Jeni Thornley’s AFCA nominated documentary recently played in Melbourne at the Melbourne Women in Film Festival. To see who Jeni Thornley is and what she has done for independent and feminist Australian cinema she appears with others including Margot Nash in Brazen Hussies a documentary by Catherine Dwyer.
Jeni’s Super 8 documentary is more than a personal archive it captures the hopes and aspirations of artists working within second wave feminism in Australia. Creating film clubs, collectively speaking, and individually speaking. Jeni’s work asks how much freedom a woman has to create when given the task of sole or primary caretaker of others. How to question and interrogate the White Australian “possession” of stolen lands.
Both intimate and broad – memory film is the essence of Luce Irigaray’s notion of “polyvocity” in cinematic form.
Nadine Whitney speaks to Jeni about her work.
Memory Film is based on the tradition of jisei. A reflection on life at the point of death. What drew you to the tradition?
Jeni Thornley: jisei offers an ‘awakening’ to time passing and impermanence. Also, it recognises the fundamental humanity that we all share through birth, life and death! A friend gave me a book called Japanese Death Poems some years ago. In Japan Buddhist monks and nuns write poems to express their feelings about the transience of life and the inevitable passing of all things, a ‘farewell poem to life’ (jisei). Householders write poems as a gift to their children – a legacy of beauty and insight gathered over years. I like this idea, the contemplation of ageing and approaching death, yet brimming with the lightness and beauty of life – and it offers both poetic and historical themes for the film. I thought, ‘I can make a film as a death poem’. So, you make a film poem as a gift for your family, for your children and grandchildren and for your society. Audience members, too, even strangers can experience the film as a gift being given – something they are also part of. As an elder now, the final chapters of the film represents where my mind has come to reside – often in solitude with time for meditation – to reflect on life and what is important.
Your individual films have always been deeply personal. Connecting lived experience to a larger political continuum. They are the product of second wave feminism (of which you were a vital activist in Australia). Do you feel they helped you achieve liberation from patriarchal constraints?
Certainly! Feminism’s notion that the personal is political is so significant for me and the transforming power of texts, ideas and people. In Film For Discussion (1973) I perform a young woman in a crisis of identity. Or am I playing myself? There’s a 3-minute take of me, filmed in a mirror, after a horrible family argument with an alcoholic father. This moment is both a site of instability and a space of possibility. Subsequently the mirror shot became foundational in my turn to an internal ‘found-footage’ film-making style, developing an ‘archive of the self’ in my film Maidens (1978), and later an ‘archive of the nation’ in For Love or Money (1983); To the Other Shore (1998), Island Home Country (2008) and Memory Film (2023) take this intertextual filmmaking style further.
I’m still committed to liberation as a journey and radical feminism is one of my pathways. Yet, I need other tracks: meditation, Buddhism; psychoanalysis and ‘recovery programs’ are also my roads to liberation. Memory Film is the study of a mind and my Super 8 is documentary evidence of a mind going through different phases or tracks: I’m young-confused, then a radical, then a mother, now a grandmother. Motherhood is also a pathway of liberation. It can be an oppressive institution in patriarchy, but as an experience it’s potentially liberating, as is childbirth. Men have the capacity for ‘the maternal’ as well as women. Memory Film suggests this could be a pathway to world peace, not war. Liberation is a tender movement.
3. You use a variety of philosophers, poets, critics, and artists to help navigate the film’s thesis. From Basho, Sexton, Plath, Marker, Wittig, Rumi, Irigaray, and First Nations voices. How did you choose?
Most of the quotes are from beloved texts I’ve collected over many years. Some are inspirational second wave feminist favourites like The Three Marias’ New Portuguese Letters or Monique Wittig Les Guérillères on women’s utopia; or Sheila Rowbotham’s famous quote about the contradictions that catalyse women’s liberation. The First Nations quotes are about their potent ongoing connection to country, culture and sovereignty. The more philosophical quotes by poets Basho, Tagore and Dogen, interwoven with psychoanalytic extracts from Freud, Irigaray and Bion, offer insights into their pathways of liberation that complement the emancipatory journey of feminism. Dogen’s practical teaching: All that’s important are the ordinary things or ‘The Song of the Grass Hut’ offer an ethic to live by.
The choice and placement of quotes evolved through the edit process and provide a narrative arc, rather than using narration. Along with the original music score by Joseph Tawadros they provide analysis and a space to think – a counterpoint to the film’s immersive strategies. These approaches, their origins linked to silent movie conventions, create strong visual and emotive non-narrative storytelling.
One of the questions posited at the end of the film is “How do you feel about your memories becoming an archive?” Do you feel lucky that you documented so much of your life?
JT: Actually, I don’t see it as luck. It’s my conscious choice to be aware – to look and learn about what is going on around me – personally and politically. Over time through my filmmaking, I have become an ethnographer of ‘the self’ and my society. That’s an outcome of my own history. Born into a family of cinema exhibitors, as a child I was lost to their screens, their images – and lost to myself. My father and grandfather were the cinema men exhibiting the American majors (MGM, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox) and local newsreels across Australian cities and country towns through ‘the silents’ and ‘talkies era’. For decades, even as a developing filmmaker, I had no idea who I was. Film was so seductive, overpowering and destabilising of ‘the self’. Then in the late 1960s when I started acting in short films – feminism found me and later psychoanalysis! By 1974 I started filming on Super 8. I took my camera everywhere – around the city streets, on film sets, with my family, in the communes, with lovers and in the women’s liberation movement – filming fragments, random moments. But I had not yet realized my intention. Indeed, what does it take to gain insight into one’s intention with a film work, or an archival film fragment, and understand it as an internal process of the psyche. For me it’s an ongoing inner journey towards liberation – of understanding my own mind – a space of possibility – an open future.
