|
Laurence Simmons reflects on the
achievement of Gaylene Prestons’ War Stories
“…
when it’s been bad, it’s ‘history’ – and
if it’s been good, it’s ‘memories’.”
-Tui
Preston, War Stories
As a film that conveys the
immediacy of the experience of the Second World War,
as lived in New Zealand rather
than on the battlegrounds of Europe, North Africa or
the Pacific, Gaylene Preston’s War Stories Our
Mothers Never Told Us is entirely successful. Through
a simple and hardly new (remember Reds…) technique
of oral history interviews, the interviewee placed
to one side of the frame and shot against a neutral
black
background, we effectively participate in the deep
sense of loss of a new bride as not one but two ephemerally-shared
husbands are declared missing in action. We wince at
the awkwardness of reconciliation and the resentment
of abandoned children upon the return of a long-absent
husband or lover. We partake in the release of unbridled
energy associated with the assumption of men’s
labour as women become “manpowered” yet
share these women’s righteous indignation at
the injustices of inequities in their pay and conditions.
We are made
to feel the scorching power of an event or a loss which
has displaced a life, or may have ineluctably shaped
and moulded it and the generations to follow, despite
the fact that this is never played out as naked drama
for us. Preston, along with women interviewees, refuses
even the slightest hint of melodrama in her portrayal
of the daily life of human beings and their difficulty
in living in the world. It is in this sense that she
profoundly respects the action of memory.
For what
is unusual about War Stories is the responsibility
of the filmmaker towards her represented subjects.
Her film, as she has rightly pointed out in interviews,
slides
between the genres of documentary and drama: “When
I say the word “documentary” I mean certain
things. I don’t mean reality programming, I don’t
mean infotainments, I don’t mean exposé.
I don’t want to turn audiences into voyeurs and
I’m not talking about ‘personality’ stuff.
I’m talking about documenting life. I think there
are plenty of feature filmmakers like me who like to
document life.”
Preston understands that facts
and fictions are intimately intertwined in any historical
account and that because
the documentary account can never exist outside of
narrative it is not a merely neutral record of data,
but is itself
already textually processed by the culture in which
it is produced.
While they are not free from error
unconscious fabulation (especially fifty or more years
after the
events) the
audiovisual interviews of War Stories allow spontaneous
access to the resurgence of memory, as well as significant
details of everyday life. As Claude Lanzmann’s
powerful film on the Holocaust, Shoah, teaches us,
the more purchase we have on those events that seemingly
escape us in the past. Walter Benjamin once remarked
of the past that:
“All historical knowledge can
be represented in the image of a weighing scale. One
pan is weighed down by the
past, the other by knowledge of the present. The facts assembled
in the former can never be too numerous or insignificant.
The latter may, however, carry only a few heavy massive
weights.”
In the hype of our post modern lives
we have made our negative definition of the ordinary
assume typicality
and a blandness and ignored the intensity and specificity
of individuals’ experiences and situations.
Whereas it is really in this latter sense, according
to Raymond
Williams, that all culture is “ordinary”.
Now that new information technologies
can infiltrate and mediate everything, our search for
the authentic,
the unmediated experience, has become both more crucial
and more desperate to our daily existence. In this “society
of spectacle” our technical expertise has allowed
us to provide simulacra for almost any experience,
however extreme or privately intimate that may be.
However, the
more technically adept we are in communicating or
re-presenting our experience, the more seamless the
interchange for
soundbites, the more easily its effects are simulated,
then the more interchangeable, the more forgettable
that experience becomes. Who remembers last week’s
Hard Copy? In the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots
it became
clear that the Rodney King videotape played over
and over again lost its expressivity, its metonymical
power,
as the idiom of its violence was routinised and viewers
became anaesthetised to the cruelty and sensationalism
of the event. In contrast, War Stories leaves powerful,
yet often apparently trivial or irrelevant, images
indelibly etched on our minds as we walk out of the
theatre: “The
memory I have is clear today, silly little trivial
things that you keep in your mind. A shoebox filled
with three
bunches of primroses and three bunches of violets,” says
Rita Graham, recalling her one-year-old daughter’s
death. These images seem all the more true, more
real, because we know that this is the way in which
memory
functions, evolving its own stories or symbols as
a movie in our minds.
Today as we recede from the
events of the Second World War, and those of us with
first-hand knowledge
of them
dwindle in numbers, we are suffering from a sort
of memory-envy, especially as the idiom of past violence
is now played
out again for us as a hideous parody in the concentration
camps of Bosnia or French nuclear tests in the South
Pacific. As Walter Benjamin was to lament in the
early
decades of the twentieth century, we have lost the
ability to tell or listen to stories. Benjamin stresses
the significance
of a lack of awareness of finality, of temporality
and consequently of mortality, to that lost capacity
to tell
and listen to stories.
Storytelling is intimate, it presupposes or anticipates
the returned “gaze” of the listener,
but most importantly, Benjamin argues that storyteller’s
authority, his or her capacity to provoke recognition,
stems from death itself: “Death is the sanction
of everything that the storyteller can tell”
War
Stories is an example of a new genre of the audiovisual
which recuperates for us the function of storytelling:
video-testimony. In the video-testimony the telling
of the event is also a taking of responsibility for
it and,
despite the divide between past and present, video-testimonies
express a much more difficult juxtaposition of temporalities
than simple past and present. The facts of the past
are not the only thing these witnesses seek to give,
nor
simply what we require from them. We are fascinated
by their lives of ‘afterlives’: the way
their daily reality is still affected by a traumatic
past and
may at moments shift back into it. This video-visual
medium has its own hypnotism but unlike the simulacra,
every time an oral history is retrieved in this form,
it is as if video is employed to counter the numbering
effects of video, to rouse our conscience and prevent
oblivion. A good viewer notices the oddness, gaps,
hesitations of voice, meanderings, non sequiturs,
the apparently
irrelevant details inseparable from the rhythm of
memory, all the marks of the inexplicable in such
a text.
In War Stories memory is allowed its
own space, its own flow as the interview is conducted
in a non-confrontational,
non-interventional way, when the attempt to bring
the memories of the past into the present does not
simply
elide all effect to the newer present – the
milieu in which the recordings took place. Almost
imperceptibly,
significant events are brought to the surface and
revealed: hidden lovers confessed to, misplaced desires
acknowledged,
a previously unremarked-upon victimisation proclaimed.
If the incidence of so-called ‘recovered memory,’ our
apparent ability to recover a deeper past through
psychotherapy, seems to have increased dramatically
in recent years,
it may be that the images of violence in many different
forms made manifest hourly on our television and
cinema screens have popularised the idea of a determining
trauma.
So it is understandable that many might feel a pressure
to find within themselves an experience that is decisive
and bonding, the possibility of some terrible identity
marking their lives. For it is equally true that
the pain of an absent memory may be greater then
the wound
of a memory recovered.
Maurice Blanchot writes that “to
confess or to engage in self-analysis…in order
to expose oneself, like a work of art, to gaze of
all, is perhaps to seek
to survive” Despite the fact that it provides
access to the personal and the intimate, War Stories,
as Preston
insists, is not voyeuristic. This is because our
gaze as viewer is never inveigled into a point of
view, our
imaginations never captured in a programme of thought.
In this film the viewers’ eyes area fully implicated
in the imperative to make things visible. We are
made aware of our detached and silent glance as spectators
removed, yet under a spell, so close to voyeurism,
we
share the intimacy of each interview. This is also
true because in the archival material the film draws
upon
so effectively, the director makes us aware of a
structural gap that exists between the visual footage
and the soundtrack
voice-over. This familiar male authority voice drawn
from many of the original National Film Unit Weekly
Review segments is constantly ironised as Preston
makes us laugh
at the all-too-obvious clichés, cringe a little
at the stageyness of the government propaganda machine,
smile at the sentimentality of the songs on the soundtrack.
In so doing, she poses the question what is an authentic
depiction of the past? Is it to be found in the confident
male voice-over’s mythology or in the women’s
tangle of voices where the presence of the past is
evoked primarily though human speech, through testimony?
War
Stories, because it focuses on women’s stories,
exposes a set of questions concerning the stakes
for masculinity’s contemporary rememberings
of itself. It undermines the pastiche of boy’s
own stories that characterised the recent television
series New Zealand
at War which, with its quickfire editing and relentless
voice-overs, reflected an inability to enter history
and a deep incapacity to acknowledge loss. This was
an emotionally inadequate masculinity crisis marked
, as
Gaylene Preston has suggested of the official (male)
story of the war. By ‘that amnesia that blocks
out thoughts of waste and futility and turns them
into mythology’ A sanitised, collective mythology
that mourns a phallic masculinity of boys playing
with guns
in a nostalgic elegy for a lost, idealised father.
War Stories ironises these constructions of masculinity
and
presents the other face of war: The surfeit of unwanted
pregnancies, the difficult struggle of conscientious
objectors, the government appropriation of ancestral
Maori land, the lack of psychological support for
returning soldiers. This face of war is a shadowy,
haunting darkness,
a mask in need of a soul:
“
War took away the predictability of life, I am a fatalist
now because I feel that covers up all the unpleasantness.”
Pamela Quill
“The war changed our family.
Somehow it changed it from a nice happy family to a
kind of remorseful family.”
- Florence Small
“Wartime, especially, was a
period of secrecy. The secret…it
couldn’t be talked about, and that’s
not me. I had to talk things out. I had to. And since
I’ve
been able to do that, nothing will frighten me again
in my life.”
- Rita Graham
In this film the one modality of memory
Preston’s
women never engage in is nostalgia. If we were to
seek for an equivalent literary figure for the film’s
mode, it would have to be prosopopoeia. A prosopopoeia
is the giving of a face, a name, or a voice to the
absent, the inanimate, or the dead. Many times this
film gives
that face literally as we focus on a still portrait
photograph, creased with caring rather than glossy,
of the missing
person and listen to a woman speaking:
“He came into the room, and I just looked across at him.
My heart started thumping, I felt sort of peculiar
in the tummy, I felt weak at the knees. I though he was
just the most marvellous-looking being I’d
ever seen and hoped like mad that he’d ask
me to dance.”
- Pamela Quill
War Stories literally calls up the
names of those who have gone, functioning in this way
like
the more
concrete
war memorials that are to be found in every small
New Zealand town. The film also speaks to the fact
that
we live to be the survivors of the deaths of others
and
this is a determining feature of the human condition.
If prosopopoeia is a coverup of death or of absence,
a compensation, this is because its power is needed
even in relation to our living companions who are
always somehow
absent even in moments of the most intimate presence.
The film is memorial, compensation for a loss, as
it must be for the women speaking, and in another
more
general way, for the viewers, it is an attempt to
make up for
the ultimate loss of death, ultimately our own deaths.
Maurice Blanchot is the contemporary
writer who has written most willingly of death, memory,
and forgetting
while
writing and thinking about the disaster that is
war which haunts our century. As Blanchot says, the disaster
belongs
to a past that never ceases to impend. But how,
he
asks, can we talk about the disaster when by its
very nature
it defines speech and compels silence? How do we
abide within its threat without abandoning the
task to describe,
explain, redeem and prevent again its pain? Paradoxically
only by speaking. Blanchot employs the infinitive
to indicate the timelessness of the interim, in
particular the infinitive dire (to say, speak, tell).
He nominalises
and capitalises it as le Dire speaking, sheer telling
as opposed to anything told or kept secret; the
conviction that speech, not any particular communication,
but
the offering of language that makes Preston and
the women
interviewees of War Stories in Blanchot’s phrase “guardians
of an absent meaning” For it is in their words
we encounter the devastating responsibility of what
Blanchot names as the last wish of those who suffered
in the death
camps:
“Know what has happened, do not forget, and at the same
time never will you know.”
i) Gaylene Preston, “Through
Women’s
Eyes,” Interview with Stephanie Johnson, Quote
Unquote, 25 July 1995, pp.14-17, [p. 15]
ii) Quoted in Irving Wohlfarth, “The Measure of the Possible, The Weight
of
the Real and the Heat of the Movement: Benjamin’s Actuality Today,” New
Formations 20, 1993, pp.1-20 [p.11]
iii) Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, London: Chatto & Windus, 1961,
p.
37.
iv) The work of Guy Debord and Jean
Baudrillard has examined the formation of these
simulacra in some detail.
v) Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflection on the Work of Nicolai
Lesov,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, translated by Hannah Arendt, New York:
Schoken Books, 1968, 9.94
vi) The Writing of the Disaster, translated by Ann Smock, Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 1986, p. 64.
vii) Gaylene Preston, Preference to War Stories Our Mothers Never Told
Us,
edited by Judith Fyfe from a film by Gaylene Preston, Auckland: Penguin Books,
1995,
p.7.
viii) In particular his The Writing of the Disaster, op. cit., and his earlier
essays “Forgetting,
unreason” and “Forgetful Memory” in The
Infinite Conversation,
translated by Susan Hanson, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993, pp194-201 and 314-317; as well as the “Essential Solitude” in
The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, translated by Lydia Davis, edited
with an afterword by P. Adams Sitney, New York: Station Hill Press, 1981, pp63-77
xi) Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, op. cit., p. 82.
|
