This is a video installation made by Rachel Shearer based on a collection of amateur films shot by New Zealand women in the 1930s and held at the NZ Film Archive .
It exhibited in the Film Archive’s Mediagallery in June 2009. It features music specially composed by Lovely Midget to accompany the film footage: old home movie 16mm from NZ Film Archive holdings.
“In 2006 Rachel Shearer performed at the annual Film Archive event SoundTracks. She created a live soundtrack for a film shot by amateur film-maker Ethel Garden entitled PARITAI DRIVE (1937). Moody, dark and filled with David Lynch-like psychic energy, PARITAI DRIVE was an unusual film for a home movie maker.
Two years later NZFA researcher Kathy Dudding presented a paper at the 2008 FHAANZ conference ‘Tracing the Flaneuse: On early women amateur cinematographers.’ Dudding noted a number of female home movie makers whose films she observed ‘depict a female psychic space’ and ‘add a moving visual voice to women’s social history’.
When Shearer subsequently took up the Film Archive’s offer to turn her SoundTracks piece into an installation, she also embraced the opportunity to incorporate Dudding’s discovery of films shot by other women of the era.
Ethel Garden, Violet Winstone and Lucy Wills were all upper middle class women, but their lives were distinctly different.
Lucy Wills was born profoundly deaf. She immigrated to New Zealand in the 1920s from England with her companion who was paid a stipend. She bought a sheep station at Lake Tekapo with no prior knowledge of how to run such a business. Her films depict herself and her companion working on the farm and engaging in leisure activities such as ice skating.
By contrast Garden’s PARITAI DRIVE (1937) features domestic images that would not be out of place in Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING (1980); a large empty house, a suit of armour, a sudden cut to an image of a small child shaking her head - eerie images of emptiness amidst luxury.
In the course of her research Dudding discovered that like Garden, Violet Winstone also filmed images in Paritai Drive, a remarkable co-incidence that pointed to the possibility of Garden and Winstone exchanging thoughts about film-making. If so, Winstone’s films in HOLD STILL are remarkably different to Garden’s, revealing a sunny vision of family life on the lawn with baby and family.
Rachel Shearer has previously worked as a sound designer on a number of short films. She has also recorded and released a number of records under the name Lovely Midget. Her music has been described as ‘a transcendent world of shivering ambient sounds, distant ruptures and warm washes of analog sheen’. Her 2006 SoundTracks performance reworked a number of amateur films from the Film Archive’s collection into a single unbroken 20 minute moving image presentation that used footage by a number of amateur film makers from the Film Archive’s collection. She describes HOLD STILL as ‘An installation of fragments. Three women in 1930's New Zealand use 16mm film cameras to document their lives and surroundings.’ Shearer quotes Duddings observation that ‘a psychic tracery is drawn’ and adds ‘the installation touches on this fine and broken line to feel out a network of simultaneous moments’.
None of the three film-makers who created the original images in HOLD STILL are still alive. Outside of Duddings conference presentation their films have only previously screened as silent movies for friends and family. Shearer's installation reminds us of the intimacy of home movie making, and leaves us to wonder at the mystery of films that outlive their makers.” NZFA Events Calendar, July 2009; www.filmarchive.org.nz.