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NEW ZEALAND
WOMEN TELL MOVING ‘STORIES’ OF
WAR
By
Kevin Thomas
In her prize-winning documentary
WAR STORIES Our Mothers Never Told Us, New Zealand
filmmaker Gaylene Preston takes a simple idea and turns
it into
a rich, universal experience.
She has gathered seven elderly
women, seated them one at a time in front of a black
dropcloth, and asked them
about the impact of World War II on their lives, while
interspersing archival footage and stills.
There are many
levels and meanings to what skilled off-screen interviewer
Judith Fyfe draws from these pleasant, grandmotherly
women. Right away Preston and Fyfe remind us of how
easy it is for it not to occur to us that ordinary-looking
people could ever have had extraordinary experiences.
Yet these women are full of alternately warm, romantic,
harrowing and tragic tales.
Preston’s film inevitably
provides a fresh perspective on the World War II era.
The United States and New Zealand
were – and are – so much alike in many
ways. Both countries sent their young men to distant
locales,
both have puritanical traditions, but New Zealand,
which had a population of only 1.5 million when war
broke out,
is so much smaller, so much more remote and even now
so much more conservative. What we hadn’t expected
to learn is how strong and deep anti-American feelings
ran among New Zealanders at the onset of war, and Preston,
in addressing her own people primarily, never tells
us why.
Two of the women are Maori, and one
of them became an honorary U.S. Marine for her service
as a
kind of
mother
figure for an American military camp, where her informal
duties extended far beyond washing and ironing uniforms.
By and large this woman, Jean, has good things to say
about Americans, but she does report putting a racist
in his place.
The other Maori woman, Mabel, tells
of taking over her family’s school bus and trucking
business while her husband served in the Maori Battalion,
which suffered
great losses.
Throughout, Preston’s researchers
went to considerable effort to provide specific contexts
for their interviewees’ recollections,
and the newsreels of the returning Maori soldiers
and all the traditional ceremonies involved are especially
memorable.
Preston’s women all have such striking,
often painful revelations that they shouldn’t
be given away here. (One woman, for example, tells
of her own
devastating
frontline experiences in Egypt and Italy.)
Inevitably,
they involve losses but also various forms of discrimination
and, at times, an oppressive conformity.
Ironically,
in this light, one woman, who is in fact Preston’s
own mother, tells of an unhappy wartime marriage she
had a special reason for not forsaking
and what it cost her to make work.
There are lots of
things we don’t learn about these
women we’ve come to care about. Are those whose
husbands survived the war still alive? What about their
children and grandchildren? But that’s not what
War Stories is about, and Preston has made a succinct,
captivating 95-minute movie that perhaps wisely leaves
us wanting more.
Unrated. Times guidelines: The film
has adult themes, including a description of an attempted
rape.
War Stories
Featuring Pamela Quill, Flo Small, Tui Preston, Jean
Andrews, Rita Graham, Neva Clarke McKenna, Mabel
Waititi.
A First Run Features presentation,
produced in association with the New Zealand Film Commission,
New Zealand
on Air and TV 3. Producer-director Gaylene Preston,
Executive
Producer Robin Laing, Cinematographer Alun Bollinger,
Film Editor Paul Sutorius, Music Jonathan Besser,
Oral archive project manager/interviewer Judith
Fyfe, Running
time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.
Exclusively at the Music
Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869.
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