Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

119 "TELEGRAPH" Sydney, ! N.S.W. Films as good as his paintings Artists have been interested in film since it was invented, and they have sometimes made films. This has been so for a long time. since at least the 1920s, which is when Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Fernand Leger first made films. Early films by artists explored the new visual language, its jazziness, its trickery. They were either sur- realist fantasies, or scientific light - and -motion exercises. Today. when filming is olteaper and easier, it Ls often used casually by straightforward landscape or figure painters, as an occasional al- ternative to painting. In Australia, Brett Whiteley has made a film (with Peter Kingston), Which is as intense and beautiful as his best paintings. There is no reason why admirers of his art shouldn't buy a print of this movie, for projection at home. at has much more of Whiteley's art- istic achievement in it for much less money than you have to spend on a painting. Garry Shead is another painter - film -maker, and his films are prob- ably the most important artist's films to have been made here. Last weekend a small of Shead's films was screened at the Third World Bookshop. Pour or five, made over a ten year period, were shown with the premiere of his latest work initiation. I have seen at least four others. so there is already quite an im- pressive quantity of work. The quality of his film work was most impressive, too, as seen In the retrospective showing. Technically it was much he same as most "underground" movies, that is. the films are sometimes unevenly lit, the sound isn't always audible, the performances sometimes a little sel (conscious. Though the newest film, made with a $2000 grant from the Aus- tralian Council for the Arts, has become technically pretty good. But it's not for film technique that you value artists' films. You admire them because of their visual poetry. FIRE AND ICE One of Shead's most memorable -films (not in last week's retro- spective) lasts about three minutes. It shows a boy and a girl embrac- ing in the surf's edge. In blazing heat' it then cuts back and forth to old film clips of Scott at the Antarctic. Fire and Ice! You remember it for ever. All his flints so far are black and white, and he is perfectly happy in monoohroine. His paintings have never been very colorist. He did black and white cartooning for "Oz" when it began. He is a moralist. And those who are interested in good versus evil, fire versu- ice, and so on, are nat- urally their element, with black versus white. Many of Shead's images are of imprisonment. His longest film, 40 minutes, and also his best, is called "Live Between Evil" (spell "evil" backwards, it's "live"). It doesn't seem evil. Only slowly do you realise everybody Is trapped in cages. art ( by daniel thomas Mother peers out through the bars of her suburban venetian blinds. Pet dogs are behind wire mesh, or they desperately run around the limits of a pretty sub- urban garden. The daughter is confined by the life in the pretty gingerbread house; at the end, speaking from within the cage of a telephone box to her parents she annotuaces that she is leaving home. But when she and the boy finally reach the unspoilt and beautiful countryside, the last shot is a bar- rier of dead trees. In the newest film, which is a simple ghost story, there are more lingering glances at dead trees In the bush. More inanimate things become sinister; for example a motor -car, bonnet up, waits like a snapping shark. There is a constant worry about how to stay alive, how to avoid going dead, how to cope with subtle tortures like a faintly dinner to introduce a boyfriend. And yet, it all looks natural and loved; perhaps even beautiful. This is achieved by gently using the same actors through most of the films. OWN FRIENDS They are Garry Shead's own friends, their roles are very close to their own selves. Over the years you find artists John Firth -Smith and Ian van Wieringen, fitting more easily into these films; Sue Doting becomes more assured; the artist's parents are outstandingly good. It is moving to see Martin Sharp's and Ian van Wieringen's and Anou Kiesler's lost youth of ten years ago preserved in the happy celebration called "Ding a Ding Day," but it is the earliest and least equivocal of the films. Most moving of all is to see the extraordinary power that love and knowledge can produce, when par- ents and friends agree to be them- selves in Garry Shead's films. Garry Mead's own life is revealed, and if art isn't personal self - exposure it is nothing. There isn't much in Australian art to compare with Garry Shead's films for such open, plain and con- tinuous revelation of the artist's self.