a minimal relationship with nature because of my urban life and my colonial heritage. For the Gay’wu group of women, from the north of Australia, telling a story about a body of water, or whales, involves being the ‘whales and ourselves’ (2019: 16). The non-human characters in the story and sense of self are entwined. While I may have subconsciously been entwined to my balcony vine, this was not a feeling that had been problematised through generations of stories that, as Ingold suggests above, reveal the world. Drawing upon culture to connect with nature would not work in my case because I was not from the culture that held the stories and to use them would be appropriation. Haraway’s (2016a) directive to connect nature and culture is problematic in the colonial experience. As Arif Dirlik suggests, ‘any critical notion of place must recognize some notion of boundary’ (2011: 56). Respecting boundaries includes those found in cultural relationships as well as physical fences. This inability to tap into existing understandings of nature and use them meant that it took me quite some time to understand how to cut the footage I had gathered.

My emotional relationship with the river continued to develop once I had left the location throughout the editing of the footage. While filming, I was working out how to be in the space of the rivers [4]. When I returned from the shoot, I began thinking about my relationship with nature, and tried to work out how to move beyond seeing nature as an aesthetic setting for my existence.

How could I move it from the background into the foreground? I worried that I had not progressed beyond the “reward” idea that I took to the rivers with me. And so I began searching for ways in which I could connect with the images I had filmed, so that I could pull them into the centre of the story, and my consciousness. I was having to find a new emotional connection with nature, especially with the river system. In my own way I was, as Haraway so famously heralds to the world, ‘staying with the trouble’ (2016b: 1).

Finding the Meeting Place

The emotional connection I eventually developed over the course of the filmmaking was not just with the river system itself; it was more precisely with the images I had gathered of the rivers. In the documentary industry, editing is equated with the writing stage of fiction works. It is the stage where how to tell the story is discovered, and the relationship with the audience is brought to the fore. Finding the narrative, both emotional-line and plot, is partly about working the relationship with what has been filmed through to a place where it can connect with an audience. Documentary filmmaker Nicole Ma reflects this attitude when talking about her experience of the editing process of Putuparri and the Rainmakers (2015): ‘I tried a lot of different storylines and narrative arcs and structures to see if I could make a story that would then encompass what really was my journey in learning about the Aboriginal culture and what I wanted to share with an audience.’ (interview with author, October 1, 2018) The narrative of a film results from a complex set of inputs: the cinécriture that led to the moment; filmmaker intention; Renovian desires; [5] and of course, what was shot. But there are many ways a story can be told, even given the restrictions of what has been shot. Choosing how to tell the story is part of the process of developing an understanding of the world view of the subjects and how that can be best conveyed to an audience. As Ma suggests, it is not resolved in the filming stage, but rather during the editing phase. At this point the filmmaker is being in the world of both what is filmed and who might see it. For me, the edit is finished when that synthesis of worlds has been accomplished and a meeting place between the filmmaker, the filmed subjects and the audience has been found.

After my initial cut of the rivers film, I was concerned that the relationships I could create would not be meaningful because I had shot mostly cinematic images [6]. In my experience, cinematic imagery can often distance the character in the footage from the lived experience of the viewer. The cinematic footage takes the character out of the everyday and mundane shared existence that we all know; it makes them exotic and other. I was apprehensive that being cinematic also indicated I had not moved beyond aestheticizing the rivers during the shoot, and had not entered that mundane space which comes from a deeper connection and the lived experience, the place when even the most beautiful (or terrible) thing can become normalised.

Nicole Ma talks about the way she used cinematic images in her film Putuparri and the Rainmakers (2015). She brought in cinematographer Paul Elliott to film some of the footage because she thought her own cinematography skill ‘lets the team down, so to speak, in the beauty of the visual storytelling’ (interview with author, October 1, 2018). Ma’s footage has a raw verité quality focused on capturing the way that people interact:

What I wanted was to encase the archival verité footage with beauty, because I knew it was going to go in the cinema and so I wanted the cinematic story to carry that sort of footage so that it would imbue it with emotion and give it sort of a heroic factor. I needed beautiful images of country to make that happen (interview with author, October 1, 2018).

In Ma’s film, the cinematic footage often forms breaks between scenes, which allows the viewer to look at, and admire the landscape rather than be involved in the dilemmas of the lives of the people in the landscape. It also contextualises the characters’ lives in terms of a particular landscape. What troubled me was that I did not have those verité scenes that would form the storyline engagement with the audience, I only had the cinematic shots that would sit between the scenes. As much as I admire the rivers, I had no intention of making an empty hagiography. I needed to work through how to create emotional and narrative threads using them, even if they were cinematic.

Part of this internal dilemma came from the distance between the stories I heard when I visited the rivers and the shots I had. For instance, I worried that I did not see the Darling the way the Bindara station owner saw it. In the late afternoon, before my evening shoots, she would come down and chat with me about the Darling River and the station. It was clear that the river, the animals, the trees, and the land were engraved on her soul and shaped the way she viewed the world. The station owner talked to me about the mismanagement of the river, which included stories of devastating horror. One time a pulse-release of water was sent down the river on an extremely hot day. As the water crept over the dry riverbed, it heated up until it reached boiling point, and as it entered a water hole, found at each bend in the river, it heated the water. The fish semi-hibernating in those waterholes rose to the surface dead. The water crept along the next hot dry stretch of riverbed to the next waterhole, and those fish died, and so on. She watched on, helpless to do anything, angry that the water release date set for ‘environmental purposes’ had not been changed to a cooler day. This station owner revealed a deep emotional connection to the river through love and tragedy, whereas I simply thought about the Darling River in aesthetic terms—how it looked interesting in late light.

Stories can provide a way to understand a human connection to place, whether they are stories that result from a millennia of connection, as in the case of the Aboriginal stories, or even just the lived experience of one generation, such as the stories told by the station owner. Normally I would have interviewed a local Aboriginal elder, whose stories stretch through time, and also the station owner, whose stories contained a recent lived connection. These various stories could have provided a profound entry point for the audience into this place. The stories would function as a way to understand the river system in the film, and the river itself would become a visual that forms cinematic rest moments. But this film was doing something different by placing the river in the centre of the frame.

To give a sense of how this human-in-the-film to human-in-the-audience connection normally works, I return to the work of Nicola Ma. Ma filmed Aboriginal elders Dolly and Spider interacting with a waterhole named Kurtal. Kurtal is an important living entity that is central to their belief system. Ma talked about this waterhole: ‘I’ve seen things and experienced it as being a living entity … The land works with the humans that are on it and the humans need the land in order to survive.’ She went as far as to say, ‘So yes, it was a character’ (interview with author, October 1, 2018). Kurtal has an important character arc in Ma’s film, moving from being hidden and needing to be dug out, to being flooded and wild; from being without people, to being reunited with people. Connecting the Aboriginal elder Spider with Kurtal formed key emotional and structural moments in the documentary. When I asked Ma about Kurtal’s character arc, she talked about the way that Spider and Dolly saw it:

It was sad. And then they say things like ‘Kurtal’s a pensioner now’. Because when they became pensioners they thought Kurtal was also a pensioner, and maybe he’s going to die as well when they die.... Apparently some of the waterholes on that big canvas [painting of the land] had died, had been killed. One had been killed by a mining explosion, and so there’s stories of them disappearing and never coming back. So they did think of them as alive (interview with author, October 1, 2018).

Ma talked about the waterhole as if it could be alive, grow old, or be killed. She switches seamlessly between how she sees the waterhole (‘one had been killed’), and how Spider and Dolly personify the waterhole (‘maybe he’s going to die’), her view reflecting those of the people she filmed. Part of Ma’s journey in creating the film was to learn to view Kurtal as her central characters saw it. She then passes on that knowledge to the audience, so they can understand Kurtal in that way. She successfully passed on a human ‘worldview’ where Dolly and Spider are the bridge over the breach between Kurtal and the audience. I was making a film without a human bridge to help create the meeting place.

Shifting Identity

The process of finding the meeting place and crossing the breach involves more than imagining an audience reaction and cutting the subject in a way that evokes a response. It involves a shift in the identity of the filmmaker. Understanding a new world view necessarily changes an existing word view. Cultural historian Rebecca Solnit writes about this journey as a process where a person ceases to be lost ‘not by returning but by turning into something else’ (2017: 71). Being attuned to the rivers was partly about changing myself, about how I viewed cinematic shots and landscapes. It was also about realising that neither I nor the rivers were wild; both of us were managed and mismanaged.

In an interview, Pakistani documentary filmmaker Sabiha Sumar talks about how the process of filmmaking changes her. Creating documentaries is ‘a process of self-learning, self-realization, evolving, understanding’ where she is ‘moving towards a deeper realisation’ and her ‘question changes as the journey progresses and I'm always open to that change’ (interview with author, September 7, 2018). For Sumar, the director has a “sense of what we want to find and where we should look for it…. But there's no way that I can tell how anybody's going to respond to my questions or what I will learn in the end” (interview with author, September 7, 2018). Creating the film uses an iterative process where the documentary filmmaker adapts to changing circumstances and while there will always be an initial intention for the work, the filmmaker’s identity shifts to accommodate what it is that they film. This is a result of being in the world of what is filmed.

Nicole Ma does not feature as a character in Putuparri and the Rainmakers and yet, as she stated earlier when discussing editing, the film needs to ‘encompass’ her ‘journey’ (interview with author, October 1, 2018). Sabiha Sumar is a character in her films, and so as the viewer we watch her transformation as the relationships develop. First person films can document the transformation that takes place in the filmmaker as they journey to the meeting place, but this transformation occurs whether or not the filmmaker includes it in the film narrative. Even though I am not a character in Rivers, my role is key in terms of the relationships that will form the film, and the film will in some sense document my journey.

When I first reached the rivers and was still influenced by my preconceptions of what the rivers are, I took out my mobile phone and filmed a short segment. I essentially said hello to one of the rivers by filming it. Within hours I brought out my professional camera and I was filming the Murray River, starting the relationship. I did not use any of those first shots, and knew this to be a likely outcome, just as I would never use the initial few minutes of an interview with a person. We needed to move past the awkward phatic part of the conversation and become comfortable with each other, before the usable footage could begin. When I look back on those first shots, I witness my emotional distance (and also materially, in terms of distance of the camera from the water) from what I was filming. The initial shots were aesthetically pleasing, but were not yet communicating anything in particular. That emotional connection develops over time, and it continues to develop throughout the editing process.

Part of the problem I had in creating Rivers was because I needed to rethink how I approached scale. In their discussion on environmental documentaries, Smaill and Davis propose ‘a consideration of scale, and a multi-scalar approach in particular’ (2018: 22). Scale is not just applied to frame size (those cinematic shots causing me problems), it is also a measurement of time. Because the rivers exist in flux—an ever-changing present and simultaneously in the long stretches of geological time—I wanted the film to include a different visualisation of time. I was interested in capturing the visuality of past, the present and future forms of co-existence. Rosi Braidotti suggests a post-humanist approach to time is one where ‘the present becomes both a memory and a promise’ (2019: 176). This effect was achieved by using a frame-shift technique where each shot was reduced in opacity and then layered over itself around 15 times with each instance being pushed by one or two frames. The effect is that the present blurs into both the past and the future. I had discovered this technique in the work of video artist Merilyn Fairskye, who also used it as a way to shift temporality in Stati d’Animo (2006) [7].

I decided to move my editing system into an unused classroom, so as to cut simultaneously alongside the image being projected onto a large screen. This technique changed my relationship to the shots, and the cinematic was turned into the mundane, because my eye wandered around the screen picking out elements in the shot—an animal here, a ripple there. Rather than seeing the entirety of the shot, which can be heroic and overwhelming, I could now focus on individual things within it. This meant that I engaged with multiple components of the same shot, and by allowing time for that in my edit, it moved away from being merely heroic, into the everydayness of the river. This process enabled an understanding of how to use the wide landscape shots in a way that further revealed character. I thought that this would mean that the film would only connect with viewers when seen on a large screen, but as I explain later, that was not the case. The large scale was necessary for me to enter into and understand the footage, but not for the viewer to then watch the film.

I normally cut on action, essentially human bodies in movement, but there were no human bodies to use as anchors in this project. Karen Pearlman describes editing as the alignment of ‘editor’s living, breathing body’ (2009: 15) with the material being edited, usually another body with its own breath and rhythms. Here I was attempting to align my body with the landscape, and to do that I needed to make the image as big as possible so that I could see all the parts of the landscape—the kangaroo eating, birds flying, trees swaying in the wind. These became like the involuntary movement of breath and rate of the eyelids that inform editing choices when cutting a person. The large screen facilitated this process, and I created a situation of sympathetic alliance with the footage. I was no longer lost.

The meeting place between myself, the rivers and the audience that I found turned out to be with people who already had a strong connection with the river system. I released the film on Facebook in three private groups set up by people who lived in the river system. The film was uploaded a year after filming, just as late summer monsoon waters were making their way down the dry river bed of the Darling. The people who lived on or near the rivers shared the film widely and over 700 people watched it within a week. I found this surprising because the film is highly experimental and they would have most likely watched it on very small screens. As they shared, some commented on how the film captured the essence of the river system, its beauty and degradation. My concern that I could never see the Darling River the way the station owner saw it turned out to be unfounded. I had managed to create a film that depicted the rivers in the way that people who knew them well, and were part of the river system, also saw them. This included both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal viewers such as the rap artist DOBBY, from Murrawarri and Ngemba lands of Brewarrina and Weilmoringle, who used the film as visuals for a live music performance about the river system.

Non-representational theorist Nigel Thrift writes about this quality of the arts as creating an ‘interface between showing and experiencing, between sensing and understanding, between enduring and living in the moment in a kind of joyful/questioning’ (2019: vii). Whilst the film did not change viewers’ behaviours, and possibly changed very few viewers’ attitudes, it importantly became a filmic interpretation of feelings that people collectively already held, and became a way they can share a visualisation of those feelings with others.

Conclusion

Creating the film Rivers involved developing a relationship with parts of the Murray-Darling River and expressing that in video. I headed off on the shoot because I was angry with my situation, but once I arrived at the rivers, my pre-existing emotions and ideas dissipated, and I became receptive to the worldview of the rivers. My initial point of connection with the rivers—being its agential quality—remained throughout the filmmaking process, but the character of the river transformed further as I developed my relationship with what the river system is, as opposed to what I thought it would be. This in turn changed me, and how I view my own place in the posthuman world.

Rather than inhabit the world of what I film, I experience a sense of being in their world. Though this act of being I develop an understanding of their worldview. My aim is to find a meeting place between myself, what I film and the audience, so that I can share the world view of, for instance, a river. It is once I find that meeting place that the creative process of making the film is finished. The development of the relationship continues during the edit with the images, even after I am no longer in contact with what I have filmed.

It was difficult for me to cut Rivers because I was not used to creating a relationship with a non-human entity. I was working with a posthuman sensibility, both in terms of the frame size, the shot length, and the use of time. To create a film that used scale differently I needed to change my normal mode of production to enable this difference in scale.

The meeting place with the audience that I found turned out to be between the rivers and people who were part of them. The film did not change viewers behaviours or attitudes, instead it became a filmic realisation of feelings that people already held, and became a way they can share those feelings with others.

References

• Barad, K. (2003). ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.’ Signs 28 (3): 801-831. https://doi.org/10.1086/345321.

• Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman Knowledge. Newark: Polity Press.

• De la Cadena, Marisol, and Mario Blaser. (2018). A World of Many Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.

• Dirlik, A. (2011). ‘Globalization, Indigenism, Social Movements, and the Politics of Place.’ Localities (1): 47-90.

• Fairskye, M. (2006). Stati d’Animo. 24 mins.

• Frankham, B. (2013). ‘A poetic approach to documentary: discomfort of form, rhetorical strategies and aesthetic experience.’ Doctor of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney.

• Gay’Wu Group of Women (2019). Song Spirals: Sharing women’s wisdom of Country through songlines. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

• Gough-Brady, C. (2019a). ‘A River as a Character.’ Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy: 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1163/23644583-00401016.

• ---. (2019b). Rivers. 10:20. https://vimeo.com/snodgermedia/rivers.

• Haraway, D. (2016a). ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.’ In Manifestly Haraway, 5-90. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

• ---. (2016b). Staying with the Trouble : Making Kin in the Chthulucene. North Carolina: Duke University Press.

• Haraway, D., and Kenney, M. (2015). ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhocene.’ In Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, 255-270.

• Ingold, T. (1993). ‘The Temporality of the Landscape.’ World Archaeology 25 (2): 152-174.

• Ma, N. (2015). Putuparri and the Rainmakers. 86 mins.

• MacDougall, D. (1998). Transcultural Cinema. edited by Lucien Taylor. Princeton: University of Princeton Press.

• Pearlman, K. (2009). Cutting Rhythms : Shaping the Film Edit. Kidlington: Taylor & Francis Group.

• Renov, M. (1993). ‘Toward a Poetics of Documentary.’ In Theorizing Documentary, edited by Michael Renov. New York: Routledge.12-36.

• Smaill, B., and Davis, T. (2018). ‘Rethinking Documentary and the Environment: A Multi-Scalar Approach to Time.’ Transformations (32): 19-37.

• Solnit, R. (2017). A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Edinburgh: Canongate.

• Thrift, N. (2019). ‘Foreword: Non-Representational Dreams.’ In Non-Representational Theory and the Creative Arts, edited by Candice P. Boyd and Christian Edwardes. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. vii-xi.

• Todd, Z. (2020). ‘(Alberta*).’ Urbane Adventurer: Amiskwacî (blog). January 23. https://zoestodd.com/2020/01/23/alberta/.

• Varda, A. (2008). The Beaches of Agnès. 110 mins.

• Varda, A., and Jefferson Kline, T. (2014). Agnès Varda : Interviews. Book. Conversations with Filmmakers Series. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Notes

[1] Papers that result from research conducted in a particular region in Australia are starting to include the name of the area as the first author. This recognises the importance of land as a place of knowledge. It should be noted that the Murray-Darling river system runs through a number of different language groups, and as such has many names. Most of the footage being discussed was filmed on Yorta Yorta and Barkindji lands where the river is known as Dungala and Baaka respectively.

[2] I reviewed this paper in January 2020, when climate change as climate collapse was highly visible here in Australia. This past summer I not only needed to check Vic Emergency to find out where the fires were located, I also had to check the EPA Vic hourly updates on air quality before stepping outside. Beach walking was rare at this time because the air was unsafe.

[3] Haraway’s description of urgency: “The word ‘urgency,’ rather than crisis, is an energetic term for me. Urgency is energizing, but it’s not about apocalypse or crisis. It’s about inhabiting; it’s about cultivating response-ability” (D. Haraway and Kenney 2015: 260).

[4] For a discussion of this process please refer to my digital paper ‘A River as a Character’ (2019a).

[5] Renov’s desires are: to record, reveal, or preserve; to persuade or promote; to analyze or interrogate; to express (1993: 21).

[6] Cinematic images are images that are beautifully shot, well lit, and often fairly wide.

[7] I discovered Fairskye’s work via Bettina Frankham (2013: 98).

Tuinn Cagarach (Whispering Waves): A Sketch for a Sound Archive-led Feature documentary film

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2020.31 | Issue 6 | May 2021

Alastair Cole (University of Newcastle, UK)

Abstract

Tuinn Cagarach (Whispering Waves) is a 20 minute proof of concept for a feature length documentary set in the Outer Hebrides in north west Scotland. It aims to explore the role of the Scottish Gaelic language, and its historically recorded stories, songs and retelling of events, in the understanding of the contemporary significance of the sea and fishing industries to the island’s cultural, and particularly linguistic futures. The film combines Gaelic language sound archive recorded by ethnographers in the middle of the 20th century with contemporary observational documentary images filmed with the fishing community in the islands today. The project aims to both examine the links between Gaelic and fishing, as well as explore of the capacity of sound archive led creative documentary filmmaking to foster connections between the past and present for audiences.

Research Statement

Click the image below to watch Tuinn Cagarach (Whispering Waves) on Vimeo.

Password: whisperingwavesPOC

Tuinn Cagarach (Whispering Waves)

‘We moderns, despite our mechanistic and rationalistic ethos, live in landscapes filled with ghosts’ (Bell 1998, 813).

The islands of the Outer Hebrides, situated in the north west of Scotland, are one of the last strongholds of the Scottish Gaelic language and its culture. This is a language that has been spoken in the islands for well over 1000 years, and which was previously spoken across Scotland. The Outer Hebrides are an island archipelago with 15 inhabited islands, each with their own history and many with their own dialectical variations of the language. However, they are more widely known collectively through various names including the Outer Hebrides, Na h-Eileanan Siar (Western Isles), or Innse Gall (Islands of Strangers). These multiple names hint at the layers of history that are embedded within the islands, and in the memory and stories of those who today call them home.

These island communities today remain deeply connected to the sea that surrounds them. They resonate with Dirliks observation of the role of ecology and topography in our understanding of place (2011: 56), and these connections are acutely clear with the continued importance that the island’s fishing community play both culturally, and economically. Furthermore, the sea’s role as a protagonist in collective Hebridean history and lore is unmistakable. It is embedded in Gaelic oral histories through songs and stories passed on from generation to generation and perhaps best understood through Màiri Chaimbeil’s suggestion that the sea acts ‘as an emotional landscape’, and as an ‘ever present and ever changing element in the lives of the Gaels of the Hebrides’ (2002: 56).

The ongoing connection between the language, the sea and the islands’ fishing communities has been brought into focus through recent research from linguistic anthropologist Magnus Course, whose ethnographic work highlighted that today ‘fishing plays a fundamental role in maintaining and transmitting the Gaelic language’ (Course 2018: 2) [1]. This connection extends to the role of the traditional ecological knowledge bound up within the language and inshore fishers’ commitment to sustainability (see Course 2021) [2]. These findings are in tune with Dirlik’s suggestion of the ‘organic connectedness of culture, social existence, and the natural environment’ (2011: 65), or an ‘ecological social sensibility’(ibid: 68), present within indiginism more broadly. This understanding of the fishing community as one of today’s Gaelic strongholds also wades into an ongoing conversation surrounding the preservation of the language in Scotland (see MacLeod and Smith-Christmas 2018) and more recently uncertainty around fisheries and marine policy and its consequences for the Gaelic language.

This historic and contemporary context was the genesis of the feature length creative documentary film Iorram (Boat Song) (2021). This 96-minute film blends Gaelic sound archive from the mid 20th century with contemporary moving images I filmed over a period of three years with the fishing community of the islands, both on and off the water. The project aims to explore both this historic and contemporary relationship between the fishing communities and the Gaelic language, as well as the capacity for sound archive to be used in creative documentary film as a means to explore embedded history within the observationally filmed present [3].

Iorram’s conception as a piece of creative documentary filmmaking began in 2017, and vital to its progression to full production was the creation of a 20-minute proof of concept (POC) in 2018, using the project’s working title at the time of Tuinn Cagarach (Whispering Waves). This piece of work was not created for a general public audience, but instead aimed to test the underpinning creative ideas of the project, as well as bring on board the rest of the key creative team and funders that would see the feature length project through to completion. Crucially, it aimed to understand if the concept of the film, of setting contemporary observational moving images and a newly written score, against an entirely sound archive-based dialogue track, had the potential to carry with it the project’s wider inquiry aims and sustain a feature length film that both Gaelic speaking, and non-Gaelic speaking audiences could engage with.

The POC was created from around the first 30-40% of the raw visual material that was eventually used for the final film [4]. The project’s visual aim at the outset had been to create an observational portrait of the islands, leaning on an ethnographic approach of capturing the everyday activity of the fishing community, while also aiming to focus on the individuals involved in the various processes being observed. Having flexibility within the final feature edit was vital at this early stage, and included giving options for narrative devices such as daily and seasonal time shifts, visual explorations within and between islands, outlining of individual and collective industrial processes as well as capturing enough visual material to give options to lean on returning characters.

The sound archive selected for inclusion in the POC was also very much a test selection. The entire archive that was available was almost overwhelmingly extensive, with around 30,000 Gaelic audio clips catalogued and directly available, along with many more available on request [5]. The material I focused my search on was Gaelic language recordings from the islands, which began from 1937, but were recorded largely from the late 1940s onwards. The broad themes of the sea and fishing gave some further boundaries to the archival research, but within the POC it was important to test a variety of material on a timeline, including song, oral histories, traditional stories, mythology, first person memories and second hand anecdotes.

This process also included testing strategies to balance a viewer’s potential engagement and the need of formal narrative structures, such as the 24 hour daily cycle eventually given to the visual content in the POC. This testing process also aimed to better understand to what extent the final film would need to narrativise its world, or construct ‘discourse that feigns to make the world speak itself and speak itself as a story’ (White 1980: 7), and what form this may need to take. Or if the material might best operate in more poetic narrative modality embracing what Dai Vaughan highlights as the ‘zone of flux at the leading edge of communication where poetry is forever congealing into prose’ (Vaughan 1999: 82). However, overarching these broader structural experiments was a syntactic exploration to understand the ability of the audio content, including how the stories were told, to work with the observational visual material. It became clear early on that the positioning of the archival voices into the contemporary world provided an opportunity to avoid embalming the speakers, and rather potentially highlight for viewers Pogue Harrison’s observation that “culture perpetuates itself through the power of the dead” (2005: ix). Thus, the aim was to illuminate connections between the past and present and foster a final piece that took advantage of what Banks refers to as the multivocality of the documentary image (2001: 140), to create a level of cinematic ambiguity for the viewer, encouraging audiences to read the audio-visual connections not as illustrative, but constitutive in their meaning making from the film (Vaughan 1999: 83).

The use and function of music in the project, both through archive song, and instrumental score, was a further key creative test of the POC. Within the archive there were extensive song recordings, both from groups and individuals, which through the lyrics, melodies and nature of the performance on the recordings, gave fascinating insights into stories and concerns of the fishing community. They also brought with them a distinct energy, often powered by group performances, as well as raw emotion from solo performances. Within the POC a collective female voiced working song was edited alongside scallop processing as a means to connect the onshore workers from the past and today, testing the ability of the score to push the visual material to connect with the past. This approach with the sound archive was supported through the use of a draft instrumental score across the 20 minutes to both support archive, and shift energy and pacing within the edit. However, the capacity of the score to be interwoven with the chosen archive highlighted the need for a new, originally composed score for the feature film [6].

While the POC is far from a final piece of documentary filmmaking, it provides, I suggest, a creative snapshot of a pivotal moment within the production of the feature length documentary film it was conceptualising. While the eventual funders and creative team that joined the project saw what they needed in it, more importantly, it acted as a vital canvas to find creative clarity for myself as the director, helping to establish a thread through the Hebridean pasts and presents, the shadows, whispers, people and places, and the mass of sonic and visual worlds, that then lay before me.

References

• Banks, M. (2001). Visual methods in social research. London: Sage.

• Bell, M. (1997). ‘The Ghosts of Place‘. Theory and Society 26, 813-36.

• Chaimbeul, M. S. (2002). ‘The sea as an emotional landscape in Scottish gaelic song‘. Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 22, 56-79

• Cole, A. and Course, M., dirs, (2018). Muir ar n-athraichean (Our Fathers Sea) Edinburgh: Tongue Tied Films.

• Cole, A, dir. ( 2021). Iorram (Boat Song). Edinburgh: Tongue Tied Films and Bofa Productions.

• Course, M. (2021). ‘The Woman Who Shed Her Skin: towards a humble anthropocentrism’, in Hebridean fishing. Environmental Alterities (eds. Cristobal Bonelli & Antonia Walford. Manchester: Mattering Press. (In Press)

• Course, M. (2018). The Cultural and Linguistic Value of Fishing in the Outer Hebrides - A Preliminary Report. Unpublished. University of Edinburgh.

• Dirlik, A. (2011) Globalization, Indigenism, Social Movements, and the Politics of Place. Localities (1) pp. 47-90.

• Macaulay, C.( 2012). ‘Dipping into the Well: Scottish Oral Tradition Online.’ Oral Tradition 27 (1).

• Maclean, R. (2021). Ecosystem Services and Gaelic: a Scoping Exercise. Nature Scotland Research Report 1230. Accessed online: https://www.nature.scot/naturescot-research-report-1230-ecosystem-services-and-gaelic-scoping-exercise

• MacLeod, M. and Smith-Christmas, C. (eds.) (2018). Gaelic in Contemporary Scotland: The Revitalisation of an Endangered Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

• Pogue Harrison, R. (2005). The Dominion of the Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• Vaughan, D. (1999) For Documentary: Twelve Essays. University of California Press.

• White, H. (1980). 'The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality'. Critical

• Inquiry 7 (1): 5-27.

Notes

[1] Magnus Course is also the co-producer on the final feature film Iorram (Boat Song), and co-director with me on the ESRC supported short documentary film created early on in the project’s development called Muir ar n-athraichean (Our Fathers Sea) which used contemporary interview and observational filming to explore these issues.

[2] See also the NatureScot report on wider relationships between Gaelic and Ecosystem Services in Scotland (Maclean 2021).

[3] The feature film premiered at the 2021 Glasgow Film Festival and subsequently had a general cinema release and broadcast in the UK, and release internationally. For more information see iorramfilm.com.

[4] The final film had around 60 hours of observational rushes, shot over three years over 9 filming trips to the islands, with the final two filming trips completed in early 2020 during the editing of the film. The final film also used underwater and areal material shot by specialist cinematographers.

[5] The archive used in the project was housed in, and largely collected by, the School of Scottish Studies Archives at The University of Edinburgh. At the time of the research the public interface of the sound archive was housed on the Tobar an Dualchais (Kist o Riches) website (see Macaulay 2012 for more).

[6] The draft score used in the POC was taken from samples from Scottish group Lau, which was chosen specifically to test their contemporary approach to traditional music against the archive and visual material in the film. The original soundtrack for Iorram was eventually scored by Aidan O’Rourke, who is also their fiddle player.