MARTHA ANSARA



Has it been easy or difficult to make documentaries in Australia?

I don't think it's easy in this period for most people, but it has been easy for me in some ways and hard in others because of the way I've done things - I've never tried to make a living from doing it. So usually there hasn't been much worry about it. But it's very hard because I've had a family to look after and the two things don't go together. Also it's very exhausting work. Right now I'm doing a film about Frank Hurley, who's the model documentary maker. The reason I'm doing this film with my friend, Pat Fisk, is that his obsessive pursuit of bringing the film back from wherever is so typical of documentary makers, including me and her, we need to really examine this obsession we've had and we're doing it through him. And making documentaries allows you to get away from the foundations of your own life into other people's lives and you don't have to think about anything that you need to think about.

What drove Frank Hurley?

His first films were done on the Mawson expedition of 1911-1913. And because he never speaks of himself, it's been very hard to get a completely satisfactory analysis. He wrote many diaries but they're all at a distance. There are a few times when he lets things slip. He had a very difficult childhood and ran away from home at the age of 13. In later life I know that he avoided his family, including his widowed mother. His daughters dreaded going to see her. But I don't really know what it was. In those days there was great excitement about exploration, about science and about aviation, all of which he participated in, and in Empire and even war. It was a sort of glorified realm which men of stature were involved in and men of education.

Although he left school at 13, he did do some courses later. He always wanted to be a very well-educated person and, in fact, he was. But he had an intense wish to idealise things, which you see in his pictures. I have a lot of identification with his tendency towards pictorialism. The compositions were really very important to him, beyond the content, unlike, for instance, Damien Parer, who worked with Frank Hurley in the Second World War and represented a much more emotional type of picture. Hurley wanted to keep everything in its place and beautifully composed. I know that when I've shot films, those are the things I like, too.

In your film, how much is biographical and how much is study of his technique as a film-maker?

Well, we believe the two are very closely linked, so we're attempting to talk about him biographically, analytically, with a great deal of sympathy, obviously, and appreciation of his actual film-making and its style, and also about the social trends of the time.

From 1911 to the 40s is certainly a striking thirty-year period in the development of film, from silent to sound, and only 15 years or so after the Lumiere Brothers' first screening.

It's very, very interesting, yes. He came into film in the very early days in Australia and he made his last films after the Second World War, and he continued photographing stills until the day before he died in January 1962.

And yourself? When did you start making films in Australia?

When I arrived in Australia at the end of 1969, it was just the time of that big cultural upsurge which ultimately led, along with the social changes, to the Whitlam Labor Government. In 1970, I believe it was, the Film, Radio and Television Board of the Australia Council had its first round of applications for an experimental film fund and I received some money then to make a film for the Women's Liberation Movement. We made that film, called Film for Discussion, although it took quite a long time and babies intervened but that was the first film I made.

Did you do any formal studies here or had you done any in the United States?

No, but in 1975 I applied to the Film School and was part of the first full-time program there. I actually, by then, wanted to be a cinematographer but I didn't tell them that because I had failed everywhere to get work as a camera assistant because they said women couldn't do that. So I told them I wanted to be a director. But it's not really what I really wanted to do.

You would have preferred the cinematography work?

Yes, but you're away from home far too much. So, although I did do that for a few years - and I think I was pretty successful at it - I was learning all the time but it wasn't something I could pursue. I did shoot a lot of films for other people.

Why did they say a woman couldn't do it?

Well, it was a sort of throwback to the times when equipment was very heavy - but they even said that even to a friend of mine who's 5'11" - and because there was an entrenched view of what a cameraman was. Certainly Jan Kenny, who was one of the first women to work professionally, encountered a lot of prejudice. But it's interesting that, once you showed that you could be one of the boys, you were allowed to do the work. There are a lot of women who do do it but, in fact, because it conflicts with home life for women and child-rearing, although for some reason it doesn't seem to do so for men, it's hard for most women to stick to it. In fact, it's very hard for most women to work professionally in film because there's still the question of the home front. I always thought it was the film industry which should change, but it's supposed to be the people that change to meet the film industry - well, it's becoming an industry, but it was never really an industry.

You were associated with a number of women's groups, at least in the '70s, even later. Who were some of those groups and what were they trying to do with film in those days?

You must understand that we were really shut out. We had hardly ever seen a film directed anywhere by a woman or in which women played key creative roles, much less in Australia. But at the same time as this incredible social change was going on in Australia, there was a women's movement and an attempt to develop an Australian film industry. Naturally we wanted to have a place in it and we wanted women generally to have a place in it and not just be continuity girls, make-up and so on.

There had been a lot of stifled talent and many of the women who later became leading producers had been continuity girls, like Sue Milliken, Jill Robb, Joy Cavill - although she was one of the ones to break out of that - because that was the role that women were supposed to be able to do. So we were raising a lot of questions about women's position and women's ability, in the context of the Women's Liberation Movement, as it was called then - that word "liberation" rapidly disappeared!

What were the kind of films you actually did produce in those years?

We worked on each other's films and we had little groups to distribute the films because, in fact, most Australian films couldn't get distribution, and we very effectively managed to get our films into the schools and government departments and places where people still looked at films as part of education or discussion, that kind of thing. It still goes on, but not in the same spirit. And now, of course, they're all sold on video. But there had been a very strong film movement in Australia from the end of the Second World War and there were film societies everywhere. So there was a habit of looking at films and discussing films and we made films about women's condition, largely, and we worked through the Sydney Film-Makers' Co-op, which we had helped establish.

In Melbourne there was a group of women who weren't really serious about film-making, I don't think, because most of them didn't ever go on in film-making. They were called Reel Women and they insisted that the women's film group should be separate. We said, "No, we've built up this film co-op and, of course, we want to be part of it, but we can have a separate interest group within the whole." Ultimately that co-op fell prey to what I would call ultra-Left thinking which was its demise.

In the Sydney Film-Makers' Co-op, there was a time when people adopted these Left positions - and mind you, I was in the Communist Party all this time. But I feel that through the Communist Party I had learned that there are times when it's appropriate to put forward your ideas and times when it isn't, and to run a Left-wing film co-op in the circumstances we were in was absolutely ridiculous and I bowed out of it sometime in the late '70s when we went to an annual general meeting and everybody congratulated themselves that it was only the Left-wing people who were there, and I thought, "Whoops, that's the end of us." And so it proved to be, because it needed to serve the interests of all film-makers, whatever their particular bent, because that's the situation we're in in Australia, that everybody needs to put forward their ideas.

So, ultimately the co-op floundered, but it served a very important need. It was through the co-op and through our own work in the co-op that we were really able to get these women's films around very widely.

You photographed Essie Coffey's well-known film that was often used in seminars, My Survival as an Aboriginal. Was that part of the co-op movement?

Through the co-op we showed it at the cinema. And the co-op got wonderful audiences. Through our collective work that way, we really made this film and caused debate about its ideas. It's interesting, everything is professionalist now - an appearance that is often much larger than its reality. In those days I think the reality was much bigger than the daggy appearance.

I remember Essie Coffey introducing the family as they all came out of the caravan, and her walking one of her grandchildren through the bush and teaching him. Aboriginal grandmothers are great communicators.

When we made that film, one of the things that was in Essie's mind was that people were saying that, unless you're up in Arnhem Land running around in your undies, so to speak, you're not aboriginal. So that question of identity and being aboriginal was actually a debate, which it isn't now, thank God. There's a much broader view now of aboriginality, whatever that is. The film was made to reflect her views, and her views also changed over time, not a lot, but significantly, so that when we made the next film 17 years later, My Life As I Live It, she had thought a lot about some of the ways forward for aboriginal communities. It wasn't just protest, very concrete ways that things might change.

Another film was Changing The Needle. It screened at State Film Centre programs in Melbourne.

That's right. Because Australian documentaries were relatively rare and there was an audience for social documentaries, we used to be able to get audiences in those small state-supported cinemas for films on lots of different issues, mainly social issues. But, of course, that doesn't exist now. I was very pleased to see that my friend Gill Leahy's wonderful film, Our Park ran at the Valhalla for several weeks. It's a great film.

There still is an audience for these documentaries but with television and people moving into television which, I suppose is a good thing - I don't have a television and I don't like watching it - but it gives an economic base to your film-making if you can sell a film internationally. Now, of course, you don't get the theatrical screenings, but then those kinds of films couldn't get on television. In the year My Survival was sold to the ABC, they bought, I think, only five documentaries made outside the ABC. Within the ABC, although there were some wonderful films, they often tended to be formula films. At least My Survival was certainly not a formula film.

Did you go to Vietnam for Changing the Needle?

Yes. I had gone to a meeting in 1979 for somebody who had been teaching in Vietnam and was reporting back on the state of the country and I realised that, in fact, the war was continuing by other means. I felt very concerned about this and felt it would be a good time to look at the country and try to understand the condition of things because nobody heard anything. So I went to Vietnam with Mavis Robertson, who had been a joint secretary of the Communist Party and who, being in that position, gave us a lot of clout with the people there because there's a sort of Chinese system in the whole of government, very hierarchical in their thinking, a lot of respect for people in high positions.

We held long, long, long discussions day after day after day to try to work through the huge cultural differences and what they might expect and what we might expect and how we could make an arrangement, because we knew it would be very difficult to make a film there. We actually settled on a subject, a wonderful subject, which was to revisit the 17th Parallel where the great Dutch film-maker Joris Ivens had made a film in 1967, 1968 or 9, sometime around then, about how people managed in this intensely bombed 17th Parallel. We had wondered whether anybody would be alive or if anybody could find them. A man who had been head of the army film unit and had worked with XX had not only written a book, which had won a prize, about that area, but actually knew where most of these people were who featured in his film. They had mainly survived.

So we wanted to go back and visit where they were now, but Ivens was working with the Chinese and he forbade us to use that footage, even though Wilfred Burchett put it to him for us in Paris. That is what convinced us of the necessity of being absolutely independent of any government body when you make those films. Ivens was tied - I'm sure not just financially but emotionally - to the Chinese who were engaging in the border war with the Vietnamese, and he was not going to cross the Chinese by allowing us to use that footage.

It was very shocking. I had met him also in 1980, I think. Yes, we went to Vietnam in 1980 and I had met Ivens at the Flaherty Documentary Seminar in New York, and he was a marvellous man, absolutely marvellous man. He was eighty years old and he had more energy in his little finger than almost everybody in the whole place. He was just incredible and funny and we joked about some people walking towards us, the big-wigs, and how they looked like a Bulgarian delegation. We had the same sort of background and thinking and knowledge.

So we made a film about drug rehabilitation as a way of looking at the country, and we tried to take as objective a stance as we could. But it was a fairly conventional film in terms of a film in Australia. But in terms of making a film in Vietnam, anybody who had ever been to Vietnam, like John Pilger, was amazed at what we shot. But it took constant work, diplomacy, discussion, discussion, discussion. But we knew how to do that and, more than that, we were tough. I mean, the Vietnamese are really tough, but my friend Mavis Robertson is tougher, and more polite. So it took enormous politeness and enormous toughness. We did impossible things, even though it looks quite normal.

The Pursuit of Happiness and your decision to do a fiction film, and with a longer running time than your documentaries?

I hadn't decided to do a fiction film originally. Being involved in the Peace Movement for all this time and being involved in what was known as originally AICD, Association for International Co-operation and Development, which later became People for Nuclear Disarmament, I felt it would be good in 1985, after our big peace marches, to try to come to grips with the relationship between Australia and the United States. This seemed to be the critical issue: the reason why we have the US bases here, making us still a nuclear target.

At first I wanted to make a documentary, but we realised we couldn't see any way of getting to the issues that we wanted to get to through a documentary. All those documentaries have been made on the ABC, on Four Corners, over and over again really, by Jim Downey - he actually helped us with the film, some voice-overs. He was a Four Corners reporter throughout the '60s and '70s and his films said everything there was to say. But I realised that didn't have an impact because you had to put in all these facts and figures. So, ultimately, I thought I could make it in the form that I had made my first film in, Film for Discussion, which was a form of a psycho-drama. But it didn't turn out to be that kind of film because time had moved on and people I was working with didn't know how to deal with things that way. So it wasn't at all what I had planned. It was very difficult to make on the budget and in the way we were trying to do it. I still wanted to work in the way in the new circumstances, and in Fremantle, which was the correct place.

So I worked on improvising things there with the people we had. But it didn't come out improvised and we had documentary sections with facts and figures. And it was a story film in which there was a relationship between a husband and wife, a sort of paradigm for the relationship between Australia and the United States. It was a bit of a crude analysis, but it took so long to make (under the 10BA system) that by the time we finished the film - it was 1987 - for various reasons, the anti-nuclear movement was on the way out, so the film missed its time. And with films, timing is everything. If we had done it in a year, which we couldn't, it probably would have done very, very well. As it was, it did return 40 percent to the investors, but that was because it was very low-budget.

The interesting thing about the film is that, if the audience was not very sophisticated, they liked it enormously. If they were sophisticated, they thought it was really daggy. It got four stars and a huge audience on New Zealand television, whatever that means, and in Fremantle it played to packed houses.

With Pursuit of Happiness and in Questions of Peace, because I was born in 1942, I was ten years old in 1952. I experienced the stories of the Second World War, the horror of the concentration camps, the Japanese atrocities, as they were singled out, the Japanese and then, of course, the Cold War with the build-up of the nuclear arms race, it affected me very profoundly. I've been involved in the peace movement since I was a young thing taking around Ban the Bomb petitions. I have had a chance through the peace movement to get a very broad view of the world and of the relationship between the personal behaviour of people and the political things that happen. I can really see the inner and outer connections. The peace movement has influenced me profoundly.
I don't think that film actually reflects what I would want it to reflect. It's very crude and sort of programmatic, but nevertheless there are relationships between individuals and relationships between countries, nations, power relationships, the resolution of conflict, contradictions are still very pressing issues. I wish I had made a film which could have transcended its immediate use to explore some of those issues, but maybe we might do a little bit more along those lines, although not as overtly, in the film about Frank Hurley.

Between The Pursuit of Happiness and Frank Hurley, what have you been doing?

I did that film with Essie Coffey.

With the demise of the Communist Party, there was an attempt to form a much broader Left-wing party. I don't make films very often. I realised I couldn't. When my last child was born in 1982, I tried to keep on making films but, really, as a single parent of a young child, with other children, I couldn't. Besides, I was waking up to myself about my allocation of time, so it got harder and harder and I realised that I certainly couldn't go and shoot films because you're always away from home. You can't do it.

You mentioned "dragging your child through the goldfields of Western Australia"?

Yes, I did. I dragged my child through the goldfields of Western Australia. I was working with David Noakes and there was supposed to be a babysitter and there wasn't. We would just hand Alice to the nearest person who would wheel her in her pram over the land until we could wave in the distance and say that her crying would not disturb the filming. That wasn't very satisfactory. I remember there were all those pictures of the guerrilla mother with her rifle in one hand and her baby on her back. Bullshit! All this time I've been very involved in social movements and political things, trying to continue to do that.

So I was in Western Australia trying to help this new Left party, but it was started too much on the foundations of the old Left parties. The idea was that we, the respectable Communists, should link together with the weird sects instead of people from the environment movement or churches or whatever. Anyway, I didn't like that and, of course, for many reasons it didn't succeed. But I was working on that in Western Australia, living in a hotel in a room with the two kids, which was good, lovely. We rented out this little house - people kept lowering the rent on me - lower and lower and lower - but I loved living in a hotel room.

In the course of all that, I met up with my old friend, Robert Bropho, of the Fringe Dwellers of the Swan Valley. They were occupying the Swan Brewery and he kept working on me to do a film. I gave in and borrowed a camera and some used tapes and we made a little film that was really good. I just shot for five mornings with him. It was called Always Was, Always Will Be. It was about this occupation of the Aboriginal sacred site in the heart of Perth at the foot of King's Park at the old Swan Brewery, the opposition to the development of this very important sacred site and the battle that was going on over it.

So I came back to Sydney, finished the film as quickly as I could because it was needed, and it went everywhere. It was short, 33 minutes. Because it wasn't going to be for television, we didn't have to worry about the length, we could make it what it needed to be. And I managed to get some money from an inter-faith religious foundation in Perth. They gave us $2000 and I wrote this book. I was to have a creative arts fellowship at ANU and I went there and, instead of doing what I wanted to do for a long time - which is what I'm doing now - an oral history of the Australian film industry, I worked on this book about the Swan Brewery dispute and we printed it and it sold like hot cakes and we had to reprint. In the West it sold out and it's almost impossible to get. So that took up a bit of my time. That was another year or so.

After that, I went to Uni to try to prepare for this oral history. I met up with Essie Coffey again and we made her film. That took a bit of time because, of course, doing all this without a lot of money, things take time. I went back to trying to do this work at uni, because I got admitted as an MA student in Applied History and, although I didn't have a BA, it was okay because I had done a lot of writing. But I wasn't getting closer to doing my book, especially as I stopped to do another film, which was an incredible disaster, with two men who were friends of mine. We didn't get along very well and I mistakenly gave them the power of the film, thinking such things didn't matter - I had such confidence in friendship - without realising that the grip of power in film is even stronger than friendship in some cases. It was quite an interesting revelation.

Then I have gone back to try to do a PhD, to write my history of Australian cinematography, but family problems intervened, so I'm going very slowly. Unfortunately, I've realised that I'm not very academic. I just can't make out what they're saying. I think I deal with ideas, but not in the right way for universities these days.

And I've gotten a job De Luxe Media Arts. It's an evolution from what used to be the Sydney Super 8 Film Group and then the Sydney Intermedia Network. They surround themselves with this hideous artspeak, but the films are fabulous. I've always had an interest in experimental film. The films are wonderful. A lot of them are a bit in this academic realm and I'm not so crazy about some of them. Anyway, I just love their films because they're making films for the sake of making films. There are all sorts of messages in them. Some of them are just beautiful objects. I'm sorry that it's surrounded by this artspeak. For instance, the newspaper Reel Time has taken the place of our old Film News. I used to be on the board. But you can't read it, you can't understand it. I can't understand it. Some people obviously can, or it wouldn't exist. So I'm sort of weird in those circles. But the films themselves, no matter how they try to talk about them, some of them are just wonderful.

I saw one the other day by somebody named Troy Innocent - it's probably an Italian name anglicised - and it was to techno-music, which I hate. But it was such a wonderful film. I saw it three times in a row. John Tonkin who is on the board of De Luxe has made a film which is just waves - I couldn't describe it - waves coming at us, just wave after wave, to beautiful modern music, or pieces of paper falling out of the sky. But this in no way does justice to what you see.

They're often made with computers. Sometimes they make virtual reality environments. So I'm really pleased to have that job and just go to work and try to promote the organisation and the films. But I need to get my thesis done and get back to my sort of social movements.

With almost thirty years in Australia, you've obviously identified with the country and its history and its culture. You came from outside and felt at home here?

Yes. I don't know, there's something about the way Australia has been, which I hope it isn't losing, that really suits me.
Where in the US did you grow up?

I was born in Boston, but my family went to Washington DC and I grew up in the South until I was 15. I went to back to Boston, then I lived in Chicago for a long time, and life was very difficult there, very brutal - if you don't have money, it's very nervewracking. And you don't have the freedom if you're in a very insecure economic situation. It's very hard to have the freedom to do all the wonderful things I've done here in Australia because life was very easy and because there's a lot of acceptance. I've learned so much about life here because there has been support for people, relatively speaking - although so much of that is gone. For instance, now people with illness don't get supported the way they used to. It's really dog-eat-dog. Lots of people work very long hours while other people have no work. It's heartbreaking to see this happen here, to come from a country where that experiment in the way to live, capitalism, has really made life very, very tough, to come to a place where there isn't this dog-eat-dog attitude and where there is some idea of a fair go, or was, was such a relief.

The things I've seen in my life, you would have to be Aboriginal in Australia to have seen - and that was a normal part of American life. The poverty and the frustration, the imprisonment, the acting out and destruction of families, the destruction of social fabric. So it's very distressing to me to see this happening in Australia. I'm not sure where I belong in it all because I've been unusually preoccupied with my own concerns. I still contribute money or go to a march or do those things, but I don't really engage in the way I used to. I just haven't got the strength I used to have. I really need to recupe.

I sometimes think I should join the Labor Party, but I can't come at it. Then I think, well, I'll join the Democrats but I couldn't join the Democrats because they don't understand the Labor perspective. Then I think, well, what about the Greens; the Greens are pretty good. But then they're all over the place. And it's very hard for me to work outside of a party structure. Now I get the Catholic Social Justice newsletter. That's my information on those fronts.

Your values, then, come from social awareness.

I was brought up by Communist parents, although I didn't know they were Communist - I didn't know, believe it or not, because this was in the United States and it was such a frightening time, people being jailed, so it was a secret. But I learned all sorts of values from them. And at the same time I was heavily influenced by Quakers, the Society of Friends, so I was brought up in an environment in which a lot of spiritual issues of that sort were linked with social issues. This made a profound impact on me. And then to be young in the '60s, be in your twenties in the '60s, when a lot of things were questioned, consumerism, the relationship of people to the earth, environmental issues, and then to have been involved in the Left with the social movements of the '70s, this has shaped me for life. Social justice has always been the leading philosophical problem for me in my life.

I'm very interested in discovering, even though I didn't know it and didn't recognise it, that the people that I felt confidence in or closest to had some spiritual values in the areas of social justice that really have led them to question the values of capitalism, of consumerism and of the sort of power plays that are all too common amongst people of any political persuasion. So, although I'm not religious and although I don't, for instance, believe in God as such, I find that most of the people that I respect or am drawn to in a personal way have a spiritual belief and I don't seem to care what it is, whether they're Catholic, whether they're Buddhist, whether they're whatever.

Ultimately there is a goodness in human nature which transcends all the difficulties, the excesses of capitalism or communism and that that is a sustaining spiritual belief.

I don't know if there is a goodness of human nature and I don't even know if there is a human nature, but I think there's a lot of potential for it. One of the reasons why I'm not so interested in many of the films I've done is that I find it very difficult for these things to be expressed on film - or let's say up until now it's been beyond me to really express what I feel on film. Sometimes even more abstract films for me express it more. Take Peter Weir. His films are very spiritual, I think. He's a great artist and a great thinker, in a non-programmatic way - or he's developed into that. But film as such interests me less and less in the mainstream. I know without a doubt that I have no interest in mainstream film. I haven't got the strength that somebody like Peter Weir has got to surmount the incredible problems that the so-called film industry presents in order to bring that vision to a film.

All I ever wanted to be was a cinematographer, and since I can't do that, I think I'll just make my films on the side. It is true that I'm involved in a project with Film Australia, but I'm trying to take a back seat in it and just try to inject ideas and let it turn out how it might. In other words, I don't really want to direct it in that context. I just want to make films in a quiet way, in my own time, with the wonderful new technology which has brought the possibility of making films back into our hands again, the way it was in the early days of 16mm.


Interview: 7th November 1998