JOHN HUGHES



Documentaries and features - do you make both or are you more of a documentary film-maker?

Most of the work I've done has been in documentary, but I'm not particularly persuaded of a radical difference, from the point of view of making the work and of gauging the work. In many ways the radical difference between documentary and drama, it seems to me, is a function of the market, so the kind of creative issues that are confronted in both realms are more similar than they are different.

Following that through with some of your documentaries: the film about Walter Benjamin.

Benjamin was a German- Jewish philosopher and critic of the '20s and '30s, and with that project and others, a lot of the documentary work I've done has had a drama component but, normally, in the context of documentary. The drama has been highly stylised in one way or another in relation to whatever the kind of themes of the work. Whereas in What I Have Written, the feature drama, the performance style was much more in the traditions of realism, much more naturalistic than in those other works where performance style is part of a different kind of creative treatment. They're quite different deployment of the skills of acting and performance.

Staying with the documentaries and the creative treatment: Walter Benjamin was a philosopher. You seem to have taken more intellectual subjects. (And, in a sense, What I Have Written is an intellectual, intelligent drama as well.) So, early in your career, you seem to have favoured "intellectual topics". Are these subjects that appeal to you?

It's a difficult question really, because it presumes, in a way, a distinction between, let's say "intellectual topics" and "social topics", whereas my documentary work is really in a tradition of a political-social documentary film. But it seems to have had a connection with cultural practices. I'm thinking of the film Film Work, which is the beginning of a certain theme that's continued through in my work. Film Work was about that Waterside Workers' Federation film unit of the '50s, where a group of filmmakers made a commitment to work in collaboration with the Trade Union movement at the height of the Cold War when it was not possible to speak outside a very rigid orthodoxy of mainstream press. In a way the work that I've been doing identifies with that desire to make commentary from the outside of the mainstream orthodox elements of the dominant culture.

The film on Benjamin is consistent with that general idea, in that it's about recognising the philosopher whose work was insightful and critical in a very unorthodox kind of way.

That's probably the word I should have used, "insightful" instead of "intellectual". It's mentally stimulating to think about the themes you've pursued but there is a need to appreciate the social dimension. Since you've raised it, "political" is also the word. Traps comes from the mid-'80s. It seems to have that insightful, social and political agenda that you speak of.

Yes. It's hard, isn't it, to come up with the key word? Maybe "critical" is the key word. "Reflective" might be another one. One way of looking at it is to think in terms of the genres that are in play in documentary traditions. Not so long ago we used to think about documentary as a kind of monolithic category. Then we started to realise that there was a whole range of different traditions that were in dialogue in most documentaries, while some documentaries were very comfortable in one sub-category of documentary. My work has probably been more consistently part of an essay tradition than, say, an observatory tradition - not that they're mutually exclusive.

Traps was an exploration of a kind of play with genre. Its artistic project was to explore the borders between narrative drama and documentary. It was trying to develop a loose narrative framework within which to raise documentary questions about that present moment. It was trying to reflect on the Zeitgeist of that first period of the Hawke Labor Government from 1983-85.

The film was trying to explore, in an imaginative rather than a didactic way, what were the qualities of the political culture that was being developed in Australia at that time and to consider that political culture might be something that was not only determined by the actions of politicians, but it was something that had an input from the activities of artists and writers and from a whole range of cultural practices that somehow or other entered into a dialogue that constituted a political culture.

So that was the project. One of the things it seemed to throw up was how one might work with traditions of documentary itself: how could you open up the discourse of documentary in a way that would lay out space for a discussion about political culture to take place inside the form of documentary.

In retrospect, how does that particular period seem now?

It's very interesting. Traps was screened at the VCA relatively recently. I looked at it again over ten years later and it's actually quite weird. It's got quite a prophetic quality, because it was made during that period when, in many ways, the Labor Party's commitment to economic rationalism and the rejection of the traditions of its own Left were being fought out. Traps has an eerie kind of quality looking at it today.

What I Have Written. What drew you to the novel?

I saw an excerpt from the novel in Scripsi. That was the first point of contact, and I was quite stunned by it. I thought it was an extraordinary piece of writing. The two themes that drew me to it, I think, were the critique of masculinity and masculine sexuality that I thought was really rigorous in the excerpt that I read, which was something I felt was not being taken on anywhere, really, with that kind of intensity that John Scott had brought to the task. The other element was that it was an intense critique of aspects of academic culture. It was a mix of those two things that initially drew me to it.

Then I saw the full novel and the way John was working with points of view and with - almost - the re-purposing of texts, the interplay of texts and their meanings. That was the element I found most interesting to try and deal with.

The film's complexities seem to arise from the ambiguities of a literary text combined with the ambiguities of cinematic points of view. How much of a challenge was it to develop a cinematic objectification of literary texts?

There's a huge common ground that's been elaborated in what's called reception theory, where there is, in both cases, in literature and in the cinema, the role of the reader. In some ways What I Have Written is all about that. So to try and translate that to the experience of the spectator in the cinema is not so difficult. One of the bridges to that is the interesting connection that's made in the book between the fascination of the art connoisseur on the one hand and the fascination of the pornographic imagination with the pornographic image on the other. So the whole issue is like a bridge that leads directly to the fascination we have with the image in cinema.

The film also contains religious iconography, sacred and the profane, sacred iconography and pornography. Leonardo da Vinci's painting of St Anne and the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist portrays a manipulation theme.

One way of looking at it is to talk about it in terms of Freud's essay on Leonardo's painting. What you've got there is a whole series of reflected readings where you've got Freud psychoanalytically reading the unconscious motivations of the artist Leonardo. Then you've got, in this case, a lecturer then re-reading that material for a contemporary student audience. In each case there's a series of mis-translations that are actually at the core of that reading. The whole issue relates to the larger themes that are in play in the narrative of the film, so that the story of Freud's reading of Leonardo's painting becomes a microcosm of all the central issues that the film is dealing with across its whole narrative.

On the other hand it's possible to see a kind of parallel between the behaviour of the characters in the film and the story with which Leonardo's painting is concerned. It is the relationship between Freud's reading of a manipulative St Anne and Jeremy becoming St Anne and Angie Milliken's character becoming the Virgin while Christopher becomes the sacrificed innocent. There's any number of ways of going.

So using those images as you did, and the Paris setting as well as Melbourne, you offer an extraordinary look at the Australian psyche, Australian sexuality and Australian masculinity, but with an international context and the cultural traditions of Europe. This gives the film many layers as you worked on several levels at once, which is not the usual thing in Australian films.

Well, the book is incredibly rich, and John Scott, who wrote the original novel, also wrote the screenplay, so the whole process was one of working very closely with John. I think that's the privilege of the filmmaker's job. You get to examine a particular text over a long period of time. The more work I did on the What I Have Written project, the more I came to admire the skill of John's work.

My contribution was to have ideas about treatments, about visual styles and some structural suggestions. Some of the speeches are exquisite, the interactions complex and layered.

It was important to give audiences the opportunity to recognise that there were three characters who have different ways of seeing, experiencing and assigning meaning to things. So it was important to come up with a way of allowing audiences to distniguish meaningfully betwen the difference narrative voices, one of which is a book - a 'contemplated text' - within the film. The visual styles flow from that necessity.

What I Have Written - is that the Gospel reference to Pontius Pilate?

Yes, that's right. It's a matter of interpretation and it's a beautiful formulation. What I have written, I have written, and it throws the matter back onto the reader.

Going back to reception theory, did the reviews and the public respond to the many layers? In retrospect, what is your impression of how the audience responded at the time?

I was surprised, basically, how widely the film circulated, because it was also going to be a "difficult" project and it was always going to be a minority audience project. And - this is the case with most of my work - when it encounters journalism a crisis erupts, but when it encounters its own audiences, it's usually quite well received and generates interesting discussion. I think that's what took place in the case of What I Have Written. It found theatrical release quite widely; it was quite well received in international context; it sold well. I recently discovered that it screened in Korea theatrically for three months, and God knows what a Korean audience made of it. I've got no idea. It was very nicely written about here, particularly in Metro. There were a couple of pieces in Metro that were really quite thoughtful.

After Mabo was screened on television at the end of 1997.

Yes, it was broadcast on the eve of the Senate debate, it was something like 27th November 1997. That came about because Richard Frankland, a Melbourne-based indigenous filmmaker who made No Way to Forget on which I'd worked as a script editor, was the chief executive, at the time, of an organisation called Mirrembeak(?) Nations Aboriginal Corporation, which is the indigenous organisation in Victoria responsible for native title issues, the representative body in Victoria for native title. He called me up in August 1996 and asked me if I would help him with a film project he was interested in developing on the amendments to the Native Title Act. I kind of knew that amendments to the Native Title Act were on the agenda of the government that had been elected earlier that year, but I hadn't paid close attention to what they were about up to that point. I'd been interested in the Native Title Act as it had come into play following the High Court's judgment a couple of years before, so I knew something about it. The project just grew, really, from my initial response to Richard's request.

It was very cinematic, the devices used. You gave a lot of thought to the editing and the structuring, the speeches, the visuals, the different perspectives.

Yes, it was a very interesting project. The thing that I find most interesting when I'm confronted with having to make a film is trying to work out what are appropriate or productive creative concepts that can animate the work. Apart from communicating the ideas on the level of content, it's always interesting to me to try and work out how one might make the work also speak to the traditions of documentary. In this case, how might you be able to make a work that can make a contribution formally? How can you build a dialogue between the creative, imaginative decisions about the treatment concept and the material that it's working with?

So, in all of the films there's a relationship between the creative ideas that are driving the work and the material that it's trying to deal with. In the case of After Mabo, the central problem was how to address the tradition of advocacy films, which is where it really sits. It's a film that's quite clearly, explicitly putting a position that represents the interests of indigenous people who are supporting the maintenance of native title in a context where the dominant political power wants to do its damnedest to destroy the real implications of native title.

So the idea arose that one way to mediate the tendency of the advocacy film, which is a tendency to didacticism - advocacy almost requires a didactic speech, a singular speech - was to employ a screen design and create a collage in the frame itself, as well as have a process of montage between sequences. It was about trying to articulate the possibility of a complexity of dialogue, of non-monolithic speech. Maybe it's possible to graphically represent a public sphere in crisis by exploring the possibilities of collage in concert with the traditions of montage.

And your work at SBS?

SBS is another matter altogether. All I'm doing here is trying to support the work of colleagues. I suppose I have resist the temptation to want to intervene too much in other people's creative judgment. But it's fantastic because I'm getting to see much more of the work that other people are doing than I would normally. That's great. There's so much really interesting work being done. But the other terrific thing about this job is that I get to see a lot of the work that's being done by the emerging filmmakers.

A particular project of your own?

I'm halfway through a film called River of Dreams which is looking at issues around the variety of futures that are planned for the Fitzroy River in the Kimberley where, on the one hand, some developers would like to see the Fitzroy River dammed and the water redeployed to the development of the cotton industry in the West Kimberley, whereas the people who live there don't see the Fitzroy River as wasted water. They see it as an invaluable moment of Creation that ought to be respected. And certainly the indigenous people, who have been systematically dispossessed there as everywhere, experience this as a final dispossession. It's been possible for people to keep in contact with traditional country while the country has been under pastoral leases with beef cattle - which is no longer economically viable - as soon as the land is irrigated and primary production takes place on the basis of irrigated agriculture, the land itself is completely transformed. You might as well build a city. It's a destruction. So that's the issue there, really, the way that landscape is lived in with a variety of values.

Somebody wrote of you, "Cinema thinking, the manufacture of meaning." Is your filmmaking manufacture of meaning?

It is a phrase that could have come out of discussions around Traps, because there's a strong theme in Traps about media that's really about what we now call spin doctors. The spin doctors are the... - I was trying to think whether they are the factory workers or the architects. They're the production managers of meaning.

Religious, even theological dimensions in your films?

An interesting book to write would be a book that tried to explore what the theological themes, the streams or the lines through what the cinema tells us about fundamental beliefs. You could get at this either through the way that characters' actions were explored, or else you could get at it in terms of the way the cinema seeks to make its connections with its audiences, its spectators. While What I Have Written has an explicit discourse in relation to that reference in the title of the film - I guess the theological moment in the film, as it is in that original statement, has to do with the extent to which language provides us access to a final reference and the extent to which human language simply creates a sphere in which the meanings that are available are determined by its borders. And I suppose that the film and the book, What I Have Written are an exercise in that latter exposition.


Interview: 28th October 1998