WAR STORIES DVD RELEASE

By Helen Martin, WIFT
2005 DVD release - War Stories: Our Mothers Never Told Us By Helen Martin

“It felt like I stumbled onto a beach that I’d kind of lived on all my life and I stopped for a minute and I turned over a stone and there was treasure. And I was lucky enough to be surrounded by the right people to support a process that meant that I could capture that stone in light and plastic and beam the message out.” Gaylene Preston, commentary in conversation with Judith Fyfe, DVD War Stories: Our Mothers Never Told Us, 2005.

The contribution film makes to a culture is immense, perhaps nowhere more sharply focussed than in stories told through the documentary form. And when a documentary is supported by a body of work in other media, its cultural value is exponentially increased.

The DVD release of War Stories: Our Mothers Never Told Us in time for the 60th anniversary of the end of World War 11 is cause for much celebration, not just because the re-release of this superb film draws new attention to it, but also because it carries material that adds more layers to the story thus far told via an oral archive, an exhibition, a book with expanded interviews and, of course, the original 7-interview film.

To briefly reintroduce the work – War Stories began as an idea during research for the docudrama Bread and Roses when, unable to initially get funding for a film, Gaylene Preston, with initial funding form the Lotteries Commission and the Suffrage Centennial Fund, organised interviewers to find out from 66 elderly women the spectrum of their experiences during World War 11. On a personal level Gaylene was inspired to seek out the ‘secrets’ of her own mother Tui’s story when, in 1986, Tui commented that the theme tune from Casablanca was special for her “because of the war”. From those initial interviews, eight of the storytellers two years later re-told their stories on film and seven of the interviews, intercut with stills and archival footage and accompanied by the Casablanca tune, formed the basis of a documentary that has gained both critical and popular acclaim.

Chief interviewer, journalist Judith Fyfe, came to the project not so much interested in World War 11 as in working with Gaylene collecting oral histories, or “what isn’t published”. This interest had led her, with Hugo Manson, to set up an archive, now housed at the Alexander Turnbull Library, to record the stories and voices of New Zealanders.

On the DVD’s commentary track Gaylene and Judith talk as the film plays, their conversation ranging widely through issues of interview techniques and protocols, the small details and the big picture of social and cultural mores during World War 11, the contributions of the women who eagerly agreed to tell stories that had never been told before and their own learning resulting from the project. They discuss how oral histories “look at the edges of the frame”, Gaylene’s anxiety that, before all the interviews could be done “someone was gonna die” and the beauty of Alun Bollinger’s cinematography. It’s a rich and fascinating resource, adding so much depth and texture to our understanding of the War Stories women, the events, the emotions and the ideas they so eloquently describe.

Also a fantastic DVD bonus are an eighth interview, shot at the time of the others but only released now that the subject, artist Doreen Blumhardt (now 92) has decided it’s time her amazing story sees the light of day, and a featurette showing the seven original participants in Hollywood for a triumphant US cinema release.