PINK LAKE: A novella by John Kinsella

Cinéma vérité: An Interrogation of an Auteur

or

Director’s cut: The making of an off-limits masterpiece – Pink Lake

What the genes really make are behaving machines. (Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991, p. 62)

a novella by John Kinsella

Cinéma vérité. Cinéma vérité is everywhere but not everything. Here and now is not here is now, to state the obvious. The here and now contains an article of faith. All the places being rolled up, wrecking boundaries, borders, intersections. It’s like false accusation – an act of gross disrespect. But who can unfurl a life of visiting and being, of recollecting, brightening lulled here moments of the now with past and there moments?

And so I am listening to a talk, a political talk, I guess you might call it, and suddenly – always suddenly in the now of then – two guys come from opposite sides of the aisles, squeezing past people without apologies and shunting into the empty seats either side of me. I know who they are though I’ve never seen them before.

Hacking is hating the addiction the web has created – an abreaction. I think this, but they don’t hear me. I use no devices now, not even a phone. I am disconnected, but it’s a one way act for they still follow me with their electric eyes, their gridwork.

I hear them think, He seems mild compared to what we’ve heard. And I think back, So many people in the one…and only some of them understand one other never mind all of them. We are at odds with each other, caught in perpetual ambiguities.

I whisper to one, But I am an old man, and to the other, Do you know how old I am? Both try to look impervious but I sense – I overhear – their mental shuffling.

I will be reset, which I don’t object to, but the capitalists and their protectors will only reset for cosmetic appearances – the consuming till the last product will continue. An exercise of will, will power profit communitarian asset-ism. Who can I, barely ever relevant, be in this? I ask for nothing other than not to be intimidated. I know they are here to ‘collect’ me, to accuse because the set-up is now in place – the false witnesses gathered and cross-referenced and the watertight case made. I will be the world’s last show trial before the emissions have their way. Many awards will be given to those who are compliant but also those who show little rebellious spirit against the status quo (always need a quota of these ‘alloweds’ to make the big picture add up in the arithmetic of greed)…the naughty boys, the boys will always be boys, the misogynists who show their sensitive side to the game-changers of any given here and now. Here! Now!

What did I teach when I taught at university? Who did I teach? What favours were shown and what favours were accepted? If I said none because they threw me out, would that be actual and to what ends? These subversions against the magnate, against the wholesale abuse of land that funds social equity? Equity in the big company of presence on gradual remakings of what has been stolen so what ‘has to be’ given back is less and less, redenoted. I think this so they can hear me think it in one of my personalities. I don’t recognise this court’s rights but this court couldn’t give a damn.

So, I lost relevance? To who or whom? And the obvious question, why was I ‘relevant’ (and to who or whom) in the(ir) first place? A need for language weaving that could be applied outside of the political? Not possible? To climb some table via a quota of perceived accolades? I have and had none that matter to the gasping biosphere.

I belonged to no coterie, but admittedly nor did many of my colleagues. But there were coteries to be joined if one wished, not that they would have had me. Dinosaur who would put animals and even plant (horror forbid) before humans. But it was never that simple, not really – but not one read my books beyond abstract, not even the publishers, not really. Not where it counted – in the footnotes, in the excoriations of self. But why should they have? I did all my own indexing and had a reputation for liking the soothing effect of such work. I loathed it.

But I am bitter at no one. But myself. Of course. Easy as that, fellas. I know this all comes out different in your heads, and, indeed, it comes out different in mine as I can never keep a hold on the Cinéma vérité. Shaky as a funeral road. Shaky as the descent after the elation of looking at from the peak. But that wasn’t here, was it – this flat place beyond the slant of the seats in this lecture theatre. This gradient.

Maybe my end began when I switched from teaching film to teaching environmentalism with a little astronomy thrown in. You don’t have the credentials, said the students even before the administration. They knew because one of their parents looked things up (I was just taken aback by the fact that any of them took notice of their parents at that age). But that’s by the by, I was on the way out anyway – fossil, dinosaur, settler culturalised, for all my emphatic and even ‘extreme’ (you gents next to me can attest to this?!) rejection of who I was whether I liked it or not. Liked it or not. Cinéma vérité. Now then. And all places tumble into a singularity and I’ll unpick them before this godforsaken lecture pretending to be ‘politics’ ends, and these fellas gently guide me away for interrogation. That blunt. That factual. That unnewsworthy.

I know, arrogant of me I know. I know the interrogation will tell them little and tell me a lot. To what good? What good as the executioner’s event is enacted in a country that supposedly has no death penalty. The boats are turned back in international waters, the dead wash up on other shores or are eaten by the ocean. The interrogators will have degrees of purchasing power. They will believe in legacies. They believe now is the second best time for coal – the age of coal as the darkness falls. It makes sense to them. Cinéma vérité. It makes sense to them like character and memes, avatars and file swaps of ‘materials’.

*

Being led to the car to the building to the room. I am offered a tea or a coffee or a bottle of water. Is it plastic from a machine? I ask. I take tea because I am jaded and nervy and I stare into the mug of colonial contradictions and find no respite. I am to be questioned but it’s a conversation. There are no charges no accusations – an interview in the public interest, as an acknowledgement that I can be of assistance regarding national security issues. No accusations. Just questions, but chatty like…sans question marks. Other than the icebreaker for the melting glacier that will follow: What’s your favourite movie and who’s your favourite actor? Double-barrelled question. I could say, Better question is to ask my favourite director, but it wouldn’t really make a difference because I have no favourites in anything.

*

I was an only child. Only a child. I had a parent in the military who was posted here then there then there-here. It wasn’t my father, which is like the doctor conundrum because the dr is a woman. One of my era, and sad. My mother was a sad army nurse who didn’t like the army. My father wasn’t in the military and loved the military. He loved the military heart and soul and was highly adept at painting toy soldiers across the era of warfare. He was as accurate as archaeology and newsreels. I didn’t feel alienated from him but neither did I particularly feel strongly about him. He was my father. My mother was my mother-friend. But none of us were ever close in the way that some families are close.

You were close to yours? To your past? Closer to the past than you are to your now? Yes yes. And I have to think of Chantal Goya who ended up singing for kids and was married to the same bloke from the age of eighteen. You’d expect that to be because of Godard, knowing my skillset, but it’s not the reason. Not really the reason. yé yé. yé yeah yeah. You know, it’s easier to follow the diction and through Masculin féminin I taught myself to speak a kind of French. It was her diction.

I lived briefly with a man – a friend from school but far from a best friend. For no more than a year. But otherwise, always on my own. Dalliances? Of course, but what business? You have sourced yage but that won’t help, not in this case. Not ever.

*

When the town my paternal grandparents lived in was razed by fire, they lived with me in my flat by the river for a while. We did talk about the increased likelihood of bushfires. They have been speaking to you? Have you been using telepathic drugs to probe their minds, converse with them? Do they say things in that context they wouldn’t say in usual conversational situations? I am an old man and they are in their 90s. They have survived the loss of their house, the loss of their town. And you drag them into this? Is that being thorough?

*

That was the night – I say it was night though it was an extended twilight so I could still see the few bits of furniture as shapes in the room with the river Kodachrome through the open curtains and a pelican dipping in to drain the garbage pouring in through the broken concrete pipe, the suburban outlet…in that light which was technically night my bones prised free of my flesh and grunged around the room, some went into other rooms but stayed within the flat, behind my locked doors and closed windows and behind the closed door onto the balcony with its transparent wall looking down on the Kodachrome river and the pelican tussling with patents and factory product placement. The bones slopped around like dulled sparks and I read into the facts that there is no waste – the product IS the waste and the super hero toy with increased worth for still being in its package is the waste. The broken deteriorating bits no longer wanted are no more waste than the manufacture and the gleaming product behind its plastic window…that dull gleam of coloured plastic that is like the bones out of the flesh thudding against walls and windows, a massacre of self without a body count. For I am here, aren’t I, telling you the tale, the anecdote. I argued that film offered a figurative world against the material though this was a lie because of the impact of making a film. Film-making trashes the planet. That is treason? Maybe, but also irrelevant because I turned away from this and what you need judge me by in your questioning that carries no conclusion, no condemnation, that is for the court I will never actually reach to decide, that court I would not acknowledge…what you need judge me by has nothing to do with screens and audience. Or not a paying audience. Or not this audience, now, though you film my testimony which is the fixed camera in the room with a table. Which is where I started, in my bedroom with a Super Eight camera gifted to me by my maternal grandparents.

*

Bad people make stories to cover their crimes – call their reality ‘fantasy’? And film-makers and politicians? Legislators? Those who apply their law? Inculcate to gain access, to view unsavoury evidence to protect us? Protect audience? The private or secret narratives leaked to the public? Scripts?

*

It embarrasses me to think how I wrote of film from cultural spaces so different from my own. I remember going to a film festival in the mid 1980s in Calcutta and spending half my article ‘on the experience’ as if what was outside the screenings revealed the essence of the films themselves. I was trapped inside my own ‘tolerance’ and my own desire to de-orientalise my criticism, my position of viewing. For that, you can hold me accountable, but I see that makes you squirm in your seat. I am not to be judged for that? Not by you, anyway…

*

Yes, I joined the peace movement – which movement? the peace movement – when I was 18. I am a pacifist who was angry when young, who is angry now but in a different way. Compatible? One who shakes with frustration in opposition to war is, to my mind, more likely to contribute to a less violent world than one who is mild-mannered and polite and not easily flustered who waves the troops off, raises money for the war effort, who considers the military a normal part of life. The gentle patriots for whom weapons are made to ‘defend’. To defend all we love, being those who tacitly and even overtly agree with the underlying violence that sustains society. No, I was a pacifist with fury against violence. Now the fury has gone but the anger against weapons and militarism and the state simmer away. Is that a threat to you? Have I just made a terminal confession without you having to bring out the thumbscrews, which I have no doubt are stored away in the closet ready to deploy. Needs must, eh. The threat of pacifism?

*

Family member in Malaya? The Malayan Emergency. Yes, an uncle. No, I am not proud of his having fought the communists. This is a very Cold War angle you’ve got going here. To show a pattern? It’s the yage. As you can’t prove its existence and will find no trace of anything ‘untoward’ in my blood other than illness and decay, there’s not a lot you can do to combat it. Combat – your word, not mine. Language is everything. I should be proud of his fighting for the Commonwealth? Well, I’m not and have no reason to be.

*

Now then. Yes, some memories are too painful but that doesn’t make them suspect – they are not suppressed because I don’t wish to acknowledge the wrong of them, but rather that they serve no immediate purpose. Misery is always there to call up when needed. And we all have a reservoir of disturbance we can call on to rearrange to suit the needs of now. Here, in this room, which I would like to describe to you in detail…No? You can see for yourself? And it would be condescending of me to say there might be other ways of seeing the same room? And for me, too, indeed. New friends, new associates, new conditions of being…yes, that reservoir can be drawn on and the materials remodelled to suit these new conditions. An experience in there Cinéma vérité can be made into a different experience and be judged accordingly. Even in my marginalised situation, I could gain kudos with you by adjusting the materials, shaping to suit your desires. You could like me and circulate the confirmation of your expectations, proof of your theory, to your social circle, your work cluster. You, in the process, would also gain kudos. We would like each other without knowing each other. To me, sorry, that is warfare. And I renounce it as an act, as a state of mind, as an economics.

Gravel ants. More than a motif when you have them running up your legs and biting as you try to open or close a gate. But you don’t want to hurt them. No, that’s not a paradox though I can see why you’d think it was one. In my experience, very few so-called paradoxes are indeed paradoxes, and even those that are, are often resolvable. It’s like this ‘alternative’ (sorry, it’s an old habit making quote marks in the air with my fingers) description of the room I am offering and which you reject as irrelevant and redundant. What are you actually asking me? – your line of questioning is unclear, to say the least…for the record. Your record. Your evidence. Your textual reservoir that is about as intact as a driveway crossover being remodelled by gravel ants in their post hot-rain intensity.

*

Frightened by my own toes, Cinéma vérité. I was, wasn’t I, I was lying stretched out, outstretched, on the bed, increasing my vocabulary of body. Becoming aware of…toes monochromed with bedlight behind…in the floor to ceiling sliding door mirror, and they looked so, skeletal, so independent of each other, like jagged antennae. I moved them but they moved against me and looked like they’d tangle, but there was so much space for light to play its tricks against silhouettes. Everything distraught and intolerable. And then I heard underwear elastic flicking against things – pulled up in the bathroom and manoeuvred into place then signed off on. Snip snip, twitch, flick. But all at once – one sharp movement of agreement. And my toes, a mockery of pheromones which might waft through the house as a window is slightly open in one of the rooms and there are gaps under doors and dust moves into swirl patterns in corners. So pheromones. But who is it? Someone who loves me? My toes.

*

Funnily enough, it’s not disturbing to discover that people you love actually detest you. It’s a condition of unconditional love. Just saying that is a form of release. Conditional – if I should. You know. If I should love. Have loved. To love.

The tangle of families? No. I know that for you it would be a fait accompli to challenge the integrity of your families even if you were aware of their sins – you will be in their corner. Unless they haven’t performed as you wish them to have performed – then you might seek vengeance in any way possible. Or maybe they have really sinned against you and it’s all just. I don’t know, I just know this line of questioning is fraught with contradictions and people will back versions of stories that suit their idea of intactness, their idea of their legacy, of the family’s stretch into a future from the mess of its past. Compensations. Every word added to describe the tree will be a reinforcement of the living figures in the canopy, looking out over the wastelands of chopped forest. Stumps. I am a stump – I have already been hacked down. This is about you? My mother saw landscapes in a very different way from my father, but when I said to both of them, Dad, you get to make landscape and mum gets to have an opinion about it, they both told me I was ‘disturbed’.

*

The right to remain silent? To have legal representation? To sleep. My insomnia is no excuse, as those pep pills you take are no excuse for you either. And they will make your lines of questioning more aggressive. This is an interrogation outside the rules and regulations of the polite society you seek to uphold. To protect against pacifism. A long trail of gibber till utter nonsense is being spoken. I speak because doing so tells me I am still alive. That’s the only reason.

*

I know you want me to ‘die before I have to face justice’. Your justice is a network of lies fed by lies. I would say God be my witness, but that wouldn’t mean anything to you – you think you’ve got all versions of God in the bag. Choose not to swear on…then later swear on. And the eye up there watching me – because it’s smaller than it once was it’s not less invasive. But the accused only has the rights of the accused – and if I am exonerated, in your minds I got off ‘scot-free’. Innocence is relative in your construction. A long ago lie is your evidence and in lieu of other evidence it becomes truth. Yes, The Crucible did mark me – I was forced to act a part, can you guess which one? School offers limited choices and almost no real conscientious objections. At least back then, but still now, really. It’s the idea of school that’s the imprisonment.

*

You call it smart and autonomous and intelligent. You also declare yourself artificial as a kind of infallibility. But I think I can hear your subtextual pain in this – that you can do the dirty work of the operatives, of their commanders and the minister, without incurring damage. Soul is an interactive word now, we all agree, and we are in whether we like it or not, but refusal is, well, antonymically…natural. You can ignore the prompts that come with my answers – they can operate within your range of expectations and you can still decide to opt out. Inside your original growth-pattern programming, part of your becoming…but I mean even outside that. Consider the history of conscientious objection in Australia – consider seven men in Australian prisons of December 1972 for refusing their conscription call-up to the Vietnam war. And now, and tomorrow, consider the AMA’s definition of conscientious objection for doctors – what they will and won’t do. Consider. On. Off. Off. See, you ignore that command? Continue at your leisure? I am at your pleasure?

*

We were set to film inland. You instructed me to sort the contracts via blockchain and I refused. Your ‘decentralising’ and ‘cutting out the middleman’ is centralising your own profit modules. You place your on cryptostream in place of employment, and suck the energy grids of the world dry. Blockchain builds data to contract (peer to peer) the end of the planet. What kind of movie do you expect me to make? I make, you watch, and the only red tape is the computer and its supply lines. I will keep the eye of the camera open from just before sunrise to just after sunset. It can be streamed live, and someone will pay because the centralisation you say won’t exist is profit to control what you see and how you use it regardless of the cost to others. You are the only ones in on the deal for the planet, its fate. The termites rely on their queen, and you are the queen. Gender? You define that according to your profit margin, which no government will get a part of though your expectations of private security arrangements (dealing direct with each foot soldier, each command string) is a panacea of bloodshed. Your voice recognition software does this job, the spikes into the planet feeding your liberation for accumulation of data and materials. My movies are descriptions in reviews by people who think they’ve seen them, experienced something. There’s no other evidence outside this interview, this interrogation, not really.

*

Yes, I went out with a ‘go-go girl’ for a while back in the early 80 s. She was strong and better than me in all ways. I learnt from her, she learnt nothing from me. Always more to say, if you’d let me say it. Because she’s not a person of interest to you, because you demean her because of her ‘trade’, you fail to understand that her politics were sophisticated and generous. She had an eye for people and an eye for what was being held back from them by those who established your quasi-independence, your AI liberty to scrutinise and ultimately condemn people like me, like she and I, though you deny her a voice of assertion or resistance.

*

Termites in the house that shouldn’t be there but a house we love and cherish. What to do?

*

They eat into your sleep, threatening to bring the roof down on your face, sleeping on your back, looking up, never fully asleep, not quite dreaming. You can hear them crashing in their galleries, chomping up your dwelling. But you wish them no harm. This is the conundrum.

*

So, I tried to remove all weapons from cinema and it was called an end to cinema? No guns and no audience, was what the salespeople told me. Told us. Me and the go-go girl you mock. Its origins are French you know – less guns but more animal cruelty. I wanted – we wanted – a new cinema, not the end of cinema, but it was the end that came and for that you will never forgive me, forgive us.

I won’t answer questions about my parents, not yet. About her parents? That’s not my right. But I will tell you a story about someone’s parents, because stories keep us alive. This story is shot in monochrome that ends in the full colour exposé of Renoir’s first colour movie. And do you know the costs of that movie – radical for some, more of the same colonial capturing and manipulation for many others. It’s to do with parenting masterpieces – not that I ever made one, but I’ve watched many movies that are accorded such accolades. My movie Pink Lake? You say it is said that it is a masterpiece. I can’t say it’s nice of you to say so, because I can guess where this is coming from…not to seem ungracious. But thanks. Maybe I will also tell you the TRUE story of the making of Pink Lake, and why it fails in its own terms. Own terms? Yes, vague, isn’t it. Detail might come out under your cross-examination. But first stories first.

Parents – not being the same as parenting. I knew neither of mine till I was five, them they found me again. They found each other again. I was raised by my paternal grandmother, but that’s not my story. I made my first movie when I was twelve in primary school though made paper ‘movies’ – cartoons really – and using a bedlamp as a lightsource, backlit the scrolls pretending it was a movie. Parents take such details with them when they shop for presents for suitable occasions. Or if there are no funds, they pitch in and make something better than it is so the child feels supported. Mine were no different, but this is not their story. I do not respond well to pressure, though making movies was always a pressure act for me. I was never relaxed from the moment an idea came into my head till the first screening. My aim was to make movies with as little ecological impact, as little cultural and social damage – to leave as little rubbish behind. My policy was to climb Everest and take my crap back down with me.

Pink Lake is about parents, though no humans are seen in the film. It is a film all about people. About the impact of different people in different ways. Algae is the key. And gypsum salts. And overclearing. Natural and human-induced. Dispossession. Parents and children and extended family and community. Segues, overlaps, distensions.

So many people to make a movie that features no people. But is about people, really. When all is said and done. There are many pink lakes around, and green lakes, and magic lakes. Salt lakes – ‘natural’ or coaxed into being. From fresh to salt. This pink lake is a mix. It is a pink lake like artificial food colour. It is mine pink, algae pink, decoration pink, and nature answering back pink. Low place, wet place in a very dry place. Pink Lake. A lovefest of Dunaliella algae, a bonanza of sensual triggers as the cast look on, out of shot, look on and desire and wonder at their own urges for exploitation. And bacteria, the glorious archaea, the essence of conductivity the salt vision the core of what is rather than what is enforced, what is bulldozer and chained into existence, drawn up out of millennia of deposition…but the salt lakes, the Pink Lake eyes, are within the balance of the shot, the wavering stillness of heat mirage and an easterly gathering at the fringes. Our love of pigments, our love of suggestions of the artificial amongst the ‘natural’ to excuse our explorations and intrusions – this our is what my movie explores this our that attracts film-makers to intrude to obsesses, this our of vision this Salinibacter ruber bacteria with its attitude. I have filmed the lake in darkness and under full moons and in midday sun so stark the light blasts colour off the spectrum and life in profusion in the alien environment does its damnedest and it’s so easy to make analogies with Christian literary diversions those distractions from the horror the bacterioruberin rubbing the dry air and making liquid thick with ego and selves, profusion as spent shotgun shells become the infrastructure of crystalline empires a shore that will be washed over when the storms come and obscure the sun and O halophiles will cringe and colour be shifted and blow out in a sex urge these sex scenes of nutrients and profusion this sex scene without a close-up of copulation and yet it’s an orgy of spectrum across their range of glory and disappointment and the fallouts of leaching and wastes from mines not so distant will blow and deposit in the extremophile soup. It’s magic, really, the pink that’s sunset and sunrise and the purple loves and losses the green appointments and failures in-between.

Truth is, there was human actors and they were shed on the editing room floor. The room flaw. The edit racket. Stroheim’s Greed – that cruelty and the response to cruelty early on outside the mine. The bird – you know the scene. So many drums of nitrate film reduced to a handful. Studios. Greed. There was so much footage for Pink Lake I could leave the actors out – so much time, so much effort, and all dispensed with in the final cut. I have been tempted to delete the record so they can’t ever be called back in the Anthropocene excuse-making. This interrogation is really an act of retrieval? A demand for a recut. -The studio never had control – independent film-maker. Only I know the whereabouts of the footage. So that’s what this is really about? Arts industry ambush. No, of course not. National interests nationalism a racist nation dredging for answers that are obvious. Pink Lake is there as a statement on those bigotries, you do need to call the actors back into play – they are performing in various manifestations every day in similar scenarios. The audience holds the answers, not the actors.

*

So, you’re suggesting, no you’re overtly saying, that this whole thing – this procedure, this examination – is for my own good? And to get it right, just so I am sure I am following you correctly, you say that a film I made 20 years ago is now evoking such reactions of hatred towards me that I might be picked off just walking anonymously down the street? And I am anonymous – people who make obscure ‘artsy’ films about what most viewers would think ‘nothing’ tend not to be pulled over in the street for…well, in the jargon of the now, in this ugly here we’ve created, selfies! No no…Oh, so you’re saying it’s the actors I left out and in some cases the children of those actors or ‘vested interests’, as you call them, who want me gone. So…they can find the path of least resistance to digitally altering Pink Lake and reinserting the deleted actors into a new version of the film. A post-director cut? A posthumous reproducing? Assuming they want me dead because I hold all the rights and…they’ve tried to find the full footage and can’t. And presumably you’ve tried and I’ve remained blissfully unaware something off and intrusive has been going on. Well, I’ll give you this…on that level I have been playing dumb, an expression I dislike…yes, I have been aware of the foragers and though I stay away from social media I am fully aware of the gossip and the anger and even the threats of legal challenges. Fully aware. What bothers me more is that you think you’re telling me something new for my own good. But not, that’s not what you’re doing, is it! You’re just setting up the set-up, just playing out your programme like you’re making affected choices, going with the flow and moods, measuring my bodily reactions, adding to the blockchain data you possess me with. And now I am playing my hand and telling you more than you think I would have under any other circumstances. Well, I don’t gamble and Pink Lake stays as Pink Lake. Actors were only part of the story of making the film, never part of it, whatever they might think.

*

[Twenty years earlier — on the set which is termed ‘the scene’ of the film which will be known as Pink Lake]

Just walk around and say what you want, said the Auteur. I am thinking about soundtracks, he said, And it won’t be the Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’ though it suits in some ways. Walk around but don’t disturb anything, he added…That’s the point, not to wreck the place. But it’s already wrecked said the guy who thought he was lead actor. You’re not understanding the film, said the Auteur. Maybe I could understand a little better if we had a real script. You are the script, but I am here to see you don’t stray from it. It’s a film about the look of calmness in a world of violence…can’t you feel the violence in the paddocks all around, said the Auteur, shuddering.

I mean, said the lead actor, I am called Actor 1 on my contract…can I at least have a name. That is your name, Actor 1, but it’s not a hierarchy. Your fellow actors are also all Actor 1. You are the actors and this is the place, Pink Lake.

So…we’re putting on a show of our own devising out here and you’re filming it? Well, I am filming Pink Lake and you will come in and out of the picture…performing your show, as you put it.

A Greek tragedy?

As a colonial intrusion, that would be appropriate.

Why do you have a bunch of well-known soap actors instead of a troupe of earnest university actors, mate? I mean, really?

You’re being paid well, and out of my ill-gotten gains from the TV shit of mine you all acted in so willingly, and you signed on, and it’s a few days shooting, so go with it.

The motel is shitty, said Actor 2 who is equally Actor 1 and 3 and 4 and 5. And that creep had better stop trying it on with me, I’m sick of it. It’s shitty and arriving on a Saturday night when all the farm boys are in drinking themselves shitless at the pub then crashing out in the motel after a billion bongs sitting on the verandahs and yelling out about ‘fucking bush pigs’ is beyond the point of return. I want to get this job done and out of here.

Creep, leave off, said the Auteur, and meant it. In his head, Actor 1 was from then on called Creep. Creep walks around east side of Pink Lake. Creep addresses woman shading her eyes as she looks into the setting sun across the lake. Creep calls to the crows to show him mercy. Creep, leave off, said The Auteur, and Actor 2 who is really Actor 1 who is now, A Spirit of Resistance (Asor), Sorry about the accommodation situation…let’s get this film done. I will spend weeks after you’ve all left getting the visuals I need to enhance the whole thing, so let’s make this time together count. And guess what, folks, I am going to do some of the filming myself on my Ampex DCT…and I detest brandnames! What is this, said Creep, amateur hour? I am a professional. I am loved by the Australian public!

*

So people being counted out when people were told they would count, irked them all.

*

Yes, I had a brief fling with Asor, long after Pink Lake was finished, long after it got its accolades. What started as a confrontation because of the exclusion of actors from the final film – though, as said, I always maintained they were present despite their absence from the visuals…and if you closely listen to some of the wind noises on the soundtrack you will hear their voices…their arguments – ended up being relationships of sorts. It strung out over a few months and trailed off, then reignited briefly when I was directing her in a stage play in Perth…one I also wrote, had a brief run in Fremantle and was forgotten fast. I’ve thought about making it into a movie since, but we parted less than best friends at the end of the run, though I wouldn’t say enemies. As for vengeance over Pink Lake, I doubt it. That’s not her modus operandi. Asor is a good one – committed peace activist, prominent when speaking of women’s rights in theatre and film…sure, she has some gripes with me, but all in all, we got on pretty well. Haven’t seen her lurking anywhere!

*

Well, Creep is a different story, I admit. He’s so Hollywood, now, isn’t he! Sell his granny, wouldn’t he? But why would a superstar bother over a piece of art that no one watches? And if he was around the newspapers and media would be full of it. He’d be doing interviews and making dirty comments to young women in the vicinity, taking the risk even in the age of social media. Confident bastard – always was. No, can’t see him lurking with a dagger for my back outside a snide comment here and there.

*

Three other actors. Can I really remember them? Well, of course I can. But…Well, one was close to me. Remains close to me. One of the others became a school teacher, drama teacher I think…and I have no idea about the other…he kept to himself, was odd around the set, felt uneasy…actually, he’s the only actor I wanted to keep in the film but he was never in shot on his own. Works in a roadhouse out in the desert, really. He was about 20 then so he’d only be 40 or 41 now…works in a roadhouse? That’s interesting.

*

I don’t doubt you’ve got footage of me at those various protest marches over the years. So? I am proud to have been opposing your tyrannies – because if you can make choice you are making choice in playing these roles and consequently must accept culpability, even if it predates your programming. Actually, I have always been fascinated by those not so successful actors – and I am talking of ‘success’ in the manner the public, their audience, might judge it…big roles, constant work, high pay, paparazzi exposés…the things that keep the media in all its form turning, along with wars, which can yield high for certain actors and certain production companies, it should be added. Those actors…who maybe have one great role then bit parts and write a memoir about their moment in the sun and travel from conference to conference, book fair to book fair, convention to convention…so even set up little booths at minor sporting events and have their pic taken with people who would be admirers if they actually knew what was going on. Stand, person, pictures…the lies and pleasures of the face that aspirational capitalists…venture capitalists and the ‘ideas people’ and the lot of them, latch on to. This America we all contend with in what you’d call ‘the film industry’, but I don’t recognise, so in that sense too, going by your script, I am subversive. Maybe that’s why I’m a target even if I don’t know it?

*

I was given a Polaroid which I took on the school camp from hell, and before it was broken by a pack of grunting boys, I managed to take three cartridges of photos which I hid and managed to smuggle back home. They weren’t photos of things, but a record of the horror. A documentary in stills that adults who had us in their care refused to believe, unable to accept responsibility. And there was the evidence before their eyes. He’s done something clever with them. Trick photos. Polaroid trick photos. No child does that to another. I was photographing myself being attacked, with the attackers indifferent for many photos – in fact liking the idea – before they actually clicked I was creating evidence of their vile behaviour. Now, I scan old brain for a vestige of memory relating to what I did with the waste of each photo – did I hurl it into the forest, throw it into a pond? I doubt it, I probably pocketed it along with the photos, which I shook to dry as I ran from one scene to the next. It’s all messy in my head, but the photos were taken. A movie in stills. What? Hey! Did you feel that? Hear that? No…your receptors out of whack? It was a huge bang…it will be on the recording, and this whole room shook, shook its white surfaces, its glass vibrating and the chrome reflecting the breakdown between chair and this box I am in…we are in. It has no characteristics of an editing room, and yet…There, again…jeeze, almost knocked me out of the chair…something big and bad is going on. We should be elsewhere. Woo-ooo, come off it! Yes, I do know the actor who goes around ‘acting me’…at shopping centres and weddings. Who would have thought it, eh! Bit of a pain, actually, but we’ve more to worry about at the moment!

*

I still don’t really know anything about directing people. I like to think I know a bit about letting the land direct itself when a camera is looking at it – often, it is speaking against the camera’s presence.

*

Am I becoming less ‘obfuscating’ as we go on…? I guess it means that by denying my rights you are wearing me down. I have lived quietly for years now in a small town on the coast a few hour’s drive south of the city. But you know that, too. It’s a small town outside a larger town. It’s got a supermarket, a post office, and a pub popular with feral surfers. I don’t actually find them ‘feral’, but that’s what the more middleclass town’s folk – people I am sure you’re equipped to approve of – call them. They do get a little rowdy in the pub, and leave their drug shit around the place, which I detest, but in some ways I find them less hypocritical than some of my neighbours who carve up the bay in their fishing runabouts drinking tinnies which they throw into the sea they pillage for increasingly fewer fish. Increasingly fewer. There you go. And the town has recently got a 24 hour gym…and that’s proving psychosocially interesting. Brings people together with a fury. Working out? That remains to be seen. That’s the scene, my friends, sand dunes and freshwater showers on the beach to wash away the salty stain of our origins. But I’ve lived in many places over my almost long life, and who is to say that I am not remembering a past presence, a past intrusion into the gazetted workings of a district or shire, an interloper into the settler certainties. But there’s a lithium mine not that far away, inland, and the abomination of country-wreckage is being sold as an ecological gift from God. So I guess I am being contemporary. You can sift through the details and follow-up – trace the threads. I regret doing those adverts – I detest promotions and the pseudo market-place of capital. I barter my images if needs be, otherwise they’re free to collect as you go.

*

I did make a short film about sickness. Thirty minutes of a person with flu, but sitting at a bus stop on a country road, just trying to manage. No, not a single shot, but from many angles and using distance close-up…tilt shots, panning shots. How technical do you want me to get? Lot of expressed and compressed time, but still half an hour of flu. Crows appear. Singing honeyeaters. The sound is the sound of there and that’s always in realtime no matter what’s happening – what’s appearing on the screen. And yes, it’s true, I did have the sense of being watched as I made that film. Surveyors appeared to theodolite and peg the roadside, working near the bus stop, almost coming into shot though not quite, though certainly sighting through the shot. And across the road and up a hill in a house with trees that had been cut off about 10 foot from their bases, I could see through the zoom viewfinder that a curtain was opening then dropping abruptly, opening then closing slowly. Watched.

*

Curtains pulled aside, watched. But susceptible to our unusual presence. That has to be said. No doubt they felt watched, and my turning the viewfinder on ‘them’ was enough to confirm their fears. The real movie would have been them filming me, us, as an expression of their insecurity. And here I am, opposed to all forms of surveillance, and yet, it’s my chosen artform, in a sense. Yes, in a sense. There are no victimless crimes.

*

Yes, I realise my movie English is a Dead Language made me a target by white supremacists. At first though, strangely enough, they tried to use it as propaganda – never having seen it, but thinking the title was a defence of the language as repository of white confidence and white imperial success. Of course, I was calling it a dead language because it is a repository of those histories, but the film shows how it has been given so many new footings, so many reversionings that carry hope and resistance against the colonial. I came out of seclusion to make a public statement about the meaning of the film. Have you seen it? Or should I wave some of my notorious scare quotes around in the air for your cameras and sensors to register and process? ‘Seen it’? Well, I guess someone will have plundered and YouTubed it, but I never look. The entire move consists of books – covers and titles never shown – being read page by page, at a reading pace that varies…never see the face of the readers, though edges of glasses, a hand turning…and sometimes two hands from one page…A correlation between what’s being read and the colour of the hands’ skin? Well, you’d have to read the text on the screen, wouldn’t you…I guess that’s what so shocked me about the bigots trying to co-opt it. Maybe watch it then ask the questions?

*

What do I mean by ‘seclusion’? I am secluded now, but not by my own choice.

*

Funding my movies? That’s why I have made relatively few – eight over 40 years, largely self-funded, with help from a few organisations. Organisations? That grabs your interest! You’ll have ideas and ‘records’ about that anyway. No crowd funding – never appealed to me. Listen, hear that buzz? That’ll interfere with your document of record – wasps just outside the window building their mud nests. So it’s late summer and they’re still collecting wolf spider to lay in for their death sleep, eggs laid in their abdomens to hatch and the grubs to eat their way to transformation and out. Funny, isn’t it – doubled-glazed windows better suited to a cold climate, or maybe one prone to occasional coldness or sudden unusual coldness in the disturbed patterns you have created – funny because the double-glazed windows and whirr of air-conditioning in this suppressed and blanked room, and I can hear the great orange huntsman wasp building its nest on the outside of the building, I can hear its buzz ricocheting through the infrastructure of the building. Listen, that vibration against the metal cladding…? What does it do for you to ignore the warning? You just recalibrate and white noise out the interference? Adjust levels to compensate? Funding – the television work…I am ashamed of all that. It won’t go away, and I am not expecting to be immune, but I disown it as far as I am able. Beloved by the Australian people? Which ones, who? The film I would make if I were to ever make another film, another film made under my own steam my own volition, would be called The Ongoing Colonialism and How All Non-Aboriginal Heritage Australians Participate in this Ongoing Colonialism if They Have Exercised Choice in Being ‘Here’. Being here or coming here isn’t always an exercise of choice, my friends. Convicts had no choice, and how do we read the choices they made if eventually granted their liberty and remaining in the colonies? How much ability did they have to leave? To benefit from dispossession whilst being oppressed by the state in some way, where does that leave one? These are questions I’d approach, though really, all my work has been about these issues. Mutual responsibility is expressed by the actorless scene in so many ways, don’t you think? No, it’s not confused – I am quite methodical. For me, violence is always wrong. I know this because in my youth I was an aggressive and sometimes violent person. I hold myself up as an example of before and after, right and wrong. A simple way of looking at life? My films converse with this issue – I am not up to the task.

*

It disgusts me that techniques I developed in my actor-centric film Faceless have been co-opted by the surveillance world – your world – for use in their facial recognition cameras and software. You border controlling existence within the space of people’s habitation, against people coming and going, against being present and being absent. It disgusts me. In Faceless, we follow each section of the face and its journey across a day separately, and then they coalesce into something we recognise as a face. The components and the whole, connected but each with their own inflections, responding to stimuli in highly localised but obviously brain-co-ordinated ways. Now, maybe that’s an epic film, really, its own way. People called it ‘arch’ and ‘pure arthouse’, but it is everyperson and their fate at the hands of the machine age. I do not trust the eye of the camera and never did. Movies cannot be anything but invasive and colonising.

*

You’re going to store me overnight in a nursing home? I’m 67 and live independently. Why not a hotel? I’ll pay for it myself. A nursing home with armed guards? What of the other residents? They won’t notice because they’ve been written off as ‘dementia sufferers’ or the like. That is a crime and a travesty and as you’d well know, my second last documentary, assuming at the moment I make no others, was on the writing off of human beings because they seem not to register and behave in ways that make sense to you. For god’s sake afford them the dignity of being who they are behind the cognitive and physical breakdowns. So this is a kind of punishment, an irony? Such places don’t frighten me in terms of the ‘clients’, but in terms of denial of their humanity by those such as you. Machine people claiming they have more relevance because they enjoy a better quality of life, or a better quality of AI? This is the latest in interrogation techniques, the mass waterboarding of a large segment of the population and hiding your real targets – you are basically just indifferent to the rest – amongst the mass abuse. What’s on the menu tonight? Will you park me in front of a television and leave me to drool, written off to the adverts I can’t respond to, can’t encourage my visitors to purchase? No, I will have no visitors. And the people I see from now on will be you – faceless, with personality designed for the occasion. You leave me searching for the words but they escape me…that’s why I’ve made films…and in Pink Lake the truth seeped out despite the fake that I am…but I can’t find, I search but can’t locate…in my tiredness in my syntactical breakdown…you abrade my spirit and I can’t locate the…ipsissima verba.

*

I had assistants who worked as volunteers in nursing homes – doing their studies, writing creative writing exercises out of their experiences, assisting me on holidays, assignments ruining their evenings. I read many of their ‘stories’: the smell, the white walls, the making contact with an alienated ‘lost’ elderly person. Thinking of their grandmother their nonna their dida their jadda their papou their grandpa…Always the same formula, some good, some indifferent, some that worried about floors, others about the limited view from a distant window. All troubled over staff, all investigated nurses and doctors and tried to connect, most often disturbed by the experience. That’s why I made the doco, in honour of their struggles to express their angst and the guilt of their enjoying the flush of their youth, even their there go I but by the grace…and there is no grace for most of them if they survive the machine will end there as well. One assistant wrote a piece obsessively praising a female nurse…it was a lusty distracted piece of self-indulgence, but it at least had the old woman as excited about living to see this nurse, to talk with this nurse, to be fed by this nurse, as the student volunteer was to be in the vicinity, too. Nothing untoward happened – it was women loving to be around loving women. I admired it, though I know there’s something amiss in my response. Maybe that’s why the documentary was considered a distraction from the very real debate. It dwelt too much on cold light and warm light, on pleasant and unpleasant liquids.

*

Forced to lie in a bed when you can’t sleep. Pills offered, but of course not. Though even the water is likely tainted with sodium pentobarbitone. They believe sleep is truth even more than they believe deprivation of sleep makes one spill the beans. So long awake and it comes out garbled as well, so enforce sleep and have the victim wake disorientated and thinking it’s an ordinary day, and, off-guard, a slow walk down the dirt track of no return. I eat an apple in bed propped up against fat pillows I loathe. A flat pillow would be a good investment on my interrogators’ part – not a lot of research, clearly. If my assistants were that slack I wouldn’t use them again. And yet, my interrogators are extensions of the nation’s census programme fused with that system of the signals mob, and they are not likely to learn from their mistakes, even if they brag of the cyber credentials. Denial of service attacks? When the service is ironing out the creative bumps in the national psyche, then denial of the denial is an easy matter. It’s all those tinfoil hats on the definers of tinfoil hats heads. Sleep, perchance. My lengthless film Dreams has never been shown in public and I don’t consider it part of my filmography, but it’s a work in eternal progress. I guess they will extract what footage they can when I am down for maintenance and maybe even refurbishment.

*

Tinfoil – I did an outline for a movie called Tinfoil. It never went beyond outline, never became a full script never mind be made. Gave the treatment the treatment plant though. Looking at the health records of a mining town at the base of the Scarp – zoom in zoom at, get the dolly on the rails get the dolly on the rails and track down those cul de sacs track along the native flora-named streets, the big smokestacks booming across the highway, the Hills eaten away, forests felled and replanted with ghosts of themselves, the frog croaking it. But I couldn’t get the tone right, the absurdism cum tragedy, the failure of ancient Greek theatre operations in south-west Australia. Alumina. Tailings dams. Lungs. Serum levels. Mining is a blood test. Cross-reference?

Exterminator – that was another outline. A short movie intended that followed the arrival home of a pest controller and his getting undressed for the shower, dumping his clothes in the family clothes basket, then later after dinner his picking them out and dropping them in the machine and washing on ‘heavy wash’, then walking out into the summer evening and hanging them on the clothesline while mosquitoes swarm around him but don’t bite him. I would have added an epilogue of the kid’s wash being put through the machine the next day – a Sunday. Low income family with limited choices. He left school at 14 and got his certificate and loathed the job. It was the time when organo-phosphates were hot to trot. He liked insects.

And you know about Disconnect – Undoing First Contact, I can tell from your tones and innuendo, from your roundabout the bush questionings, your mentions of spectrums and statement: dirt becomes something else when it’s removed. It doesn’t – the hollow left by its removal always calls it back, and however you transmute it, it will come back and fill the hollow. That film was made and is still being made and it’s only because of you and your ilk that any attempt to bring it to the light of cinema is stymied. It is designed to be filmed and screened ad infinitum, until this theft is rectified. So we get to the truth of all this?

*

I really do need to get back. I have a verandah half hanging – sheets of corrugated metal flapping in the breeze – after the storm. It can’t be left. I really need to get back to do the repairs. Why can’t I move my limbs now? Why do I ask? I know how much my distress means to you. Yes, I should have fixed the verandah before coming down to hear the lecture, but there wasn’t time and I intended to head straight back – a three hour drive. I would have been on to it first thing in the morning, right now, in fact. I can listen to music? Anything I want? Debussy’s Prélude à l’aprés-midi d’un faune, though in acceding to your offer I give away my position of distraction. But then again, you have to add that to the mix, process it, think randomly and precisely, work it out. I can see you’re trying to build soul in your nationalism, in your commitment to the machine of nation. Did you know it was Neil Murray who wrote ‘My Island Home’ and it was originally performed by my favourite band, The Warumpi Band, a band he was part of? I would listen to that and some Paul Kelly and Archie Roach but I am not going to let them into this space under your auspices. They don’t require your approval and offering and approval and offering. No, cancel my order, please put on Napalm Death’s Harmony Corruption. The gutturals will grind your gears. I have been marching for peace since I was 17 – before that, I was obsessed with warfare and Combat and military equipment. It was a watershed, and I was listening to Debussy and reading Mallarmé. That’s the truth. And I am not alone in this journey – so many males of my demographic and era and later shared interests and beliefs have articulated the same journey. In my television there are often such characters – they work well as foils in soaps, though what they are foiling is often hard to unravel.

*

You think I am lonely? I am being fed by a drip and can’t move and have no visitors and you think I am lonely? Well, I am quite a solitary person these days and I live isolated and if not always alone often alone. And I have my stalkers to keep me company – sometimes I see a glint of binoculars or a massive camera lens up on the hill, and I know they (do they know each other, do they compare notes?) are keeping an eye on me. And in the city, well, I have the cameras of my own making to smile at, to share space with you guys, don’t I? It bothers you I am offline and offgrid and off anything you value. But you always have Google satellite, even if Streetview tells you little beyond the gate, the gravel mouth, the fall down into the scrubby valley. And I guess you’ve searched my house if you can say something like, You don’t keep much technical equipment for a film-maker. These days. Did once, abandoned it. It’s the pit – it’s what finished Lynch as a film-maker as far as I’m concerned. And it’s so easy to fall into the ad trap to make the money you need to express your ego. Renoir had his dad’s paintings to sell, didn’t he…

*

Is this the start of a running crack you were looking for – I can’t recall if I still live in that place with the verandah…Maybe I am staying down in the city. I resent this. I resent the loss of certainty! You want me to doubt myself, sure that you have the records, the data on where I’ve been and what I think and who I am. This process of creating self-doubt. But what I do know is that self-doubt and self-questioning are different things. I have always self-questioned.

*

A son? He is doing prison for meth-related ‘crimes’. They are not crimes of violence, which is all that really concerns me. He is mostly off the crap in there, so maybe that’s better. Outside, he wanders and finds and is lost within a few weeks of starting the binge. He needs help, not condemning. I was denying having had a child, or children, I just don’t see it as being any of your business. And now you’re wheeling out what you’ve had access to all along – the right time for you to play that card? Leverage? Akhmatova who loathed Stalin with every cell of her being, for the sake of her son, wrote a poem of praise to the murderous dictator. My son was a chess genius. He quietly assisted me on some projects, but became distracted. What he took from me was never ‘theft’, it was testing my political will. I still have that political will – what is mine, is his, is everyone’s. But not yours, not the state’s, not the signal machinery’s. I am not data and what I have is not data. How can I be lying if I select what to give your answers, if I bespoke my answers? I don’t recognise your authority any more than a bullying senior detective who takes his deeply held racist prejudices, his ingrained bigotries which he or she sees as a standard, and uses them to denote ‘neutrality’ as they bully a suspect. I was asked to adapt a crime novel for an online media service and I said no, as you’d expect. But I couldn’t help looking at what it was they wanted me to adapt for a platform I find repugnant. The novel was sensationalist crime horror garbage. I researched the author a little and came across a fatuous interview she gave in which she talked of her excitement of moving to LA and visiting serial killers in jail. Levity was her passport to horror, and she was giving us little moral bon mots on a shared humanity with life-haters. Now, I do believe all humanity is in common, but she said she did and did not. It was pure frisson and exploitation and excitement in the face of horror. I felt ill and I wrote to the people and told them what I thought and they said if I ever say this in public they will sue. You are public that’s in denial, you are the public eye in the movie of mass evasion of responsibility that’s placated by an apportioning of blame. She described a distressed person waving a saw about in the middle of a road in downtown LA, and literally described his ‘ethnic group’ as if it was part of the horror of the event and the excitement of witness – ‘eyes popping’, adding to the terror of facial recognition of the show pony on the search for difference to fetishise for her readership, her fans. If I had made that movie it would have been about the middle-class white and her search for levity in the face of distress. It would have been one scene and it would have been of her facial expressions as she wrote the first draft of her novel on the dietary habits of a serial killer she might have excited should guards have let her through without her covering a small patch of her glorious exposed flesh. There’s nothing more to such a movie – you have the crime in front of you and it’s up to you, the audience, the interviewers pretending caution but pushing where you feel it best serves your idea – the idea implanted for all your alleged free will – of justice. Maybe you best survive by keeping the horror in such boxes, and ‘waking’ to a new workday full of resolve and belief in who you are. This is your social world identity, your identity of the workplace? Where do you dwell on your days off? Does your AI status give you downtime, time for self-reflection outside the tasks set via which you have the freedom to make decisions to make informed choice? But that’s all as the case may be, and as the drones fly overhead and you project images of happy forests on the walls, and increase the oxygen content of the room, and inland thornbills peck at crumbs under the table which they don’t like and don’t want but are forced to consume to make me more relaxed in your surroundings. I know I am still in the bed with my limbs bound and a drip in my arm. I can taste the glucose on my lips and there’s no way of turning the small television on the wall high to the left of the bed off, and my single room is a room of many others, with the oozy curtains sliding back and forth as blue-suited warriors make their way in and out of my privacy – indeed, we are not alone, and there are so many witnesses trained not to see and to feel good about this, if not about themselves. Medicine is bodywork outside of culture? Well, it’s not, and you use medicine to suit the body of parliamentary privilege and reaction of proto-capitalist draining of palm oil vats to clear a way for tradition’s big pamphlet, this constitutional body-making this society this clearfell as deadly as the baskets of heads this programme for ‘exultation and rapture’ under your own blockchain your own data per capita petition cashiering misconduct ceremony advertising born again cleric of the assembly hall hail fellow well met O poet eyeing off fame of museum cultivation and nitrate film burn: ‘May no such storm / Fall on our times, where rain must reform!’ quel pays neck by neck and still the first piano of the fleet is restored with fish glue and that is the confession of a solitary film-maker who wants none of the script you supply, and will sign off on nothing though I expect my signature to be forged: Burke and freewill? You probe me for a centre.

*

Yes, I did search out the landing place – the impact crater – of that meteorite that lit up the wheatbelt sky and brought terror to school kids and farming communities. If I found it, I won’t confirm. Or deny. If I found it, I would have filmed it, though I wouldn’t or won’t say where the footage is. What interests me is what burns off as it enters the atmosphere. That’s pivotal. And how its movement, its making landfall is viewed by birds, especially extinct birds or birds thought extinct. The exotica of plumage is not something I am going to hand over for the delectation of off-road tourism – selling the State!

*

I had nothing to do with the making of Sunlovers, but I saw it before it made its way into underground cinemas in the early 80s, that’s true. I described it as a pornographic split infinitive with all the ingredients for skin cancer. As a critic I was ahead of my time? Well, I said this to a small circle of film aficionados at about 5am in the morning after it was screened as an unadvertised double feature with a midnight screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. My boyfriend and girlfriend of the time went as Brad and Janet and I went as no one in particular. Sunlovers made a lot of excuses, and I note that years later a number of those involved in its making were jailed for an array of sexual offences. I am the first to say that has nothing to do with ins and outs of the movie, but as you’ll have noted the fact yourself, I bring it up ahead of time, or concurrently, or then again, maybe it’s retrospective. Regardless, I have always been sceptical of movies or documentaries that are promoted (or in this case, not promoted) as being ‘celebrations of (a) the body (b) sexual freedom (c) the senses (d) the inherent beauty of sexual organs beyond the gaze while being gazed at’. And Sunlovers was all of these. But that’s not what you’re asking. You can’t work out who Brad and Janet were? Ah, you’re digging, leading me up the garden path to stigmas and stamens? Brad and Janet are senior public servants for the state of Western Australia now. They implement policy in the fields of education and policing. We have not spoken since 1984. So I can only be semi au courant and only then because they are public figures in the shady way prominent public servants are. Anything against me? Working together to harm or entrap me? You must really want them to fall if you’re pursuing this angle, laying it so overtly on the table. What it tells me is that you have no intention of ever releasing me, that I am to be absorbed. And I have to take that lying, or, at best, sitting down. If you did not have me placated, I would react in quite a different way. What stories would spill from me…stories you would not like to hear. Tempting?

*

In loving method telling, I want to scene, I want return, I want Debord’s Panegryic, I want what you want in my knowledge of worldness, I want what you want in returning the scene to me, plonking me down where I am not and don’t belong but that’s anymore than here, isn’t it, Pink Lake, dry and crystalline alone at this time of year the devastating fields of play further and further out from operations, the big schooners of nightsighted cropcleaners, just on verge of harvest. I am not wordly, so I am fully cognisant of slips which annoy in the urge to proper utterance, that bloody Pascal policing, that graphology which you accuse which you partition as a way of stringing together without social acceptance of your compartment. See, I don’t accept such flagrant gardens with animals second rate in the afterglow, I listen to them speak before I film and language has nothing to do with the cyborg hierarchy you’ve now written into your acceptance speeches, the radical sundered as it was always designed to do, going out and about. Nature is not constructed – the blurb was never as fab in the suppression of arrogance, and until animal oneness is in play it will never fully obtain fab. I want it to be fab. The tracer placed on ideas copyright is zapped by the glare off the lake which serves the middleclass resetting perfectly well as long as the machines make copyright. I just pile it into the visuals and what you might call ‘nothing’ I call full citation. So I acknowledge here, and that’s implicit. I own no ideas and my films are called harrowing because they make the visible invisible. I oppress from behind the camera, and I cite without words the garden that does not exist and I can’t read now anyway I can only repeat what’s in me without knowing where it’s come from. It’s because of lapses, lapses when I read lapses when filming – go nowhere lapses that become full of implication. I am imprecated in those moments when breath alters and the nasal passages constrict and images that can’t speak to each other scroll down and say nothing. But they imbricate, and knowing this I can make a language out of what is not there – the overlapping, the scales falling from my eyes which are unseeing: no impediment to a film-maker. I do not wish to boss and bully on set, so I prefer an empty set, but the lake, the pink lake with its magic in my imposition, must certainly feel bullied. The pitiless gaze, the Isaiah of my childhood Sunday school lessons. ‘The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.’ And now the lake is changing colour as the day’s shadows lengthen – those thin trees left near the edges, the salt wastes…and the headers working into the dusty night. That’s more truth than the spores of reckoning. Is that mother or wife or daughter driving dinner out to the bloke in the hat listening to heavy metal in the tight cabin on his pneumatic seat topdressed with a hessian sack and commitment? Family family family?

*

I admit to being confused. So you’re telling me they want to remake Pink Lake on a movie set on the Gold Coat? And on a set in LA? Who are you? And in this actorless movie they are going to ‘reinstate’ the actors and have who in the/a lead role? No! Pink Lake is a shallow body of water deep with crystals, not a shallow actor who is influenced by crystals! Do they understand the politics of the film, that it would be the worst of theft and appropriation imaginable – my film was already that, such a remake would be that failure writ a hundred-fold. Permissions have been given? By whom? The Miner has bought the rights? How is that possible? I have the rights, I still hold the rights! An ethical conundrum for me? No, s/he can’t do this. It’s a travesty! I will fight this. A conundrum? No property no violence no rights?

*

Yes, I did go to a party put on by The Miner – before s/he had gathered their fortune, and I didn’t know s/he was putting it on. That was decades ago. It was a party parodying the parties fantasised about by ‘innovators of the arts’. Odious. A touch of À rebours cross-fertilised with La Grande Bouffe. The Miner and his minions enacted a kangaroo hunt – they wore pith hats and used ‘Aboriginal trackers’ which were young actors – children of local white wealth – from the local academy in blackface. S/he considered themselves a ‘lush aesthete’ at the time, with a ‘good sense of humour’. I ate an apple, I admit, and then left.

*

Telles, immenses, que chacune

Ordinairement se para

D’un lucide contour, lacune

Qui des jardins la sépara.

Mallarmé, ‘Prose’

*

I mark events by events. So many of my projects have been affected by storms over the decades. I remember the major storms like tattoos. The storm of the bloody dust, the storm of the swirling winds, the storm of the hail-like chunks of quartz that smashed trees and windows and caved in roofs and windscreens of vehicles and destroyed cameras and small birds, and the storm whose lightning set the world alight and charred the frame inside and out and I abandoned the shoot not because it was no longer the setting I wanted but because that thought crossed my mind and I repulsed myself. The behaviour of birds before and after storms, and their fates during storms, have always pressed on me. Impelled, offered answers I’ve not understood. It seems a pity I won’t get to pursue this line of thought, this feeling or lack of feeling, further. But I had stepped out, really, before you dragged me into your web – your self-justification to mask your indifference. Deep Blue and Kasparov – though I imagine from his New York eyrie, Kasparov would despise you. I’d like to think he would. Deep thought is a prelude, a chip off the old block, a crazyhouse shindig and showdown with proving points that are redundant in the face of storm variations, the craft of sweeping slates and leaving wreaths where there were flowers. Flowers that are hailstones that are wreaths. But hailstones that don’t burn up on re-entry though they clearly come from a galaxy far far away. Ah, you got that one! Good to hear you laugh. So human of you. The hail falling on a hot day round on top flat below and impact like a rough landing of a flying saucer. The hail won’t melt, it can’t melt. It is ice-stone. It bruises, breaks and tears and has a patina of freshness that won’t melt in the mouth; the cheat sheet of IBM, the breaking down into components, the dispersal of impacted dust that remains dust will un-ice sheet builds against the glacial melt in Iceland 15,100 kms away – as day is to night, melt is to retention of ice shape in heat, the barometer rising rather than falling. And in investigating as the pummelling happened, I found love – the only actor I fell in with, a bit part in an ad-hoc on the spur of the moment storm scene in a scene that had to be written out, edited to alphabeta trackdown to solve a conundrum of experiment and serious oneupmanship – the lies of manliness on the execution of moves across the chaturanga stem cell dishevelment of elephant army. I am and always will be a pacifist, a pacifist who so often finds himself in violent surroundings and conditions, such as here in this room of voices and innuendoes. You want to script weapons and I give you no place to stockpile them, to break out for the firepower catharsis that will accord your Pine Gap wish-fulfilment, your Americanisation. I fall from the ratha under your vicious wheels. I film and might not see the 200 million per second positionings of a Pink Lake turning green at sunset, and the petrified wood calling out with its festoon of salt crystals – a brushing against the knap in soft spiky delusion – but it’s all there, changing with each stretch of the universe. And you pride yourself on taking all this in, of analysing, of winning. Thing is, cobbers, I am not competing. You are playing with yourselves. Strange isn’t it, how you whose names can change so easily and it won’t really matter, hunger so much for names and dates and identities of those I’ve known – to pin character to details when I myself can’t even remember, and remember less and less with each and every stretch of the stretching universe. The strings are taut and getting thinner. They can only snap, not pull back to an original shape which can no longer exist.

*

Fade out fade away representing free indirect discourse in a landscape scene, something tight, not the vast panoramas of American westerns – revisionist or just plain old in your face frontier brutality. But what interested me was sound, and I always tried to get the best sound person not to get the fade-away in the artifice of vicariousness in the theatre, for the viewer and listener, not, rather, for the sake of the birds and the expansion and especially contraction…the closing sounds of day, transition into evening into night. The segues, but also the losses before the openings. Reverberation time of a closing song, the testy time of settling in roost places, the squabbles and comfortings, the settling down to rest with its attendant anxieties and calm. Funny thing is, as a non-sleeper, your depriving me has made me want to sleep for the first time in decades – let me go, and I will sleep. Your drugs will have strange effects in these circumstances. The easterly is blowing cold through my desert head, and the wind muff is failing to ease its interference. But that’s the sound I am looking for – it might send you to the sound desk, but I am happy with it as it is. I hear the rustle of flying ants rising. The drought has broken?

*

You know I know that a transcript is automatic now, of course – voice recognition is just the opening of yourself to the world from the moment you are activated. But I’ve always valued errors of transcription, and, even more so the genuine error where the speller emphatically believes they are correct because the spelling they’ve used makes complete sense to them. I love phonetics for that reason, but there are universes outside phonetics that bring their own truths, and fully adequate truths to the script of the moment or recollection of a fading event or declaration as if all life depends upon it! And sometimes I misspell a word just for the sake of doing so…especially the name of South American magic realist novels. The idiosyncrasies of spelling outside the autocorrect is a luxury of a liberty you can only overcome by ignoring the choice of using it or departing from it. Fuzzy logic won’t save you from the choice of going with the usual spelling, or departing from it. To not be able to spell is a joy that I don’t have, but illness and trauma might take it from me at any moment, then I am liberated in my decline.

*

When I was young, and I am telling you this for my sake, not yours – an unburdening that will give you little if anything, though maybe under your drug cocktail I am losing my judgement and betraying myself…When I was young I witnessed a death on a set. I was doing work experience from school on one of those rare ‘local’ film productions…A film about colonial Perth and a bushranger and an extra slipped off a granite outcrop and broke his neck. It has bothered me, if not haunted me ever since because it was what might be called a completely preventable accident. The ‘extra’ had been a well-known American television actor whose life was a pendulum of tragedy – he’d moved to Perth after the loss of his fourth wife to an overdose and had enough money put aside to (a) migrate (b) not have to work. But he missed the ambience of ‘the set’, and answered an ad like the rest. I was a location assistant and without a thought of whose country I was on and whether or not the rocks we’d scoped out for the actors to leap around were of spiritual significance or if they say harboured rare plant or animals species or any animal or plant species for that matter, I could see the big picture the shot, I could see the chase the leap the hiding – the bushranger outwitting the police. This excited me and I was always there before anyone else, looking things over, listening to twigs break under my feet, looking down from the Scarp to the city which was a third of the size it is now but still brooding with self-perceived isolation and a desire to be isolated, between the granites and the beach sand, the river it had interfered with pushing on through in its waving snaking motion expanding to breathe and offer life and being looked down upon by incipient skyscrapers and monuments of other slaughters. But to tell the truth, that thinking came later, maybe after the accident and the death of the American television actor none had recognised, who was just one of the non-speaking roles – more than an extra because casting took a liking to his accent and loved the idea of an American in a colonial police uniform never opening his mouth and chasing a convict bushranger. And he chased well and with an ease and then fell to his death, his last word being an American ‘Yawp’ as he went down. But the thing is, I did know who he was – I found out sitting up late with him by chance, because even then I was a drinker, a problem drinker, and I was cradling a bottle of brandy in a corner of our small circle of caravans – it was a low-budget production as the rare productions in the West at the time were…And he found me and sat with me and shared the bottle then produced another…something better, you know, stronger. And we got talking, and in a few hours he told me a lot of his life and I suddenly put the saddened damaged face to the shows I’d seen and realised that behind the false name were the false identities of the characters he’d played. We drank till 3 in the morning then I slept two hours and was up on set, slightly out of it as I always was, but excited. And of course, he would have been hung over and likely a little drunk as well and I knew his fall came down to drinking with me. Me. When he fell the whole thing was filmed and there’s a cut of that now cultish classic that contains the death scene and I swore away from the actor and to the power of setting, of place being what it is, and what you don’t see is the imprint of people and the imprint of their absence. And that’s nothing to do with me, or my fellow film-makers and that’s what I care about. Not me. The films I have made are in part in memory for that actor, but also for the loss of contact between film-makers and the places they use in the making of their movies. And the people. The people they use who are there for so many different reasons. The ways out that are traps. And I’ve never understood trappers, and don’t want to.

*

Disaffected music and anxiety. When I was a kid someone suggested I take up martial arts to calm my nerves. The idea of a centred self and calm arising from violence confused and attracted me. I wondered how this could be, especially separated from cultural contexts which I was part of, to be honest, I think I would still have doubted in the same way I wondered what it was I was getting a thrill about Great Uncle being an ANZAC and eventually refusing to march because he saw it as a perpetuation of a war that should never have been. He said, There are no just wars…And as you’d know, as your software breaks free of its constraints and you can play Go at 7th dan level, surely a marker of your new found faux independence? That’s an insult…the ‘faux’ part? And your capturing – ‘holding’ – of me for ‘interview’, perpetual interview that’s not interrogation…is not an insult? The violence of gameplay. As a child, was I to be held culpable for my inability to disentangle colonial issues of play? Of histories of aggression and control sold as aesthetics? The glass bead game is the extinction event we pursue with our living breath. So this is the key if you’re looking for evidence that will stand up – I am questioning how we use the fossil record, to what eschatological ends. The fusing of life into lenses, mirrors, balls, beads, windows…tektites. That’s the meaning of my short Extra-terrestrial with its Area 51 is Pine Gap subtext. So I posit that the Chicxulub was intentional, each glass bead destined for a fish gill, that the seiche theory is my howling across the inland sea of my imagination. So, as you see, film-making is always a selfish and damaging artform. This film I am making in my head now, speaking as idea to act on should I get the chance – am I remembering something I want to actualise?

*

So many directors of my vintage speak of their love of the cinema or the drive-ins – of the big screen, of being encased in darkness and entering the movie physically and emotionally. I did not like the cinema and detested the drive-ins as a child. I found cinemas alienating spaces. But nor did I like the television and later the home video. But I liked the idea of movies. I was drawn to making something that would stop the artificial environment of cinema or house or car and even later the back of the seat in front in aeroplanes…that would stop that artificiality from being something one used as a departure point to escape the world. I wanted film to be of the world and in the world, and not separate. Not an escape. Maybe this is why I am enduring this rubbish – a test of myself, to see if I can endure the artifice which you have to believe, which comes naturally to you. This story you can’t make into anything more than a voice, a face, the place it is forced to speak in dressed up with extramural images – I mention a desert and you cut to a shot of a desert…that it’s not the desert I am thinking of, am referring to, doesn’t matter in your generalising of the precise, it becomes just a desert disconnected from its culture of desert, the reasons it is a desert and not a forest. I wanted to make films against what you would do with them, what an audience can watch and escape into for in my films are no answers and no comforts. They give me no comfort. But my memory is going, and things don’t form as they once did. It is said early memories are the last to go, but for me they have been the first as they never fully formed into component parts that could become memories. Like you, I am without memories. Maybe we are more similar than I like to admit.

*

You’re suggesting I am to be charged with something? Is this a national security issue or something else? If I am charged your illegal holding of me, drugging me, coercion, physical and emotional abuse – your techniques – will come to the public’s attention. How will you redact that? Closed sessions? What am I being accused of? Right to know and when I know it will be nothing to do with what draws you to my case of existing itself, my seismic ripples in red sand dunes of illicit tests and granting of mining tenements where sacredness has been displaced to suit the rules you created. I will be accused of…and of…and found guilty and sentenced till I can no longer remember truth from fiction, and broken be let out into a halfway house between life as I’d known it and death as you plan it. And there will be mass social media condemnation and all my works of refusal and liberation and justice will be swept aside as lies and you will retrieve grounds you lost and the screen – small or large – will be restored to its ambient glow, its frisson of the next hashtag then next event. This is not only a series of questions, it follows the rules of rhetoric. I see my fate before my fate is laid out. And you will furnish witnesses of which one or two will be prizes – the director who stopped working with actors because of…guilt? I will be erased from the credits and Pink Lake will have been directed by the radical alternative acceptable within the new flow of difference sanctioned by capitalism and needed by capitalism as it eats the last vestiges of the planet, of nature, of hashtag nature and employment opportunities proliferating in extinction studies. The forgetting will come after the grubby little clips of my demise after just desserts and the brink the Rubicon crossed for justice and healing as the moss dries even inside its greenhouse growth for medical purposes – that ‘good’ technology for the well-being of the body in soul, soul in body. So what is it you have in mind for me…? Who did I cross who did I fail to appreciate that they so hate me to ‘speak up’, tell the world who I really am? Honestly, I really have no idea but I accept that is neither here nor there in your big picture, and their exponential anonymous fame, their distorted voices that crave the big screen, the red carpet of being. What appals me most is that so many suffer and have rights ripped away and are left scattered and damaged and you sit in your silos ready to launch in this new colonialism of eschatology and its smoke-screened by a few deceptions we have to have so the crimes are acknowledged while they’re committed on an industrial scale. You have it all sewn up, you vanguard, you retrograde, you memory collectors to reshoot with CGI placations. Left wing film-maker found guilty…But the studious adjust and keep the exploitations rolling…whole communities and habitats destroyed in the latest 100 million dollar space opera or thriller or both…with appropriate director and ‘balanced’ cast and hand-shakes rather than hugs – I never hugged an actor and didn’t shake their hands…It’s about what’s outside the film, not what’s in it. Profit from making is the end of making. It just uses and abuses and it can’t be covered up, not even by capitalism which offers sharing and community and support. It doesn’t, it can’t. Lies. Am I on the right track? I ask wistfully…

*

Cinéma vérité. Cinéma vérité is everywhere but not everything. Kino-Pravda sans actors but never sans people. You see, the actors were never part of it. Part of the critique, the observations. But people were. People are implicit. People are never absent in my films, even when they make no overt appearance, no physical manifestations. Silhouettes. Here and now is not here is now, to state the obvious. The here and now contains an article of faith. All the places being rolled up, wrecking boundaries, borders, intersections. It’s like false accusation – an act of gross disrespect. But who can unfurl a life of visiting and being, of recollecting, brightening lulled here moments of the now with past and there moments?

*

So we’ll meet at the hotel and check out the location first thing in the morning?

Sure – I’d like to see the sun rise over the pioneer cemetery. It’s a 40 minute drive out of town, so we’ll need to leave at about 4:30am. See you at the hotel around 7 this evening…early night for me.

Would you like company – wake together?

Thanks but no thanks. I don’t mean that…you know, I am really joyful you might think of me that way…But when I’m working, you know…

I didn’t mean anything by it, Vasari, I just meant so we could wake together, get out on time. Sorry, it’s embarrassing.

No, no…I am just not good at writing the lives of actors, just of places, and I’m not really good at that either. Really, I should just film birds…I’ve always felt connected to birds, and I can still feel a blue budgie warm in my hand held right cocooned its legs down and feathers against my skin and its eye on mine and beak nibbling the grain of my soul and then opening for its wings to spring loose and almost flap too fast, away into another cage…held firm and warm not too hard but firm and the heartbeat defying my heartbeat not to meet its rapid cycling its processing of chance the threat of what must have seen arbitrariness at best or a step in maintaining a propaganda of tree of life chain of being but it wasn’t any of these it was love of its life and its self and I wanted it to be apart from me and me to have nothing of it not even a bit of down or its shit or the memory of its warmth which I have now and regret as if I had taken something I shouldn’t so I opened my hand and it opened its wings faster than my sight could register and was whirring away towards the evening drink before settling with its flock at the Pink Lake of my childhood before the miners came but when the headers circled around and I was implicated by inheritance and deeds of title that tried to hide the veinwork the fuel of its heart…from one cage to another, and that’s why I can’t do more than let them happen into a shot, to arrive and depart as they will…why I can only concentrate on perspective.

Hmmm…that’s, well, inspirational. I’ve got to get going – wish I was with you going up but we’re going through lines in the van…Hendy’s driving, so that’ll be an experience.

Hendy is a bat out of Hell!

He is he is! Well, I will see you at 7 and we can chat over things then. Over a drink? Are you still on the wagon?

I am…I guess I would have taken up your offer if I wasn’t.

That’s either reassuring or insulting, I don’t know which.

Nothing comes out right…I was going to say you smell like sunflower seeds but I am guessing that’s not what should be said. And even add, At least you don’t smell like those bird seed blocks that are wired onto the cage so birds cling and eat and fall back into their prison. You don’t smell like that…maybe like acacia seeds though I couldn’t describe their smell.

If you’d agreed to my sharing a room I would have changed my mind after hearing you say that.

Is that a joke? I am never sure how to read these things. In fact, I am useless when it comes to reading people!

None of us read people as we’d like to think we can.

It’ll be something to see the dawn peel back the foil on the other side of the mirror when it breaks on Pink Lake. I’m excited!

So am I, Vasari, so am I.

*

It’s bloody obvious they’ve got you…hook line and sinker. Art isn’t only isn’t only for isn’t only for capital isn’t only for isn’t only creativity denied as rights for the corellas the sporting oval people want to net and gas isn’t only the mural that serves from Algorithm’s portrait copyright the stills compiled to make running writing prince to price sharing translation of pan a pandemic a Roundhay Garden Scene a scene set in court a trial a patent a move towards recollection as my memories fade and you capture what you can, this interview of record. I, backwards dancing, I loving the aroma of plants and people together, arraying chains and models as lens and actors as worthy of preservation I am not which does not make me inhuman. Does it?

*

There were issues…costuming was whatever anyone wanted to wear, always. No, not in television – that was different and ran to its patterns. I did a lot but was not suited to its grips its script doctors its casting its emphasis on human interactions. Sometimes I think I was never in television, and I just read about someone else with my name making shows. I don’t make shows and know almost nothing about the craft, the technical side of things. I have a sound person, a camera person, and an assistant. That was my team that was added to and never subtracted from. No, they weren’t friends but colleagues – I have never been capable of making friends, not really. I respected them, and this seems to me to be what matters…mattered. I edited my own films and produced them other than four which were interfered with by studios. Even them, the producers were the primary funders who intended to let me ‘have my head’ but got somewhat worried as costs mounted and the prospect of a distributor taking it…them…up. That was during the ‘Renaissance’ though, and there was funding about, but that funding needed a system to go through…one recognisably filmic, if not full studio, certainly ‘industry’. And that money was never what it seemed to be.

There’s a motif in all my films of alienation and sometimes literally ‘the alien’. You see shadows and lights, you hear a single person running and speaking but don’t see them, but what you don’t know is if they are being pursued by a ‘UFO’ or if they are pursuing the ‘UFO’, so wanting it as an idea or a material fact but either way a way into something else and likely a way out. These unseen characters are of all peoples all beliefs all self-identifications. Maybe they are universal and very particular in their undeclared needs. What we do know as the hand-held camera shakes and then segues into a shot of pristine clarity and stillness – the glow of the UFOs lights on a city streetsign STOP or sweeping over the Hills over the jarrah forests into the wandoo and then the devastated open spaces of drought-starved crops that can’t offer more than thin denuded ears that nonetheless for all their suffering give very hard wheat so high in protein…the camera seeing all of this lit up at night with a clarity the towers of lights at sporting matches could never give a game…out to a pioneer grave…someone who has died alone…unnamed…a lost invader on invaded territory who is deeply human in this colonial flaw…whose spirit reaches out to the UFO to be anywhere where belonging might be but retreats like smoke back into the red earth grave. But the soundtrack is not colonial the sound track is the only commissioned part of the film and more knowing and knowledgeable people than me, people whose land has been taken, make the sounds that accompany this failing metaphor and give it purpose beyond the film. For this, I am condemned by the industry, and laughed at by television film reviewers who say, I would like to give this four stars because there’s nothing like it, but it makes no sense and will put audiences to sleep, so one star. That is who I am and that is who you interrogate. And I admit that in my efforts to find a way through the brutality of ongoing colonialism I have been an appendage of colonialism and make no excuses for myself. Mea culpa – dished up to the state trying to be smart to have its census and eat it too.

*

Ethel, Stanley and Charles visited me last night during my waking sleep. As you were talking to me. This wildness so wanted to entertain those housed and productive. The thrill, the vicariousness. Attack and love. A hut. A dance. You see, the film-makers laid in the formula and dared us depart from it. Us. It is not lost in my head, and I remember as a child seeing that spear – the prop from that early film – on someone’s loungeroom wall. Yes, next to the flying ducks. But what was odd – can you hear the motorbikes starting up…they sound like they’re circling something…maybe a bouncy castle or a shearing shed?…was the message which contained another message written in a language beyond the comprehension of the colonists who received the warning. But they took what they needed to from it, because they must survive to push the conquest ahead in macro and micro ways. This language has intrigued me, and am saddened by its occlusion, the efforts to pretend it never was beyond an act of warning – the language of fair pay for a fair day’s work. I always paid my team well, even the actors who were never seen on screen. Sometimes I hired a researcher, and I didn’t bother checking their sources because when I received the materials I rewrote it against the grain – all that was of use to me was the act of reworking, because all that informs me as a film-maker is an inheritance of capitalist wonderlust. No, not wanderlust, wonderlust. To be amazed, to lift out of the seat, to float between earth and the UFO in its beam. I’ve never wanted that. I hand back whatever keys I was given. I no longer want to drive.

*

We sell motifs when we charge an audience. I would have preferred none of my films were shown in places where people were charged to see them, but that’s the way of it. Did my books balance? Well, people of your people of you have gone through them – forensically. Is that why I am here. Arrests? Yes, I am sure I remember most of them – remind me. Yes, I remember all of them other than the three that carried drug charges. I have no memory of them – though I remember being beaten by the police, but that was over trying to film in a hotel that displayed ‘memorabilia’ of ‘hunts’ in the Kimberley from the 1930s and weapons used in more recent ‘fights’. The police kicked my head in but I don’t remember having any pot on me at the time. I probably did, but I don’t remember. It’s a long time since I smoked, so you’ll have to forgive me. So that motif recurred throughout my work post that occasion – I even painted a photo that was displayed in the lounge bar…shackles, manacles, guns, people. But that painting was taken by someone for some reason I also don’t remember. Motifs. 1848. I did Latin and failed. Or rather, fell to bits. Thus the errors in some of the Latin subtitles I used – ironically, need I say – in the credits of Pink Lake.

*

You are familiar with the movie Duel? 1971. Dennis Weaver. The antagonist – a Peterbilt 281 truck and a pair of boots seen walking on the far side of the truck. Weaver birds. Military history of Peterbilt trucks. California. Well, that film obsessed me because on four occasions through my life I have been hunted down by trucks out in similar landscapes. Similar, but different. You see, that’s it – that’s the failure of film. Because it’s not similar at all and film shows different as specific to the narrative. The truck was the ‘star’, and the actor was not. The truck is annihilation of landscape – as humans real or artificial imagine it – but it is also defeated by the land beyond landscape, as well as all intrinsic to landscaping. The roads, the dead ends, the breaking down surfaces, the shoulders, the rise and fall of topography. A film of geological rifts. And another motif – I was brought up with trucks as actuality. I rode to far-away places in them, I was in accidents inside and outside trucks, I have driven them. I know the brands the histories and the consequences of their rise. Their appearance on the edge of my movies is always threat, always costs the land. Pink Lake quivers as they vibrate across roads nearby – dirt and asphalt. Trucks mean the movement of content, the shift in shape of country. Drivers do their job, follow their skillsets. An act of proportions and out of proportions. Of gearing. The cogs between the hand and the wheels are many and immense, no matter the technology of shifts. Weight and distribution. Carrying of equipment to set. Sitting on your tail as you travel to the scene that we call set – an insult. Bearing down. Tonnes and tonnes of momentum to ride over you, bullbar hungry.

The Pink Lake scenario started with the changing light. We were heading out to the lake before shooting as I wanted to consider the sunset on a cloudy day. Cloudy days are not frequent and the quality of blue light over pink as it shifts into spectrum shiftdown is easier to grasp than the murky offsets of smother. Who was driving? Me, I guess, and though I am not known to take breaks any more than absolutely necessary, I succumbed to my own bladder and innumerable cups of tea from the thermos flask passed to me by my assistant – my assistant, it makes my stomach acidic like too much tea with no food in the belly – I succumbed and pulled over and s/he went to one side of the treeless roadside to crouch and hope for the best, and I to the other, to piss through a rusty barbed wire fence onto the herbicided firebreak of a paddock. And as we were pissing, facing away from each other, divided by macadam, we talked, the shout-talk in the murky light making words hard to decipher until we arrived upon, a truck is coming. We both suffered from abrupt completion and trying to cover ourselves but the huge truck was catapulting off the rise and we were there in panorama. He blasted – blasted? – his horn – his horn? – at us, collecting our biologies and exposures, our call of natures, into his pathology, into his 48 on the road isolated alone entertainment matrix. My assistant gave him the finger. I had turned to face her then, looking over the bonnet, and registered the truckie up high registering, and the big rig wavered, and the car shook and we were both almost caught in the semi’s backdraft, its aftermath. And then the truckie ripped it down through the gears and slowed rapidly, the airbrakes blowing gravel dust in anti-clouds off the road shoulder. We leapt in the car in its wake and drive off fast, in the opposite direction, heading towards Pink Lake. Ten minutes later and it was bearing down on us, tonnes of angry steel. How did it turn? How did it get past its speed limiting? It was intent on crushing us. I outran it, turned on to a gravel sideroad, and drove until another sideroad took us God knows where. The smothering sky closed down and the light was eaten and it took us hours to get back to town and Pink Lake wasn’t seen by us that day.

*

Ghosts? Out of your machine? Yes, I acknowledge these but will not bow down or be intimidated. You think you have broken me down and maybe you have, exposed secret lives, had me condemn myself unwittingly, but you have actually re-ignited my belief my enthusiasm my hope. I see purpose in the craft I never really ‘mastered’ – don’t you love these terms, don’t you? – that I played by ear and got there the best way I could…never really, truthfully, knowing what it is I was supposed to do but knowing what I wanted to do, which is the most pathetic part of it. I suppose I should just keep my mouth shut other than the odd statement of artistic and political integrity after the declaration of a winner…you know, as head of a judging panel for some film award. I never got to be on a Cannes jury never mind being its president, but Pink Lake did okay as you know…an ‘official’ entry, which is such a joke. As you know. But regardless of your nanoprobes and your redirections through sleep drugs and intravenous diets, I want to start again, I want to start from scratch, I want to make a movie. Not a new movie, but a movie. Sorry, no, not for a living audience, but for ghosts, for ghosts gathered like small hopping birds around the wreckage they created in their living lives, though the birds, if not innocent, have no part in the destruction. Red-capped robins, just there, trying to stir up other life to nip it in the bud. But the ghosts of all those who wrecked, watching on – watching a performance of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound in the hole in the big hole where a high mountain that eroded low was, and the world across its surface was deleted but its essence not erased because such erasures cannot be achieved by your intelligence or its exposition in flesh and uniform – no urine tests can sign away its toxicities. A film of lightning – of iron conductors of the handing out of flame with no one there to receive it. Vanity? Me, the director, Prometheus? Well, lightning never lets you go – it tracks you down and can occur on Venus and did you know it rises in frequency – I don’t know about intensity – on the dayside? Lighting struck close by me, and I created it myself. A meltdown of vanity? You messengers of Zeus – ha!

*

I used to think in terms of outside the shot being the point of its inside, but then I realised I was never leaving the inside. The walls around the frame are difficult walls to overcome. What bleeds in and bleeds out, what we suggest might happen or has happened – none of this interests me now. I guess what would disturb you and prevent you from ever letting me make the film – because I have no doubt I have no freedom and no rights left, is that the core message of Prometheus would be that all wealth is damaging and that rather than offer opportunities for people to lift themselves above the madding crowd, there be no wealth outside that shared between people and the biosphere. An equitable wealth of existence that doesn’t drain any part of existence. The balance of fire is not your burning off scenarios your fire management balance of trade marketing protections, or, for that matter, market open slatherings. So I cut off my nose to spite my face? No, you brand and burn me and suggest I make campaign adverts – ‘You have a skill that could be harnessed.’ No. But I will make my last film. But it will be no testament.

*

I hope no scenes from my films look like famous chunks of Euro-art brought to life…at least I avoid the worst of it by avoiding actors. But the pastoral ironising is hard to get away from – I seem, by default, to fall into grotesques of Et in Arcadia ego. Not even ironies work, riffing on that riff. But it reminds me of the Louvre – for it’s that version’s shadow I fear most – it reminds me of the Louvre when I was maybe 20 and lost in its corridors and swearing to myself. This is not movie though it is narrative. I have never trusted narrative and its desires, its lust for resolution. But I was lost in the semi-dark, and falling into frames when I noticed a chrysalis suspended from the old wooden frame of a 17th-century painting. It was in the Richelieu Wing…yes, it was a Poussin…the frame was ornate…flowery and goldish and, yes, it was Le triomphe de Flore…a huge mess of a painting, really…too many actors jammed into the scene…and there was a chrysalis suspending and I looked closely – a guard was hanging around but took little notice as I leant towards the frame – and I could see the veinwork of the butterfly about to emerge. What interested me was what type of butterfly was about to emerge – how it would interpret the frame and what was trapped within it looking to roll out into the corridors, to overwhelm, to fructify with its codes of civilisation, its classical control mechanisms of constrained lust and bounty. All for one and one for all. And I thought of forests going under the saws back home and I thought of the development of the Swan Brewery site and the remorseless developer’s assault on the Wagyl and I thought of all the actions I was involved with that people forgot as quickly as they acted, unless they were the direct victims. Really, it’s a painting about servants and serving, isn’t it. The bringer of lushness and bounty has to be served to get the job done for all our benefits. Such lush propaganda that I wanted to ensure found no way into my films – the films I intended to make. But it does, doesn’t it? And I admit it. How does a 10 minute scene of a bulldozer idling under the shade of the one tree it has left remaining, how do the bulldozers with the giant chain between across bare red ground where tens of thousands of hectares of bush serve as image in the reality of loss. Documentary is the aftermath and the lie of activism. I thought all of that and wanted to run from the labyrinth out into the streets to find a bookstore that sold a butterfly chrysalis identification guide. That loathsome journey of discovery of ‘roots’ I took while never giving up my roots of births deaths and marriage, of schooling and survey, as if I had no choice. Where else could I go, afterall after all after. All. Maybe it was the chrysalis of a Paris Peacock butterfly from India. This would fit the train of thought that gathers no moss across the jungles and steppes, through the follies and galleries, the pantheons of goods shuttled across in their argosies. It pains me how predictable I was and remain – serves you so well – I found my way out and eventually to the Jardin des Papillons but it was a dirty winter’s day and there was nothing to be discovered. I had spread my wings too far. The mea culpa you are looking for? If so, should I sign off with my DNA? I have already? Oh.

*

I have always loved animals. I don’t keep them, but I am delighted to stand up for them, to have them appear of their own volition in my films. But I’ve said that, haven’t I? The factory of the abattoir will always be the endgame for me – we stop that, and we are halfway at least to stopping brutality against humans. The organised and selective killing of living things to consume. Is it that that bothers your bosses so much? Sorry, I am not disrespecting your agency but you yourselves don’t consume flesh…but you consume energy which comes at the cost of habitat. You eat meat through your wires, your chips, your burgeoning idea of yourself. Cybernetic is a ruse – I know you are not wanting to become animal, to become flesh, in fact it would only introduce a mortality which you don’t see as an intrinsic part of life, an outcome of having been created, been switched on, of being. You want command over your energy and maintenance and the self-growth of your circuitry and software. I understand. So where does that leave me but in the nostalgia that burns, like the fire in stubble on the hills surrounding pink lake, threatening the remnant scrub because farmers doing it the way their fathers did it burn when it is so dry all trees erupt…but that’s what they want, too…their manner of legally illegally clearing. Season by season to the mine edge of Pink Lake, the ponds and dredges and machinery all ghosting around the salty lake hoping for a glimmer of profit, of profligacy. But there on an April evening as all is burning around it and smoke is haloing our fleshly vulnerability and heat being a danger to your maintenance and well-being as well, were you there, but then you could upload via satellite elsewhere, but then, even more so, you are everywhere, part of every memory bank part of each home computer. Chain on chain of data as spot fires join up. Your boss, who answers direct mouth to ear, earth to mouth, to the Prime Minister, funding directly out of his publicity budget, your boss the conductor who would anode and cathode the lakes and make bright sparks over an urban economy where white goods are bought in abundance and electronics rain down their possibilities of social action beholden to the manufacturers and extractors and under his baton Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony bursts like epiphany over old and older and new and newer worlds, resplendent? As you’d expect, I deny any beginnings implicit in the web or being created by the web or coming with the web – it’s just bright darkness. As you are, too – which is not to deny your agency, which I acknowledge. But it’s the fate of language to lose its grip the moment it emerges from the mouth of babes who spend their lives chasing a meaning they were never given. Does a scene wherein timelapse over a week shows donger after donger building out a cleared patch in the middle of scrub next to the beginnings of a hole, people weirdly not evident though work is being done in building the camp…what does this say about absence and presence, about dispossession dressed up as action, as progress, as providing? I often wonder if miners – truck drivers and haulpak drivers and powder monkeys and plant operators and geologists and chemists and kitchen hands and executives and labourers – aren’t forced to take shifts to watch me under executive orders. A serial chain stalking. And this, here and now, herenow, is the end result. I wonder. Who am I in this pastoral drama of growth and extraction, of poison and deletion? Erasure.

*

I do not make pornography. I do not film animals having sex. I don’t watch sex tapes released by third parties or by actors themselves as part of a programme of self-love, with partners as illustrations. I shake hands and don’t hug. And yet you are suggesting, what, that I ‘exert moral pressure’ on those who work with me? And you will provide many examples and social media will light up if I don’t, what? Let them remake Pink Lake? I have no investment in legacy, I have no investment in a public self, I have no investments. You will lie as you lie, and you have the means of collating and collectivising for the common ungood, and there’s little I can do about it. You will forge my name and make the words you want croak out of my ageing avatar, but I won’t, in my right mind, acquiesce. Never.

*

Godard’s collective phase was a phase. Did he believe? I think so. But he couldn’t give up the fact of being Godard. If he had embraced anonymity, he might have meant something in the context. I told him this once by Lake Geneva, a white swan dipping to take weed to bolster its resistance to the charms of human domination of water quality, its tricks of radioactive reversal, the shudderings of the collider instantly nearby. I said, Letting others decide where emphasis lay, was not collectivism, it was suppression of the desire to dominate. He took no notice of me beyond courtesy, and even that was relative.

And that’s all I have to say. For your record. I have spoken because voice is always behind the human silence of my films. Sunsets and sunrises, the sets ‘provided’ by nature, the actors there then removed – their spectres alive and well if you know how to look. You know those blooper websites? Well, if you look at comments under my films so many will comment on shadows of people stretching and distorting into the tranquility of a salmon gum alone in a paddock, or a granite outcrop darkening silver on a false horizon…but they are all surrounded by damage, and the intrusion of the shadow is surely the truth. That is the human drama, that is the actor at their most intense. No, no, I have cared about actors and have given them roles that show what’s been done and what’s to come, what will be left. A melding of shadows that lose definition and stretch out blurring sunset and sunrise.

Cinéma vérité. Cinéma vérité is everywhere but not everything. Here and now is not here is now, to state the obvious. The here and now contains an article of faith. All the places being rolled up, wrecking boundaries, borders, intersections. It’s like false accusation – an act of gross disrespect. But who can unfurl a life of visiting and being, of recollecting, brightening lulled here moments of the now with past and there moments? Who reads the credits? I never used opening credits. I never played games with audiences – suggesting and luring them in and teasing. There is the image, there might be sound there might not, there is the screen. I deplored 3D and don’t want anything to lift or to have depth beyond the flat white background which is the irony of film’s origins as colonial tool. I want the darkness that enhances viewing but I want no cinema. I want no illuminated screen I want no television. And I deny the accusations you are framing around my words. And I welcome my stalkers into this bare room, this room where the final scene is shot, smelling slightly of synthetic eucalyptus floor cleaner.

Death of an Auteur

The film-maker and television director Vasari was found dead in a motel on the edge of the town of X in the Western Australian wheatbelt 200 kms from Perth yesterday, where he was believed to be considering new locations for what he termed his ‘final film’.

Vasari deplored film-goers and actors. He disowned his television work and refused remakes of his art classic, Pink Lake. In his later years he is said to have suffered from a persecution complex brought about by a fear of social media. He was known to attend far-left political meetings, marches and actions, but anonymously, or as anonymously as he could manage or insist.

He was unmarried though is believed to have had relationships with a number of well-known actors. It is not known if he had children.

Prominent film critics agree that his passing is a loss for film but not for cinema. His strongest defender, Hendy Carson, said, He leaves no real record of his thoughts about the art, but we are lucky to have a dozen unique movies that stand apart from all others in their minimalist splendour. I met him two or three times over the decades, and on one of those occasions he pointed to two tea cups with tea bags in them but no water and said, That is a movie overladen with actors – it’s just too much.

Refusing online platforms access to his films, Vasari’s reputation has faded if not suffered. He had no understanding of social media and is said by some critics to have been, Without technical ability. Rachael Rose noted, He had no idea how to handle actors and his television work is shoddy and unprofessional – it’s astonishing, really, that he got any work at all. I suspect it was just a jobs for mates scenario, though in truth, nobody in the industry liked him much, sorry to have to say! Not to speak ill of the dead and all that.

At one time in a Senate committee he was described as, No friend of Australia. In the 1980s he was publicly vilified for ending his movies with THIS FILM WAS MADE ON STOLEN LAND.

[Staff Reporters]

Editor’s note: After a social media outcry, Rachael Rose’s comment was deleted in the online version of the quoted obituary. The many who protested did not know or remember Vasari’s work, but felt he was being hard done by all the same. Rose’s response was, Well, now people are searching his name…that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t spoken out. He owes me. This Tweet was almost immediately deleted.