Suzy and the Simple man, 2016. Australian documentary film.

Suzy and the Simple man, 2016. Australian documentary film.

Why do some people get an Australia medal and celebrate themselves unashamedly, and others, in an unasssumed manner pass notice or attention with ease simply going about their lives?

When an academic assumes they can deny sentience and state “You’re nothing but a waitress…[or]Better than being a waitress” I asked, “What did they think of themselves around others to assume that superior stance or their subjectivity mattered more than an other’s?” Suzy and the Simple Man, an Australian 2016 documentary revealed to me that some people receive medals for being adventurers as well as living without a WAG or woman-handbag to attend Galas and balls as a star. Suzy was beautiful in her own way and through her love and admiration for her garden, her health and her partner Jon Muir. Throughout the documentary I never really knew who the “simple man” was. He simply existed as simple as possible. I thought I was watching two people struggling through illness and taking in the day, slowly and with generosity as part of their environment and community. At the end of the documentary, I realised that Jon Muir had an Order of Australian Medal for being an adventurer, a mountain climber and a trail blazer or path finder for the few who dare, like Mt Everest. Instead of constantly imposing a fascist stance directed towards others they both lived in love simply.

Would they assert dominance over others, stating “You’re nothing but a waitress!”? Like the academic, I can’t assume and answer my question. I can only suggest that my sentience and my well-being as someone who is not a waitress but belittled for being a mother who cares about her children as someone aware of the perverse attachments some people make when they are determined to destroy a life or many lives. Some people abuse their social positions and desire to be flattered in public: to gain a medal is to gain admiration. The documentary revealed that Jon Muir simply kept exploring and living as the man he always was regardless of a medal of honour. The documentary didn’t focus on this part of his life – a day or an hour that potentially made him dress up differently for an occasion (if he attended) and instead followed him enjoying the sunshine, sunset, his partner’s company, his business and his prize winning community vegetable show. Like the Good Life characters going against Penelope Keith, the couple smiled and enjoyed what others would find too difficult and unable to find any comfort without running piped water and spa baths: a simple life. A life living off the grid and I assume a life away from the torment and torture others would impose: get a hair cult, a real job, and live in the grid paying taxes. They built their business and they built their home: simply and from what they loved and knew. Family traditions had taught Suzy how to garden well. I admired her involvement in the local school educating students about gardening. She made her interests look worthwhile and with integrity, before cancer set in, involved young people in something she knew a lot about: gardening and well-being evolved from it.

As for people knowing about whether a waitress or mother feels when they determine they don’t is another story still kept hidden. The story that some have claimed medals and accolades unfairly and unjustly for work they have never done. I have known some who belittle others because they were a school captain, studied law, or came top in the state in English and never again revealed this was worth it. The titles became their worth and others their path they trod on rather than stepped aside, acknowledged or allowed to grow and develop beyond their weed-like parasitic nature. Australia Day medals have never fascinated me and neither have adventurers. The story changed this as I looked up the people and discovered they had contributed a lot to society and culture that I knew little about. Other people found what they had achieved worthy. I found their story that advocated simplicity and less judgemental values and denial of emotional connections worth something more than a medal. 

Clearly, I remained the same after watching the documentary: an Australia Day medal is meaningless. They flatter those who know the people and just like most considered socially below most wealthy people celebrated in life are the overworked, poorer, overlooked people, a medal recipient never really demonstrates gratitude to the society that holds the medal with value. Of course, I ask what is generosity and gratitude in the light of this documentary? 

I find that an academic reducing a person to “nothing but….” ungrateful and without generosity and knowledge that people don’t need a medal nor social status sign or symbol. It is, like in other conversations, disgusting to hear social status playing out in society so easily and accepted without question. “I am an academic…I am higher up than you…” as childish, immature and without sentience nor humanity. Blinded by status and the need for social flattery stands in contradiction to the film’s purpose: eyes wide open Suzy makes her own decisions about cancer treatment that we all need to consider when faced with the difficult struggles whether to seek medical treatment or alternative medicine wasn’t her advice. 

She lived revealing her path and we didn’t need to copy or mimic because that might prove dangerous. We could persevere just as she did with our own choices supported by loved ones. She reveals a vulnerable woman uncertain of her future as well as a woman determined to follow her own path and make decisions that suited her. 

The academic again pushes and says “You have no proof…you can’t prove it…” Of course, these are ghosts and the voices that suggest reduction and determination to beat and defeat or control and compete are from past conversations involving many people – hurt and attempting to reframe this hurt with others who have experienced similar belittlement and denial of their differences.  Aggressive people – men and women – don’t allow questioning to explore. Jon Muir must have been a strong person to explore and to adventure away from social moorings. Suzy did the same. She wasn’t simply the partner of Jon Muir OAM. She was a sentient being who lived generously and simply off the grid. The grid. A place for competition and denial, for some, in the gaps – those who lived without wealth and still struggled do so dangerously. Shamed for being poor, the wealthy (cashed-up citizen)  gain access to admiration and dignity they don’t deserve and haven’t earned. The nameless masses who build up the empire toil unnoticed and without medals or accolades. A community gifts people and takes away. The wealthier (or more cashed up) live off this system, the grid or the organised flattened plane where like Descartes they stop up their ears and close their eyes determined to consider their own existence worthy before – their reflection? 

Well, just like a woman ridicules another and puts her supposedly in her place, the reflection she projects is one of the man she attempts to gain admiration from. In her place, her embodied stance she abuses and controls other women unquestioned and re-presents her own presentation of masculinity as the only project for society. Suzy presented me, the spectator, with a question, another woman creating her spirit and her life loving and supporting as genuinely and generously as she felt she could. Without contemporary confines – hair and make up come to mind easily – she questions the grid and what it means to be a strong woman living off the grid.

© Cate Andrews, 2024.

D’entre les mort or The living and the dead. Disco and a short discussion of the film Tralala, French 2021 directed by Jean-Marie Larrieu & Arnaud Larrieu.

“God had to create disco music so I could be born and be successful” – Donna Summer.

“From children to men we cage ourselves in patterns to avoid facing new problems and possible failure; after a while men become bored because there are no new problems. Such is life under the fear of failure.”― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

D’entre les mort or The living and the dead. Disco and a short discussion of the film Tralala, French 2021 directed by  Jean-Marie Larrieu & Arnaud Larrieu.

Stepping away from suffocation: a short discussion of the French film Tralala 2021. Disco! Disco in Lourdes, France. 

First the music was intriguing as well as different: not quite a musical and more like a Hymn or meditation through music through life it breathes another dimension into the ordinary, a homeless man’s day and those he meets. 

Tralala is a musical that is like clapping a beat, or adding boots and cats to rhyme and he takes this as his name. He, homeless. He lost. He like a dice roll drifts and finds something in the small and unseen in our lives we might usually overlook. Like vertigo, or a feeling of dizziness and disorientation. A song in the film D’entre les mort or often the English translation The Living and the Dead, a 1954 novel re-named Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock’s movie adapted from the French novel) directs me to this. Lourdes, the setting in France, is a place that orients pilgrims and disorients the disbelievers: can miracles happen? Have they happened? Why is the belief so strong and the community stands stable and solid in these beliefs. Tralala turns up in the town and disorients people. His appearance, like vertigo and like the song’s English title a life returned from the dead as well as breathing new life into the dead or forgotten relationships in the town. Who is Tralala?

Another dimension and I have the feeling of uncertainty with breathing and letting go. As an audience member I wasn’t prepared to take another’s perspective that like a bomb Tralala is the devils advocate. I didn’t want to determine my meaning, my attempt to connect with the film through with their stable stance. To suffocate; to accept their choices and their approach as the only way to feel this film wasn’t going to stop me breathing or giving it an organic life that evolved or appeared seen through different scenes something different and new.

In a way, borrowing from Dice Man, I questioned their habitual repetition to compete and interpret the whole before my own exploration or discussion. Determined to determine the spectator instead of accepting their perspective was unsure how to receive the film. I walked away from their perspective just like Tralala.. It felt right to let the film have an organic, fecund and less organized moment in my life. To breathe and not judge was what I was taking from Tralala. To feel less suffocated by the other’s perspective. Less dualist and less determined to simply place it in between a miracle and the devil I let go and breathed. 

Uncertainty added dimension and took from the one who tried to destroy the film experience for me. Was this also part of Lourdes miracle or pilgrimage? I breathed and then submitted to the music. Woven through Tralala’s narrative was his perspective: song and music simply walked in him and exchanged with others as part of his day, his ontology. He connected through music and lived as his music. Homeless and facing problems as they unfolded. Disco erupted into this unfolding. Lourdes missed their disco and the family that ran it missed their son, Pat, 20 years gone and now Tralala walks in and they need to fill that gap, their loss with the appearance of who they believed was their lost son and brother, lover and father. Who was Tralala? He had no story in this film. He was presence. His history unknown.


Disco! SO many moments in this film was like vertigo without the anxiety – if possible. The extraordinary in the ordinary – the music we play as we walk around, listen to when we shop and share together as we love, laugh or leave plays a role more significant for the sensitive or interested than those deaf to the rhythms around us. The next generation, the sons who wanted to leave for Australia were still caught in their father’s loss or mourning his brother and his musical connection.

 The loss and the new, rap or hip hop for another generation, was still mourned. The dance music and shared moves as well as light and pleasure was mourned. Where had disco gone for this generation and should older people feel shamed of their age and needs to express themselves through their generation, disco and dance? Unashamedly, I enjoyed the final scenes: dance and then songs sang by the “brother” Seb “D’entre les mort” is sang by the actor Bertand Belin. With Le mot juste, the hypnotic rhythms – percussion created a space to forget and to enjoy performing and the performance. The narrative again lost or wandered and music plays a role in the pilgrimage out of grief and into life.

I found in the film an encouragement, or going against the tide, for older people to dance for therapy, memory and improve quality of life. The intergenerational trauma that disrupted and disoriented the extended family from Pat’s disappearance to the sudden appearance of Tralala was like the lights on the disco ball in town, a removing of dust and spinning with the earth again. Without one meaning many worlds could world without holding onto an other through grief, dishonesty and regret. Tralala is not a musical and is not not one. The meaning for me is to sit again and listen to Bertrand Belin’s voice transport me somewhere else, unknown and unfamiliar with familiarity. Uncertainty unfolds for me as flexibility and opening to the voices of others: their daily hymns or values and meanings intertwining with my own.

(5) D’entre les morts – YouTube

Le mot juste (youtube.com)

 Not the waltz, this is Disco!

© Cate Andrews, 2024.

Disgust. A conversation about the character Anaïs in Anaïs in Love, French 2021 film directed by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet.

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

― Anais Nin

Disgust. A conversation about the character  Anaïs in  Anaïs in Love, French 2021 film directed by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet.

Why talk about disgust? Conflicting meanings and reasons why disgust is powerful and socially bonding and considered moral whereas I have reframed it, from embodied feelings to consider it as a feeling that is unethical.

Disgust means to me someone who has behaved in a way that disgusts me. They have done something that denies conversation as well as defies my own questioning regarding their self-entitlement to behave in a certain way in a social setting. Their defiance doesn’t present me with creative energy nor an opening to question my own bias nor subjectivity. The behaviour is a barrier and invalidates future acts that might change society or provide happiness and relief from the ordinary. This “barrier” feeling, meaning no potential, depth nor possibility for transformation (either the act the person has done nor my thinking to attempt to reframe) is like stopping a stream needing constant motion to cleanse, renew and explore. Invalidation is one concept I have considered to discuss the inner feelings of disgust.

The barrier is a blocking, a wall that behaviour “behaves” (I think I’m trying to reach the moment of feeling like stating a world that worlds, or a lack that lacks) to control me and my own needs.  And the behaviour invalidates my safety and expectations in a community. Some people simply live in a way that’s disgusting and their treatment of others (their well being, need for safety, enjoyment, and social cohesion or intelligence with empathy or awareness of alterity and diverse interests).

Disgust isn’t moral for me it’s ethical and for me it pushes me and my inner being. Disgust, feeling that disgust is another psychosocial attempt to control. I feel controlled by the barriers that feeling arouses. It’s an attachment that’s perverse or against my own nature. This is unethical for me.

Disgust becomes a feeling of oppression and the oppressiveness of the other that determines me and wishes only to subjugate, control and dominate. Their perspective is the only one. The wish to dement; or to repeat their behaviour to produce and reproduce their social, what disgusts me, as the only access to the social. The oppressive feelings is that unethical, felt disgust. It’s not moral, for me, because I have repositioned myself through questioning as the one the disgusting or act of behaving in a certain way can’t stand and determines to overpower and defy their own discomfort and feelings (immaturity, for example as well alienation and isolation from their group) to cast aside any connection to rule or control.

One film that reveals an example of this (I have experienced this in  many situations) is 2021 French film Anaïs in Love directed by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet. I couldn’t stand the immaturity of the young main character Anaïs. Her selfish, self-centred pursuit of whatever she wanted and with disregard to others’ feelings was, I assume, a perspective of French freedom and sexual liberation. I usually attempt to consider other perspectives offered to me through film narratives, and almost accepted her older female (played by Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) lovers’ approach that she needed to express herself. Her allure was her energy and free nature. But when Anaïs didn’t get her own way I didn’t find this freedom. I simply thought her immaturity was disgusting and unethical. She was selfish. The film, like the title explored female sexual expression and attraction. I did consider the erotic stories of the author with the same name  Anaïs Nin and this quote from her writing: 

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings”.

 My feeling of disgust revealed more about my own sense of identity and love as well as my values: that  Anaïs in the film didn’t know how to replenish, she simply took. Her character, I felt, lacked social development and love that would end up alone simply because sexual attraction would wither with her need to feel free without connections. A strange feeling. The questions that might be better explored through French philosophy about freedom and whether Sartre’s often quoted assertion “Man is condemned to be free” might suggest that Anaïs’ freedom for me was a condemnation that was unethical or disgusting because it was individual and selfish because of her lack of acceptance. Her need to impress herself and feel wanted oppressed others’ needs.

For me, the character drained the sources of others’ generosity or sexual attraction to her and love never really matured nor developed as a way to understand and connect with people. Disgust, beyond abject physical repulsion or rejection, becomes part of the discussion about maturity and community not simply a power of horror oppressing diversity or differences that is generally accepted as a moral attitude towards control and social meanings of disgust.

© Cate Andrews, 2024.

Joy, Jouissance, Journal: the “doing” of collage.

“The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas I do” – Roland Barthes.

Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912.

Joy, Jouissance, Journal: the “doing” of collage.

Organsing a collage for family brought the simplest pleasure. I was reminded of a lecture that suggested a collage torn piece with the lettering Jou suggested joy or playfulness, a game as well as Le Journal. My lecturer reframed Picasso’s collage Still Life with Chair Caning, oil cloth 1912 and presented the frame: A game? Caning suggests for some, from catholic school to public education, discipline and chastisement for wrongdoing. Until it was seen as child abuse, the cane brought many literally to their knees for a bare back side whip or a rap across the knuckles (often a ruler). Chair caning, or the chairness of the chair has the bottom in mind for socialising, resting, eating and playing board games. The essential use of a chair, to sit and communicate with others or to solitary enjoyment has been fragmented: the still life reveals partial life and beyond my own, my grasp and my chair. The caning is familiar from my childhood; we had those chairs with a dark wooden stain. They remind me of family gatherings, celebrations and stillness walking by and seeing them under the table, waiting for use and out of the way or my path walking by. The pattern is familiar. 

As I sat tearing pieces of paper from a magazine for others to use I felt joy: the sound of tearing, gentle and low coupled with the ripping from my fingers was mindfulness in motion. I tried the collage and the game extended to the application of paper, glue and fast fingers onto cardboard. The rhythm caught in ‘doing” took me out of time, out of my day and the simple joy I felt was unusual at that moment.

Reading the newspaper for Picasso is different from today’s social media and access to a variety of platforms all-at-once. The sound of pages turning, just like ripping has gone. Mimicked sound on devices is not the same. The cerebral connection between black smudged newsprint on thumbs and finger tips with the engagement of rustling large papers and stories – engaging, personal interest or simply read on a Sunday afternoon has changed.Swiping pages opens doors – no more wiping fingers and I can read on the treadmill, listen to podcasts walking and don’t need to sit and manually turn a page. The game has changed. The Journal and way to journal has also changed. This transition into technology has altered collage: I can make a digital one instead. Pieces fit and colours can dim, blend, or simply change. No need to cruise papers and magazines for an eye catching connection with a misprint, colour, advertisement. Google can do that just as well as photo APPs.

Roland Barthes’ The pleasure of the text, (1973) presents some with a “rich tapestry of ideas” connected with the body: the body enjoys, experiences and reads the text for pleasure. Barthes’ writing examines the way we can explore contradictions, silences, sounds and rhythms through spoken and written texts: the joy that reading can offer! My collage offered a mindful or automatic approach to a moment, like unbottling the sea something flowed out unpredictable and unmanaged. If you have ever been confronted (and quite aggressively more like walking into a brick wall than an opening filled with curiosity, discussion and disagreements with acceptance) with the comment “Read it and weep” this moment and memories of reading Barthes re-writes and reframes the conflict: feeling small joys alleviates more wrongs. Processing and “doing” becomes enjoyable with spontaneous, unplanned moments like collage. And, to finish my comment through the silences and rhythms that tearing revealed, my thoughts about Picasso and a lecture coupled with collage preparation and “doing” unfolded with a memorable quote from Barthes:

“The text is a system suspended between desire and its destruction, between production and the silence of disappearance” – The Pleasure of the Text (1973).

Roland Barthes (first published 1973). The Pleasure of the Text. 

© Cate Andrews, 2024.

Comment about Mike Parr’s Sunset Claws, 2023: a dialogic exchange with reframing through psychological construct Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.

Comment about Mike Parr’s Sunset Claws, 2023: a dialogic exchange with reframing through psychological construct Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.

In December 2023 The Guardian reported that Anna Schwartz dropped the artist Mike Parr after a 36 year relationship with her gallery because of a process conceptual piece Sunset Claws. The process involved text, automatic writing and red paint: symbolism and literal transferred to a gallery wall. Blood red paint, and black charred text indicating issues that aren’t grey (cerebral matter) nor black and white. The flesh experiences war and trauma. The Gaza area is known for a high anti-depressant culture being one of the highest prescribed areas in the world to date (numbers per capita). A grey area indicates a lack of finger pointing and a suggestion simply to stop and reframe, rethink and organise populations experiencing trauma, unemployment, poverty and migration as well as trauma from the sound and sights of constant artillery bombardment. 

Schwartz’s decision suggests a moment or professional experience indicating Rejection sensitive dysphoria. This condition – I am not diagnosing Schwartz, simply reframing the response that is similar in a lot of workplaces and not simply the art world or in discussions involving Israel and Palestine – is characterises ADHD and reveals that the brain “can’t regulate rejection-related emotions and behaviours” and the person and the receiver experiences heightened intensity related to the moment they don’t feel comfortable with (https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24099-rejection-sensitive-dysphoria-rsd). Briefly put, rejection sensitivity means a person can’t, through their brain or neurological make-up, manage their severe anxiety associated with rejection; has trouble seeing negative interactions as a process to develop conversations and reacts according to their neurology which is extreme intensity; overreacts to feelings of rejection – anger, rage, extreme sadness, and severe anxiety (https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24099-rejection-sensitive-dysphoria-rsd).

They feel pain and they feel discomfort and this means an experience filled with overwhelming anxiety and what others might experience as rage, aggression, and intense attempts to humiliate them once they have called out the wrong (in a workplace, for example). It is a psychosocial hazard and it is something people experience as overwhelming humiliation and shame and the desire to harm others instead of feeling that pain and emotionally regulate is difficult. People suffer not knowing how to respond. 

I called Mike Parr’s performance painting a “process” and he has opened the possibility for conversation that extreme behaviours like rejecting his comment denies. The work is a process that offers a way to regulate emotions, or an outlet to speak, dance, paint, cry, laugh and hold out a hand for reconciliation not simply exclude, like the experience of apartheid. It has been documented that writing and re-writing supports processing trauma. The images of war traumatise people through the media and in lived experience. Rewriting is a process and the cerebral or brain stimulation necessary for enjoying life with others needs this care and kindness. The process and act of self care, not simply for counselling and processing vicarious trauma, is evident in Parr’s work.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/dec/08/melbourne-gallery-drops-mike-parr-performance-artist-israel-hamas-war-piece-anna-schwartz

© Cate Andrews, 2024.

Mimicry and imitation: Paris etc 2017 (French language tv series).

Mimicry and imitation: Paris etc 2017 (French language tv series).

Why do women imitate other women? 

The young woman from Alsace, her flatmates’ “favourite fascist!” travelled to Paris to learn to cook (or become a chef?) in a busy Parisian kitchen. She arrived with long blonde bland hair, engaged, young and a National Party supporter because her family believed “migrants are taking all the jobs from French nationals”. Her flatmates questioned this because they asked, What does it mean to be French in the 21st Century? Allison, neither a Parisian nor a German from Alsace (something the region is known for is it’s location as well as cultural differences) was altered: after her first sexual encounter and then moving on to a young female chef she changed and looked more like the other female chef: short, edgy haircut, eye brow piercing, tattoo fresh on her neck with black liquid eyeliner her “look” from the innocent, countryside transformed by Parisian life and social interactions. Her ideals remained the same. She couldn’t accept the body of the other woman and she couldn’t communicate this justly: she felt repulsed because “she didn’t know how to express herself with the woman”. The other woman, hurt and emotionally distressed, responded with depth to the still seemingly naive “fascist” Where was her emotional connection to herself and to others?

Imitation comes from many sources: sexual attraction constructed through cinema, social media, and magazines as well as the home and other social institutions (education, religion, etc). How was she to unlearn her socialisation process and reframe her future and her needs as a young person? 

Paris, after their own terrorism attack is discovering the “etc” throughout this film and through diverse perspectives – age, relationships, gender, professions, etc. Who does this young woman imitate to discover Paris? Not a local and not quite foreign in the capital she explores as a tourist with an extended stay. What is Paris to us, the outsider? Are they used to the camera gazing at them, longing for the stereotype romance and the black and white photograph by Robert Doisneau The kiss by the Hotel De ville that sealed it from the outsider’s perspective: the romance. The lifestyle. The language. The philosopher and the revolutions (with refusal and the underground). Imitation and why we do it intrigues many psychologists and their research. Mimicry, simply put, works like a social glue and indicates a person wants to be as admired as the one they imitate. It also promotes social bonding and cohesion. Allison changed her look to belong and to explore within a social group. The critics suggest it’s because some people have no personality nor identity of their own and lack the confidence to create their own identity within a social group. 

What is Allison? And the people who visit Paris? What are they seeking? My approach to this is to question and not accept a fixed response; with flexibility I explore other films/books with  similar outcomes reported like, the ordinary women who followed Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love (loose memoir) approach to letting go, eating a culture and finding love somewhere other than America. More exotic? More likely a holiday romance? Or spontaneous and accidental finding of one’s self, a travel writer, someplace else. Neither local nor superficial tourist, What is found and What is lost?

Single White Female syndrome, named after the American film, labelled the disorder that imitates beyond normal limits or spectrum: the aggressive, murderous approach to mimicry and imitation of a “look” and identity to experience life beyond the person’s ordinary – past issues – and present problems. Imitation, in this instance is obsession and the compulsion to do harm reveals the dark side of envy and extreme jealousy. French films often (at least the thinking ones) offer the spectator ways to experience sexual jealousy beyond murderous intentions. They know it happens and, for some writers, the educational aspect of conversation and acceptance becomes the philosophy and the attraction to the French culture in films. Paris, etc revealed complications and relationships that weren’t perfect.

The red balloon that the artist made brought my thinking back into film theory’s history: the 1956 French film by Albert Lamorisse, The Red Balloon. A child’s need for hope as well as innocence through the eyes of the child. The artist created a much larger red balloon and we see, driving through the streets of Paris the excited eyes of the onlookers – like tourists visiting – all had an innocent and hopeful look on their faces: joy and simple fun finding this red balloon travelling through Paris to the artist’s destination. The hope for the young girl from Alsace? That her innocent approach to finding work was questioned: that her political ideals fit for Weimar Germany and the entrance into the world arena of Nazism because so many suffered poverty,  unemployment and starvation after WWI and weren’t without social credibility because all nationals believe they deserve protection and financial security as well as question: is violence or neglect of who we are as people a problem that institutionalised poverty and the acceptance of unemployment as simply racially motivated? Like the Stolen Generation in Australia, many have suffered the politics within the foundations that construct the institutions and the mimicry and imitation that socially bonds people to a group and group acceptance. The young male band, the flat mates with their beautiful French song singing the spelling of Amour L’amour en toutes lettres by Les Nouveaux Garçons (Unfortunately the O and the Story of O once they sung this and the translation appeared, I thought of Pauline Réage‘s novel, 1954 The Story of O, and the disturbing elements of SadoMasochism unwanted in my image of amour or love. The less than innocent Alsace moment becoming sordid and questioned simply because of translation and my educational past I brought to viewing to frame this scene) brought a balance to the imitation and mimicry: they experienced their political life as well as their music as local, a group as well as a moment or experience that we can’t get access to: theirs. 

We all need to have self-expression and a group – psychologists and sociologists argue. And we all need to feel our story validated. Imitation does annoy some people and occasionally is flattery. It’s the way we explore expressing this annoyance and acceptance that makes the difference to deepening social connections. For me, the references within my writing that have appeared again from discussing this film are from remembering Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Tati (especially the Kleptomaniac in the department store) just as much as I would have liked to have discovered more of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s influence in contemporary French cinema. This series didn’t appeal to me immediately and of course, I remained to uncover the questions as well as suggestions that the French cinema often offers to the spectator. Of course, complicating the story is the Tahitian man who states quite clearly “I hate Paris”. He is Tahitian and French speaking and prefers Tahiti. He doesn’t see the romance nor desire to be the tourist. He has contempt – not like Godard – and reveals another lover, a way to love that doesn’t fit Paris.

© Cate Andrews, 2024.

Arctic directed by Joe Penna (2018)

Arctic directed by Joe Penna (2018)

A young person suggested to me that Polar bears are the only animal that actively hunts humans. Not entirely correct, a polar bear often symbolises climate change and our own neglect to view our responsibility and connection to all animals on the planet. The planet strikes back through polar bears to question and challenge our sustainability on earth. I have questioned idioms and taken for granted assumptions mainly because I have overheard a person overuse idioms in all their attempts at speech in conversations. They exclude as well as assume universal connections and interpretations. They annoy me!

Another annoying statement is “Another day another dollar”. I responded is that life on earth for you? Mads Mikkelson’s performance in the film Arctic directed by Joe Penna (2018) was intense. The isolation and the vast white landscape – hostile (for me sitting in Australia) as well as invigorating like bringing children up in a minimalist white cube Where is the colour? and human connections to emotions, emotional expression and stimulation. This film offered me strength and responsibility beyond the dollar-focussed everyday. Survival and rescue for two people is the focal point. Capital gain and interest-based banking refused through the harshness of the environment and the knowledge that even though surrounded by many powerful countries his rescue was limited by vision, knowledge that he was there, as well politics. Which country would you turn to for rescue in the region? Of course, I was unfamiliar and checked a map and I assumed in the end that a Scandinavian country like Norway or Greenland were to be the life line and hope. I am uncertain and this uncertainty intrigued me.

With so much light the darkness of this film is intensified by minimal contact and the struggle. The silence, the will to survive and the frozen-communication was difficult and I – with the thoughts of survival tv series (Denmark) – knew I admired this in the character because it’s tough and culturally I am distant from nature survival techniques and skills. Surviving ice is a way of life for some and once the polar bear appeared I thought superficial. Until I was reminded that polar bears attack, are fierce hunters and won’t simply walk away like in an animation. The bear’s territory as well as survival seeking food for itself and a family is tough and made tougher through the impact of my (and others all over the world) lifestyle choices. I live connected to the Arctic and polar bears without a felt connection to them.

Mikkelson’s character doesn’t experience general everyday taken for granted connections with others – chatting, touching and relaxing. His plane has crashed and then, after crying out for help to another helicopter – theirs crashes too. His character’s sense of responsibility defies most of the people I come across in my everyday travels. His determination to rescue a woman because she has a young family – photo evidence – is superhuman. His strength – a contemporary viking. 

In Norse mythology Magni is the God of strength and valour and Eir is the goddess of healing and predicting the future. Mikkelson’s strength and will to heal this woman he couldn’t communicate with and who needed medical attention, is foreign to me. The man, not a god, needed to survive and couldn’t predict this. Without magic he was left to his own knowledge of the environment, map following, and strength as well as nutritional understanding. I wouldn’t know to use my flare to save myself from a polar bear. Was this a representation of human flight-fight mode where stories have been told of superhuman strength during extreme survival and attack situations? 

Eir, a female goddess, is associated with medical skill. In some stories Magni has fathered many children and others, the suggestion is that his strength is through solitude, loyalty and bravery. Mikkelson’s character has loyalty and bravery intertwined with his fierce responsibility towards the female in his care. Not a Hollywood blockbuster who would have had the female woken and intimate relations begun, Penna directed a film without direction towards an audience needing screen-mediated sex, intimacy and romance. The whiteness blanketed this as well as revealed that men can trudge towards survival – without knowing – without the complexities of romance or sex-interest fogging his needs for rescue. 

© Cate Andrews, 2024.

In the name of love? Reliability of memory: idioms, Liar the (or as a) memoir and doubt.

“Every man’s memory is his private literature” – Aldous Huxley.

In the name of love? Reliability of memory: idioms, Liar the (or as a) memoir and doubt.

An idiom is supposed to maintain an understanding that extends through time and is lasting. It is figurative and can be literal. Take for example, “My marriage was on the rocks” literally, they might have got married on a cliff top and metaphorically it might have been a risk – a sink or swim event – or that some aren’t great cliff climbers and simply married for failure and knew it would happen: they can’t climb the cliff nor could they survive the fall. Even the “fall” becomes an awareness of vulnerability inherent within religious “man” and humanity. We fall and how do we manage the fall? Do we blame others for the fall, for the rocks presence or do we accept the fall and get up and try again with that knowledge?

On the rocks is a drinks order many bartenders know: with ice. Many marriages break down through drug addiction and ice is considered one of the number one destroyers of families, intimacy and financial stability. A rocking ship or horse gives the sense of instability: the horse for the child can remain in their control, a rocking ship rolling through the waves brings uncertainty about survival and this vulnerability intensifies through management and teamwork to steer that ship.

The title: Liar, a memoir written by Rob Roberge, caught my eye after reading about the unreliable evidence given in a sex abuse trial by a young woman against her parents. Roberge (2016) wrote a “darkly humorous” about mental illness, the erosion of memory, drug-fuelled experiences and rock-n-roll. The rock: his writing into memoir rocks the world of truth-telling and narratives to examine the unreliability of memory and the readers’ interest still caught by the talent: the humour and story-telling. He rocked the world and so too do sex abuse memoirs: they shift perspective and band together as a “Me too” generation begins to air their “dirty laundry” in public to gain some integrity.

Questioning integrity in story-telling is Richard Guillatt’s article “I know we’re innocent …” a wrongful convictions report. Memory and a child’s memory is unreliable. Not wanting to claim they are “liars” or manipulators, both sides in the case claim they are right and right to speak out. The doubt of course is in witnessing and evidence. The child’s evidence – a young woman – was shaky or on rocky ground: there were inconsistencies. The point to doubt, from my perspective because as I have discussed before there is doubt whether a memoir writer lived through an experience or life with their family that matched the judge’s comment that the travesty was that the parents showed “no remorse”. Like Huxley suggests, we all have fragments of knowledge about others in our lives whether they are family, close friends or passers-by that others don’t have. The institutions that maintain integrity publishing and denying questions are known. 

The buyers of the stories are unknown to me : Do they believe them or need them in a way I have questioned and this makes them angry because of discomfort and humiliating error that they feel they have been deceived and now the person that sheds light on the deception must suffer or pay? These memories are inconsistent because people buy them and need them to connect with. The me too generation has both power and life-denying forces: copycats and attention seekers do exist and once someone gets attention they claw at the limelight to cast shade on those receiving attention to gain some light on themselves whether honest or through lies. The performance is maintained through crowd expectations or group mentality.  A group memory exists: communities live through hell and experience trauma and grief together. Groups, like cults also lie and present pies to the public for attention. 

Liar written by Justine Larbalestier, 2009, was written from the perspective of a compulsive liar. There are traces of Epictetus in her writing “We are all made of broken glass. The school grinds along on grief and anger.” Epictetus suggests we accept impermanence and change as well as control the wish fulfilment, dreaming element of desiring things we cannot have. The stoic suggests that boundaries, like wishing for a fig in winter, need control for happiness as well as community. The compulsive liar doesn’t know these boundaries and like many stories that appear as truth telling (not all and this makes the credibility and integrity of some standing on shaky ground because others couldn’t accept no figs in winter approach) they seek the impossible and eternal: they wish only for public attention at the expense of private lives, like child sex offenders and stealing stories for attention.

Liar is a great title and suggests our truths are hidden or contained within those lies. The problem with casting doubt over child sex abuse claims, like Guillatt’s article, is that If the parents are innocent what were the motives of the child? As well as, if the child is speaking the truth, are the motives of the media to chastise a child who broke their system and won in court a presence: the abuser is not always disempowered by high profile paedophiles and sex offenders. Many stories through the media are written by sex offenders and their supporters – only some in public are outed as guilty and ashamed. The majority still maintain a self-righteousness to write and question crimes as well as participate in them. This is the private life of underworld criminality: the web deceives some and others simply turn a blind eye or turn away from the light that might produce the knowledge to change the way we think, feel and behave around the always present underworld.

Shame is both destructive and creative: some people shame to control and destroy creativity and others, who allude shaming, seem to hold the power to destroy as well as deserve some shame that might have – in childhood – thwarted their adult attempts to simply blankly destroy others without remorse. Love is needed for that. And a psychologist, once researching the brains of mass murders discovered that his too was similar but he didn’t turn out that way. He deduced this was because his mother loved him in a way that socialised him to marry, discuss with his family his psychopathy and they joined together to support his understanding where he felt he missed the human connection or neurobiology that others have to connect. His family life, his childhood had memories and the warmth to pull him out of the “mass murdering” brain that missed these crucial developmental events.

A marriage on the rocks – wrote someone about their memoir. When they also wrote a little known piece about walking along a Sydney beach cliff face and – quite devoid and distant from any emotional connection to land as well as event – simply swept over the event that someone died slipping down the cliff that day. The writing lacks presence and the memory of the person who fell is – I believe – still with integrity and grief within their personal, private lives where their loss will never be filled by a writer’s attempt to gain public integrity through writing. Personally, I feel the connection is theft and indicates more about the religious background of the writer than they would like to suggest. Also, because clearly I know more than the general public about their private life. Not all because I too am a fragment holding a key to the memory of them and this is disturbing. Their group has attempted to control everything and the institutions that support this control are also involved in – for some – outing frauds and identity theft like the case of the Aboriginal artists Eddie Burrup constructed by Elizabeth Durack as well as other frauds that imitate the needs of the public: that crimes will be investigated in the right way. The reliability most communities want to achieve in the integrity of institutional support and human rights, for example to seek justice, is not always fair nor shared. There are groups who miss out and groups chosen for support.

Erich Fromm, 1956 The Art of Loving:

Love requires courage: Love requires us to be brave and vulnerable. It calls us to be willing to open up and take risks, even when it feels risky and unfamiliar.

SOme liars don’t enjoy or take risks. They simply appropriate to enjoy public flattery and like high profile paedophiles they aren’t brave they are simply predators on the vulnerable and use the system because they know that memory, just as what they’ve “got” or perhaps like the psychologist never really developed or had, is unreliable. Like old theories of education, where “banking” simply put knowledge into blank heads or a tabula rasa with the belief that all the same knowledge churns out the same answers for tests. Paulo Freire teaches us to reframe and rethink knowledge, connection and living or developing through the lifespan as public and privately matched humans with integrity: to question the oppressors rather than resemble them – unfortunately the displacement of Palestinians currently is a resemblance of Nazism and Nazi Germany – the oppressed now imitating the oppressors for dominance and control.

The conversation that creates and reframes is inclusive. Simply accepting print media as the most powerful truth telling tool excludes diversity and cultures with orators, speakers, stories and oral histories. Of course the inspiration for this writing – not simply private knowledge of a story thief or, borrowing from Markus Zusak, The Book Thief narrated by Death offering perspectives of victims in WWII Nazi Germany, a book was published unquestioned about it’s truth or plagiarism (Do publishers use turn-it-in like some Universities?) – inspiration? A Norwegian TV series In the name of Love (2024) opens with an assertion that the series is based loosely on a true story. Someone’s history and life was impacted by the 1960s-70s feminist and Hippie movements that questioned objectification of women and the oppression of women who remained without enlightenment and poor therefore turning to photography to reduce themselves to being “looked at” in magazines for man’s observation of his sexual pleasure. Man observes and watches; woman acts out a sex which is not one or not her own and remains desperate for attention and man’s confirmation of her desirability as sexually desired. Clearly I have borrowed like other writers, Luce Irigaray’s title “This sex which is not one” and where others have added an extra (like in a performance the extras exist) “not” to imply the web cannot simply be undone or walked away from. In Norway this time period opened doors to discussion and like in many educated countries, to questions about pornography and freedom as well as women, education and general abuse in everyday relations. Now the doors are open to discussing women who abuse and it is not simply a male-dominated area for discussion: women abuse women and men, children and adults. So too do men. 

Sexual liberation questioned female oppression. The liar as a memoir has questioned the oppression of dominance and controlling truth in public institutions, families and general everyday lives. The 1970s held circle discussions (not always equal) and listening became a skill to question oppression and the way people have felt oppressed.

“Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organise the people–they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.” – Paulo Freirer

Richard Guilliatt (April, 2023) https://wrongfulconvictionsreport.org/2023/04/01/i-know-were-innocent-these-things-just-did-not-happen/

© Cate Andrews, 2024.

Dead Snow (Norwegian: Død snø): Sacred ground 2009 directed by Tommy Wirkola.

“And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves” Matthew 21:12-13 

Dead Snow (Norwegian: Død snø): Sacred ground 2009 directed by Tommy Wirkola.

A revolting Zombie film that I struggled to maintain interest as well as comfort. The guts and gore and excessive blood spurting from greyed, dead just brutally violent Nazi-uniform clad Zombies wasn’t my sort of comedy. I did immediately think of Neville Wran’s daughter and her drug-addiction that led to murdering a drug dealer. Neville Wran was once a Premier of NSW and his daughter, an ice addict with a boyfriend (the story I haven’t followed for detail nor interest). The Zombies – a Nazi presence in the history of the Norwegian mountains – ghosted the landscape like avalanches and the fear of being stuck, isolated or swallowed by the mountain without knowledge nor being found. Myth, legend and history spoke through the disgusting gore of the film and the legends of Nazi terrorism for gold and jewellery in the area must still be present today for the loose narrative suggested this was still a part of local life and their past – silenced and present.

The Zombies attacked young medical students on their vacation and wouldn’t stop their gut wrenching – literally – terrorism until they found a few coins and a box of gold hidden beneath the floorboards of the cabin. The students did tell us, the audience, that it would be corny or stereotypical like in most B grade Horror films for young holiday makers isolated in the snow to be terrorised by a presence unknown to them: inhuman and determined, the Nazi Zombies simply wretched their lives from them without reflection, control nor humanity. Clearly that is part of the history of the area.

Why think of a drug addict and their murdering to pay for their addiction? The Zombies lacked a life force of human energy I usually watch in films. They lacked joy, and human connection. Part of the snow and foreign to the place they stopped for no one to grab at coins -just money – and the lives lost. So many stories in the news speak of ice and the war on drugs and the terror people face when living with addicts in their families and personal and work lives. Ice destroys people. The setting – snow and ice – mountains of white blank landscape known only for the riches through local stories was metaphor and literal for me. The cold-hearted Nazi approach and my surprise that someone local would camp out into that weather was clearly culturally different and part of their local history and way of life. The locals know the life and paths there. They have knowledge of the activities: fishing, hunting, surviving that I don’t have. So I looked for metaphor and meanings beyond the aesthetics of blood and guts. I was asked: What if Nazi’s were resurrected? I hadn’t thought of that. The religious landscape and sacred ground before the senseless spilling of blood for money by the Nazis in the area.

I looked and thought about Jesus in the Temple: accusing those running a “marketplace” of what I have interpreted as greed, selfishness and a lack of spirit or divine for the place. Dead Snow was difficult to see and easier for me to question the story and think about the meaning. The young travellers weren’t disrespectful, they were simply ignorant of local legend. Like one said after calling an emergency number, it sounded like he had been smoking his underpants or the sort, the story was unbelievable except when put into the context of families who manage the violence and aggression of children and parents with drug addictions. 

The fear also produced: who would find these young people beneath the snow and believe that it was Nazi Zombies not, as they wanted to suggest to Emergency, a terrorist attack to bring them to the location. The doubt and the local knowledge conflict: some people simply knew the presence was inhuman and existed desecrating the landscape, the snow now not considered pure, like the simile as pure as driven snow, the purity of the Nazi’s motives and beliefs that an Aryan nation shall conquer (clearly through appropriated of religion and philosophy), left the sacredness of the mountain “angry” and longing for the lack in their lives: their history, like others who have lost sacred sites, simply trodden on and bled dry or impoverished through the marketplace – the drive for money to fuel the anger. The Zombies revealed the unfairness of that drive to impose the “fair, pure, and superior race” inferior to those who lived peacefully around and with the mountains. Fear. The story imposed fear and with my own frame, knowledge that people do terrorise people simply for wealth and control – that is inescapable and reframing what might it mean to live with some “quality” of life reconsidered in light of mental health and wellness and the ability to distance oneself from issues to take some time to breathe. I didn’t breathe during this film. I needed to feel, without guilt, that history can’t always strangle or take away one’s breath for the loss of others; it’s how I choose to breathe with the knowledge that offers a way to consider “quality” of life. The film was ugly and so too the loveless destruction of loves for amassing wealth. No love, like Jesus suggested, when a temple that’s sacred is turned into a marketplace enslaving animals and the poor to the values of the spirit-less wealthy.

© Cate Andrews, 2024.

Taking another look: the marvellous in debate and seeing again: Brook Andrew’s illuminated arrow Warrang.

Paul Klee. Separation in the Evening. 1922.

“Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvellous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.”

― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

Taking another look: the marvellous in debate and seeing again.

The title “Separation in the Evening” 1992 by Paul Kee attracted my attention. Recently I visited the MCA and considered the contemporary illuminated “arrow” by Brook Andrew, for me, looking up at the Emu Dreaming is looking down at the landscape, sacred ground hidden beneath the grass and concrete of the building – once the Maritime board (1939 commissioned for design / building) Sydney MCA. The architectural style, art-deco inspired, reminds me of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis revealing the above ground world and the shady, underground: the criminal hidden elements in Lang’s Metropolis and M become the architecture, the way we occupy spaces and are manipulated and manoeuvred through those spaces to “see” certain views and viewpoints. Klee’s Separation in the Evening is often used as a tint and tonal exploration for art students (young ones). The layers and separation through shade, tone and tint are, for me, architectural. Like sandstone blocks the  lines and texture reveal a hidden depth: the separation (the title) hides or conceals that depth or that which needs to be close but doesn’t know how or is prevented through architecture and ways of seeing. Is there a matching arrow we can’t see that is hidden beneath the MCA? Or, like Klee’s evening, are the murky waters of the harbour trying to turn us around and see?

The arrows point down or up, like a reflection in a night water or harbour. What is reflected is Andrew’s illuminated arrow is also what is concealed or denying reflection: the emu, the sacred ground as well as the convict and colonial past now hidden in broken or fragmented Dreaming stories. Like Philosophy, some believe is a conversation looking back and questioning Plato and Socrates art too is a conversation between artists and ways of seeing – privileged and gifted for reframing in the present. I stumbled into this conversation thinking of Brook Andrew’s arrow and Paul Klee’s title. I now open this stumbling with some illumination from Water Benjamin’s writings, especially concerning interpretation and the “marvellous” feeling – not unproblematically (a philosopher might question my borrowing of this concept when it hints at the ultimate meaning of “reality”) – art can offer when no-one agrees and the conversation arouses discuss, debate and some warmth from the fire that glows with lighting the forgotten, or shaded artworks that are often walked past, overlooked or displayed as an entrance to discover something else. 

© Cate Andrews, 2024.