the new project / the first fragment
It's been a long time coming, but I'm finally ready to make a soft announcement about my new project. (Or rather, v.2 of an old project.) But I also want to share very honestly some of the deep backstory of how this project -- indeed this entire body of practice -- came about.
As you may know, along with the work of an incredible team of collaborators (and Find & Replace Films), last year I wrote and directed a film called "Close Observations of a Single Subject". It starred the wonderful Daniela Farinacci and Edwina Wren, was shot by DP Kevin Campbell, produced with me by my husband & creative partner Nicholas Coghlan, and was finished this year by a dedicated, talented and generous post-production team.
It was my first narrative film -- a big adventure, a big experiment, and a massive labour of love.
At this point it's worth noting: I've never been really great at short-form narrative. By which I mean I've written a lot of short film screenplays along the way, and the ones I've loved have been assessed by colleagues as not really narratively clear enough; whereas the ones I've written that have been "produce-able" to more of an accepted standard have, to be honest, not been my aesthetic/literary cup of tea. I've tried to bend my tastes into more of an industry-friendly shape, but trying to do so has always ended up just making me sick. As in literally, quite unwell.
(This was a common problem I faced a lot in making theatre, as well, I might add. My tastes always seemed to run just a little too obscure or conceptual for a dramatically-based form. Ugh. My brain, folks.)
So, anyway, somehow an amazing group of people agreed to come on board my subtle, oblique semi-narrative film and shoot it. But then the more feedback I received on first cuts, the conundrum I faced in finishing "Close Observations" the short film was, "do I add more information and clarify the narrative to make it legible to a general, filmgoing audience? Or do I return to my original artistic intention and pursue the slightly abstract, oneiric essence of what I always intended it to be as a work of art?"
Surprise, surprise -- ultimately I ended up going with the latter option -- although not without toying with and trying the former repeatedly and in multiple configurations. The film itself went through something crazy like 11 full re-cuts and 9 months of editing. We shot 18.5 minutes of screen time, and ended up with a film that comes in at just under 9. (I could anatomise the process at length, but I don't want to get too off track.)
What I didn't realise is that this adherence-to-form would mean we'd be turned away from film festivals left, right and centre. And that's why you make a short film, right? To get into festivals? To get runs on the board? So that you can then go for funding? So that you can make more short films? That then get into festivals? So that you can then go for more funding? So that you can maybe one day make a feature? I mean that's how it works, right?
There was also an overwhelming response from the small, early audience who had seen it that while they didn't get fully grasp the narrative specificity of the story, they wanted to, because the film itself is fascinating and beautiful and disturbing. They wanted to know more. Much more. Conundrum and a half, right?
Still from "Close Observations of a Single Subject" the short film. (Who wouldn't want to know more, right?)
I took leagues of time to let these questions swim around inside my brain. Along with the big old quandary of what it is I was actually aiming for in terms of my career -- my body of work.
Slowly the answers came.
Slowly and not without resistance I realised that the filmmakers whose work I aspired to live amongst most intensely were people like Eve Sussman and Bill Viola; Matthew Barney, Chris Marker, Yoko Ono, Peter Greenaway... the list goes on, but the defining element of most of these makers (including the more traditionally "cinematic" filmmakers amongst their number), is that they are artists first. Filmmakers second. In fact, they're artists who happen to use film (or video) as a medium. At around this time, I also learned and began to understand the definition of "artist film" as I experienced the work of Tacita Dean and Fiona Tan; recalling for myself the practice of Angelica Mesiti, Yang Fu Dong and Julien Rosefeldt all of whose work had recently been exhibited in Melbourne to a thrilled MZ.
But aside from my meditation on the work of these gods of art, I started to realise that I was also not interested in my work being limited to the medium of just the moving image or narrative performance. In fact, I may have never fully realised it, but it probably never was. I had always thought my fairly long-held love of contemporary fine art was one of pure cross-form aesthetic influence on my performance making practice. But there was clearly more to it than that. I started out as a theatremaker; a writer-director-producer; but now that I was really thinking about it, I realised I had been toying with video and installation for years, but never really considered the legitimacy of a true interdisciplinary practice. I mean, not really. I never went to art school. Who was I to explore this strange, deep yearning that didn't really have a name?
But recently I had also begun really quite ravenously collected fragments of text and still image. Concepts for oblique images had made their way into notebooks both physical and electronic eclectically -- and now they began to find a little order. The patterns began to emerge. Something was happening. Something was trying to make itself known.
Following more letters of "thanks but no thanks" and marathon stretches of sleepless nights, I started to wonder why for years I had been constantly fighting to shoehorn my practice into a shape it doesn't really belong.
What if I reimagined the work -- my practice -- as something I was genuinely curious about and hungry to do? What if I let go of "shoulds", guilt-trips and my personal interpretation of social expectations? What if I went back to my diverse, growing collection of notes and hunches and started to follow the breadcrumbs?
I was still drawn to dive more deeply into the exploration of the world of "Close Observations".
Could I continue the project more or less where the work left off? Could I also maybe be guided by the voices who said that they didn't quite understand the full story in the short film but knew that they did want more? What if I took my fractured, kind of post-modern-y, formalistically experimental desire to make meaning through fractured, episodic concept and symbol, and married that with a narrative based on this story that extended both vertically and horizontally: so that an audience could choose how much or how little of it they could experience and draw conclusions from? My mind began to race.
The abbreviated upshot is that I have begun.
I'm very proud to announce the first, small steps towards "Close Observations" v.2 the multimedia novel - it's the best, most accurate way I can describe it!
I'm thrilled to be welcoming Daniela and Edwina back into the project to revive and further expand and deepen the characters they created in our first iteration together. And also very honoured to be welcoming not only Nicholas back as one of the project's producers, but for him to be joined by Ally Curtis and Renee Dudfield, too.
In short, it is a huge project. Multifacted, multifarious, multimedia. We're using a combination of still image / photography, video, filmic image, audio recording, written text, documents and objects to tell the story. Sometimes literally, sometimes poetically. It will have multiple iterations as well. Online, in the real world, and in your hands.
I'm not quite sure how long the work will take to make yet. I'm not quite sure how much it will cost or whether (or how) we'll get funding to create some or any of it.
In the process of owning up to my work sitting in the "art" bin, and not so much in the traditional "dramatic storyteller" bin, both my philosophical and my practical approach to the work has changed. Immensely. This is the first major project I'm creating where this is true for the entire kit and caboodle. The pressure is off but the excitement levels are through the roof. I've not felt like this, to be quite honest, for years.
I'll not only be sharing the work itself more and more over the coming months, but I'll also be sharing some of the guts of its process. If you're interested in keeping up with where at I'm with the work and with the project as it unfolds (trust me: it really is very, very exciting), pop your email address in the box below and subscribe to the letters -- which will come roughly fortnightly. It's definitely the easiest and most efficient way of getting the scoop on it all.
