SALLY MANN
In my final year of high school, Mum was nearly killed in a terrible car accident. She had driven from Vermont High School on her lunch break to a local shopping centre to pick up some carpet remnants. I have no idea why she wanted these remnants, but soon it wouldn’t matter. She had bought a meat pie at a bakery and asked the baker to squirt some tomato sauce on it before they put it in the paper bag. She drove out the shopping centre exit onto the main road. A car was heading towards her, but she judged that it was far enough away for her to make a right turn. She didn’t know, however, that the car was travelling way above the speed limit. A teenage driver. Unlicensed, drunk and driving with a broken arm in a sling. His car slammed into Mum’s driver’s side door. The T-bone impact was so violent that her seatbelt snapped open as her body took the full force of the side-on collision. She ricocheted across the front seat, her head smashing the passenger window. Luckily, the newly purchased carpet remnants were in the front passenger seat and softened the impact.
I was not at school that day. I was supposed to be at home, studying for my final year exams. In fact, I was with John at his place, not studying. Dad called and told me not to rush home for dinner: ‘Why not stay at John’s until later, as Mum has been in a small car accident and might not get home tonight.’ I don’t know how he could lie so well. He must have been completely gutted. I did not find out until years later what had actually happened. It took emergency services half an hour to cut Mum from the car using a device nicknamed the ‘Jaws of Life’. Mum was barely conscious but she could hear a woman screech, ‘Oh my God, is that brains on the window?’ No, it was her meat pie, flung against the windscreen. Mum was too weak to correct the stranger, but could see the humour of it.
‘Look, is that petrol leaking out?’ someone else said. ‘What if the car catches fire before they get her out?’
Mum was afraid. A stranger was holding her hand. Mum never forgot this hand. She said it kept her alive. She even wrote a poem, ‘Hold My Hand’, about this stranger.
Much later, I learned that Mum had flatlined in hospital and had to be resuscitated. Years later, she told us that she had an out-of-body experience in the minute or so she was clinically dead. She saw a bright light and felt at peace. She was heading towards the light, ready to cross over, but then she heard Dad’s voice calling her back, pleading with her not to leave him, not to leave the kids. Mum remembered deciding to turn back. Then she woke up and was whisked into surgery to have her ruptured spleen removed. She had suffered massive blood loss from internal injuries.
At first Dad tried to underplay the accident. I imagine it was because he was terrified, and afraid of breaking down. But when Mum did not come home, Kathy and I asked to go and visit her. ‘It’d be better to let her rest,’ said Dad. We wrote notes and asked Dad to take them to Mum. More days went by. Dad asked me to come the wrecker’s yard with him, and to bring my camera. He wanted me to take photos of Mum’s car for the insurance. When I focused my camera lens on the mangled driver’s side door and the smashed-in window it dawned on me—this was a terrible, violent accident. Dad then revealed that Mum had a fractured pelvis, two broken legs, multiple broken ribs and a shattered collarbone. She also had internal injuries.
Kathy and I caught the train to see Mum at Box Hill Hospital. She looked tiny and frail. She could barely speak, but managed to ask us to press down on her abdomen, so it wouldn’t hurt when she coughed. It was the first time we had ever seen Mum as vulnerable, and we were frightened by her weakness. She was on morphine and kept drifting off, making odd movements with her hands. Sometimes, she said, she imagined she was folding washing. Other times she hallucinated that she was writing a letter, or cooking a meal.
It took her more than a year of determined rehabilitation, but Mum learned to walk again. Thirteen months later she was looking after her herd of donkeys and planting flowers in the garden. It made for a difficult HSC year for me, and then a difficult HSC year for Kathy. All we cared about was Mum getting better.
I don’t know if it was the shock of almost losing Mum, or how vulnerable it made Dad, but around that time Kathy transformed herself from an average student into a serious scholar. She decided that her love of sculpture and fashion were not going to provide her with a career. She had always had a strong sense of justice, so she decided to become a lawyer. We were all shocked, but she quickly became a straight-A student. Dad was thrilled, he had always hoped one of us would become a lawyer. He remained so proud of Kathy until the end of his life.
I just scraped through my HSC exams, but got into Rusden State College to study media and drama. It was a teacher-training college, but for the first two years of the four-year degree, I wouldn’t have to set foot in a classroom. I could spend most of my time playing with cameras and making short films. This sounded like a fine idea.
One of my first teachers was old-school. After giving us a tour of Rusden’s TV studio, he allowed time for questions. I couldn’t wait. There I was, my naive young heart bursting with dreams.
‘What advice would you give me for how I might eventually get to be a director?’ I blurted out.
‘You? A director?’ he said in a snarl. ‘Learn to type.’
I wondered how typing would help me direct.
‘Then,’ my sarcastic, sexist teacher continued, ‘you might get to be the secretary to a big producer. And, who knows, if he likes you, maybe he’ll give you a chance.’
It felt like he had dumped a bucket of cold water on me. Fortunately, my other lecturers were wonderful professionals who believed in inspiring young minds.
At Rusden we learned everything from graphic design to large-format photography. We worked on video productions and were taught how to load and operate 16mm cameras. I got to make a short narrative video about two tortured musicians (starring John McAll, Christina Pozzan and her boyfriend, Robert McMenomy), then a short film about a young girl rebelling against her artist mother, starring my parents, Greg, Kathy and a host of other ring-ins, including my former drama teacher from Vermont High. The role of the daughter was played by John’s little sister Sophie, who had the most fun because she got to slash up her mother’s canvases (all painted by me). I also worked on a lot of other students’ films, doing different jobs each time: I would record sound or operate the camera or cut film in the editing room.
We also learned about improvisation, different acting techniques and theatre production. When we staged a play about mental illness, called Snap Out of It, my role was a madwoman who played Schumann’s ‘Child Falling Asleep’ from his Kinderszenen. Halfway through, I stopped playing the piano, started screaming, then fell from my piano stool onto the floor, where I was bundled into a straitjacket. I had to stay there for the remainder of the play, totally ignored by the other actors.
We studied the art of clowning. Clowns and mimes had always scared me. Something about the sweaty, smeary greasepaint and the sinister painted-on smiles. Clowning is an art, like mime. It involves training your body to move in a comic way, learning how to make certain expressions, how to perform slapstick. We were given just a few days of lessons from clowning experts, then asked to create a clown-comedy for children and take it into the community, namely a school fair the following weekend.
I played an evil boy-clown who pushed unhealthy fast food onto princesses to make them fat. Dressed in oversized baggy pants and a gaudy shirt, I force-fed the pink princess clown cheeseburgers until she got sick. The good clowns then threw me out of the clown castle. The audience of eight-year-olds took it seriously and were lying in wait for me backstage after the show. Before I knew it, I was being attacked by a mob of vengeful children, kicked by little angry feet, mostly on my bottom. Luckily, my clown pants were padded. Visions of young savages out of control, like something out of Lord of the Flies, sent me into a panic. I barricaded myself in a broom closet until I heard the kids wander off.
The next day we visited a special school for kids with autism and Down syndr
ome. I knew little about either disability. In high school, I had read Virginia Axline’s Dibs in Search of Self, the story of an autistic boy who is treated by an angelic therapist. The mother is described in the book as emotionally crippled and largely responsible for her child’s condition.
At the special school we performed a different clown play. This time I was cast as a bird and dressed in a costume of bright yellow feathers, with a large tail and a cardboard beak. I felt like an imposter even before the performance began. I was hot and sweaty. My teacher kept urging me to physicalise the bird. Be the bird. Preen.
The assembled children were excited and noisy. There were about fifteen children with Down syndrome. A few others, in wheelchairs, seemed to have cerebral palsy. The rest looked no different from the children who had attacked me the day before, except these children had autism.
There was no stage, just a cleared area of floor. My character didn’t perform until five minutes into the play, so the leading clown gestured for me to sit in the front row of the audience until my cue. I plonked myself down, trying to remain a calm, hippy, drama student, but I was scared of these children. I was afraid they might try to talk to me and I wouldn’t know what to say or do. I decided to stare straight ahead. If I ignore the audience, I thought, they will ignore me. Wrong. I was covered in bright yellow feathers, a big, fluffy, neon-yellow bird in their midst.
Someone began to pat me. I looked around. A little boy was staring at my feathers in a kind of rapture. His small hand was gently patting my arm. Another child started to pat me. I looked up at the teachers. I wanted one of them to explain to the children that I was a character in a play and that touching me was breaking the rules. But the teachers were smiling at me, happy that this drama student in a silly yellow costume was bringing so much joy to their students. I looked at the children. I was a magical creature in their eyes. A child hugged me. I wanted to be a good bird for them, so I started to preen. I put all my energy into being the best bird that I could be. How could I have been afraid?
8
Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.
INGMAR BERGMAN
In 1980, when I was twenty and in my second year at Rusden, I discovered Cinema Papers and read the bimonthly magazine cover to cover, all the articles about international and Australian films. The year before, I had seen and loved My Brilliant Career, a first movie by a new director, Gillian Armstrong. Now I read about how she had been one of the first students accepted into the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in Sydney, set up by the government in 1972. I had never heard of it, but was immediately obsessed with becoming a student there. If that’s how Gillian got her start, maybe I could do the same!
Getting into the AFTRS was not easy. They took a total of twenty students per year into five ‘workshops’—Producing, Sound, Editing, Production Design and Camera. I wanted to be a cinematographer/director like my hero Nicolas Roeg, who had started his career as a camera operator for David Lean, the (director of Lawrence of Arabia and Dr Zhivago), so I applied for the Camera workshop.
As part of my application I sent the 16 mm film I had made at Rusden (in which the girl slashes her mother’s paintings), a script I was working on about an alien invasion, and my Super 8 films, edited together into an epic twenty-minute movie called Dreams. But I had a problem. My Super 8 films were silent. So I recorded twenty minutes of the instrumental side of the David Bowie/Brian Eno album Low onto a cassette, which I sent with a note instructing the assessors to press play when they saw the first image of Dreams. It was a primitive procedure, but it must have worked because I made it into the next round of assessments.
This time I had to f ly to Sydney and meet with Storry Walton, the head of AFTRS. I also met the Camera teacher, Brian Probyn, a cinematographer who had worked with Terrence Malick and Ken Loach. It was a long day. After my interview, I was put into a small room with a light, a box of props, a video camera and instructed to ‘do something creative in ten minutes’. Next, I had to watch a strange abstract film, then discuss it with the assessors. I blathered on about symbolism and shooting style and hoped for the best.
Six weeks later, there was an urgent telephone call for me in the staff office at Rusden. It was Mum, squealing in excitement. ‘A telegram has arrived for you. Do you want me to open it?’
‘Yes! Yes!’ I shouted into the phone.
She read it out: I had been accepted into the Camera workshop.
Attending film school in Sydney meant leaving home for the first time. It meant moving to Sydney, a city I did not know. It meant saying goodbye to Mum and Dad and Kathy and Greg and Angela. It meant leaving all my good friends and teachers at Rusden. It also meant leaving my beloved John. He wasn’t happy. He assumed I was leaving him for good, but I wanted us to try to remain a couple. I begged him to come to Sydney with me, but he was applying to the Victorian College of the Arts to study jazz composition. I promised to come back to Melbourne by train every second weekend. It was worth it to be together. John said he would try to come to Sydney too.
On my first day at AFTRS, in early February 1981, I met my fellow classmates, including a Paul Hogan. I remembered his name from the orientation package, which included short bios of the other students. Paul Hogan, aged eighteen, was from Tweed Heads, NSW. I had felt sorry for him, whoever he was. Imagine having to share a name with the famous TV comedian? I was also impressed that he was only eighteen. He was coming to AFTRS straight out of high school.
Paul Hogan turned out to be tanned and skinny with longish brown hair. He had a wicked smile and piercing blue eyes. He was attractive (but eighteen!). Also, I was devoted to John, so not looking for romance. I kept my distance for the first few weeks of school. His sense of humour was outrageous; he talked loudly and was opinionated about everyone and everything. He excelled at the quick comeback. He was the kind of person I felt safer being silent around. Better not to speak at all than risk being judged, and inevitably mocked, by this young and arrogant brat.
During my first year away I was always torn between rushing back to Melbourne to be close to John or remaining in Sydney to follow my dream of becoming a film director. John kept begging me to quit film school, and I kept begging him to move to Sydney. In my second year of film school, we got engaged, although we never set a date for the wedding. We tried very hard to stay a couple.
Eventually, Paul and I became friends. Neither of us knew anyone else in Sydney. We both loved spending weekends seeing as many movies as possible, and we both liked Indian food. I was discovering that, as well as being hilarious, he could be charming, when he chose to be. Like Angela, he had the power to make me cry with laughter. Within months we were close friends. We worked on our films together, spent our free time together, and eventually both moved into a share house with three other film students. The only thing Paul did that annoyed me was ask me to pick up his laundry from the laundromat. Oh, and he did once lock my cat, Betty, outside in a rainstorm. She ran away and never returned. I still haven’t forgiven him for the cat.
We couldn’t have been more different. I came from Melbourne, where it rained a lot and people read books, went to plays and visited art galleries. He came from a Gold Coast tourist town, where people surfed, worked on their tans and rode the rollercoaster at one of four major theme parks. Paul was not a surfer. He liked books and films, and books about films, and Mad magazine, and Charles Schulz. He hated organised sport. I was a quiet, serious young woman; he was iconoclastic, outrageous and very funny. And he brought out my playful side. We made each other laugh, a lot.
The other female student he hung around with was Jane Campion. In 1981, she was already the shining star of our class. Every short film she directed was amazing. We knew she was a film genius. She was beautiful and hilarious. She used to do a brilliant imitation of Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, turning to look over her shoul
der with haunted Streepian eyes, saying in a throaty, Streepian voice, ‘I am the French lieutenant’s…whore!’ That would always crack us up. When Jane and Paul were riffing off each other, their rapier wit was so intimidating I would find an excuse to leave. They were highly entertaining, but you didn’t want to be their target. They mercilessly poked fun at lecturers, other students and everyone’s short films. Eventually they convinced me they did have true affection for me, so I stopped avoiding them when they were sitting together.
I remember the first time I started to feel a glimmer of ‘more than friends’ feelings for Paul. We were doing a compulsory Television assignment, directing a short dance performance using three cameras: we had to direct the multi-cam broadcast from a small control room, watching three television monitors at eye level. An Editing student (a ‘vision switcher’) would sit by your side, and wait for instructions on which camera you wanted to cut to. Your job was to watch the three screens, make snap decisions and tell your vision switcher to cut to one of the cameras, all in time to the music. Each of the cameras in the TV studio was controlled by a student wearing headphones. In between camera cuts, you had to direct the camera operators to move closer or further away. The goal was to get as many different shots as possible.
I found this exercise incredibly stressful. I have never been very good at handling a barrage of visual input, which is probably why I didn’t learn to drive until my late thirties. To make matters worse, our TV lecturer was always angry, and shouted at us when we made mistakes. We felt like lambs being led to slaughter.
A girl in a pink dress danced elegantly around the television studio. Camera A was framing her in a wide shot. Camera B was panning with her in a closer shot. Camera C was framing her elegant feet, and tilting up and down to her hands and face at different times. About twenty seconds into her performance, I panicked. I was supposed to choose a camera angle (close up, wide shot or medium shot) and instruct the vision switcher sitting beside me (who happened to be Paul) to cut to camera A, B or C. He waited. When I said nothing, I saw him glance at me. He understood that I had frozen. Without saying a word, he took over and cut from camera to camera, occasionally talking into the control-room microphone, instructing the camera operators to go left or right or zoom in. I felt as if my mouth couldn’t move. I was ashamed, but also incredibly grateful. I remember watching his hands on the buttons and the switches and thinking: ‘He bites his nails, but he has such elegant hands.’
Unconditional Love Page 7