Why Pioneering Women?
Pioneering Women co-curator Alexandra Heller-Nicholas takes a celebratory look at the historical movement that created the foundations for many Australian women filmmakers today.
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
After the shockwaves triggered by MIFF 2016’s Gaining Ground program that focused on New York women filmmakers in the 1970s and 1980s, a hunger to discover neglected or forgotten films made by women was clearly in the air. The voracity with which these films – including Elaine May’s A New Leaf (1971), Girlfriends (Claudia Weill, 1978), Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982), Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden, 1983) and Sleepwalk (Sara Driver, 1986) – were embraced by Melbourne audiences and critics alike raised an immediate question: what about movies made by women filmmakers here at home? Welcome to MIFF2017’s Pioneering Women program.
Who laid the groundwork for these filmmakers, what kinds of films were they making, and what can we learn from them today?
The 1980s and 1990s were an extraordinarily productive period for women filmmakers in Australia, the latter decade impressively so. I go into the scope of this area of Australian film history in some depth at my website Generation Star Struck, which itself was borne from a research fellowship with the AFI Research Collection at RMIT to explore the intersection of women’s filmmaking and women’s film criticism during this period. This in turn lead me to collaborate with MIFF in the capacity of a co-curator of the Pioneering Women program, working closely with the festival’s Artistic Director Michelle Carey. While the late 1990s in particular was the site of a veritable explosion of women’s filmmaking, we wanted to find out what lead to this: who laid the groundwork for these filmmakers, what kinds of films were they making, and what can we learn from them today?
Jo Kennedy in Starstruck
Ana Kokkinos, Clara Law, Claudia Karvan, Nadia Tass and Gillian Armstrong will discuss these questions and more in-depth with director Samantha Lang in the Pioneering Women: In Conversation event, but many of the key figures from this era are already familiar to audiences both here and internationally. The most immediately recognisable names from this period are perhaps Jocelyn Moorhouse, Jane Campion and Armstrong, and a glorious restoration of Moorhouse’s Proof (1991) by the National Film and Sound Archive was a highlight of MIFF 2016.
Many of the key figures from this era are already familiar to audiences both here and internationally.
Likewise, Campion’s presence at the festival this year is profound – not only is the much-anticipated second season of her series Top of the Lake: China Girl being screened in full, but Campion herself is a festival guest and will be speaking about the project in a highly anticipated MIFF Talks event (a full retrospective of Campion’s filmography is also to be screened at the Melbourne Cinematheque this September/October).
As for Armstrong, her unquestionable status as an pioneering woman of Australian filmmaking is underscored by the inclusion in this program of two of her finest achievements: the iconic Sydney-set pop musical extravaganza Star Struck (1982) and the lesser known – but equally intriguing – High Tide (1987), starring Judy Davis and then 14-year-old Claudia Karvan.
A baby Claudia Karvan in High Tide
While the program focuses on filmmakers explicitly, Karvan of course is a pioneering woman in her own right, on screens both big and small, and as an actor in front of the camera and a producer and writer behind it. Her presence is felt in the program not only as Davis’s estranged daughter in High Tide, but as a baby-faced Ben Mendelsohn’s love interest in Nadia Tass’s euphoric teen rom-com The Big Steal (1990), garnering Tass the unspoken reputation as Australia’s John Hughes.
Karvan reveals yet another distinctive aspect to her range as a performer in Laurie McInnes’s Broken Highway (1993), a breath-taking slice of Australian tropical gothic with a measure of film noir, European art film and the Western thrown in for good measure. This melange of genres and conscious experimentation with familiar tropes, codes and conventions also lies at the heart of Ann Turner’s vibrant, unforgettable Celia (1989) that places young Rebecca Smart at the heart of a twisted tale of childhood trauma, fantasy, violence, and the real-world bigotries that permeated Australian suburbia in the late 1950s.
Celia
But Australian pioneering women perhaps don’t come any more impressive than Tracey Moffatt, one of this nation’s greatest visual artists whose work was recently showcased at the Venice Biennale. While Moffatt made her impressive skills as a filmmaker impossible to deny in shorts like Night Cries (1990), Nice Coloured Girls (1987) and Heaven (1997), it is in her feature film BeDevil (1993) – also a part of the Pioneering Women program – that the fusion of her skills as both storyteller and artist combine with unparalleled force. An anthology of three supernaturally-imbued tales, BeDevil brings together stories Moffatt heard as a child from both Indigenous and white relatives, woven into one of the most visually striking and sensorially intoxicating Australian films ever made.
BeDevil
Further evidence that Australian women’s filmmaking is far from an all-white affair can be found in Clara Law’s powerful Floating Life (1996). A key figure in the Hong Kong Second Wave, Law’s career was already established when she moved to Australia, a journey that inspired Floating Life’s tale of Chinese immigrants living in Sydney in a visually astonishing, heart-wrenching film about identity, displacement and community.
Floating Life
Similar themes are explored in a strikingly different way in the late Mary Callaghan’s energetic, raw and captivating Tender Hooks (1989), starring Star Struck’s Jo Kennedy and Nique Needles from Richard Lowenstein’s Dogs In Space (1986) as a bedazzled young couple in love forced to face up to the reality of who they as they struggle to make ends meet in late 80s Kings Cross.
Two shorter features shown in a high-octane double bill of female fury, agency and rebellion continue to underscore the diversity of films made by these pioneering Australian women during this period. Evidence of Ana Kokkinos’s reputation as one of Australia’s most fearless and confrontational filmmakers is palpable in the explosive Only the Brave (1994), tracking the often-violent manner that two Greek-Australian schoolgirls cope with the pressures they are forced to endure on a daily basis. Susan Lambert’s heist film On Guard (1983) tells the story of a group of women pushed to the edge in an altogether different way, lesbian feminists who turn to terrorism in their shared determination to challenge the corporate control of biotechnology over women’s bodies as they plan to take down the ominous U.T.E.R.O corporation.
On Guard
Susan Lambert, Ana Kokkinos, Clara Law, Mary Callaghan, Laurie McInnes, Tracey Moffatt and Ann Turner are as much pioneering Australian women filmmakers in their way as Jane Campion, Jocelyn Moorhouse and Gillian Armstrong. Between them – and the many, many others who were producing equally intriguing, diverse and powerful work during this period – they form a historical movement that created the foundations for the work of many Australian women filmmakers today, both established and emerging. This is our history, there for the taking: these women laid the groundwork, it is up to us to acknowledge their achievements and celebrate their legacy.