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