Before

Before Artists’ Cinema By Martin Rumsby What an inspiration it can be to have one’s talent recognized is known by anyone who works skillfully and has been, in some measure, rewarded, for such a man feels no discomfort, inconvenience, or fatigue when he can look forward to honour and compensation.” Giorgio Vasari The history of artists’ cinema in New Zealand is one of founding mothers and fathers working independently and often alone. That many died or retired young points to the severity of their calling. Our prematurely deceased moving image artists included Joanna Margaret Paul, Darcy Lange, Merata Mita, Barry Barclay, and Kathryn Dudding. At their best, they could have aspired toward an artistic practice enlivened by empiricism, intellect, inter-cultural communication, creativity and ideas of moral responsibility. It could be said that they grew up in a society in which almost everything was free. They all saw that change. Our first film artists produced a diverse body of individualistic work, sometimes possessed of the concentrated intensity of poetry. At times raw and abrasive their work rejected the privileged discourse of institutional and industrial modes of production. The degree of alienation from mainstream culture that some of these artists felt are evidenced by themes of death, suicide and rebirth in the work of George Rose, David David Blyth and Brent Hayward. In Defstruxion, Gavin Mbali wondered how much longer human life could continue on this planet. These artists questioned social and and artistic norms. Some academically trained artists, on the other hand, adopted the dandyism of Duchamp and Warhol, employing irony rather than anguish to playfully prod at expectations of art and its audiences. Others ventured neither too far from documentary nor art education. “It is rather the documentary gesture and an investigation into indexicality and realism than the actual history of documentary cinema that (is visited).” Volker Pantenberg. Temporal Economy: Distraction and Attention in Experimental Cinema and Installation Art in, Millennium Film Journal #59. Spring, 2014. p45. This division can be characterized as one between ideas and sensuality. One chooses either critical distance, the other a lyricism associated with personal filmmaking. ‘Cool’, or academic work, tends to favour looped and installed image sequences often referencing a distant modernism. As Jackie Hatfied pointed out, Cinematic performance involves “a temporality that the digital and its potentially never ending film loop, does not have; namely the end point, the enforced resolution at the end of the leader.” Jackie Hatfield. Moving Image – Resisting Taxonomy. Dialogue with Malcolm Le Grice in, Millennium Film Journal Nos. 45/46. Fall, 2006. p79. Personal, first person work, on the other hand, is more experiential, incorporating montage, collage or direct filmmaking techniques. For the most part, the New Zealand scene is unrelentingly institutional, skewed towards academic artists and institutional interfaces. Unless an independent artist can successfully produce for the market then her work will be overlooked. When a culture is reduced to forms, artists do not have to strive for excellence but rather for merit gained by correctness. In an environment which allows no room for outsiders adventurousness is diminished and artists are pushed away from individual expression and excellence. Art, the writer V.S. Naipaul tells us, always has to be new, burning itself out very brightly in process. “What is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing … all living art is always on the move. It is part of its life that its dominant form should constantly change.” V.S. Naipaul: Reading and Writing. New York. New York Review Books. 2000. p62. Some of the artists catalogued below continued to work into the twenty first century, more visual and conceptual than literary, sometimes infused with a social aspect. Much of it was outward looking, as a type of local internationalism. Others, like Martyn Sanderson and Joanna Margaret Paul focused on domestic subjects before, in Sanderson's case, grappling with intercultural relationships. Peter Wells brought a gay sensibility to Kiwi cinema whilst Shereen Maloney helped to refigure representations of women as identity politics came to the fore. Occasionally the work incorporated humour. It is as if the years in which they emerged as media artists were a cradle for future activity. Sadly, despite New Zealand’s burgeoning media arts culture much of this work is overlooked. What little writing exists on this work is incomplete, at times inaccurate, and access to the work is limited. It is as if the institutions mandated with preserving, promoting and interpreting moving image culture actually act as inhibitors of such work. Private bodies and public institutions that may be expected to support experimental cinema choose instead to ignore almost anything that is not connected to corporate industry or academic output. New Zealand media arts academics have little or no interest in this type of work and its international precedents. Consequently, there are no tertiary courses available on experimental filmmaking. The frostily aristocratic indifference of academics toward experimental film mirrors the circumscription of art curators and commentators to our work. Yet some of the work is now available online, where media arts academics and their students can access it. All it would take is for the academics to point to the work. But they have more important places to be. Creative New Zealand and its predecessor the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council have been the main body of funding support for media artists. In the early 1980s film and video funding was subsumed under crafts. Later, a film and video office was set up, at some point with funding from the New Zealand Film Commission. This office was disbanded in the early 1990s and film and video funding again came under the purview of visual arts. After the NZ Film Commission withdrew its funding input for ‘short’ films a Media Arts Section was established to support what is now known as artists’ cinema. The media arts initiative did not last long and now film, video and artists’ cinema once again are located within the visual arts. The work had sprung from honest questions about film in relation to the visual arts. Where, for example, do individuals stand in relation to society? What could an artistic cinema be? What interchange can there be between art, cinema and life, what are the medium’s specific qualities and how may it change the way we perceive and live in the world? Could our definitions of art, life and society be a little broader? In addressing these issues they found themselves venturing down darkened alleys and lonely lanes, in slipstreams of consciousness. As we have progressed from the photo-mechanical, through electronic to digital forms of cinema Dan Browne has noted the differing postures associated with each type of this practice, “Analog media wants to remain static, to be preserved, while digital media wants to be dynamically played and constantly migrated.” Dan Browne commenting on a link by Steven Woloshen, Facebook. Accessed March 11, 2014 Some of these artists are known in New Zealand - Joanna Margaret Paul, Ronnie van Hout, Philip Dadson, Chris Knox, Richard Adams, P Mule (Popular Productions) are familiar names in the Kiwi art and music scenes. Martyn Sanderson, Peter Wells, Alison MacLean, Gregor Nicholas, Chris Kraus and all went on to produce feature length films; Wells and Kraus also wrote novels. Others, such as Brent Hayward and Darcy Lange seemed to take out lifetime memberships in the artistic underground. Today Hayward continues to perpetuate a cult following as New Zealand’s pre-eminent post-punk performer, leading underground filmmaker and painter of uniquely expressionistic images. There were other figures and precursors - Leon Narbey (who also directed two feature films) and Rodney Charters became notable cinematographers; Ian McMillan, Jason Oliver, David Rivers, Mathew McLean and David Franklin appeared then disappeared. There was also work by Gray Nichol, Greg Burke, as well as Peter Roche and Linda Buis. The home movie mediums of 8mm and Super 8 lent themselves to intimacy and immediacy, partly because of their low cost, in relation to 16mm and 35mm filmmaking, and because of the smallness and portability of lightweight 8mm cameras. As a result quite a few artists found the 8mm medium amenable to their working concerns. For the most part, however, this work was not less seriously than other forms of filmmaking. Between 1970 and 1982 Joanna Margaret Paul made over 30 experimental films, mostly on Super 8, and so became the first New Zealand filmmaker after Len Lye to create a body of experimental films and also the first to do so in New Zealand. Paul’s films varied from personal documentary, to lyrical landscape to ritualized performance in work that often spoke of the domestic situation of women. Her films laid bare a close attention to the world, simply illustrating her love of the land, nature, flowers and family, mediating a space between interior and exterior realities, between life and death, between culture and nature. Paul's work could be described as domestic portraiture. They include the visual poem Napkins (1975), a housewife’s view looking out her kitchen window at wind-blown fabrics drying on a clothesline; the repetitive Task (1982) showing a woman ironing, and Peony 1 (1976), in which voluptuous flowers transform into a painting, then back to flowers again. She also made Port Chalmers Cycle (1970), Magda (1973), Journey (1), Body (1973), 3 Seasons (1975), Woman’s Things(1977) and Aramoana (1982). In 2003 Joanna Margaret Paul died by accidental drowning in Rotorua. Alexis Hunter, a well known New Zealand artist based in London since 1972, where she became a seminal figure in the development of radical feminist art in England. “I wanted to authenticate a form of art that incorporated feminist theory – that insisted on the female identity of the artist - I used the still and movie camera to capture the symbolic relationships between objects and the human psyche. These ideas were a visual antidote to the ideas of romance and sexuality in advertising.” Cited in, so let us now praise Feminist Artists/lament for Alexis Hunter. Accessed at www.newzealandpaintingco.nz March 12, 2014 In 1973 Hunter made The Anatomy of a Friendship, a twenty minute long film which she described as, “A painted portrait develops as another woman puts on make-up.” Personal email to author. January 18, 2010. The Park (1974) depicted cross-gender sexual tensions in a park in London. The March (1974), The Right To Choose (1976), Approaches to Fear (1976-77) – being images of phobias of spiders, snakes, blood and fire, Cat (no date) as well as Domestic Warfare and The Making Of Domestic Warfare, both 1978. Hunter died in London, England in February, 2014. Her work can be seen at www.alexishunter.co.uk Ronnie van Hout shot a series of continuous take Super 8mm film portraits of people around Christchurch whilst a student at the Ilam School of Fine Arts. These films included Shop Proprietor, Burger, Ringo, Methodist and Mission Worker (c1980-1981). His other films included, One Minus One, and The Elvis Presley Movie (16mm, 1981), described on the Circuit Artist Film and Video web page as, “By the beginning of 1981, anyone who was anyone had ended up being shot. First there was John Lennon, Reagan was next, and then the Pope. The Elvis Presley movie imagines that if Elvis was still around he would probably have been added to the list, but like many conspiracy theories surrounding ‘The King,’ not everything is at it seems.” www.circuit.org.nz Accessed March 7,2014 The Elvis Presley Movie stars Christchurch cult hero, musician and filmmaker Ritchie Venus as Elvis Presley. Since then van Hout has worked in various media sometimes incorporating video in sculptural installations at other times just as videos themselves. In his work he plays with prevailing modes of art making, overtly referencing film history. Van Hout lived for a time in New York and Berlin before settling in Melbourne, Australia. While living in Auckland then Wellington Derek Cowie made impromptu performance movies shot on a whim, a prayer and single reels of Standard 8mm film. Cowie manipulated his camera lenses with pieces of tape, plasticine and magnifying glasses to create ambiguous double exposures. His Standard 8mm works include The Psychology Of Leaving (1980), Scapel – featuring George Hubbard (1982), Ultimate (1982), Rata Pool (1983), Portrait – Warwick Broadhead (1983), Portrait – Ray Castle Ray Castle had been the manager at the Edinburgh Castle Tavern’s Liberty Stage when it was a venue for punk rock bands in the late 1970s, showcasing acts such as The Scavengers, Toy Love, Spelling Mistakes, The Swingers, Proud Scum and others. He later founded the alternative art space Closet Artists Gallery in Queen Street exhibiting work by Phillip Clairmont, Nigel Brown, Dean Buchannan, Debra Bustin, Lee Feltham and Stuart Page. Castle curated the influential New Artists New Art exhibition at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth in the early 1980s. He also played Neil Roberts in William Keddell’s film The Maintenance of Silence (1985). From 1987 Castle was influential as one of the original DJs of the Goa Party scene in India and also introduced the dance party concept to Japan. As one half of the duo Mantaray, Castle recorded and released a CD, Numinous Island, in Tokyo in 1995. More recently Castle has taken up filmmaking, his work in this area includes Moon Shadow (2009), Manga Mad (2007) – a 60 minute long documentary on pop culture and the history of comics and animation in Japan and Tokyo Techno Tribes (2002) on contemporary urban and cyber youth cultures in Japan. Manga Mad and Moonshadow can be viewed on YouTube. (1983), Blue – Anthony Donaldson (1984), and Stretcher (1985). He also made portraits of the art dealer Peter McLeavey, the actor Judi Dench and the playwright Harold Pinter. Since 1989 Cowie has been working on World War – animation and work in progress. “World War is a huge set of drawings of the indifference and computer head turning that allows problems to arise and take hold,” says Cowie, “It is also about personal anxiety and loss. Personal email to the author.” His other work includes Caravan Escort (1990) and Keu – Study of a Woman (2010). Quite well known in New Zealand as a painter during the 1980s Cowie moved to England in the 1990s where he worked at the Royal National Theatre in London, television, opera and as a mural artist. His art department credits include the English TV series Little Dorrit and the feature film Neverland. Cowie now lives on the Thames in London. He holds all the forms of his art making activity to be private. Gavin Mbali a.k.a Gavin Smith crafted fast moving, energetic Super films which combined text, drawings, video, photography, pixilation, appropriation and audio created on a home-made sound processor. These techniques included stripping out parts of appropriated movie images with bleach, drawing, painting and scratching on the film’s surface as well as curing film in urine and orange juice. I may have been a lonely champion of Mbali’s work from 1982 but a recent online article by Kim Knowles seems to locate his creative methodology within recent experimental film practice. “… an economy of recuperation, re-use, and recycling of old materials represent a stark alternative to an economy utterly dependent on disposability and a throwaway culture of constant upgrades and relentlessly ‘new’ electronic goods … many filmmakers are venturing beyond conventional filmmaking techniques by using food, household products, and … bodily fluids as a way of producing images.” Kim Knowles. Blood, Sweat and Tears: Bodily Inscriptionsin Contemporary Experimental Film. Accessed at www.necsus-emjms.org/blood-sweat-and-tears-bodily-inscriptions-in-contemporary-experimental-film/ June 21, 2014. His work questioned conventional notions of cinematic representation and photographic illusionism while also challenging militarism, imperialism and maybe even optimism. Mbali’s films include the anarchic Series X (1981), the apocalyptic Defstruxion (1984) and Tri Story (c1983). Mbali grew up in Africa before attending art school in England then migrated to New Zealand. Since the 1990s he has worked as a sculptor in Auckland. John Calder’s singularly charming Super 8mm films include Imagex One (1979), Space Ace and the Rain of Death (1980), Sillibrush (1981), Le Teeth (c1981), Amandla (1981), Men of the Weeds (1982), Picture Start (1984), Walled City (1987), Tailspin (1988) and The Snag’s Guide to Love (1994). Calder was also responsible for devising many low cost special effects which he freely passed on to other filmmakers. He lives in Auckland and continues to make work. Australian Rita Riccolo made a number of Super 8 films including The Lonesome Cowboy With Things on His Mind (1979), Night Flite (1980), and Gone Away (1981) whilst she was living on Waiheke Island. Riccola now lives in Auckland. Stone mason and potter Simon Buckle reworked images of nature that he had shot, single frame, on Super 8mm film, sometimes whilst hunting in the Urerewa Ranges. Buckle then subjected his footage to various direct film interventions by painting and scratching on the surface of the film. His films were widely screened, projected at various speeds, in bars, cafes, lounges and at Alternative Cinema – the Auckland Filmmaker’s Co-operative, usually accompanied by live music. Buckle’s films included The Madness of the Pseudo Intellectual Filmmaker – 2500 hand painted Super 8mm images projected at 6 frames per second, Te Whanau Apanui Coast, And Tuteatako Stream, all made in the early 1980s. He now lives in Gisborne. Ron Brownson made Super 8mm experimental films which he described as documentaries. His films included Monkey (1979) – a work about acting and performance style, and Springbok (1981) – a film about racism. Brownson later formed City Group, a project based video collective which dealt with issues of perception within human interaction. City Group produced about a dozen videos including Flight Crowds (1985) – a description of colour as emotional content, and Valvegrind (1985-86) – a film about personal survival, made in celebration of the International Year of Youth. Their other media artworks included Tracking Dirt (1982), Ditch (1984), and First V8 (1987). Vivienne Smith and Neil Pardington studied together at the Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland. Their work included Passage Time Out of Mind (1983), and Pier (1984-85). They later joined Ron Brownson in City Group. Pardington subsequently moved to Wellington and began collaborating with writer and filmmaker Stuart McKenzie. Their feature film For Good (2003) screened at the Auckland and Wellington International Film Festivals. A number of other experimental filmmakers including Joanna Margaret Paul, Darcy Lange, Philip Dadson, Leon Narbey, Rodney Charters, Alexis Hunter, and Gillian Roberts emerged from the Elam School of Fine Arts. Vincent Ward, Ronnie van Hout, Merylyn Tweedie, Terry Urbahn, Bella Grant, Marie Quinn, Rongotai Lomas, John Chrisstoffels Chrisstoffels made music videos of bands including, The Bats, This Kind of Punishment, The Terminals and the Jean Paul Satre Experience. and other moving image artists studied at the Ilam School of Art in Christchurch. While growing up on a diary farm in rural Taranaki Darcy Lange was given a guitar to aid his recovery from pneumonia. Lange played his guitar to the cows during milking. Later, as a proficient electric guitarist, he formed a band which played at schools and social events around Taranaki. In the 1960s Lange moved to Auckland to attend the Elam art school where he studied sculpture and was introduced to Spanish flamenco music by the painter Robert Ellis. From Elam Lange progressed to the Royal College of Art in England and began working in film, photography and video. During time off he travelled to Spain, to sit with locals in dusty villages, picking up rhythms and an understanding of flamenco which he later passed on to others as a teacher, performer and recording artist. He strove to find ways to reconcile his understanding of the aesthetics of flamenco with his concerns as a video artist. Pedro G Romero listed these concerns as, “A concept of slow rhythm, measured pauses … of means … themes that are drawn out … (in)… precision and simplicity.” Pedro G Romero. Darcy Lange, Work and Flamenco in the Image Chain in, Mercedes Vincente (ed). Darcy Lange: Study of an Artist at Work. New Plymouth. Govett Brewster Art Gallery Catalog. (no date). pp167-182 Using the musical pseudonym Paco Campana, Lange released several CDs of flamenco music. These included A Los Amayas, Madona Negar, Casa Blanca Moron, Meca A Mexico, Caballo De Mareo, Viaje A Los Palamos and, Jael. Lange's vision as a moving image artist was for a better future for our world. His passion, politics, work and talents were, however, sadly underestimated and life, for Darcy, was often difficult, following his heart and eking out an existence in a financial compromise between welfare, busking, performing in restaurants, cafes, hospitals, workplaces and sometimes more formally, the odd arts council grant and occasional art gallery exhibition. His videos documented people at work including, Workstudies in a Spanish Village, 1975; Waitara Freezing Works, Study of a Meat Works, 1974; Ruatoria Study of Sheep Gathering and a Tangata Whenua Shearing Gang, 1974; Study of Three Birmingham Schools, 1976; Competition Axemen, Agricultural Show, Stratford, NZ, 1974 and Maori Social, Cultural and Land Project, 1977-80. He also made a series of 30 minute long 16mm sound films of people entertaining, eating and drinking in England and a series of Super 8mm film studies of people at work during the early 1970s. His real-time video documentaries employed the medium in its most literal way, as a recording tool in the service of those who would not normally be the subject of art or media interest. His simple extended takes capture the actual rhythm of everyday life, forms of manual, factory and agricultural labour and education. Describing himself as a servant of those he represented in his work, Lange said, "We have a responsibility to keep questioning the nature and power of realism. Are there ways for the camera to record without stripping people of their spirit, without sloganizing, without replacing a deep sense of community by a shallow voyeurism?” Darcy Lange. Video Art. Auckland. Department of Film, Television and Media Studies, University of Auckland. 2001.p17. It was as if his work anticipated reality TV, but as it should be, rooted in aesthetics and politics rather than in commonplace notions of economics or entertainment. Between 1998 and 2000 he made a series of videos of New Zealand artists and musicians at work, some of which were broadcast on Triangle TV in Auckland. Artists documented in this series included, Ruri Sunde, Alan Muggeridge, Philip Dadson, Jim Allen, Don Binney, Phillipa Blair, Robert Ellis, Richard Killeen, Claudia Pond-Eyley, Greer Twiss, Robin White and Marie Shannon. Lange's videos are rich archival and ethnographic treasures, records of being human, of ways of being in the late Twentieth Century. He died alone of pneumonia in Auckland in August, 2005. Since his death Lange’s work has been exhibited in Europe and the United States under the auspices of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. A founding member of Alternative Cinema and the music performance ensemble From Scatch, Philip Dadson has since established himself as one of New Zealand’s leading inter-disciplinary artists. His film and video work includes Earthworks (1971), Breath (1976) and Triad Four (1981). For Earthworks Dadson collected sounds and photographs that artists had recorded at various spots around the planet at 1800 hours GMT on the equinox of September 24, 1971. He then edited these into a 360 degree camera pan filmed on the Rangipo Desert on the North Island’s volcanic plateau also at 1800 hours GMT on September 24, 1971. The sequence ended when the camera froze up. Breath is a black and white two monitor video that captures the pulse of birth and death. Triad Four features the projection of ears onto two sides of a suspended bass drum and was later recontextualized into the larger four part audio visual installation Conundrum Quartet (2000). Dadson also collaborated with filmmaker Gregor Nicholas on two films – Drum Sing and Pacific 3,2,1,0 – cinematic evocations of From Scratch in performance. His videos include Uncharted Crossing (1980), Maya, Resonance 2 (1994), Physical (1976) and the impressively choreographed video wall Footstep Hocket (1990). When on a Fullbright Scholarship to the United States in 1991 Dadson made Soundstories Number One (Meetings With 14 Experimental Instrument Builders). His other sound and video works include An Archaeology of Stones (1995), Global Hockets (1999), Conference of Drums (2000) and Three Short Films (2000). In 2003 and 2004 Dadson worked on a video installation piece titled Polar Pulses – five video/sound works comprising Echo-Logo, Aerial Farm, Stonemap, Flutter, and Chthonian Pulse - drawn from his artist residency in Antarctica, almost as camera meditations on Eden. In 2008 he made the delightfully nutty Breath of Wind depicting uniformed brass band musicians playing a mournful tune as they drift above a landscape in balloons, possibly as a metaphor for the loneliness and isolation of contemporary life. Also a composer and performer of new music his CD releases include Pacific 3,2,1,ZERO: Parts One and Two, GUNG HO 1,2,3D, Eye Drum, Songs For Heroes, Global Hockets and the solo release on Atoll Soundtracks (2004) – a series of innovative improvisations on home-made instrumentation and voice. In 2011 Dadson exhibited Deep Water, a video and digital still series where an upside down view of landscape and water intersect with reflections on geometry, nature, signs and portents. He continues his activity as an intermedia artist. Actor, poet, and writer Martyn Sanderson, whose mother was the popular fiction writer Nora Sanderson, co-founded Downstage Theatre in Wellington. He later made a series of experimental films in Australia and New Zealand including A Stone in the Bush (1970), a pixilated document of the filming of Ned Kelly (1970) featuring the Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger. A Stitch in Time (1976) – also shot in Australia, was an anguished lyric reminiscent of a Brakhagian home movie. His poetry films included The Magpies, on the poet Dennis Glover and Like You I’m Trapped featuring the Cook Island born poet Alistair Campbell in performance at the Settlement Restaurant in Wellington. Keskidee Aroha (1981) documented the tour of Keskidee, an Anglo-Afro-Caribbean music-theatre troupe, through maraes, prisons and community centres in New Zealand. In 1990 Sanderson made the low budget feature film Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree, possibly the first existential Polynesian film. Based on a novella by Albert Wendt Flying Fox … is the story of a young man, Pepe the trickster, son of a Samoan patriarch. Caught between the conflicting pressures of tradition and modernity, Pepe leads a juvenile gang in Apia, experiments with alcohol and sex, burns down a church and robs his father’s store, bringing shame to his family. Later, suffering from TB in a hospital ward, Pepe turns his hand to poetry, writing a letter to the self which became the story Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree. Among his many roles as an actor Sanderson played the writer Frank Sargeson in An Angel at my Table, about the New Zealand author Janet Frame, Len Demler in Beyond Reasonable Doubt and a cinema manager in The Maintenance of Silence. He also received the Feltex Award for a television portrayal of aviation pioneer Richard Pearse. In 2005 Sanderson was made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature and theatre. Earlier, Sanderson had participated in performance type films made by Geoff Murphy as a member of the alternative musical/theatrical group BLERTA in the 1970s. In 2006 he published a book of poems titled Like Smoke From a Wheelbarrow. Sanderson died at home in Otaki aged 71 in 2009. From the late 1970s and through the early 1980s an independent an experimental film scene began to coalesce in New Zealand. As a teenager David Blyth produced the part surrealist, part psycho dramatic Circadian Rhythms (1976) followed by a punk feature Angel Mine (1978). Circadian Rhythms is the New Zealand equivalent of Bunuel and Dali's landmark surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, Despite having featured so prominently on the Surrealist Map of the World (1929), this is how far ‘behind’ New Zealand was at the time. attempting to bypass the conscious mind in exploration of the subconscious. Drawing on dream images, Circadian Rhythms opens on shots of a man driving a car down a highway. Following a car crash the film goes into the man's mind as a flash of emotional consciousness, complete with exclamatory inter-titles such as, 'Most mirrors are homosexual,' dreamlike imagery and an electronic music soundtrack by the New Zealand composer Ross Harris. Toward the end of the film we hear the sound of a woman in birth labor. As the image fades to white we hear the actual birth of a child and its bark like cry as it comes to consciousness in this world. A fundraising event at the University of Auckland for Blyth's first feature film Angel Mine (1978) was the last performance by New Zealand’s first punk rock band, The Suburban Reptiles. Angel Mine was the first film to be funded by the Interim New Zealand Film Commission and was, in a way, Blyth's manifesto for a low-budget, independent cinema as he simultaneously strove to strip apart at what he saw as the repressed sexual tensions at the heart of New Zealand society. Following the censor's R18 rating and a warning that Angel Mine 'contained Punk Cult Material' the film opened in a blaze of controversy with Blyth receiving death threats and a former school denying that he had ever been a pupil there. In a long and varied career which has included directing episodes of the New Zealand television soap opera Close to Home and The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers series as the colonial period drama A Woman Of Good Character (1982) Blyth has continued to make films that confront societal taboos, from the B horror feature Death Warmed Up (1984) through to Bound For Pleasure (2001), about eight Auckland dominatrixes and later, Transfigured Nights (2007), a documentary that depicts masked men dressing up as women to enact mostly sexual fantasies on the worldwide web. In 2010 Blyth returned to the psycho-dramatic interior landscapes of his youth in Wound, a no-budget horror film in which a daughter returns from the dead to possess her mother. The English filmmaker Ken Russell described WOUND as, “A masterpiece …(of)… Gothic psycho sexual horror.” In 2013 he completed Ghost Bride, another low budget, independently produced feature film. Follow David Blyth at www.davidblyth.com In 2002, Blyth collaborated in editing Jed Town’s ambient ‘digital wallpaper’ work title Fish Tank Telly. Town was formerly of Fetus Productions and the Auckland punk rock band The Features (EP The Features Exposed, 1980). Fetus Productions' Jed Town, Sarah Fort and Mike Brookfield began making films in 1980 as backdrops for their live musical performances, then evolved into an intermedia collective operating, in various incarnations, in New Zealand, Australia, and Japan between 1980 and 1989. With a string of impressive releases to their name Fetus made a video called Intensive Care Unit. Tracks included What’s Going On, Flicker, Dali, Prisoner Tokyo Rain, High Rise, Thug, Drip, Torment in a Room, Backbeat, Anthem, Have Your Fun, and Postmortem. This series of short films, related to music videos, at times incorporated multiple viewpoints of landscape scenes, superimposition, close ups, distorted images of human bodies acting in concert with each other, appropriated surgical footage, graphic abstract images, right through to a Brakhagian style of cinema, but with musical soundtracks which serve to draw the viewer in and lead them through the experience of the work. FETUS' music releases included Fetus Product (1981), Self Manipulation (1983), Fetalmania (1983), Environmental (1984), Perfect Product (1984), Luminous Trails (1985) and Intensive Care Unit (1989). Intensive Care Unit was later abbreviated to ICU when Town ventured into electronic techno music and visuals with Gus Ferguson in London, England between 1987 and 1995. Town and Ferguson incorporated images from 12 slide projectors and 16mm film in their performances. Fetus' work was the subject of a retrospective installation at Artspace, Auckland in 2002. For this exhibition Fetus' previous film and video work was transferred to digital media then re-edited in a 3-screen format. This installation was later purchased by the Auckland Art Gallery. Town's DVD installation work Cloudscapes of Aotearoa (2006) was exhibited at the Moving Image Centre in Auckland in 2006. In addition to creating the music for the documentary Toki Does New York, in which he appeared, Town also composed soundtracks for the feature films Bi-Polar and Hugh and Heke (2009) as well as for David Blyth’s Our Oldest Soldier, Bound for Pleasure, Transfigured Nights and Wound. In 2009 he completed and exhibited an audio and video installation work titled Secrets From the Ocean Floor filmed underwater at Matauri Bay in Northland, New Zealand. Over three decades earlier, Richard von Sturmer had collaborated with David Blyth in writing Blyth's Circadian Ryhthms (1976) as well as contributing additional dialogue for Blyth's Angel Mine (1978). In the 1980s von Sturmer made experimental films including, The Search for Otto (1986) and Acquavera (1988). Writing of Acquavera, von Sturmer stated, “Acquavera came after I’d completed a book of prose poems, ‘We Xerox Your Zebras’, and the two works can be seen as balancing each other. For the writing of ‘We Xerox Your Zebras’ I pushed myself into strange mental states to hear the voices that narrate many of the brief stories. There was also a gymnastic quality to the language that was needed to take the reader into often convoluted and paradoxical situations. With the making of Acquavera I could now relax and let a lighter, more lyrical quality develop … Central to Acquavera is a love of Haiku.” Richard von Sturmer. Acquavera in Cantrills Filmnotes #57/58. December 1988. P55. From 1993 to 2003 von Sturmer lived at the Rochester Zen Center, a Buddhist community in upstate New York. In 2007 he completed Twenty Six Tanka Films – a series based on the Japanese Tanka poetic form. His more recent short films include The Underworld and the Overworld. In 2015 he produced The Open Broken a short post-apocalyptic digital video set to a haunting soundtrack by Jed Town. Von Sturmer also acted in films including One of Those Blighters (1982) about the writer Ronald Hugh Morrieson, Dangerous Orphans (1986), and Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree (1989). Besides writing the 1980s hit song There Is No Depression in New Zealand, von Sturmer was a member of the rock group The Plague and the performance art duo The Human Animals. Von Sturmer famously performed naked, though painted entirely blue, as singer for The Plague at the 1979 Nambassa Music Festival – an event which drew an audience of 65,000 people. Part of this performance is documented in the 1980 film of the Nambassa Festival. He wrote We Xerox Your Zebras (1988), Network of Dissolving Threads (1991), Suchness: Zen Poetry and Prose (2005) and On the Eve of Departing (2009). Von Sturmer continues to make experimental films and publish his poetry and prose including Book of Equanimity Verses (2013), inspired by Wang Wei’s The Book of Equanimities. His films can be viewed online at www.circuit.org.nz In Wellington George Rose and Richard Adams produced the great unknown masterpiece of New Zealand cinema. In The Sadness of the Post Intellectual Art Critic (1979) a critic giving a lecture in an art gallery is overcome by memories from his childhood. The film jumps backwards and forwards in time showing the critic in various states of lucidity and madness at cathartic moments of his life. Co-directors Rose and Adams both acted in this sometimes witty, powerfully imagistic depiction of emotional isolation set against a breathtaking soundtrack by Jonathon Besser. Scheduled to show at the Auckland International Film Festival the screening was cancelled just ten minutes before the film was due to commence. The cinema manager announced to a full house that the film would not be shown because it was pornographic. Yet the Censor had already rated Sadness … as suitable for film festival audiences. The announcement caused a near riot in the cinema. A screening was later organized at Jan Grafstad’s Classic Cinema in Queen Street and the film subsequently played for several weeks at a cinema in Sydney. Alternative Cinema traveling film shows later presented the film throughout New Zealand. The National Film Unit of New Zealand had previously confiscated The Sadness of the Post Intellectual Art Critic during the post- production phase, causing Rose to initiate a lengthy battle to have the film returned. More recently Rose and Adams have been working to re-release Sadness … and their other films on DVD. Richard Adams is today a member of the jazz group the Nairobi Trio which performs nationally and internationally. He exhibits his abstract paintings at Oedipus Rex Gallery in Auckland. An excerpt from The Sadness Of The Post Intellectual Art Critic can be viewed on YouTube. The opening sequence to The Sadness of the Post Intellectual Art Critic was created by Euan Frizzell, an animator who had made the experimental film A Speck of Truth (1976). Frizzell worked as a camera operator on Merata Mita’s Patu (1983) and created animation sequences for The Return (2007) and Asylum Pieces (2010), two films by Kathy Dudding. Wellington film artist Kathy Dudding died aged 49 of cancer in August, 2010. Born in Te Kuiti in 1961 she was brought up by adoptive parents on a farm near Wellsford. She also lived in Auckland, Paris, and Christchurch before settling in Wellington in the early 1980s. In Paris she was influenced by surrealism and developed a political consciousness that came into play in some of her films. Her experimental films which merged documentary and personal types of filmmaking included Hey Daisy (1983), an energetic montage of hay making on a farm intercut with urban footage and the psychodramatic Smash Dupe (1986) about an adoptee’s search for her birth mother, with a soundtrack by the Kiwi Animal. Kanaky Au Pouvoir (c1989) contextualized the indigenous Kanak struggle for independence from their French colonial masters in New Caledonia. The cinematic Lily in the House of Lipsticks (2001) represented Dudding’s return to filmmaking after devoting over a decade of her life to bringing up her daughter, working menial jobs and putting herself through university. She completed a landscape regional landscape film The Return in 2007 and Asylum Pieces (2010), an essay style experimental film which incorporates social and personal subject matter Asylum Pieces completes a photographic unfinished project that her former lover left after committing suicide whilst being medicated for depression. An accomplished and mature work Asylum Pieces proceeds through a series of contemplative shots, lingering on the landscape setting and architecture of historic New Zealand mental asylums. These are contrasted with the transcendental Japanese concept of Wabi Sabi and the Eighteenth Century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings of imaginary prisons. One gets the idea of a self that cannot quite reconcile itself with the demands of society, or a society that cannot quite meet the needs of its citizens. The film slowly, almost imperceptibly, leads the viewer toward the conclusion that evolving practices of mental health treatment in New Zealand may be systemic only in their continuing dysfunction. Dudding’s early films were shown throughout New Zealand and North America in Invisible Cinema touring film shows. Her video art work was also shown at Van TV, the Pelorus Trust Media Gallery, NZ Film Archive, Wellington and at the DAAP Gallery, University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. Also a poet, Dudding’s writing was published in Jaam #15, Brief #33 and by the Earl of Seacliffe Press. In her final years Dudding worked at the New Zealand Film Archive in Wellington. Excerpts from Asylum Pieces can be viewed on YouTube. Englishman, Michael Nicholson migrated to New Zealand in 1953 and lectured at Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts until 1960 when he moved to Sydney, Australia where he continued to paint and make sculptures. In 1977 Nicholson began experimenting with video whilst working as artist-in-residence at the College for Advanced Education in rural New South Wales. Green and Red Tapes for Two Banks of Monitors and Primary Structures resulted from his experiments on an analog computer system called Scanimate. In 1988 Nicholson returned to New Zealand and in 2007 and began collaborating with Diane McAllen in Wellington on the Visual Music Project: Stage 3. Opus 1–4 which was completed in 2008 when Nicholson was 93. Envisioning himself as a composer of images Nicholson conceived of these four short non-figurative works as a visual music akin to classical music. He cites the influence of Australian aboriginal rock art, along with European abstract painters such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Juan Miro on his thinking. The energy, or forces, that Nicholson marshals create pattern as a stable, enduring integrity, shaped in choreographies of light, electronic color, shape and movement. Musician Chris Knox came to prominence as a member of Enemy, possibly the South Island’s first punk rock band, in 1977 going on to attain mainstream pop chart success in New Zealand with his subsequent band Toy Love, the most influential Kiwi band of the time. (First single, Rebel, 1979; album Toy Love, (1980) Since then Knox continued to produce music as half of the Do It Yourself, indie musical duo Tall Dwarfs. Their recordings include Three Songs (1981), Crush, The Brain That Wouldn't Die, The Slide and Nothing's Going to Happen. In 1983 Knox released a solo recording titled The Chris Knox Ego Gratification album - Songs for Cleaning Guppies. An enthusiastic amateur filmmaker in the early 1980s, Knox commenced making rock videos which challenged the prevailing television aesthetic of the time. His music videos include Nothing’s Going to Happen, Tally Ho, and Turning Brown and Ton Into plus over a score of others. James Robinson and Rowan Wernham’s innovative animation X.O. Genesis (2009) included sound by Chris Knox. Knox suffered a stroke in mid-2009. The New Film Group was a group of Auckland filmmakers – Peter Wells, Gregor Nicholas, Shereen Maloney, and Alison MacLean and Stewart Main. Wells, their spokesperson, asserted that they represented a break from the drab disconnected realism and rural settings of previous New Zealand films. Of the four former core members of the New Film Group only Wells continued to evolve a personal and poetic film language. Former film critic for the New Zealand Listener Peter Wells also established himself as a writer, publishing two novels Dangerous Desires and Boy Overboard in the 1990s and a memoir – Long Loop Home, winner of the Montana Book Awards. One of Wells’ short stories was made into the feature film Of Memory and Desire (1991) directed by Niki Caro. His other books include, Lucky Bastard (2007) and The Hungry Heart: Journeys with William Colenso (2011). Much of Wells’ work evokes the past and attempts to bring a sense of order to the world. His films include Foolish Things (1980), Little Queen (1983), Jewels Darl (1985), Newest City on the Globe (1985), A Death in the Family (1987), The Mighty Civic (1988), A Taste of Kiwi (1990), Behind the Scenes (2001), Pansy (2003) and the feature film Desperate Remedies (1992) made in collaboration with his then partner Stewart Main. Wells’ other filmic collaborations include Naughty Little Peeptoe (2000) made with Garth Maxwell and Georgie Girl, made with Annie Goldson. Wells was the 2006 Writer in Residence at the University of Waikato where he completed a feature film script on the dancer Freda Stark and also worked on a new novel. Since then he has completed another film Somebody’s Darling, being stories connected with the colonial graveyard in Napier. In 2014 Wells was completing another book, Journey to a Hanging and was accepted for the Autumn residency at the Michael King Writer’s Centre in Devonport, Auckland. Shereen Maloney made a documentary about her mother Irene 59 (1983) followed by a film about her father Doc (1985). Maloney’s later films include Return Journey (1985), Akarana (1988), Behind Closed Doors (1991), The Confetti Conspiracy (1991), and Mother Tongue (1993). In recent years Maloney has worked as a producer of television documentaries. Gregor Nicholas’ films include Mouth Music (1981), Bodyspeak (1983), Drum/Sing (1985), Danny and Raewyn (1986), Rushes (1998) as well as two feature films User Friendly (1990) and Broken English (1996). Nicholas now lives in New York. Alison MacLean, a Canadian by birth and now resident in the United States, spent her formative years and launched her filmmaking career in New Zealand. MacLean’s films include Taunt (1983), a work reminiscent of Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon was one of a handful of experimental films available in New Zealand at the time. (1943), Rud’s Wife (1986), Talkback (1987), Kitchen Sink (1989) and the feature films Crush (1992) then Jesus’ Son (1999). MacLean lives in New York. Experimental filmmaker Christopher Barrett produced rock videos including at least one of inter-disciplinary artist Brent Hayward as Smelly Feet singing Fruit and Veges Hayward’s song Fruit and Veges (A Vegetable Market) can be viewed on YouTube.. Through the early 1980s Barrett worked on a huge autobiographical film project for which he made and processed film stock. Barrett utilized pioneering video and computer effects in tandem with optical printing. As President of Alternative Cinema, the Auckland Filmmakers' Co-operative, Barrett organized two to fourteen day long experimental filmmaking workshops in Auckland and Wellington These workshops pre-dated Ant Timpson’s 48 hour Film Festival.. At the conclusion of these workshops Barrett screened the films at the Classic Cinema in Auckland as well at various locations around Wellington. The most notable film to emerge from these workshops was Celluloid Daze (1983) by Janet Brady, a bleakly humorous account of the residue surrounding a failed relationship. Brady, who now lives in Dunedin, later made Suite For An Independent Cellist (1986) before abandoning all forms of art making. Barrett was also cinematographer for William Keddell’s Maintenance of Silence (1985). Returning to New Zealand after spending a decade in Europe studying art and making experimental films such as Eric 1 and The Monsters of Achanalt, William Keddell set about producing and directing music videos of Kiwi rock Sideways, Miltown Stowaways and the Screaming Mee Mees. Around this time a young man named Neil Roberts blew himself up as protest against the storing of information on all New Zealanders into a single police computer, or, as Eric, a character in Keddell’s film The Maintenance of Silence (1985) put it, "The State home of files, of personal information on all citizens." Keddell became intrigued by Robert’s motives and the media representations of the act. His innovative Maintenance of Silence (derived from the graffiti slogan ‘We Have Maintained a Silence Closely Resembling Stupidity’ Roberts had painted on a washroom wall before his suicide). I think that the silence Keddell addresses is based on fear and insecurity where business is carried out behind closed doors. Doors framed by pillars of statuesque silence, neither polite not magisterial. Here, society, including art society, closes in upon itself in hermetic self-referentiality as an endless circular confusion. It is not surprising that Keddell chose to live most of his artistic life in exile. The film screened widely throughout North America as a part of my traveling experimental film shows. The Maintenance of Silence featured an innovative soundtrack by Steve Roach Roach also created the sound for Gregor Nicholas’short film Rushes (1998)., a former member of Kiwi rock bands the Techtones, Sheerlux, as well as The Stridulators. Keddell and Roach shared the belief that all sound is music. Roach incorporated natural sound, at times mixing up to 25 layers, to evoke a focused sense of reality. Unfortunately the audio mix was too subtle for the optical 16mm film soundtrack and parts of it are a little muddied. It will only be heard in its full fidelity when Keddell digitizes the film at some future date. Since 1987 Keddell has resided in the United States, first in New York then later Miami, producing stereographic photographic art works which present dimensional conundrums and spatial anomalies. “I use stereography to explore and to bring attention to a full corporeality of dimensional space. You will often see in my work the evidence of deliberate interventions, which are calculated to delineate and/or to subvert a location’s spatial characteristics. In some work - bright pinpricks of light serve to carry our consciousness to the volumetric integrity of a location. In other projects the interventions are – the structured placement of numbered states, or of floating symbols, or of colour clashes or other devices which seek to achieve the same end, which is to bring attention to a seemingly palpable corporeal place.” Personal email to the author Since 2010 Keddell has embarked on his Airborne and Video series of reflexive landscape videos comprising long aerial tracking shots of American landscapes filmed from his powered parachute. These include, 8.5 Minutes Over the Bonneville Speedway Road, The Smell of Burnt Pine in the Morning (1 minute 20 seconds) and Finding Ranch cattle Florida (2 minutes 27 seconds). Examples of his work can be seen at www.williamkeddell.com The Maintenance of Silence can be viewed on Vimeo. Multi-talented and multi-disciplinary Brent Hayward is a prolific producer of rough-hewn transgressive work which articulates the anger of the disenfranchised or depicts intense, sometimes violent, cross or same gender sexual relationships. At times, Hayward's work has encompassed themes of witchcraft, Revelation, anti-fascism, animal rights and concerns about the dehumanizing effects of society. His work is contemporaneous with, though independent of, that of Nick Zedd and the Cinema of Transgression in New York Nick Zedd now lives in Mexico City.. The similarity between Zedd and Hayward's work is partly attributable to their applying an ethos of alternative music culture to filmmaking. His films include Mudslinging (1984); Beat It (1986); Dream Machine (1988); Slaughterhouse (1989); Slick (1989), Not the Life and Adventures of Sir Balzac Hardbodies (1999), Mondo Biko (1991), Rim (1991), Gatecrash, Hope, Gunplay, Manawanui, Ward 9C at 3am, and The Confessions of Johnny Barcode. He also self published two comic books in 1981 and wrote a piece Confessions of a Crooked Taxi Driver for Pulp Magazine. Some of his poems have been published under the pseudonym of Fats White in Short Fuse. Hayward had previously released records as a member of the punk band Shoes This High, as the solo artist Smelly Feet and as part of the musical duo Kiwi Animal with Julie Cooper. He is currently a member of the musical group Fats White, producing at least a couple of CDs as well as painting under this name. In early 2014 the LP record Straight To Hell by Shoes This High, featuring Hayward on vocals, was released in the USA on Siltbreeze records. Described as, “Something truly dangerous from the back pages of Kiwi musicology,” by Doug Mosurock, the album was drawn from a recently discovered 35 year old audio cassette tape. Around the same time Hayward also released the CD Endymion Best on Powertool Records. After abandoning filmmaking for music, Hayward again picked up his camera in 2005 to document the scene along Auckland's Cross Street as Brent Hayward directing a music video of a Fats White song. (This may have been Goodnight Norma Jean). A related video, Audio Slut (2007) Audio Slut can be viewed on YouTube. Other Brent Hayward films can be seen online at www.circuit.org.nz, is included on the NZX2K10 compilation DVD This DVD was included as a free giveaway with Illusions #42, Winter, 2010. Participating film artists were paid a royalty for the use of their work. Thanks to Creative New Zealand. of New Zealand experimental films. Since then he has been devoting his energies to painting. (He may have made one or more short films while in France in 2010). For several years now Hayward has been devoting his energies to painting, again under the name of Fats White. His painting style is an energetic and garishly colourful amalgam of brut expressionism and pop. Some of Hayward’s film and video work was shot by filmmaker, photographer and musician Stuart Page. Originally from Christchurch, Page now lives in Auckland. He has produced directed over forty music videos as well as shooting several 16mm films and videos. His rock band The Axemen (since 1983) has performed widely, touring the United States in 2009. Page has also exhibited his photographs, photo-screen prints, films and books in Australia, Europe, and the USA. His experimental films include WARPORNUSA (2004) a ten minute long collage work compiled from internet downloads, and Code Orange in the Big Apple (2005) made up of images of European and American street art. His documentary Shustak (2009) was the winner of the Best NZ Documentary Feature Award at the New Zealand Documentary Festival in 2009. In 2014 Page produced the 52 minute long documentary How Bizarre: The Story of an Otara Millionaire which was broadcast throughout New Zealand on Maori Television. Page’s musical activities can be followed at theaxemen.wordpress.com Popular Productions arose from a loose art 'collective' comprising a number of interchangeable individuals including, L Budd, Lillian Budd, CJ Arthur Graig and Sons, Marlene Cubewell, Roland Wells, Merit Groting, Menerva Betts and Blanche Ready Made. Their work which addresses concepts of gender, originality and individuality plays with ideas of artistic meaning. Because much of the group's work arose from a variation on second-hand shopping they were sometimes seen around Testrip Gallery on Auckland's Karangahape Road. They are now seen less often in that precinct as many of the second-hand shops have moved elsewhere and army surplus stores are now providing the impetus for the continuing popularity of their productions. The collective was also sometimes spoken for by Merylyn Tweedie (MT) an artist who studied initially at the Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch and later at the Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland. Tweedie may have been expelled from the group at some point. Popular Productions produced numerous examples of Bad Music Bad Sound and Bad Films made on Super 8mm and 16mm film as well as on video. The collective's films included The Master Bedroom (1986), You Require Filmic Pleasure (1987), Dora Visits the Blushing Bride (1988), Wonder What (1990), Wonder What’s Wrong (1990), Utopia: Discreet Investigations (1992), Epicene Soundworks (1993) and Ploughed Field (2003). These wryly contemplative moving image works often incorporated text and refuted notions of cinematic craft and quality. Writing of the collective’s film A Narrative That Provides the Measure of Desire (In Three Parts) early in her career Merylyn Tweedie stated that, “The work is an expression and exploration, multi-layered and diffuse, of a feminine/feminist sensibility, weaving together like fabric the cerebral and sensual. Her ‘narrative’ has no action in the usual sense. Its movement is like thought-energy, anarchic and lateral. Her penchant for blurred imagery flaunts photographic convention in a radical naivete – an ‘anti-technique’ that subverts technical virtuosity, or even competence. The three parts of the film are in fact, different versions and extensions of each other, related through recurring imagery.” Merylyn Tweedie. Notes on A Narrative that Provides the Measure of Desire (In Three Parts) in, Cantrills Filmnotes #55,56, May 1988. P59 In 2004 The Fundamental Practice, a work created by this collective, at the time known as et al., was the subject of a media furor in New Zealand after being chosen as the country's official representative at the 2005 Venice Biennale. The Prime Minister was outraged and became involved. The upshot was that instead of submitting an art work to the following Venice Bienale, New Zealand sent a committee of five people. This was quite a statement in itself. Some of the collective’s film & video work can be viewed on YouTube and at www.circuit.org.nz Chris Ghent in Wellington made a couple of interesting film loops, one of a dripping tap, the other of a passing train in the early 1980s. Other New Zealand film artists working at home and abroad, some of whose work is known of but rarely seen include, Harry Wong a.k.a Wong Sing Tai, a visual artist who was associated with Pacific Films in Wellington in the 1960, won the first Benson and Hedges Art Award in 1968. Wong also created the title sequences for the feature films Don't Let It Get You (1966) and Utu (1983). He made several experimental films, including Black Zero, the 1970s and 1980s and The Night of the Hungry Ghost (1999/2001), produced by David Blyth. Wong, who lives in Auckland, has, for many years, been working on a film titled The Dream of Chung Soo. John Henry produced an abstract video art piece, in the style of the films of the American film artists James and John Whitney, in three parts, Images (1976,) set to the music of Billy Cobham. Henry now works as a freelance web designer. Fiona Gray's Street Piece, Soccer Piece, Simply Fictitious, Doesn’t Necessarily Follow, all made in 1984. Small Time Encounters, In Search of Subtlety, Companion Piece and Afternoon Idyll, all 1985 and Untitled (Lost Narrative). Christchurch based artist, musician and Elvis impersonator Michael Braithwaite a.k.a Ritchie Venus produced a body of work in the 1980s that attained cult status in Christchurch. His titles from the 1980s include The Saga of Billy Byrne, Jaws of Death, Vigilante Fury and Off on a Comet. “The films of Ritchie Venus draw their plots, style and iconography from the heyday of American B movies. He uses the generic conventions of film noir, sci fi and the Western as the aesthetic basis for the creation of an imaginary cinematic universe,” wrote Alan Wright, (as) “lurid fantasies of revenge, narcissism and male paranoia.” Alan Wright: Vigilante Fury: Ritchie Venus VS Sam Neill in Illusions #42, July 2010. p13. Ritchie Venus appears as Elvis Presley in Ronnie van Hout’s The Elvis Presley Movie, is viewable at: www.circuit.org.nz The colourful and extroverted Raymond Millard, who had worked as a presenter on the popular children’s television show Spot On, moved from Dunedin to Auckland in the early 1980s. He worked on several experimental film projects at Alternative Cinema through the mid 1980s before experiencing an Asian religious epiphany which led him to retire to a spiritually based community somewhere down country. Born in the USA, Chris Kraus spent her formative years in New Zealand after her parents emigrated during the Vietnam War. Kraus returned to the United States in 1978, living in New York and becoming involved with the St Marks Poetry Project and various experimental theatre groups. Her first film, In Order to Pass (1982), a hand-made meditation on memory, reflection and nostalgia, was inspired by a trip back to New Zealand. Following that, Kraus made Terrorists In Love (1983), and then Voyage to Rodez (1986) and Foolproof Illusion (1987), two films made in association with the critic and philosopher Sylvere Lotringer, about the life and legacy of Antonin Artaud. Kraus then went on to make the controversial How to Shoot a Crime (1987), a 26 minute long film combining sadomasochism, gentrification and police videography. In 1988 she made The Golden Bowl or Repression, a conflation of Georges Bataille and Henry James, then Traveling at Night (1990), a videotape of speculations about the Underground Railroad, the escape route to Canada taken by fugitive African American slaves. Between 1993 and 1996 Kraus worked on a feature film Gravity and Grace. Spanning three countries, three years, and some 70 cast and crew members the film was, according to Kraus, 'an unmitigated disaster'. The disappointment of that experience led Kraus to writing her first novel I Love Dick (1997). Her second novel, Aliens and Anorexia (2000) confronted the troublesome experience of making Gravity and Grace. A refreshingly honest and insightful writer Kraus also produced a book of subjective art criticism, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness (2004). In 2006 she published her third novel, Torpor followed, several years later, by Summer of Hate and then Where Art Belongs, a book of art criticism, in 2011. Her novels tell of her life experiences, loves, and her involvement with art and thought in New Zealand and the world. Kraus, who lives in Los Angeles and upstate New York, is a co-editor with Sylvere Lotringer and Hedi El Kholti, at Semiotext(e), America's leading independent press. Then there was also my simple films including Vistas (1985), American Sketchbook (2000), For Dots (2005), and Brown’s Barbeque (2006) which equated experimental film with a marginalized, homeless activity that takes place outside of society. For Dots and Brown’s Barbeque both crossed the intersection between experimental and ethnographic filmmaking. The anthropologist Dr Michael Goldsmith described Brown’s Barbeque as a work of, “pure visual anthroplology.” Personal remark to the author, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand c2008. Increasingly I find myself questioning the obsession with media technologies, presentation and theory that characterizes much academic work. My interests are being drawn toward a humanistic cinema, one where ethnography lends itself to cultural and artistic activism. This may be as externally focused work that may eschew individuality for community and a consciousness that rises above self-consciousness. Or maybe of existing at a level of autonomy that transcends psychological need and gain, freedom from human desire where action may be shaped by due consideration and self reflection. In his presentation Representation and the Intellectual for the 1993 Reith Lectures, Edward Said defined the intellectual as necessarily a disturber of the status quo, one who lives in dissent, often as an outsider, as someone who cannot be ‘co-opted’ by the institutions of government, academia or corporations. Such an intellectual may also be an intervener, inserting themselves into a context with the hope of correcting it Oraib Toukan. We the Intellectuals Re-routing Institutional Critique. Accessed at www.ibraaz.org/essays/98. This was certainly my ambition when I began collecting independent New Zealand films and organizing them into travelling film programmes in 1980. It seemed so natural and I wondered why our cultural institutions were not already doing it. I naively believed that my activity may spur them to action and that the ‘business as usual’ of New Zealand arts academia and management may be improved in a humanistic and ultimately artist-friendly direction. One where payment to artists became the norm and where arts academics and administrators would ask, first of all, what is best for our artists and most important for our culture? And when artists answered that question for them then they made it so. But this did not happen and so the business carries on, pretty much as usual. From 1985 to around 2000 I called my project The Invisible Cinema but discarded this name around 2000, replacing it with Homeless Movies, as a more accurate representation of my life in experimental film. Excerpts from some of my work can be viewed on my YouTube page and at www.circuit.org.nz. Over the past decade or so more artists have begun working with moving images, placing themselves as practitioners of an ‘artists’ cinema’, a cinema largely divorced from experimental filmmaking. Much of this work comes out of art schools and academic contexts, quite different from the independent, even ‘outsider’, status of earlier film artists. Academic artists are not independent artists, the range of their expression is constrained by the imperatives of the institutions they work for. While such constraints could suit a formal address of cinematic and digital media this has not happened in New Zealand. The overwhelming aura of New Zealand art is conservative. The most singular visions in European New Zealand art have been created by non-academics whose work was (broadly) inflected by a sense of particularity within indigeneity. These artists include, Len Lye (1901-1980), Theo Schoon (1915-1985), Colin McCahon (1919-1987) and Tony Fomison (1939-1990). With the exception of Maori and Polynesian, who have a genuine stake in the culture, those artists who wish to push the envelope often choose to take their chances in the vicissitudes of of exile. I recall a North American artist once asking of my residence in North America if I was on the run from the law in New Zealand. To remain as independent media artist in New Zealand is to face a life beyond the margins. For even approximations of media arts centres invariably function as the marketing and promotional arms of academia and true independents can expect little joy there. There are two types of academic artists’ cinema, one being work produced by faculty members and the other being student work. Unfortunately, a lot of this work comprises little more than a cinema of empty gestures, much of it exhibiting no compelling reason for being made. See Genres of New Zealand Experimental Film on my page at www.academia.edu for rationales around types of experimental filmmaking. But I guess that is the nature of the academy. Curatorial choices, when they are made, are timid and notions of payment to artists virtually non-existent. This may be OK for a colonial style arts society, one in which paid administrators coordinate artists and their work as volunteers. It is not so good for an arts scene. Unpaid artists are stressed, their time and resources stretched across an uneven playing field. One in which art is appropriated by academics, tied to research outputs, I overheard recently of one art school employing a particular person to lobby curators on behalf of its staff. This is because if curators can be convinced to include academic artists in their shows then the institutions the academic artists represent are entitled to more funding. within a framework of art as a cultural industry. Here, arts academia functions as a tactical field in which power plays are made up, down and across infinitely Byzantine hierarchies. There exist long-standing models of media artists being paid for their work. One only has to look to Canyon Cinema in San Francisco, Filmmakers Co-op in New York, CFMDC in Toronto, LUX in London and Light cone in Paris. Even Alternative Cinema and the Invisible Cinema were paying New Zealand film artists from the 1980s. Yet fully funded organizations such as the Moving Image Centre (which was set up to distribute work) could not find a way to meaningfully support or exhibit experimental film. Instead, from the late 1990s the MIC figured itself as a moving image ‘gallery’ and so programmed work to fit within that framework. The art gallery model is quite different from the experimental film exhibition system. For a fuller discussion of these frameworks see Martin Rumsby. One Day in Chicago – Interview with Brenda Webb and Patrick Freil of Chicago Filmmakers in, Illusions #27, Winter 1998. pp 30-32. Also, “Some of us have chosen experimental film for precisely the ways it resists some of the worst tendencies of the art world … Experimental film is de-centered … Experimental film is poor … and the gap between established and emergent makers is relatively small/” – Roger Beebe. On “Artists Cinema” and “Moving Image Art”. Accessed at: booklynrail.org/2014/07/criticspage/on-artists-cinema-and-moving-image July 9, 2014. Scott Stark offers a film artists perspective, “For me , one of the liberating lessons of the avant-garde of the sixties and seventies was that audiences could experience cinema beyond the borders of the screen, engaging with the senses on a para-cinematic level – beyond conventional ideas of logic, beyond the perceived limits of the cinematic experience. We could engage with ideas that were part of the larger art world. Thus a few of us became interested in the possibilities of media installation and performance art, in which light and sound could be more than a means to convey information: they were physical substances that could be molded and shaped sculpturally … But being an installation or performance artist also meant that one had to find a gallery, theater or other public space willing to commit a significant amount of its real estate for a specified period of time, with little likelihood of financial gain. This, in turn, meant having to engage with a highly codified power structure, which to somebody groomed on avant-garde film exhibition seemed a considerably more ambitious task than getting a five minute film into a group show … It also meant producing a work of art that, for good or bad, could not be easily sold, a concept certainly familiar to avant-garde filmmakers.” – Scott Stark. Rendering Outside the Frame:: Film Performance and Installation Art in, radical LIGHT Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000. Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley, 2010. p241. On payment to film artists Dominic Angerame, former director of the independent distributor Canyon Cinema in San Francisco, reported that, “Filmmakers … get 50 per cent of Canyon (film) rentals … The future may be in downloading film. You digitize the work and pay per view. Museums are a new market … The paradigm is that if a museum wants a piece for three months, they pay for the transfer. The artist oversees the process and ensures the quality. If a film is exhibited eight times a day, you charge for each screening.” Dominic Angerame, Canyon Cinema: Ideals and Institution in, Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz and Steve Seid (eds), radical LIGHT. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2010. pp 186,187. Recently, K.C. McLeoad set up Vyer Films, an online subscription service featuring a robust catalogue of independent films. “We remit a very large share of revenue to the fillmakers … 70% of revenue goes back to filmmakers. So dollar for dollar, more money from a Vyer subscriber is going back to the filmmakers than any other subscription service at this time.” Accessed at: nofilmschool.com/2014/08/vyer-films-gives-glimpse-future-curation-indies/ August 26, 2014 Film artists missed out. As far as I know, no curated shows, national or international touring programmes, catalogues or critical writing come out of the MIC after about 1996. If our film artists had already been let down by our media arts academics they have been almost completely sidelined since the days of the MIC. How different the North American exemplar where artists’ rights are promoted by artist-run centres which prioritize payment to artists. Founded in 1973, Chicago Filmmakers is one such centre. According to Brenda Webb, Chicago Filmmakers’ Director, “In terms of the philosophy of Chicago Filmmakers from the founding, paying artists’ fees was a critical commitment. Probably the most important philosophical decision. It was something that was not really understood by the larger arts community. Art galleries don’t understand why we need to budget money to pay film artists … experimental films are not a commodity.” This type of thinking is completely foreign to New Zealand’s arts administrative culture where to propose the notion of payment to film artists is to commit a heresy. Yet in a society whose core values are egalitarian an equitability, not to mention equanimity, between artists and art professionals could be effected by the simple means of artists being reimbursed for the use of their work. Our arts environment will be fully professional when artists are paid for their work. For a broader context see my interview from February, 1985 with the visual artist Theo Schoon where he and fellow artist Tony Fomison talk about relationships between New Zealand art institutions and artists - Theo Schoon: An artist is only shit and he is supposed to play the prince. The benevolent prince. Tony Fomison: The prince of shit. Schoon: Yes … Whereas the institutions should be generous … and should be conscientious about paying (artists). Fomison: Well those office holders in … art scene jobs have a higher standard of living than the artist. Schoon: They drive around in cars while you walk. Fomison: And they can take a plane trip anytime. Schoon: That’s so familiar. I know the story inside out … Be sure you get paid … All the things that had to be done and I was never paid … I’ve done my work. If they can’t be alert. If they can’t have any curiosity then they merely fail in their job. (Schoon is speaking from a perspective formed in the 1940s and Fomison from the 1970s and 1980s. Sadly, I can report from my own experience that, in regards to experimental film, this attitude is still ingrained within the administrative and academic sector of New Zealand arts). Martin Rumsby. Interview with Theo Schoon. Accessed at rumsby.net/interviews/theo-schoon June 30, 2014. I find this particularly frustrating, not only as a film artist, but also because in the early 1980s I set up Alternative Cinema Film Distribution. From the very beginning I paid out film rentals and from 1984 began purchasing 16mm & Super 8 mm film prints. This as an unfunded private enterprise. These films were assembled into shows which toured throughout New Zealand and later North America. In doing this I was trying to set a precedent. Which I did, only for this example to be ignored by subsequent professionalized arts administrators. In the early 1990s Keith Hill set up the Moving Image Centre, primarily as a distribution and exhibition centre. The MIC staged successful screenings and released DVDs of local short films. After Hill left the MIC was repositioned as a moving image gallery, a half-way house between ‘dance parties’ and careerist maneuverings in an environment of indifference toward experimental film. To ask for a screening of one’s work would be to receive no response. The justification was that the MIC had expanded its focus to also include new media. Following years of widespread unhappiness with the MIC things came to a head around a Chris Welsby installation which he withdrew from exhibition in 2009. Welsby explained to me in an email of February 10, 2010, “I am disgusted by (the Moving Image Centre) … This is the first time in nearly forty years that I have ever had to withdraw my work. The gallery and its staff are arrogant, ignorant and completely incompetent.” When the MIC subsequently lost its funding many of us breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe things would get back on track again and experimental filmmakers could look forward to paid exhibition opportunities for their work along with some contextualized curatorial initiatives. Sadly, this has not happened. It needs to be pointed out that not to reimburse an artist for the use of their work is exploitation. In creating works of art artists have costs to meet, in terms of paying for and maintaining materials, equipment, research as well as day to day administrative and living costs. Even when a work is completed artists also incur costs in exhibiting their work. It is as this point that artists need support in getting their work out and in being reimbursed for it. If professional expertise is brought into play in the exhibition of the work, surely it is professional to pay the artist for the use of their work. After all, without artwork then there will be no work for arts academics and administrators. It is now apparent that we need a specific artist-run centre that supports moving image artists who produce cinematic work. Experimental film is not particularly well-suited to art gallery exhibition. Co-ordinating art and artists has got to amount to something more than creating opportunities for institutions to interface with one another. Artists will only be unhappy if their work is used as window dressing for art political activities. Representing artists and acting in their name means putting artists first and of creating opportunities to support artists. Ask first, what is good for artists and our culture? Then take it from there. The question and the solution are quite simple. I wonder why we are having so much trouble getting it right in New Zealand. Work that is best regarded as intellectual property. I recall Maori kapa haka Kapa haka – traditional Maori performing groups. groups putting their feet down in the early 1970s about being paid for their performances. Until then, Maori had been expected to front up for free at all manner of official and public functions. There was a period of awkward silence following their demands but eventually Maori began to be paid for their cultural contribution. No one would now question paying Maori to perform kapa haka. It would seem that the time has now come to start putting things right for our film artists. As a way of doing things right by artists maybe funding bodies could insist that payment to artists for the use of their work be an integral part of the budget of organizations seeking funding to represent media artists. In these ways a measure of equitability and fairness would be introduced into our arts environment. With meaningful support our moving image artists can be expected to have longer careers and longer lives in which to produce more work and stronger work. And that will be good for all concerned. SOURCES Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz and Steve Seid (eds): radical LIGHT: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2010. pp 186,187. Russell Campbell: System Overload: The Anarchist Rebel in William Keddell's The Maintenance of Silence in, Journal of New Zealand Studies, 2009 Andrew Clifford: Reproducing Perfection in, Fetus Reproductions. Auckland, Artspace, 2002. John Dix: Stranded in Paradise: New Zealand Rock and Roll 1955 to the Modern Era. Auckland, Penguin, 2005. Roger Horrocks: New Zealand Filmmakers at the Auckland City Art Gallery. Auckland. Auckland City Art Gallery. 1985. Roger Horrocks: The Tradition of the New, in Film in Aotearoa New Zealand. Jonathon Dennis & Jan Bieringa (Eds.), Victoria University Press, Wellington, 1992. Alexis Hunter: Email correspondence with Martin Rumsby, January 18, 2010. Darcy Lange: Video Art. Auckland. Department of Film, Television and Media Studies, University of Auckland, 2001. Robert Leonard: Screwing Up the Eyes in, Illusions #9, 1988. Sylvere Lotringer: A Visit With the Artists. Melbourne, Pataphysics, 2004 Romero, Pedro G: Antipodes: Darcy Lange, Work and Flamenco in the Image Chain of Production in, Vicente, Mercedes (Ed): DARCY LANGE: STUDY OF AN ARTIST AT WORK, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, pp 167-182 Martin Rumsby: One Day in Chicago in, Illusions #27, Winter, 1998. pp30-32 Martin Rumsby: Interview with Brent Hayward. Accesiible at: rumsby.net/interviews – search Brent Hayward Martin Rumsby: Diary of a Viewer Part Four, Auckland, 2009 in, Illusions #42, Winter, 2010 pp 17-25. Deborah Shepard: REFRAMING WOMEN A History of New Zealand Film, Harper Collins, Auckland, 2000. Jed Town: Secrets From the Ocean Floor, Programme Notes, Auckland, Moving Image Centre, 2009. Peter Wells: Glamour on the Slopes, in Film in Aotearoa New Zealand. Dennis & Bieringa (Eds.). Wellington, Victoria University Press, 1992. Wright, Alan: Vigilante Fury: Ritchie Venus Vs Sam Neill in, Illusions #42, Winter 2010, pp 13-16 PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 2