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Click on the
image to see a larger version Click on the
image to see a larger version In Australian
independent cinema over the last three decades, Jeni
Thornley is the filmmaker whose autobiographical project
has been to articulate feminism as a historical crisis of
female subjectivity.[2]
As a founding member of the Sydney Women's Film Group and
Feminist Film Workers, and as the daughter of a failed
film exhibitor, Thornley's exploration of this crisis has
been intimately bound up with cinema and the problems
that the cinematic apparatus poses for women as
spectators and as filmmakers. As an actor, filmmaker,
distributor and critic (as well as a founding member of
the Balmain Women's Liberation Group in 1969) Thornley
has alternated between social action documentaries and
personal filmmaking.[3]
Between 1970 and 1996 Thornley has been involved in the
production of four key films which can be read not only
in autobiographical terms but also as a body of work
which constructs second wave feminism as a 'crisis' of
female subjectivity. A film for discussion
(Australia 1970-73) ends with a shot of Thornley
contemplating her mirror reflection in a state of
existential crisis. In Maidens (Australia 1975-78)
feminism itself is perceived as a crisis which ruptures
the continuity of matrilineal history. For love or
money (Australia 1978-83) draws on the national film
archive to produce a feminist history of Australian women
at work, drawing conflicting experiences of race, class
and ethnicity into an apocalyptic ending.[4] Thornley's
most recent film, To the other shore (Australia
1986-1996) is an autobiographical, compilation film which
draws on archival footage, documentaries, feature films,
independent feminist films, home movies and family
photographs to construct a public, autobiographical
memory of the female self as both mother and daughter, as
Kleinian analysand and as autobiographical filmmaker. The
film's long period of development can be divided into
five phases: in 1983 Thornley began collecting material
for a film on love and war; from 1986-90 the project took
the form of a diary film about becoming a mother, The
dawn of love; in 1991 the film was re-written as a
dramatised documentary, To the other shore; in
1993 it became a low budget feature film about the
psychoanalytic experience, Room of secrets; in
1995 it was submitted to the Australian Film Commission
and funded as a low budget ($A244,538), experimental,
compilation film, Requiem. It was first screened
at the Chauvel cinema in Sydney in August 1996 as To
the other shore. Traces of the five phases of the
film's development are evident in its overlapping
concerns with images of war, motherhood, death,
psychoanalysis and cinema. Conceived in
its final development phase as a requiem, Thornley's
compilation film presents itself as a work of mourning.
The film's narrative logic is structured around key
scenes from Thornley's years as a Kleinian analysand, a
process represented as a movement from emotional numbness
to reparation with the past and acceptance of mortality.
Each of the film's core scenes between analyst and
analysand gives rise to a montage of images associated
with loss and mourning arising from: the birth and death
of Thornley's brother; multiple abortions; the birth of
her daughter and the psychic death of motherhood; and the
deaths of her father and mother. The film's other major
concern is Thornley's identification as a filmmaker with
her father as a failed film exhibitor. Throughout the
film Thornley juxtaposes psychoanalytic scenes
with Grethel's narration of the fairy tale, Hansel and
Grethel. to explore her ambivalent relation to the
maternal through a Kleinian analysis of her desire for
her father's cinema. A historical
parallel for Thornley's personal filmmaking can be found
in the autobiographical films of the New German cinema.
In a study of women's "self-exploratory narratives,"
Barbara Kosta argues that German feminist autobiographies
in the 1970s were motivated by "crisis and inquiry"
rather than "public achievements," and concerned
themselves with postwar historical amnesia, "the
psychopathology of the postwar family," and the "creation
of a public forum for mourning."[5]
Personal films which explore the "wounding of the female
subject" (Kosta, 8) by focusing on the mother-daughter
relationship and the absent father, have not been
confined to Germany's postwar cinema of mourning. The
figure of the grieving daughter has been central to
Thornley's collective and individual films: in
Maidens (Australia 1978) she is "orphaned and
destitute;" in For love or money (Australia 1983)
she is "numb, silent, and grieving;" in To the other
shore (Australia 1996) she is "numb, exhausted,
cleaved." This refrain of female destitution and grief
recurs in Thornley's films not only as a consequence of
feminism's struggle with the maternal but also in
relation to the missing father and his
cinema.[6] To the
other shore opens with two questions which attest to
the tension between maternal and paternal figures in the
psyche of feminism. One question takes the form of a
psychoanalytic koan: black and white shots of Freud's
consulting rooms (from 1919, Hugh Brody, UK, 1985)
are accompanied by a voice-over which says, "You have to
find out whether film is anything more than the search
for the lost father." The film's other question is
presented in a black and white freeze-frame of a daughter
who cannot turn her head to look into the eyes of her
dying mother. The question posed by this image is the
nature of the obstacles which block a reciprocal gaze
between mother and daughter in Thornley's feminist
cinema. In To the other shore Thornley brings to
light the obstacles to a reciprocal, maternal gaze by
mulling over feminism's primal scene themes. In this
paper I will argue that these primal scenes, projected
onto the screen, provoke a flash of recognition of what
has been at stake for the woman filmmaker as a
remembering subject in her father's cinema. The potential
of a reciprocal gaze of memory and the problem of a
nostalgic gaze of identification with the lost father
have become pertinent terms in recent theorisations of
memory and mourning in films which, like Thornley's,
insert clips from the stockpile of film history into
autobiographical narratives. In an article on the crisis
of male subjectivity in autobiographical films, Susannah
Radstone sets up an opposition between two kinds of
cinema associated with the work of mourning: the auratic
cinema of memory which produces "a common
recognition of mortality, finality, temporality," and the
narcissistic cinema of history which denies
temporality and death.[7]
Radstone draws on Metz's distinction between
discours and histoire to critique the
seamless integration of clips from the canon of film
history into nostalgic constructions of boyhood memories
in Cinema paradiso (Italy 1988) and The long
day closes (UK 1992). In Radstone's view, Tornatore
and Davis use historic film clips to produce a nostalgic
gaze of identification with film history, thereby
perpetuating "nostalgia for a lost ideal of phallic
masculinity" (43-4). Like Radstone,
Kosta also draws on the discours/histoire
distinction to argue that in feminist personal histories
"discursivity constitutes the primary mode of expression,
along with self-reflection"(21). Accepting an established
tenet of feminist film theory, Radstone and Kosta assume
that a discursive mode is essential for a reciprocal gaze
between feminist cinema and its audience.[8]
However, Thornley's film shows that psychic resistance to
a cinema of reciprocity is not confined to male
autobiographical films. Nostalgia for the lost father and
resistance to a reciprocal gaze (modeled, as Miriam
Hansen reminds us, on the look between mother and
child)[9]
are formative elements of Australian feminist cinema,
nowhere more so than in the discursive, self-reflection
of Thornley's personal films.[10] An alternative
to Kosta and Radstone's binary opposition between
discours (feminist, progressive, memory
films) and histoire (masculine, regressive,
nostalgia films) can be found in Philippe Dubois's
concept of cinema as an apparatus of memory. In his
article on cine-autobiography, Dubois compares five films
by photographer-filmmakers who have experimented with
different models of cinema as a memory apparatus.
[11]
Specifying "a particular enunciative posture, that of the
'story of the self' told through images and sound,"
Dubois draws on four models of memory: the ancient
rhetorical art of memory; Freud's dual
archaeological model of Rome as the visible city of ruins
and Pompeii as the lost city, buried whole; the Freudian
concept of screen memory, and Benjamin's concept of
auratic memory drawn from Proust's memoire
involontaire (154-5). In To the other shore,
montages (of photographs, home movies, documentary and
feature film clips) gain their intelligibility through a
Benjaminian logic of involuntary memory which provokes
flashes of recognition of Thornley's primal scene themes.
These montages correspond to the different temporalities
of Rome's visible ruins and the buried city of Pompeii.
These ruins can be interpreted, "egregiously," in terms
of a constructivist model of
memory.
[12]
On this model, the film's Roman temporality is evident in
visible traces of idealised/repudiated maternal and
paternal figures; and its Pompeiian temporality excavates
the buried scene of abortion as the scene of the woman
filmmaker's perverse desire for her father's
cinema. The
mise-en-scene of maternal and paternal figures in To
the other shore enables an egregious (rather than
hostile) interpretation of the unconscious of feminism as
it is projected in cinema. The film's activation of
phantasmatic primal scenes is performed within two formal
spaces of narrative containment. The first is the cool,
white space of Kleinian analysis where the couch and the
chair are props for inciting, constructing and
interpreting memories within a maternal holding space.
The second is the shadowy space of the forest through
which Grethel journeys as she recounts the tale
(Hansel and Grethel) of her struggle with the
nurturing/devouring witch. These respectively modern and
traditional spaces of storytelling provide anchor points
throughout the film for a series of montages which
transform Thornley's collection of photographic and film
images into visual traces of the primal scene themes
which emerged during Thornley's Kleinian
analysis. The psychic
dilemma which defines feminism as a crisis of
subjectivity has been elucidated by Jessica Benjamin: in
feminism's primal scene the daughter risks loss of self
if she continues to identify with the devalued mother and
her "missing" subjectivity, but if she repudiates "the
holding, nurturing mother" in favour of "the liberating,
exciting father" she remains (unconsciously) in the grip
of the omnipotent mother of infancy.[13]
Thornley's body of feminist filmwork is structured around
this conflict: she describes cinema "as a substitute for
love - a place for repeating the primal
scene."[14] To the
other shore draws on "emotions and memories embedded
in family photographs," (Thornley, MFA thesis, 42) as
well as film clips, not to reconstruct a family history,
but to project onto the screen a series of montages.
These montages are dominated by what Dubois describes as
a Roman temporality: a "wild accumulation of odds and
ends, leftovers, deposits and other debris" (163). In the
opening sequence, a shot of a midwife attending a birth
(from Sons of Matthew, Charles Chauvel, Australia,
1948) is juxtaposed with a black and white still of the
adult daughter sitting on her mother's deathbed, unable
to return the look of the woman who gave birth to her.
This juxtaposition, between the birthing, nurturing
mother of infancy and the repudiated mother of adulthood,
recurs in a "wild accumulation" of maternal images which
range from diary and documentary footage of birth and
breastfeeding, to oil paintings of the idealised madonna
and child, to haunted photographs of Sylvia Plath as the
Black Madonna. In this Roman
temporality of "odds and ends," film fragments and
snapshots which attest to a crisis of maternal
subjectivity (through the birth of Thornley's daughter,
Plath's suicide and Grethel's tale of the
nurturing/devouring witch) invite neither identification
nor nostalgia: they provoke recognition of the maternal
as a profoundly ambivalent figure for women. This
shock of recognition occurs in two dramatised scenes
constructed around resistance to the exchange of looks
between mother and daughter. In the first, of mother and
daughter folding the washing, the daughter steadfastly
avoids the mother's eyes, silently negating the mother's
memory of her as "a happy, placid little girl." In the
second, standing together facing a mirror, the daughter
listens silently, glancing at her mother's reflected
image as the mother laments the death of her only son. In
both scenes, the adult daughter and her mother avoid the
reciprocal look that would allow the mother's memories,
her subjectivity and her grief, into the film. Thornley's
montages are dominated by a Roman temporality of visible
ruins which activate memories. As fragments from personal
and public archives they suggest temporality and death,
working against a nostalgic, identificatory gaze. In a
montage devoted to the lost father, the filmmaker
associates a memory of her father's private collection of
war images and pornographic photographs with film clips
of sex, violence and death. On the image track, Eva
Braun's home movies of Hitler with SS officers and their
children are juxtaposed to photographs of Bosnian
refugees and Holocaust victims. These shots, along with a
clip from The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover
(Peter Greenaway, UK, 1989), are discursive rather
than nostalgic. The clips are part of a dialogue with the
psychoanalyst about the filmmaker's investment in images
through idealisation (of her guru as an "all loving
mother-father figure"), fascination (with her father's
public cinema and his taboo collection of photographs),
and projection (of inner conflict onto media images of
holocaust and nuclear meltdown). Although these
montages can be seen as visible, Roman ruins, there is a
further, Pompeiian, temporality at work in To the
other shore. The film's Pompeiian temporality enables
the spectator to grasp, in a single flash of recognition,
the relation between feminism, the maternal and the
father's cinema through the excavated scene of
abortion. [15]
In Maidens and To the other shore abortion
recurs as the phantasmatic scene which severs the
feminist subject from the maternal. Thornley's first
autobiographical film, Maidens, was originally
funded as a short drama based on Thornley's experience of
an illegal abortion. A trace of the abandoned abortion
film surfaces in Maidens in a scene excavated
whole from a forgotten feminist agit-prop film in which
Thornley performed the role of a woman seeking an
abortion. In Maidens, Thornley's ambivalent
repudiation of the maternal through abortion is evident
in the image of the feminist daughter who uses the family
photo-album to think back through the matrilineal chain,
refusing, however, to become its next link. In To the
other shore the scene of abortion is excavated as the
buried, Pompeiian scene of the woman filmmaker's desire
in and for her father's cinema. The entry of the woman
filmmaker into Freud's psychoanalysis (mediated by
Melanie Klein) and into the father's cinema (mediated by
feminism) is an explicit concern of To the other
shore in its discourses on filmmaking and film
viewing. It is here that the constructivist model of
memory becomes useful to interpret the archaeological
metaphor of Roman and Pompeiian ruins. The dialogue
between filmmaker and psychoanalyst in To the other
shore corresponds to Kenneth Reinhard's description
of psychoanalytic construction as "a moment of
disarticulating intervention ... a narrative which is
almost by definition farfetched, egregiously extreme, a
blatant imposition" (68). Cinema, abortion and the
woman's desire to make films become the object of such an
egregious construction in a sequence which revolves
around Thornley's relation to her film-exhibitor
father.[16] The sequence
begins with archival footage of a Vietnam war
demonstration and a voice-over: "Dad drinking night and
day. It was hell for Mum." A memory image of a woman
emptying beer bottles down the laundry sink cuts to a
close-up of projected light flickering across the
filmmaker's face: "I withdrew into a world of film: cold,
yet safe and untouched. Then you say that I'm always
searching for my mother in my father's cinema, but it's a
lonely experience. Just phantoms on a screen." On the
image track the woman filmmaker looks at the screen and
the protagonist of The woman in the dunes (Hiroshi
Tehigahara, Japan, 1964) stares back. Next, a close-up of
a young girl, eyes on the screen, is associated with an
earlier memory: "Every day after school I caught the bus
to my father's cinema. In the dark. My special place with
him." The psychoanalyst's voice (and body) come between
the woman and her enthrallment with the father's cinema:
"Years later you make films, his babies, but it's
tortured and painful, riddled with guilt. And when you
make real babies you have to kill them off." In response,
the filmmaker reconfigures a scene from Maidens of
the night she was "immersed in the cinema" when "in the
dark, desire welled up," she followed a man out of the
cinema and they made "a cold impersonal love" leading to
another abortion. Here, the excavated scene of abortion
(the refusal to become a mother) is a trope for the
daughter's seduction (in the family, in the father's
cinema) and her rebellion. It is not only the excavated
scene of her repudiation of maternal subjectivity, it is
the phantasmatic scene of her politicised relation to
cinema as a feminist filmmaker. The dilemma
for the feminist daughter of the idealised/repudiated
maternal as the ground of her own subjectivity has
permeated Thornley's filmmaking. To the other
shore brings this dilemma to consciousness in the
black and white freeze-frame of the daughter sitting on
the edge of a bed, eyes averted from the face of her
dying mother. Toward the end of the film, in an act of
reparation, this image is restored to living colour: the
daughter turns her head, says "Hi, Mum" and, for the
first time, returns and holds the mother's look. In the
course of Thornley's filmmaking this gesture of
reciprocity has been endlessly deferred. Its eventual
enactment is indebted to the work of mourning which
brings the father and his cinema into the scene through
abortion as a trope for feminism's resistance to maternal
subjectivity and identification with the father's
cinema. In To the
other shore the filmmaker's cinematic
re-configuration of psychic events is (in Reinhard's
words) a "corroborative response" to the analyst's
constructions and interpretations, rather than an
archaeological unearthing of the historical truth of
Thornley's desire for cinema (68). This "corroborative
response" is closer to Benjamin's concept of auratic
experience than to Freud's archaeological models of Rome
and Pompeii. In Reinhard's view, construction is a
"reverse archaeology" which neither preserves nor
destroys the past: it "'frees' the fragment of the real
from its encasing figurations and disfigurations in order
to return it to the past" (72-3). Like
psychoanalysis, cinema as an optical unconscious enables
this return through "exteriorised memory" rather than
"interiorised rememberance" (Reinhard 73). This
distinction, aligned with Benjamin's opposition between
the epic memory of reciprocal storytelling and novelistic
modes of remembrance,[17]
opens up a space for considering the possibility of a
cinema of collective, auratic experience. The figure of
the woman filmmaker/spectator as a remembering subject
has received little attention from feminist film theory
whose key figures, since 1975, have been the female
narcissist, transvestite and masochist, joined more
recently by the window-shopper, streetwalker, consumer
and fan.[18]
Thornley's remembering subject is a filmmaker who appears
in her films at the editing bench, mulling over images,
engaging in a dialogue about her ambivalent relation to
cinema as both filmmaker and spectator. The tension
between the filmmaker's auratic distance of contemplation
and the spectator's desire, in Benjamin's words, "to
possess the object in close-up in the form of a picture,
or rather a copy" is perhaps the source of fascination of
the compilation diary film for Thornley.[19]
Her presence on screen provides an occasion for
reconsidering the auratic relations of proximity and
distance of the woman in the cinema as
image/filmmaker/spectator. The problem of
the woman's proximity to the image has been defined by
Mary Ann Doane in her article on femininity as
masquerade: "Too close to herself, entangled in her own
enigma, she could not step back, could not achieve the
necessary distance of a second look."[20]
In To the other shore the woman's desire to make a
film out of her maternal experience entails a distinct
lack of spatial and temporal distance. Over home movie
footage of Thornley bathing her daughter we hear an
actor's voice-over: "I know what I want to do. Make a
film about being a mother. What it's really like." Later
in the film, the opening image from Thornley's earlier
film, Maidens, of a naked, pregnant woman
silhouetted in a doorway is accompanied by a voice over:
"I became pregnant again, as if to replace her. I decided
to make a film about it. I remember she warned me once
before: 'Don't make another film yet. Go carefully with
projection.'" For
psychoanalytic film theory, the unsatisfactory solution
to the ambivalent position of the female spectator in a
cinema dependent on the spectacle of the female body, has
been either masochism, narcissism, transvestism or
masquerade. As Doane argues, the masquerade of femininity
is adopted by the woman who wants to defend herself from
the suspicion that she has stolen the father's privileges
for herself (25). The woman filmmaker who takes her own
image as her subject is a triply suspicious figure.
According to Dubois the "autobiographical pact" rests on
the filmmaker usurping the privileges of narrator,
character and author in "a triple coup."[21]
In Thornley's autobiographical films this triple coup
deepens her entanglement with the image at the same time
that repetition of images from one film to the next opens
up "the necessary distance of a second look." In To
the other shore Thornley uses actors (Anne Tenney as
The Woman and Xenia Natalenko as Grethel) to open up a
gap between narrator, character and author, gaining some
distance from her own voice and image.[22] Concepts of
auratic distance, involuntary memory and the optical
unconscious in Benjamin's writings have been deployed by
some feminist theorists to shift the emphasis of feminist
film theory from women's spatial entanglement with
the image to the question of temporal
proximity/distance. Hansen finds within Benjamin's theory
of auratic experience and its "answering gaze" (212), a
displaced memory of "the constitution of the gaze in the
relationship between mother and child" (215). This veiled
memory of "a look that leaves a residue" (Hansen, 215)
distinguishes the intersubjective, auratic gaze of memory
from psychoanalytic theory's regime of voyeuristic and
fetishistic distance. For Hansen, Benjamin's optical
unconscious "readmits dimensions of temporality and
historicity" into the cinema, offering "a perspective on
marginalized forms of spectatorship, historically
associated ... with the precarious position of female
audiences in relation to classical modes of narration and
address" (217). Writing about the "fascinated" female
spectator, Jodi Brooks argues that the temporal gap which
provokes involuntary memory is a precondition for the
possibility of auratic experience in the cinema: aura, or
the "anticipated return of the gaze" is understood in
terms of a temporal distance whereby "what is opened is
the field of the involuntary memory and the
correspondances, those images and resemblances which are
lost to conscious, voluntary memory and rather rise as
images of another self, images which fleet
past."[23]
For the fascinated spectator, the film clip, the
photograph or home movie becomes the occasion for
recovering not the past but an involuntary memory of
"what has perhaps never existed" (Brooks, 87). In
Thornley's case, involuntary memory provoked at the
editing bench returns obsessively to the figure of her
father, a film exhibitor "lost to alcoholism" (Thornley,
MFA thesis, 41). Unlike
Tornatore and Davies whose films remain fixated on
nostalgia for the lost, idealised father, Thornley
appropriates psychoanalysis and cinema to investigate her
fascination with her father's images, opening up the
necessary distance of a second look. In To the other
shore the father is idealised as "the Mayor, the
Prince" and denigrated as "the drunk, the hopeless
failure" in a slide-show which begins with his image
projected over the filmmaker's face. As a dialogue with
the therapist proceeds, the filmmaker gains distance from
her father's image by taking control of the
slide-projector and separating herself from the screen,
taking the position of both projectionist and spectator.
At the editing bench, re-viewing film images on the small
screen, the woman filmmaker (like the analysand on the
psychoanalytic couch) occupies a womb-like space in
relation to a phallic apparatus. The formal distances
between projector and screen, filmmaker and performer,
voice-over and image, (couch and chair) open up the
auratic distance necessary for the activation of
involuntary memory. Toward the end of To the other
shore, the woman filmmaker sits at the editing
machine reviewing images already seen in the film: "What
did she say? Oh yes, I remember. 'You have to find out
whether film is anything more than a search for the lost
Father.'" Her attention turns to an image of mother and
baby (Thornley and her daughter) floating in water. The
filmmaker, smiling, addresses the small screen in front
of her: "That's great. See, you can float by yourself -
see how easy it is." The unresolvable question of the
woman's relation to the phallic apparatus of cinema sits
alongside the fleeting moment when, marvellously, the
relation of the feminist filmmaker to the maternal image
is affectively connected yet spatially and temporally
separate. This is a
mildly redemptive moment of reciprocity between the woman
filmmaker/spectator and the cinematic apparatus. It leads
directly to the final exchange of looks (and more
importantly perhaps, touch) between mother and daughter,
a mutual exchange which holds both women within a
reciprocal gaze. In Thornley's cinema this "answering
gaze," constituted literally "in the relationship between
mother and child" (Hansen 212) is an auratised gaze which
remembers. Part of what is remembered is the difficult
mediation of that look through the daughter's attraction
to the father and his cinema. The use of home movie and
dramatised footage in these scenes, rather than an iconic
clip from film history, marks the difference between
Thornley's reciprocal gaze and the narcissistic
identification with male father figures in Tornatore and
Davies' films. In Radstone's terms this difference
distinguishes the cathartic mourning of a "chastened"
gaze (which recognises mortality) from the melancholy
pathos of "an unchastened masculinity" (47). For Thornley,
filmmaking is inextricable from the work of mourning, of
mulling over and rearranging a collection of images into
contingent patterns of significance. One of the key
objects to be remembered, mourned and separated from in
Thornley's filmwork is the outmoded feminist cinema which
defined her as a filmmaker. Thornley has been the
archivist of a currently anachronistic cinema. As a
remembering subject of feminist cinema how can Thornley
maintain a connection to her past work without succumbing
to melancholia? Max Pensky discerns two remembering
subjects in Benjamin's work: the melancholic and heroic
brooders represented respectively by Proust and
Surrealism, and the collector represented by
Fuchs.[24]
Pensky's description of the brooder as "the preeminent
melancholy subject" has a remarkable resonance with the
figure of the filmmaker brooding over images at the
editing bench in To the other shore: For Pensky,
"the task becomes one of understanding how the subject
can obtain truth-bearing images from the mass of
collected historical texts ... without ... falling into a
Grubelei that would transform what were to be
dialectical images into allegorical ones - that is, into
politically useless bits of private speculation" (172).
Pensky proposes that the collector's "love for the object
... overcomes melancholia and marks an end to
Grubelei'" while the brooder's "desperate search
for meaning" brings forth "a messianic will, a call to
make good again that which has been broken" (93).
Thornley as filmmaker is both intent, melancholic brooder
and vigilant collector of images and texts. Organised
into significant patterns of meaning, Thornley's
collection invites memory rather than
nostalgia. In the course
of valorising a cinema of reciprocity, Radstone has
castigated melancholic pathos in favour of a cathartic
working through of the crisis of masculinity which
remains unresolved in Cinema paradiso and The
long day closes. Thornley's cinema reveals just how
difficult this working through might be, whether the
crisis is that of masculinity or femininity. Irving
Wohlfarth reminds us of an aspect of Benjamin's auratic
gaze which dispenses with a simple polarisation between
historicist nostalgia and auratic memory.[25]
Rejecting the ideological method of critique which pits
progressive against regressive forces, Benjamin offers an
alternative, dialectical method of dividing the positive
from the negative in whatever has been negated, "in
infinitum, till the whole past has been gathered into
the present in a historical apokatastasis (Benjamin GS,
5, 573 qtd by Wohlfarth,158). In Wohlfarth's view "the
lingering auratic gaze" is the means of this "cumulative
act of salvation" (167). If Thornley is in danger here of
being subsumed into a masculine figure of the
brooder/collector, Hansen reminds us that the prototype
of the lingering gaze is the maternal look, a look which
"lingers beyond its actualization in time and space"
(215). In To the other shore the investigation of
the reciprocal maternal look enables a critical
rethinking of the terms on which the feminist filmmaker
entered the father's cinema, as an act not of salvation
but of reparation through memory and mourning. In the
historical context of independent feminist cinema, To
the other shore invites a collective, reciprocal gaze
that remembers Thornley's earlier filmwork and the
political movement that made it possible. Writing about
collective memory in relation to an experimental,
diasporan cinema, Laura U. Marks advocates a
"participatory notion of spectatorship" through a
Bergsonian act of "attentive
recognition."[26]
Drawing on Proust and Benjamin, Marks reminds us of a
useful distinction between voluntary remembrance
and involuntary memory: "Involuntary memory cannot
be called up at will but must be brought on by a 'shock'"
(64). Marks suggests that this activating shock or moment
"when memory returns and stories can finally be told"
unlocks the social or collective potential of cinema
(64). By positing the filmmaker as a figure of
remembrance in To the other shore I have argued
that Thornley's film prompts an act of "attentive
recognition" whereby feminism's psychic investment in
cinema achieves optical consciousness. This recognition
implies a potential, collective audience for To the
other shore, an audience with a shared memory not
only of Thornley's previous independent films but also of
the milieu of independent filmmaking which shaped
feminist cinema in Australia (as well as West Germany,
North America and Britain) in the 1970s and
1980s.[27]
This audience was reconstituted briefly for a private
screening of To the other shore at the Chauvel
cinema in Sydney on 24 August 1996. However, with the
decline of independent, feminist cinema as a public
sphere and the decimation of the organisations,
publications and audiences which supported it, Thornley's
is a cinema in ruins. While the films of "an unchastened
masculinity" continue to dominate the screen, collective
memory of feminist cinema atrophies to the point where
To the other shore remains largely unrecognised as
a film which articulates the psychic underpinnings of
feminism's ambivalent relation not only to the maternal
but also to cinema.
(To
return to your place in the text, simply click on the
endnote number) [1]
Woman filmmaker to psychoanalyst in To the
other shore. (Jeni Thornley, Australia,
1996). [2]
Thornley's individual and collective filmwork which
articulates this crisis includes: A film for
discussion (Sydney Women's Film Group, 1973);
Maidens (Jeni Thornley, 1978); For love or
money (Megan Mc Murchy, Margot Nash, Margot Oliver,
Jeni Thornley, 1983); and To the other shore (Jeni
Thornley, 1996). [3]
For a comprehensive account of independent feminist
filmmaking in Australia during the 1970s and 1980s see
Annette Blonski, Barbara Creed, Freda Freiberg (eds)
Don't shoot darling! Women's independent filmmaking in
Australia, (Richmond, Victoria: Greenhouse,
1987). [4]For
a more extensive analysis of these four films in terms of
feminism as a historical crisis of female subjectivity
see Felicity Collins, "The experimental practice of
history in the filmwork of Jeni Thornley,"
Screening
the past
3 (1998). [5]
Barbara Kosta, Recasting autobiography: women's
counterfictions in contemporary German literature and
film (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1994), 7-8. Further references to this text appear as
page numbers in brackets. As well as the films of Jutta
Bruckner and Helma Sanders-Brahms discussed by Kosta,
there are contemporary parallels between Thornley's
personal films and the autobiographical films of American
independents, Michelle Citron, Su Friedrich and Ross
McElwee. [6]
I have written elsewhere on grief and the Kleinian figure
of the numbed woman in To the other shore. See
Felicity Collins, "Death and the face of the mother in
the auto/biographical films of Rivka Hartman, Jeni
Thornley and William Yang," Metro 126 (Summer
2001): 48-54. [7]
Susannah Radstone, "Cinema/History/Memory," Screen
36, no. 1 (1995): 34-47. Further references to this text
appear as page numbers in brackets. [8]
Radstone limits her argument to an exploration of the
reciprocal gaze through its negation in male
autobiographical films. Kosta affirms reciprocity as a
discursive aspect of feminist autobiographies without
specifying the obstacles to reciprocity in feminism's
relation to the maternal. [9]
Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin, cinema and experience: 'The
blue flower in the land of technology,'" New German
critique, 40, (Winter 1987): 212; 215. Further
references to this text appear as page numbers in
brackets. [10]
For instances of the daughter's search for the father in
recent Australian films see Song of air (Merilee
Bennett, 1987), The last days of Chez Nous
(Gillian Armstrong, 1992), Vacant possession
(Margot Nash, 1995), Hatred (Mitzi Goldman, 1996)
Parklands (Kathryn Millard, 1996) and The sound
of one hand clapping (Richard Flanagan, 1998). For
instances of the daughter's difficulty with a reciprocal,
maternal gaze see My life without Steve (Gillian
Leahy, 1986), Shadow panic (1989), Night
cries (Tracey Moffatt, 1989), Only the brave
(Ana Kokkinos, 1994), The mini-skirted dynamo
(Rivka Hartmann, 1996), Floating Life (Clara Law,
1996) and Radiance (Rachel Perkins,
1998). [11]
Philippe Dubois, "Photography mise-en-film:
autobiographical (hi)stories and psychic apparatuses," in
Fugitive images: from photography to video, ed.
Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1995), 154. Further references to this text appear
as page numbers in brackets. Dubois discusses the
autobiographical films of Raymond Depardon, Agnes Varda,
Robert Frank, Chris Marker and Hollis
Frampton. [12]
On the egregious, constructivist model of memory in
psychoanalysis see Kenneth Reinhard, "The Freudian
Things: Construction and the Archaeological Metaphor"
in Excavations and their objects: Freud's collection
of antiquity, ed. Stephen Barker (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1996), 57-79. Further
references to this text appear as page numbers in
brackets. I am grateful to Tim Groves for bringing
Reinhard's critique of the archaeological model of memory
to my attention. [13]
Jessica Benjamin, The bonds of love: psychoanalysis,
feminism, and the problem of domination (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1988), 168-71. [14]
Jeni Thornley, To the other shore: a film about birth,
death and motherhood, unpublished MFA thesis,
(Sydney: College of Fine Arts, University of New South
Wales, 1996), 42. Further references to this text appear
as page numbers in brackets. [15]
Dubois draws on Freud's analogy between repression and
burial to distinguish the Pompeiian temporality of a
buried city from the Roman temporality of a city of ruins
(Dubois 163-4). [16]
On memories of her father's "exciting" cinema as "my
home, my womb" see Jeni Thornley, "Out of the dark,"
Metro 126 (Summer 2001): 122. [17]
Walter Benjamin, 'The storyteller: reflections on the
works of Nikolai Leskov," in Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana),
96-97. [18]
I am referring here to the two currents in feminist
spectatorship theory which interest me most, the
psychoanalytic paradigm inaugurated by Laura Mulvey in
1975 and the historical (Benjaminian) paradigm of cinema
as an optical unconscious which informs the spectatorship
histories written by Giuliana Bruno, Anne Friedberg,
Miriam Hansen, Laura U. Marks and Patrice Petro, among
others. [19]
Walter Benjamin, "A small history of photography," in
One-way street, trans. Edmund Jephcott and
Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso), 250. [20]
Mary Anne Doane, Femmes fatales: feminism, film theory
and psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge,
1990), 19. Further references to this text appear as page
numbers in brackets. [21]
Dubois (154) borrows the concept of the "autobiographical
pact" from Philippe Lejeune. [22]
Although Thornley recorded her own voice-over narration
for the film, she made the decision to use Anne Tenney's
recording to avoid repeating the uncomfortable experience
of hearing her own voice as 'too close' in
Maidens. Similarly, using actors in To the
other shore protected Thornley from engulfment by her
own image (Thornley appears at a spatial distance in the
home movie footage and at a temporal distance in some
photographs). Jeni Thornley, Personal interview with the
author, (Sydney: 18 November 1996). [23]
Jodi Brooks, "Between contemplation and distraction:
cinema, obsession and involuntary memory," in Kiss me
Deadly: cinema and feminism for the moment, ed.
Laleen Jayamanne (Sydney: Power Institute, 1995), 83-4.
Further references to this text appear as page numbers in
brackets. [24]
Max Pensky, "Tactics of remembrance: Proust, surrealism
and the origins of the Passagenwerk," in Walter
Benjamin and the demands of history, ed. Michael P.
Steinberg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 170.
Further references to this text appear as page numbers in
brackets. [25]
Irving Wohlfarth, "Et Cetera? The Historian as
Chiffonnier," New German critique 39, (Fall 1986):
158. Further references to this text appear as page
numbers in brackets. [26]
Laura U. Marks, The skin of the film: intercultural
cinema, embodiment, and the senses (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2000): 48. Further references to this
text appear as page numbers in brackets. [27]
I have written elsewhere about the milieu of feminist
filmmaking and its decline. See Felicity Collins, Ties
that bind: the psyche of feminist filmmaking, Sydney
1969-89, PhD dissertation (University of Technology,
Sydney, 1995). A precise account of how To the other
shore provokes memories of the milieu and its films,
however pertinent, remains beyond the scope of this
paper.
6,339 words
Abstract
Then
you say that I'm always searching for my mother
in my father's cinema, but it's a lonely experience.
Just phantoms on a screen.[1]
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
Brooding
consists in the activity of sifting through pieces of
worthless material, grubbing with one's hands,
fingering things, driven by an unarticulated but
nevertheless compelling sense that fragments of
experience, rearranged in some lost, nonarbitrary
construction, might spell out some large structure of
significance. (170)
VII
Endnotes
