Memory Film: a Filmmaker’s Diary: In Conversation with Jeni Thornley
by Grace Boschetti
Image: still from Memory Film: A Filmmaker’s Diary
With Memory Film: a Filmmaker’s Diary, director Jeni Thornley, one of our country’s great practitioners of the autobiographical essay film, crafts an intimate and wise “farewell poem”. Comprising fragments of super8 footage, spanning three decades (1974 to 2003), the documentary brims with warmth, beauty and life. Watching Memory Film is a strongly emotional experience which only deepens upon repeat viewings. It’s one of my favourite Australian films in recent memory. Prior to its screening on the closing night of this year’s Melbourne Women in Film Festival, I had the privilege of sitting down with Thornley to discuss Memory Film. It was my first time ever conducting an interview, and I’d like to express my gratitude for her generosity in approaching this conversation.
Thornley began our discussion with an acknowledgement that all her films have been made on First Nations country, on Gadigal, Garigal and Palawa land. “It’s really close to my heart: nature and living close to the bush, ocean, sky, birds and trees. I think that helps bring in this quietness that I really, really appreciate about being in country”, she said. Such a connection to country is deeply reflected in the film.
Memory Film began with 137 rolls of super8 that were “sitting in a cupboard at home, getting pretty mouldy”. It took around six months to go through every 3-minute reel by hand. “I didn’t want to put [the film] through a projector or a viewer because it would scratch it even more, so I just put a silk cloth on my couch, and I held each reel up to the light with a magnifying viewer… and I went through frame by frame”.
An experienced film valuer, Thornley was aware of the cultural and historical worth of this footage, so she brought a proposal to the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA), which agreed to purchase the collection for digitisation.
At this, I wondered about Memory Film’s reflections on the transience of life; perhaps echoed by the deterioration of the super8, but also wonderfully contrasted in how the documentary in some way immortalises each moment it contains. “It’s one of the paradoxes of film, which I think David MacDougall writes about so beautifully,” Thornley responded.
“Cinema’s quality of loss… it’s a bit like life, I want to hold on to this moment with you, it’s so lovely, but it’s going by.”
As I’m transcribing this interview, I return to a book chapter[i] Thornley wrote on the making of Memory Film, in which MacDougall is quoted: “In the end, film clearly has no more dominance over time, no more power to recall life, than the frozen images of photographs. Indeed, it offers the semblance of life only to snatch it away”.[ii] It’s a thought that both intrigues and saddens me.
Image: still from Memory Film: A Filmmaker’s Diary
After Thornley had created the first assembly, which was about four hours in length, she brought editor Lindi Harrison on board the project. “We’re like sisters”, said Thornley of Harrison, “we became really bonded”. She explained how the two women worked on the edit from separate locations as Harrison felt the task required “two intact minds”. For Thornley, the process of this collaboration was “liberating”: “[Harrison] used to call it our beautiful film, which I really loved,” she said.
In its completed form, Memory Film draws from conventions of silent film. There’s a continuous score, composed by multi-instrumentalist Joseph Tawadros, but no narration or other speaking voices. Intertitles, including a number of thoughtfully chosen quotations, gradually form a narrative, both political and poetic.
Early on, the film invokes poet Sei Shōnagon’s “list of ‘things that quicken the heart’”, as referenced in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (Sunless, 1983). It is as good a description as any for the many light-filled images – sites of beauty both natural and human-made; children engaging in joyful play; skies that are red, orange, pink, purple; tender portraits of female bodies; cats, and many dogs.
In some way, Memory Film reminds me of Agnès Varda’s poignant final piece Varda by Agnès (2019). I asked Thornley about Varda’s influence. “She’s had a huge impact on me, and actually Margot Nash and I met her when we were at Creteil one year with our films”, Thornley began.
“She also came here with the film she made on her husband, Jacquot de Nantes (1991) … she screened it at the film school, and I’ll always remember when we were all gathered around her because she was like our heroine and she said ‘don’t you idealise me, all you women. Don’t think it’s easy for me, it’s as hard for me as it is for you’…. I always remember her saying that and how warm she was towards us in her sharing even that information about how difficult it has been for her as a woman, raising the money for her films and making the films she wants to make.”
Image: Filmmakers Margot Nash, Jeni Thornley and Agnes Varda at the Creteil International Women's Film Festival, Paris 1999 source: https://jenithornleydoco.blogspot.com
The challenges and great personal investment involved in producing a film independently came up at several points in our discussion. “Because our films are, in a sense, a little bit outside the mainstream, you have to find very innovative ways to make them and raise some money”, Thornley explained. In total, Memory Film, like Thornley’s earlier To the Other Shore (1996), took around ten years to make.
“You put so much of your own finances in… one of the reasons why I don’t think I’ll make another film is, I can’t economically afford to keep putting my own money into films, at my age”.
Later in the conversation, Thornley, whose poetic cine-essay Island Home Country (2008) was produced as a doctorate at the University of Technology, Sydney, touched on filmmaking through the university framework: “A lot of us, perhaps more women than men, have made some of our films through the university. It provides a sort of structure. You get a really good supervisor for your Masters, or your PhD and you can have a very creative environment for making a film, you’ve got the facilities, you’ve also got the wonderful thing about praxis… you’re encouraged to read the theory, understand the theory and bring it to the actual creative process… that’s very different from the industry which is kind of obsessed with ‘is it going to make money’”.
Image: To the Other Shore
Thinking of To the Other Shore, in which Thornley explores her early family life – including her relationship with her father, a cinema exhibitor – I asked Thornley about her influential childhood experiences with film. “The cinema was like a child carer,” she explained. “We used to walk from school down the hill to dad’s cinema”. I asked about the films she most associates with that time. “The Wizard of Oz had a huge impact on me emotionally, scaringly, I was absolutely terrified of the bad witch. I was probably too young to see [it]”.
But these early recollections of cinema are also fraught for Thornley. Her father’s inheritance of the family business coincided with the introduction of television in Australia in 1956. “Most exhibitors crashed then, a few found a way to innovate, and they were robust, but sadly my father wasn’t, and he became very depressed, alcoholic… that’s had a huge influence on my thinking about film… it was a very destructive force, it had no sustainability”.
“I think that all of my filmmaking has been a search for the lost father… he was lost to me even before he lost his cinemas, I’d go from school, down the hill to the cinema, go into The Wizard of Oz and get lost in the images – just a little child.”
Thornley’s first film Still Life (1974), co-directed with Dasha Ross, was made during the 1974 Women’s Film Workshop. The next year, she served as one of the national co-ordinators of the Women’s International Film Festival. When I asked about this experience, Thornley first reflected on applying for the Australian Film and Television School.
“Quite a lot of women applied from the Women’s Film Workshop, including me. Dasha and I both submitted Still Life… Dasha got in and I didn’t get in and I was absolutely devastated, and it’s linked back to the wound of the father… this rejection from the film school represented the absent father again. You’re trying to get his love, it’s the patriarchy, it’s the sign, you want ‘daddy’s’ approval, you want to go into the film industry. Just look at the camera, it’s actually a masculinist instrument and it’s got this attraction to us… it represents the father… [at least] for me.”
Image: Women’s International Film Festival poster. Source: https://jenithornleydoco.blogspot.com/2017/08/
Yet from this place of disappointment came Thornley’s involvement with the 1975 International Women’s Film Festival. “Bringing in all those films by women, for the first time to Australia…. completely opened the world to me, in a way that, it didn’t matter about the film school anymore, what mattered was this body of work by women that goes right back into the silent period”.
Thornley revealed that after her documentary Maidens (1978) won a major award at the 1978 Sydney Film Festival, she received a telegram from the head of the Australian Film and Television School congratulating her on her success: “I kept that telegram because it was like, I couldn’t get into the film school, but I made this film and now he’s sending me a congratulatory telegram! There’s a teaching in that, which is trust your own pathway, trust your own intuition, and don’t give up… don’t let the gatekeepers affect the spirit of your creativity.”
Towards the end of our discussion, Thornley reflected on her early experiences working in camera departments. “I was training as a camera assistant… a colleague of mine who’s a cameraman at Film Australia[iii], [which] used to be the old Commonwealth Film Unit, he said ‘I’d like you to be my camera assistant on a documentary out west NSW, but they won’t let women in the camera department, and I’d like to challenge the rule’… and it happened, I became the camera assistant, but the weird thing, and you have to laugh, all of the men who were on the crew… insisted on bringing their wives. Because they said, if he’s bringing his girlfriend, we’re bringing our wives. And I wasn’t his girlfriend.”
In so many ways, Memory Film feels like the culmination of this personal history with filmmaking. “Being a camera assistant in the 1970s, and at one stage wanting to be a cinematographer, I love the way that my current feature documentary is all super8,” said Thornley.
“You know, that it’s made from this small camera, over so many years and there’s this intimacy that the super8 has… that can’t be found in any other way.”
If Memory Film does turn out to be Thornley’s final film, it will be an end both stirring and deeply earned.
Jeni Thornley is a documentary filmmaker, writer and film valuer. She is currently a Visiting Scholar in the School of Communication, UTS, writes about film regularly and is distributing Memory Film with Antidote Films; for further details see: https://jenithornley.com/
[i] ‘The Enigma of Film – ‘Memory Film: A Filmmaker’s Diary’, Constructions of The Real: Intersections of Practice and Theory in Documentary-Based Filmmaking, (eds.) K. Munro et al., Intellect Books Series: Artwork Scholarship: International Perspectives in Education, 2022.
[ii] MacDougall, D. (1998). Transcultural cinema. Princeton University Press p. 35
[iii] Film Australia was consolidated into Screen Australia in 2008