AustLit

'Part memoir and part meditation on memory, history and photography, ‘The Silences’ (Nash 2015) is a 73 minute personal essay documentary. Drawing on family photographs, oral histories, my parents’ letters, documentary video footage I shot over a seven-year period and clips from my own body of work as a filmmaker, ‘The Silences’ investigates family secrets through an excavation of the repressed and hidden histories in my family, in particular the history of trauma and mental illness. In this article I reflect upon a discovery-driven, as opposed to a market-driven, creative development process and argue that it fostered a ‘brooding’ questioning space where old ideas were challenged and new ideas were nurtured. I explore ‘writing’ in the editing room with images as well as words, rather than setting out with a pre-ordained script. I share the discovery of an unconventional structure driven by theme, rather than chronology or structural paradigms and draw upon my research into literary, cinematic and psychoanalytic inquiry to build an essay film that ‘speaks’ in both pictures and words. I investigate the subversive power of the subjective and reveal how the gaps and silences in history were made visible when little or no documentary evidence existed.' (Publication abstract)

'Despite contention and criticism, auteur theory has significantly influenced screen studies for over half a century and has framed as cinema’s major creative force the recurring ‘brand’ or ‘style’ of a director’s personal vision. This essay applies these debates to Jane Campion’s ‘Bright Star’ (2009), an intimate ballad of the doomed romance between the English Romantic poet John Keats and his muse Fanny Brawne. In embracing the Keatsian principle of ‘Negative Capability’—that is, ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’—the essay will engage in a meditation on the idea of surpassing the self in the process of creation, exploring the prospect of an author’s negation of his or her ego in an encounter that perhaps resists the traditional categorisation of human experience. I conclude that a director’s work is not created in isolation and that connectedness is an integral part of our relationship to each other and the world around us.' (Publication abstract)