Stories from the Silent Front

Rip It Up, Issue 213, 1 May 1995, Page 40

Stories from the Silent Front

GaylenqF’reston ' on War Stories

Gaylene Preston, the woman who put the tale of Ruby and Rata onto our big screens and injected some guts into Montana Masterpiece Theatre with Bread and Roses, introduces her new film with a childhood reminiscence. Young Gaylene's squeezed down between the chair and sofa in her family living-room, furtively poring over family photographs stored in a Cadbury’s chocolate box. The radio’s playing, and she spins tales to fit the images she’s holding. “War Stories is the logical extension of that. Look through, sift through the evidence and uncover the larger tale,” she says. Preston sees her new documentary film, interviews with seven women about life during wartime, as “returning to my roots in a way. I started making films in a psychiatric hospital in England — and it’s completely against the fashion. My interest has always been to do documentary in the true sense, and I'm not talking about the reality programming which is what we mostly see on the telly — sound bites, expose and all that. I’m interested in the very small details of ordinary lives, and I think you can make great cinema out of that.” War Stories was a difficult project to get off the ground. "The film funders thought it was just a bit of television and wanted me to film it on video. I’d always thought of it as interesting cinema. I didn’t want to do soundbites.” The meagre money supply ended up having a beneficial effect on the filming. Preston, cam-

eraman Al Bollinger and interviewer Judith Fyfe spent a day over each interview, and the filmmaking process itself was ingeniously resourceful.

“We put black velvet behind the women and in front of them, because we didn’t want to see Judith. I wanted a full frame figure of the person talking and a close eye line to camera — I hate it when they’re looking off camera. So, really, we made a little black velvet room for the people to be in, with physically cold light HMI lights, so they didn’t get overheated, and they forgot we were there filming. Something like this had a wonderful psychological effect, and it was mainly the result of not having any money.” From her 1984 first feature Mr Wrong, watch any Gaylene Preston film and it could only have been made by a woman. In War Stories, she creates a deep rapport with her subjects and they are remarkably frank, especially on sexual matters.

“We never asked probing questions. Women talk about sex a lot. I find the 1940 s interesting because of the double standard and it was that double standard, I had to fight when I grew up.”

I express some surprise at the fierce antiAmericanism that one woman encounters in the film, and then recall my own childhood where ‘yank’ was a fashionable term of derision. It strikes a chord with Preston. “There’s another title for the film — War and Prejudice. You do get a picture of a very prejudiced, monocultural society, and it’s hard to imagine anyone took those opinions so seriously. It’s not even very long ago.” War Stories is just "part of a bigger project”. It grew from 60 sound tape interviews done for the Oral Archives. Preston confesses to “feeling like a bit like a butterfly collector”, and there are still more stories to be told. T T would love to do an interview with a lesbian woman of that generation. We’ve put all sorts of requests out into the lesbian community down here in Wellington, but nobody’s wanted to do it. I’d like to talk to a woman who was a prostitute during the war, and one of the thousands who had abortions. I’m hoping the film will lift the lid off things and make it easier for people to talk.” War Stories is emphatically a cinema documentary, and Preston emphasises that is where it will work best. “The advantage is you can’t beat everybody sitting in the dark, looking at the light reflected on the screen, all laughing at once, all crying at once, and all talking madly and not wanting to leave the cinema at the

end. To'me that’s a communal experience. That’s what film is about. I live in a small community. I live on Mount Victoria, I think up the films in Blair Street, and they’re shown at the Paramount Theatre or the Embassy — it’s all happening within three or four blocks down here. I would love to make a film one day which won an Oscar or got a Palme d’Or, but I’m not shaping my films to appeal to three or four French people, who sit on the selection panel at Cannes. I’m making my filmfs] so I can sit in the dark, with my community at the Paramount, and watch them.”

There are many levels of ‘reality’ encountered in the 90 minutes or so of War Stories. Preston found the two Maori women particularly inspirational, and is pleased she caught the story of Aunty Jean Andrews, who was diagnosed with lung cancer a few days after the filming (Aunty Jean died last year and the film is dedicated to her). Perhaps our media could learn from that very Polynesian openness.

“Our television and cinema should be — it’s not because it’s been taken away by market forces — little campfires where, in the last five years of the twentieth century, we can sit and have our elders tell us stories, because that’s what storytelling’s always been for. That’s who we are as human animals.”

And it is the Maori stories that might well give 'us Pakeha the most food for thought. “The Maori seem to have been better at acknowledging the pain and the sadness that had happened in the war. Their returning soldiers were acknowledged as having blood on their hands. The Pakehas were given a number and a guinea to buy their civvies. They got off the boat, kissed the wife and went home. There was so much that couldn’t be talked about, they just rolled their sleeves up and worked for the next 10 years, and that dreadful silence I grew up in was the 50s. It wasn’t silent exactly, it was terribly bright, a bright light where everything was happily happily... until Elvis came along.”

WILLIAM DART