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Swimming
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Swimming is among the most striking short
Australian films of the 1990s. In 16mm, it is comprised mainly of small scenes
of domestic life shot on video, as if by one of the characters in the fiction. (It
thus predates, by a considerable stretch, the mockumentary/found footage craze
in the horror-thriller genre.) These scenes are assembled in a deliberately
fragmented, elliptical way, punctuated by violent, glitch edits and finally coming
to seem like the ambiguous testament or audiovisual document assembled by a
young girl who has uncovered a terrible truth about her own family. The only
interruption to the video imagery is provided by something else which is not,
in the first place, 16mm footage – Super 8 shots mocked up as the home movie
format of an earlier historical moment.
The film is only eleven minutes long. By conventional
narrative standards, it is not all that easy to follow. It is built up through
inference, “a web of visual cues” (1) and clues, slowly accumulating its sense
through a kind of indirect narration. Things are not as laboriously spelt out
for the spectator as in so many Australian film narratives (short or long), but
rather suggested in a pointillistic way. The title refers not only to a mysterious
death, but also the swimming or drifting of sense in the film itself – quietly
offering a meaning which seems to circle the film or hover just above it, a
meaning which might evaporate if one froze the projector and interrogated the
work for specifics at any given frame. Chayko remarks, tellingly: “It’s a film
about feeling, not about knowing”. (2)
There is another sense in which this film swims: in
its very ambiguity as a material, so-called filmic object. Given the nature of
its images, we might say Swimming is
clearly not a video – but can we say, with the same old certainty, that it is
still a film? The reason Chayko uses video to generate its material is, in the
first place, not especially mysterious. In the line of those important
mainstream films that have incorporated extensive use of video for key
sequences – such as The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1982), Prince of
Darkness (John Carpenter, 1987) and Shocker (Wes Craven, 1989) – Swimming grounds
its video images in a diegetic motivation: they belong to the fiction. Yet it
takes the disturbance of video’s eruption into the heart of a film – so palpable
an unease in Scorsese’s masterpiece – a little further still, by creating a
film which is almost all video, completely invaded as it were by this other medium, somewhat brutal and
artless even in comparison to the inadvertent poetry of old Super 8 footage
(which carries a poignant, expressive effect here, as in many a Paul Cox
feature).
But is it really a matter any more, in the 1990s, of
one medium threatening, invading, incorporating another? Are there still the
same rigid boundaries around the various media allowing such reveries of alien
otherness? For today, on the unstoppable capitalist terrains of technological
production and market distribution, it seems that everything, ineluctably, is
swimming – and that no medium or channel for expression is necessarily
drowning. This swimming or drifting is having enormous effects on all sectors
of film culture at once: on the relations between film and video, and between
all the gauges of film itself (Super 8, 16, 35, 70mm); on the hitherto
sacrosanct division between the short and the long film; and on the aesthetics
of mainstream cinema vis-à-vis experimental art.
Consequently, a new strategy for surveying the short
film in Australia is required of a critic who is at all sensitive to what’s in
the air. The old strategy – which has given Australian film culture its
distinctive character for about 25 years – was openly polemical and
territorial. One staked out one’s ground with a claim to the strategic primacy,
and the exotic specificity, of Super 8, or video art, or experimental film, or
whatever, and then one railed against those other territories unfairly favoured
through the cultural networks of subsidy, promotion and criticism. Some
tensions are still very much in play – there will always be a ‘mainstream’ and
its ‘margin’ – but much of the ground defining the old battles, or at least the
terms in which they could be posed, is now fast turning into quicksand.
Swimming, although at the beginning of
the 1990s a unique and exceptional film, is one that points towards a possible
future, in all dimensions. Technologically, it marks the increasing
intermingling, within any one work, of film (in its various gauges) and video,
and of low tech with high tech. In the way it tells its story, it hints at a
new kind of fast fiction which may be
increasingly understood and indeed demanded by a mass audience brought up on
the audiovisual forms developed on television. And last, it is tempting to
welcome the film as a kind of breakthrough for experimentation in a training
institution – the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) –
characterised essentially by an aesthetic conservatism, a tendency to narrow
creative options so as to better fit into the mainstream of the media
industries. Where are we swimming to?
More than ever, the boundaries which once fenced off
and regulated the flows of audiovisual culture are in
question. The time is fast disappearing when a short – and already that word is
starting to become inadequate, obsolete – meant a quaint little novelty item: a
harmless animation, a quirky documentary, a flashy dramatic or comic vignette.
Whether we like it or not, we are swimming toward a future in which the short
film/video will not be regarded as a miniature, a sketch or an anecdote, but
something more akin to a crystal: an
object with multiple surfaces and depths, creating resonances for a viewer and
complexities of reading that extend far beyond the work’s apparent ‘size’.
Those aficionados of the short form who already know and love works such as Swimming, Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (Tracey Moffatt, 1990), Tales from Vienna Hoods (Marcus Bergner,
1989) and Viva (Mark Titmarsh, 1989)
already have a fair idea of what this sparkling, crystalline future will be
like.
Note: This text draws from the introduction and
conclusion to a survey of short film production in Australia published in the
early 1990s.
© Adrian Martin late 1990 |
