Mary Macpherson
Gaylene’s Take: Her Life in New Zealand Film by Gaylene Preston (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 367pp, $40; droplet by Sheryl Campbell (self-published, 2022), 96pp, $80
Cinema and its close relative, the still image, are among the important ways we understand the world in the twenty-first century. Whether they’re staged fiction or taken from the world, images tell us stories about ourselves and society. But what shapes the narratives is the sensibility behind the lens and the intention of the storyteller. In these two books, Gaylene’s Take, a memoir by Dame Gaylene Preston, and droplet, a photobook by Sheryl Campbell, we see the power of work by female image-makers and feel the influence of feminism, which has helped rewrite society’s behaviour toward women since the nineteenth century and earlier.
Preston is one of Aotearoa’s iconic filmmakers with a fifty-year legacy of documentaries, television series, feature films, commercials and installations. In the final chapter, ‘Why I make films’, Preston highlights the importance of telling New Zealand stories: ‘Watching a movie that speaks your own accent, that wears the same clothes, that sits in the same hills—that’s a joy. I love when a film rolls off the screen straight back to the community it comes from’. Her memoir contributes to that experience by being at once a social history of Aotearoa from the 1950s onwards as experienced by a girl growing up in the provinces and an account of a woman forging her career in New Zealand’s film industry, with empathy for stories of everyday New Zealanders and a desire to highlight issues of social justice. Lashings of determination, a rebellious streak and a sense of humour are also essential to her operations.
Preston’s storytelling skills are on display in this book as she builds her narrative largely through accounts of the significant moments and people that have shaped her life. She begins with family events: her great grandfather Edward taking to his brother’s gravestone in the dead of night to chisel off his father’s words, that ‘Children must obey their parents’. Talking of this act of disobedience and bravery, she says: ‘From that hastily chiselled grave do I spring. You need both of those things to make a film: disobedience and bravery, and a bit more. I am one of the lucky children, born much later, that Edward freed—officially.’ These qualities also carry her out of a life that could have been of a woman following her husband’s career, into art school, graphic design and filmmaking, where the struggle to make the films she believes in draws on those fighting qualities. Her mother, Tui, also features throughout the book, which begins with a moving account of her mother’s death in a retirement village. ‘She is very strong in me. I have to fight her off constantly, but she travels with me always. I am resisting writing this, because I have resisted her ever since I can remember. I have made films about her and featuring her. She is the strong character who shapes my opposition,’ Preston says.
Her account of life growing up, first in Greymouth and then Napier, is redolent with the atmosphere of 1950s and ‘60s New Zealand. Preston’s descriptions of neighbourhood and family life are comprehensive, vivid and warm. Among the many stories she tells are ones that signal her future as a storyteller and filmmaker, like being under the kitchen table with her crayons listening to the neighbourhood women talk about their ‘hims’. Later in the book, discussing her poignant documentary, War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us—which includes her mother among the interviewees—she comments, ‘Their telling, like the stories I overheard down among the legs under my mother’s kitchen table, is inclusive and personal at the same time’. Elderly women, she suggests, are the ones who can really tell you about history.
Although her mother, who was afraid she would marry an impoverished artist, strongly opposed her going to art school, advocacy from Gaylene’s teachers overcame her mother’s resistance and Preston made it out to Christchurch and her new life. Following art school, she married and moved to the UK with her first husband. There, filmmaking began as drama and art therapy in a psychiatric institution. Galvanised by reading Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and inspired by an article about a woman who made a film about her disabled son, she joined arts collectives to start her filmmaking journey. A longing for home and New Zealand’s fledgling film industry eventually brought her back to Wellington and Aotearoa.
Her account of making her way in the New Zealand film industry is full of stories and warm portraits of people, like John O’Shea of Pacific Films, who gave Preston her first job in the film industry, where she became an honorary man called ‘Bruce’ in the all-male film crew. There’s plenty of humour in her accounts of what it takes to get a film made, like the time her car, essential for filmmaking, is repossessed when the car yard fails. Preston co-opts an ex-boyfriend to help break into the yard and steal it back, then faces down the police who’ve come to investigate the theft. That kind of ingenuity and determination are evident throughout her career as she solves problems or fights for funding and distribution for her first feature Mr Wrong, which successfully sold overseas but was turned down by New Zealand’s two major distributors.
Gaylene’s Take is a cornucopia of a book, written in a conversational voice that suits Preston’s threaded-together stories. By the end, we’ve been taken through rich accounts of the major documentaries and films she has made, learnt about the workings of the New Zealand film industry and its people, and felt Preston’s love of bringing overlooked voices to light. It is highly recommended reading for anyone interested in film, New Zealand social history and, above all, storytelling.
If feminism is an important strand in Preston’s work, it’s centre stage in Sheryl Campbell’s photobook droplet. When you turn the pages of droplet, it’s clear Campbell wants to you to feel— viscerally—that sexual harassment of women in the corporate environment is unconscionable and should be stopped right now. This might make the work by the Auckland feminist photographer sound didactic or like it is campaigning on such an obvious truth that it’s of limited appeal. But what’s persuasive about this award-winning book is the strategies Campbell employs to entice the reader into her narrative and how she enacts the message in a way that’s not unlike a silent movie.
The work is grounded in the many reports of sexual harassment by women in the legal profession, particularly an incident in 2018 when students, who were on internships at a top law firm, reported having been sexually assaulted by senior partners. Using female and male mannequins, a blow-up sex doll, and an assortment of slightly homespun props arranged and photographed with great skill, Campbell has created theatrical images to lure the viewer into her scenarios. The photographs range from staged scenes inside offices, psychologically charged still-lives, botanical images and documentary photography. Together they present a linear narrative of confident young women entering the office, being ground down and debased by harassment before female scientists arrive to examine and cleanse the situation. There are no men riding to the rescue here.
A key means of inviting the viewer into the pictures is colour, which exerts a hypnotic pull even when we are repelled or anxious about what’s happening. Pink and blue animate the story, and while these colours are associated with traditional female/male roles, Campbell imbues them with her own layers of symbolism. The book opens with hot-pink endpapers, a colour that crackles with confidence. But this is followed by a cinematic double-page spread of corporate buildings at night, cloaked in a foreboding inky blue that reappears throughout the book, uncannily associated with male threat and psychological defilement. There’s also a French blue-and-white striped tie that appears in several images, representing corporate authority and its misuse.
The female narrative begins with images of the voluptuous earthy pink of magnolia blossoms, symbols perhaps of healthy, confident femininity. The female mannequin wears a dress and carries a notebook in vibrant pinks, but as male predators loom, these bright colours are soon darkened by shadows. Defilement and disempowerment are represented by the pasty skin of a plucked chicken. But help is at hand, and a section titled ‘Antiseptic’ starts with the same blazing pink of the endpapers. The scientists who arrive to collect evidence and put things to right wear coats of glowing light pink, while their cleaning and forensic equipment is a riot of pink hues. Throughout the work, the reader is enveloped and carried along in this colour-coded world.
Another strength of the book is the artfully (in the best sense of the word) staged images that simultaneously attract and horrify and have us cheering for justice. At the end of a section titled ‘Induction’ are two dark images of detached mannequin heads, one seemingly defaced by semen and surrounded by cut magnolia blossoms, the other caked with dirt and drifting in an inky night, signalling complete female disempowerment. The male predator is represented by a leering penis-nosed mask, an image that’s funny in a horror movie kind of way but also terrifying. Images featuring repeated use of pins combined with plants and fruit also deliver uncomfortable psychological punches.
Having lured us into the story through imagery and colour, Campbell cements the delivery of the book’s message with quotes from media interviews with survivors of this toxic environment, printed on tissue-like paper: ‘In my second year, I was told by a male solicitor, 8 years my senior, that if I did not have sex with him, he would tell everyone that I had anyway, so I may as well just do it. (Excerpt from Radio NZ article by Jessie Chiang, 3 March 2018).’ The semi-transparent paper softens the delivery of these messages, which could seem blunt on gloss stock and is one of the ways Campbell uses the materiality of a book to advantage.
To an extent, a photobook lives and dies on the sequencing and pacing of its images and the way it uses the book form. Campbell steers her story through sign-posted chapter headings that draw on corporate language, such as ‘Procurement’, and other suggestive titles like ‘Smudge’ and ‘Dispatch’, rather like the title cards of silent movies. Combined with hypnotic imagery that carefully signals each part of the story and liberal use of full-page bleeds on pearl-coated stock, the book becomes like cinema on paper.
droplet was a top prize winner in the Aotearoa Photobook Awards, a competition that attracts art photography books, often printed in small editions. The upside of this independent publishing is the freedom to create innovative visual narratives unconstrained by the need to appeal to the wider marketplace. In Campbell’s case, she has used this freedom to forge a strongly polemic narrative, something unusual in Aotearoa photobooks, and convince us through a psychologically powerful enactment of the issue.
With stories of harassment and misogynistic trolling of prominent women still featuring in the media in 2022, along with the #MeToo movement, Campbell’s book is both compelling and relevant. The final, rather humorous image is of a masked Campbell dressed as a sheriff, wearing braces of jaunty pink and holding her pistols aloft. Even as we celebrate this female victory, the image also reminds us that there are still battles to be fought. Perhaps the sheriff shouldn’t holster her guns just yet.
MARY MACPHERSON is a poet, photographer and photobook maker from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her latest photobook is Of the Hill.
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