INTRODUCTION

At the international conference for Thalidomide-effected people, recently held in Sydney (April 2008), a key speaker talked of the deep, psychological scars sustained by members of a small tribe of people she described as ‘the hidden generation'.

Her comments opened the floodgates for an emotional forum to ensue, discussing the social and cultural impacts that the pharmaceutical phenomenon had generated for people nearly fifty years ago. For many present, the forum heralded the very first breaking of a silence borne by people variously shunned, ignored, patronised and physically challenged for most of their lives.

It was at this same conference that my film Blue Colour was launched. Its story had drawn substantially on cultural and social observations made in working creatively alongside Indigenous youth living in the Brisbane area. The story also made autobiographical reference to a number of my own personal challenges experienced in being a member of the hidden tribe of Thalidomide effected people.

Blue Colour is not a story of art-as-therapy. It is a personal story of life-as-therapy. It explores aspects of learned social patterns, and attempts to show that chance encounters may powerfully signal opportunities for escape into change.

In many ways it is a story that speaks in private symbols about human perceptions, and champions our individual abilities to navigate through our own worlds, each according to our unique sets of values, beliefs and experiences.

The following report is an exegesis of the studio project. The report includes a brief consideration of the project's theoretical framework, a reflective production journal and a post project epilogue.

 

COMMUNITY NARRATIVE
The observations made within the filmic genres of documentary can stylistically treat stories through many forms of representations, categories and sub-classifications.  

The use of community narrative, (or stories gathered from real life as resources for theatrical script-writing or screenplay), verges into the territory of what may be described as docudrama, or performed documentary.  

Stella Bruzzi, in New Documentary: A critical Introduction, 2000, p. 153 writes

"The docudrama output of the past 30 years is predicated upon the assumption that drama can legitimately tackle documentary issues and uncontentiously use non-fiction techniques to achieve its aims. It thus becomes possible for drama to perform a comparable function to documentary: Cathy Come Home raised public awareness of homelessness and prompted the founding of Shelter, whilst Granada's Who Bombed Birmingham? (1999) led directly to the re-opening of the case of the Birmingham Six" (Bruzzi, 2000, p. 153).

In considering various methods of salvaging aspects of the Belongings 2 project research, I eventually decided to use a narrative drama foundation upon which I could tether smaller, more specific cultural references drawn from the initial groundwork and research.

Seeking a story that was simple, emotionally powerful, and ultimately achievable, I settled on using an event drawn from my own experiences, which I hoped would enable me to work from the structural and cultural integrity of a true story.

My story contained dramatic elements of tension and release, and I was confident in working from its plot. I knew there were substantial creative risks in producing this story, that it may not translate well into a successful film. Nonetheless I wanted to explore my experience as the story basis for my project, since it promised to provide a solid narrative framework.

 

"Born with congenital defects to both hands and feet, I have learned much about the personality of hands (especially) and feet. Much of my early childhood was spent in learning how to adapt my own system to meet the one that digitally suited just about everyone else" (Reinthal, 2005, p.29).

Several years ago, while working as a counsellor, I was asked to meet with a twelve-year old boy experiencing severe autism spectrum disorders. The boy had never yet spoken and was very agitated in his physical movement. Eventually his intensely controlling mother was persuaded to give us some time alone.

I instinctively saw an opportunity to show who I was, rather than attempt to verbalise an introduction, so I immersed my hands into a puddle of bright blue paint and printed them onto my face, creating a very strong visual greeting. He stopped fidgeting and froze.              

I silently held out my hands to him, whereupon he shyly stepped forward and, placing his palms on mine, coated his own hands in the paint and joyfully squelched the wet blue colour through his own hands. He made one print on his own face. Together we made an incredible blue mess.

Unable to stay away any longer, his mother returned and disgustedly scrubbed the paint off her son and shepherded him off to their car. His grandmother apologised and turned to leave, but the boy broke away from his mother's grip and ran back to me. He awkwardly placed both of his arms around me and said in a raw, untried voice

    "Thank you".

His mother grimly tightened her grip and removed the boy. I never saw him again.

My purpose in making such an overtly visual introduction was not intended as an art-as-therapy approach, it was purely a non-verbal gesture of signaling difference to someone who clearly needed a positive encounter with difference.

Hand-printing my unique signature in an electric colour temporarily caused a pattern-break in this boy's reading of familiar culture, which invoked a clear response. I had introduced myself with an encoded greeting, and as a result, he altered his own patterns of behaviour significantly.

 

"Slowly we worked towards different wordless languages: we took an event, a fragment of experience and made exercises that turned them into forms that could be shared. We encouraged the actors to see themselves not only as improvisers, lending themselves blindly to their inner impulses, but as artists responsible for searching and selecting amongst form, so that a gesture or a cry becomes like an object that he discovers and even remoulds. We experimented with and came to reject the traditional language of masks and make-ups as no longer appropriate. We experimented with silence"  (Brook in Daly).
 

THEORIES AND THEMES: Considerations of Tribal Culture
H. K Bhabha, in his treatise, The Location of Culture, 1994, p.29 raises challenging objections to highly stylised methods of media treatment of issues of ethnicity, identity in culture and the use of socially framing mechanisms. Bhabha describes methods of stimulating and implementing new thinking to engender progressive dialogues within media conventions.

"Is the cause of radical art or critique best served for instance, by a fulminating professor of film who announces, at a flashpoint in the argument, ‘We are not artists, we are political activists?'" (Bhabha, 1994, p.29).

I once held the notion that a tribal existence occurred (and still occurs) in remote and exotic locations, defined by archetypes of traditional societies clinging tenaciously to the edges of survival, as Western society bulldozes its way to complete dominion of the landscape. This commonly held notion asserts tribe as an other, an outmoded, anthropological curio posited in academic reflections upon the tragic drift of tradition into extinction.

Yet, the territorial boundaries of any urban football club are as magically charged with mystical incantations and taboos as any nomadic herds-person would dare to invoke. We are tribal. How we engage with each other is profoundly determined by our conditioned and adopted tribal identifications.

The potential for engaging creatively with definitions of the tribal territory within an urban environment is nothing new. Modern, mainstream movie culture delivers an infinite number of extrapolations on urbanised society in all its variously combative, competitive and culturally defining frames. The conventional stereotypes are pre-embedded, lodged, recognisable almost from infancy, and fully utilised by society's media producers.

The phrase ‘social autism' occurred to me during an attempt to describe my own behavioural anomalies resulting from painful episodes in childhood relating to my physical differences. My deepest visceral and intellectual responses to sustained chapters of hostility and rejection were simply to disconnect, to switch off and operate from within a state of distanced, automated reflexivity.

Similar socially autistic phenomena had become evident in the process of preparing to make a journey across culturally delineated territories in an observational documentary of urbanised, Indigenous youth culture.

Observational documentary, particularly in an anthropological or ethnological genre might well be described as a sponsored entry into the sanctified marae of any defined culture, where the filmmaker seeks (passively or otherwise) exposition from members of the tribe, championing thematic mottos, whispering the most secret of social mantras, singing proudly of legendary tribal achievements and recounting the harshest of hardships.

Broaching the creative challenges of a cross-cultural dialogue, however is fraught with the typically long silence of aversion, incomprehension, awkward response; a most difficult and painful threshold for any filmmaker to cross.

It is however, a threshold that must be crossed many, many times in order to generate inter-cultural vitality, but is such vitality necessarily valid aesthetically?

SOME METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS
Many realisations, (creative, philosophical, technical and theoretical) have dawned in the subsequent evaluation of the construction elements of Blue Colour. The multi-stranded story foundation, partnered with so many complex attempts at resuscitation, frequently threatened to cause a mechanical stylisation in the thematic background and content.

These conceptual buttresses often burdened the project with unwieldy layers, stifling my clear desire for artistic freedom, which was a directorial value originally sought in attempting to craft a short film of some creative merit.  Much of the initial chaos rapidly advanced my awareness of my inexperience and limitations as a filmmaker, all of which ultimately dictated so many of the outcomes, particularly in the crafting of stylistic decisions made and undertaken during the production.

The process of injecting Blue Colour with any amount of symbolic references was an   experimental play in creative factors, something I recognised as potentially hazardous, (and therefore highly desirable).

I considered the use of many methods of incorporating visual cues particularly through the use of a blue (and to a lesser degree, red) toned colour palette. The very literal use of the colour blue to signify all manner of thematic ideas, was considered to be a dangerous device, largely because I realised that a heavy-handed approach to over-stylising the film could reduce its accessibility for mainstream audiences.

In keeping with my philosophical desire to show subtle forms of the language of autism through non-verbal codes, I sought to layer several abstractions into the film's stylisation. I expressed this idea through visual and auditory cues, using devices that could imply the experiential anomalies of the central characters, and yet still pass by, unnoticed by members of any audience physically unaware of the phenomenology of social autism.

The use of small blue items, unobtrusively sprinkled throughout the film served to establish a bower of tokens, subliminally placed to anticipate the final initiation scene as the culmination of so many smaller precursors to the change. Tomi's backpack, all of Neil's jackets, Kathy's earrings, Doctor Dave's shiny tie, Deveaux's pants, the awning and features seen in the street at the West End, each adding to the overall accumulation of blue-coloured trinkets and treasures, largely demonstrated in situations of cool, restrained and uncomfortable situations.

By contrast, the interactions between Neil and his mob were treated with strong tones of vermillion, creating a dynamic palette of volatile immediacy, aiming to create an energetic sense of reactionary behaviour. Additionally, Neil's character experienced visual abstractions, shown as a blurring of form whenever Neil comes under stress, and Tomi's character experienced auditory distortion and sonic anomalies whenever he encountered social pressure.

NON-VERBAL EXPRESSION AND IDENTITY
There are innumerable, and often very subtle social dialects existing within an urbanised community of multi-cultured peoples. These tenacious cultural dialects, often non-verbally communicated, can form impenetrable barriers to social integration.

Operating as social signals, cultural dialects commonly go unnoticed outside of the tribe, or are frequently perceived as dangerous codes, misinterpreted as the dysfunctional behaviour patterns of the stranger's world. This largely unacknowledged language realm presents, in its own way, a complex phenomenon, as a kind of social autism that powerfully constructs a silent, hostile buffer, perpetuating issues of social distance, disconnection and separateness.

 "[Brook's]... methods seem startlingly post-modern in the sense of the performance not transmitting narrative action so much as what Richard Schechner calls "multiplex signals," composed of bits and pieces of information to be processed by performers and audience alike"  (Trostle-Jones, 1985,  p.3).

These signalled and closely guarded symbolic boundaries probably exist on any urban street, between Maoris and Murris, between Muslims and Christians, between flag-waving Broncos supporters and dread-locked, organic-lifestyle hippies, between four-wheel drivers and hybrid car owners, between the politically opposed, between the hearing and the deaf. Around us urban cultures gesture silently with a thrust of chins, menacing with a pointed flick of elbows, asserting authority via clothing, jewellery, displaying power icons of identity to assert cultural dominance.

Conceptually, Blue Colour sought to communicate in the language of those who commonly go unnoticed; the person of disability, the person of Aboriginality, the wounded shadows among us, people struggling to exist at the fringes. It was important to make reference to the experience of alienation by working in the silent codes of the inconspicuous, I was striving to touch minority members in audiences, so that the shy, submissive, uncertain in us might experience Blue Colour and momentarily breathe a little deeper, encountering some sense of  ‘represented place'.

Grand ideas for a small film... but how would people respond?

A number of test screenings yielded comments from the majority of viewers ranging from "I loved it" to "I didn't really understand it", however, several people offered considered responses in ways that granted me a sense of personal success and project closure.

Basil      (retired psychiatrist with severely disabled/deaf adult son)
"It touched me very deeply, I could see that you were using the boy's character to communicate everybody's inner pain, I recognised the symbols, thank you, its beautiful."

Tenneille  (Aboriginal actor, visual artist)
"I really got it,... I know that,... the need to get away from mob, the way he (Neil) just can't be around people, I really know that, I do that... I love that film."

Several people cried at the end of the film, but I didn't assume that to be a good thing!

"I have enormous respect for writers and I don't subscribe to the auteur theory of film-making. When I direct a film, I don't try to be the author. Its self-evident to me that a film is a collaboration, in which, if anyone is the most important contributor, its the writer. Still, what the writer has provided is only a stage in the process. What matters is that what is actually on the celluloid is a valuable experience and that there's a sense of authenticity about what you've created"  (Loach in Porton, 1996).

AUDITIONS, CASTING and COURAGE
Having been very focused on working alongside the highly articulate and multi-talented Indigenous youth worker, Fred Leone in the documentary chapter of the project, I was determined to locate an actor who could interpret the character Neil with a very open and personal sense of performance response.

I specifically wanted to show an urbanised slice of Murri culture, one that clearly demonstrated the long distance from a ‘tribal other' to the portrayal of an Indigenous man existing within a contemporary city setting. This was intended to be revealed through the use of non-traditional cultural references, through the stylised drift in cultural imagery in Neil's paintings; in cross-pollinated rituals and resources used in the initiation scenes, and largely in the delivery of a character who knows his cultural roots, but has just lost some sense of the meaning.

"Often using non-professionals, Loach spends a great deal of time interviewing potential actors in order to ensure that their sensibilities or experiences relate well to the character. He rejects Hollywood standards of beauty and casts actors who look and sound like genuine members of the community in which his stories are set" (Robins 2003).

I approached the Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts in Brisbane, and was fortunate that my recent and accelerating immersion in a slate of short films and sponsored documentaries for the Indigenous community of Brisbane had afforded me some good contacts, and I had a show-reel of items that demonstrated my ability to produce works with at least some familiarity with appropriate cultural protocol.

The auditions yielded a great team of young performers, with Sonny Dallas Law being the obvious choice for Neil, and, after some slight adjustments among the support cast, the other Murri parts were cast with Andrew Legg, Howard William and Jesse Martin playing the parts of Rags, Pau' and Gordon. Caleb Stanley and Kaylah Tyson joined as Navy and Cheetah.

I was able to recruit the talents of theatrical actors Belinda Berrington and Kristina Anderson to play the characters of Deveaux and Kathy, and a couple of willing friends stepped in as extras.

I invited my son Mischa to read the part of Tomi, and although he was very uncertain at first, he warmed to the part and gradually discovered a natural ability to perform. As this was his first-ever performance, I was both surprised and delighted with his maturity of interpretation, I had asked him to take on the role, largely from the practical angle of not wanting to negotiate with a young actor's parents for hair-bleaching, insurance, time away from school and long, exhausting calls during the production weeks.

"Forman often used amateur actors as well as very young professionals. There was an impression of improvisation, as if the camera was watching a group of friends. And the film was completely unhurried, unlike so many pictures being made in the West - there was a sense of space around the performances, rather than a feeling that the camera was barging into the room. There was none of the pressure, of being pushed along, that you tended to get elsewhere" (Loach in Telegraph.com.uk, 2002).

                                                                                           
One of the best (and worst) scenarios was that, as director, camera operator, writer and editor, I was constantly debating internally just how to achieve the best coverage in order to arrive at the editing process with a good harvest of scene options, whilst still managing to direct the film, and all the while negotiating and arguing silently constantly with my ‘inner' producer, the sum of which probably drove my production partner insane with frustration and deep concerns.

The cast were all extremely patient with the bizarre conditions of surviving several outdoor night shoots in the middle of winter, dining from my esky of self-catered delights, being forced into wearing strange items of second-hand costuming, and thrust into un-scripted alternatives intended to achieve a more fluid authenticity of vernacular or method acting.
      

SCRIPT ALTERATIONS, STRUCTURES AND PERFORMANCE

"...cinema can potentially assume many different roles depending on the contemporary social context and the factors influencing the process of film production" (Strebel, 1980, p.11).

In contemplating various sociological elements of contemporary film-making, I concluded that the strongest foundations for creating accessible production value are often established by a fresh rendering of a screenplay's ideological elements, and secondly, through a well-organised crafting of a cinematic story that springs powerfully from a clearly evidenced, directorial ability to communicate meaningfully with audience through structured production.

The effective blending of these ingredients is a creative merger, informed and implemented in tight collaboration with cast and crew. The utilisation and innovation of established technical conventions, coupled with a well-formed, contemporary perspective can contribute an invaluable creative and social sub-text thereby enabling a director to deliver well-situated works to specified audiences, resulting in professionally and artistically rewarding outcomes.

How does this assertion translate in Blue Colour?

SOME PROCESS ISSUES
Describing the urban Indigenous component to the story was challenging from a representational perspective, in that I needed to give myself permission to write honestly, drawing from experiences as a youth worker, and from working with Brisbane Murris.

I wanted show a flavour of the Murri culture of West End in a snap-shot of images and dialogues that rang true, which meant avoiding watering down or objectifying any of the Murri community's youth experiences. There was a trap of crafting an Australiana tale, replete with wallabies and lap-laps, which was definitely not congruent with my story or project vision. I wanted to avoid a non-Indigenous way of reading culture stereotypically, which could only serve to promulgate the notion of tribe as the other. The gratuitous use of traditional icons needed to fall away in order to allow intimacy to develop between the story and the audience.

In order to balance the Indigenous scenes of the film in a subtle and integrated script, I allocated a fairly equal amount of screen-time to Tomi and Neil's back stories. This seems like an obvious procedural step, however it was very easy to be more excited by the Indigenous content, seeing it as the exotic, a more dynamically charged set of scenes than the familiar, white features of the non-Indigenous cast, videotaped as they pack the shopping away. It would have been very easy to cash in on the well performed and dramatic (deleted) Murri scenes that were captured in improvised experiments, which definitely sweetened the film's energy, but ultimately smothered the story and left too many questions unanswered.

There is a definite trend to fetishise a representational form of Aboriginal culture, which unfortunately limits Indigenous actors to stereotypical work opportunities, rather than stimulating creative integration into mainstream roles, where good actors are cast as people. Many of the Murri actors complained that they just weren't ‘black' enough for most of the roles they had previously auditioned for, and were greatly excited that I was casting actors based on performance ability, and not colour intensity.

I was determined to strike a balance in directing a realistic story and still maintain some restraint in the depiction of cultural definitions.

The script development was a fairly straightforward process where I made many attempts at solving logistical puzzles for production viability, and Charlie Strachan (Script Editor and project advisor) made very rational observations in a series of discussions aimed at ‘keeping it real'.  Charlie questioned the motives of each actor's screen trajectory, checking back-story and relevance with the overall shape of the story until gradually, (at least ten drafts later), the shooting draft seemed complete.

The most surprising part in this small-scale project has been the subsequent realisation that so much of the story and its roots have been evolving for such a long time. It now seems as if the progression of events that determined many of the production choices were in fact already simmering in the back of my mind, dictated by other, seemingly unrelated life experiences and observations.

The process of peeling away the layers to reveal best delivery choices, to make those decisions, whether based upon logistical factors or purely on gut instinct to ensure better character development, better use of location features etc, was often a curious set of dreamlike realisations that would arise in the middle of the night; and suddenly I would feel better, more certain.

I didn't really feel settled with the script's resolution, if in fact it was even a resolution. Despite being based on true events that had occurred, in translation it seemed artificial, and even gratuitous.

It wasn't until I reviewed the rushes that I saw with amazement, as Tomi handprints Neil, and Neil exits the frame, that this whole story was in actuality about my own hands and the fractured nature of my ability to express many parts of my silenced feelings. It was a stark, yet empowering realisation, which offered me keys to crafting an ending, which would at least deeply satisfy my own emotional sense of the story.

I retrieved a journal from my teens and found a prose piece I'd written back then, relating to the sense of isolation and social difference I'd experienced, and I had Tomi recite this as a narrative voice-over as he journeys on from his encounter with Neil.

MUSIC, SOUND DESIGN AND EMOTION
Steve Reinthal composed several gorgeous music themes and motifs for use throughout the film.  Neil's theme incorporated contemporary elements of hip hop, rap, spoken word and street sounds, which ultimately fell away to reveal a more natural sound-scape as Neil makes his sojourn into the bush, and Tomi's themes utilised layered voices, slowed down sounds and unnatural auditory distortions, increasingly applied to describe the tension of his anxiety.

Steve's idea was to reinforce the emotional journeys of Neil and Tomi through the musical motifs, making subliminal reference to the characters in several expansions of their  themes. We experimented with altering the time and pitch of Neil's music theme ‘Wandering' until we found a section that could be manipulated into a low-frequency drone sound. Steve copied the drone sequence until it became slightly reminiscent of the didjeridoo, reinforcing the theme of Tomi's abstracted sonic perception, which also matched the urbanised cultural dislocation of the Indigenous inner city artist.  I built up layers of birdsong and distorted them in key places, referencing Tomi's internal representations of his mother and aunt's intrusive and overwhelming dialogue.

We wanted to keep the sound design simple, with all effects gathered at locations. We completed the post audio mix with some expert technical assistance from Alex Waller and were generally happy with the combination of the audio track and music. I learned about the importance of ADR (additional dialogue recording), and in taking the time to double check the audio signal going to tape. 

 

HINDSIGHTS AND CONCLUSIONS
Although eager to further explore Loach's methods of producing dramatic works flavoured with a cinéma vérité sense of stories directed with a tense, exhilarating feel for the immediate, it is Brook's genius for experimenting with performance at the edges of the unknown that most profoundly inspires me to develop my craft.

Reviewing the production path of Blue Colour has revealed so many of the challenges encountered within its intrinsic procedural elements (technical obstacles, structural flaws, and social dilemmas), that I have emerged well-informed with a personal handbook of production pitfalls to anticipate and avoid.

I have observed from behind the shield of my own brief and unsteady narrative debut, that open territory is dwindling for new film texts, particularly at entry level. I am concerned that the accelerating paradigm of restriction within mainstream Western culture is indicative of a society being manipulated into forming increasingly more divisive barriers and culturally rigid definitions that threaten to cloud a sense of its own identity.

Each emerging set of protracted guidelines serves to prohibit the violation of sensitivities in groups deemed as minority, (defined by such broad definitions as ethnic, religious, economic, socio-political, gender-associated and disability) and this may accurately reflect an emerging and appropriate response to humanitarian concerns.  There is, however, a danger that we are merely generating memorandums of agreement that act as blockades to potential threats of legal action and outbursts of ideological violence.

There has also been, however, great value in reviewing the film's methodological trek and subsequent evolution. I am aware that highly structured production plans, available appropriate budget and well-supported creative processes, determine so much of the film industry's successful, mainstream outcomes.

In Blue Colour's case, so much of the outcome was determined by the complete absence of any financial resources, which is a typical scenario for many filmmakers, and one that was certainly one of the more defining elements of my project, stylistically creating so much of what appears as intentional. (For example a test viewer commented appreciatively on the grainy, inner-city appearance, which in fact was the simple result of shooting with no lighting).

Any sense of immediacy, or urgency in my footage was usually dictated by the cast's needs to get home, get to school or go to work, and the physical constraints of producing without budget, in limited time, on borrowed equipment, making stressful location raids, utilising the rapidly-depleting resources of our own very limited finances ultimately took its toll.

Although there was an adherence to the script, production plan, and wherever possible, the production scheduling, certain factors were unavoidably problematic and demanded enormous flexibility in achieving a congruent story outcome.

Perhaps the small production crew of Steve Reinthal and I, with the occasional assistance of Dave Irvine made this marathon of logistical changes more feasible, more in-built, in that we were aware of the potentially problematic location issues, and the probability of needing to find alternatives, and were able to act immediately on decisions that were made in order to maximise the variables of time, talent and troubles-arising.
 
The challenge was always in recognising the pathway between document and fiction and in seeking to catalogue my discoveries at least somewhere on the shelves of the right aisle.

Performed ethnographic drama with social justice overtones?   Maybe.

Disorganised hit and run?  Definitely.

The legacy of Blue Colour, its research findings and studio works have certainly not engendered a bound collection of definitive results, instead they have generated many more urgent questions and raised deeper issues for ongoing personal investigation.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This body of work, including the associated appendix items and support materials have been prepared under the supervision and guidance of Senior Lecturer Charles Strachan, (script editor, studio project advisor and theoretical supervisor) Associate Professor Pat Laughren (principal project supervisor and literary advisor) and Senior Lecturer Trish FitzSimons (structural supervision of the exegesis). All of my supervisors are members of the academic staff of Griffith Film School, Queensland College of Arts, Griffith University.

Charlie Strachan’s gifted capacity to enter into the fragile, gestational worlds of so many new scripted stories, consistently facilitating professional development is partnered with his great sensitivity for each writer’s individual methods of expression. Pat Laughren’s super-provision of a deductive learning contract has infused my media studies with a dynamic feature of self-determined, independent discovery. I greatly value Pat’s steady hand at razoring into projects with an incisive eye for relevance and the achievable outcome. Trish FitzSimons has always firmly (but kindly) ushered me back from the ledges of unconventional abstraction in order to elicit more congruent, structured analysis of my emerging works and experiments.

The educative relationships developed with my supervisors have made a profound impact, not only upon the various stages of my honours project and its long journey towards completion, but also upon the emerging shapes of my thinking, my sense of validity as a new producer of media, and upon my ability to recognise opportunities for claiming place within my community of visual artists. I have gained enormous benefit from engaging in these collaborative studies, and express my greatest respect and appreciation for each supervisor’s uniquely significant contribution toward my creative and scholarly development.

Thanks also to Andi Spark and Peter Moyes for shedding light upon the dissertation process.

I wish to acknowledge the technical staff of Griffith Film School for their invaluable training and support throughout my studies. Thank you Alex Waller, Brett Wiltshire, Melanie Gill and finally, thanks to Sandra Stocker and Naomi Takiefanga for their superb ability in administering navigation along the many roads to mature-entry graduation.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bellantoni, Patti, If its Purple, Someone's Gonna Die - The Power of Colour in Visual Story-Telling,  Elsevier,  2005

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture, Routledge 1994

Brook, Peter, The Empty Space, 1968, Touchstone NY http://owendaly.com/jeff/grotowsm.htm

Bruzzi, Stella, New Documentary: A critical Introduction, Routledge 2000

Daly, Owen, Source Material on Jerzy Grotowski from Peter Brook's The Empty Space, op. cit http://owendaly.com/jeff/grotowsm.htm

Gattfield-Knight, Richard Lee, Antonin Artaud in theory, process and praxis or for fun and prophet. Unpublished dissertation, Master of Arts in Theater , Graduate School of the State University of New York at Binghamton, 1993 http://www.cyberpagedd.com/gaffield_knight/academic/antonin_artaud.htm

Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre, Eugenio Barba, Editor, Preface by Peter Brook:  Simon and Schuster, New York 1968.

Heilpern, John, The Conference of the Birds, Faber and Faber GB 1977

Lapsley, Robert, & Westlake, Michael, Film Theory: An Introduction, (quoting Jean Luc Godard, p.194) Manchester University Press  UK 1998,

Lawrence, David H Self-pity (poem - 1929) http://www.cswnet.com/~erin/dhlpoem.htm#pity
Original text: D. H. Lawrence, Pansies: Poems (London: Martin Secker, 1929): 58. PR 6023 A93P3 1929 Robarts Library First publication date: 1929 Publication date note: See Roberts A47 RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire RP edition: RPO 2000. Recent editing: 4:2002/1/8 Composition date: 17 November 1928 - 24 November 1928

Leigh, Jacob, The Cinema of Ken Loach: Art in the Service of the People, Wallflower Press, 2000

MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema, chapter 4 Beyond Observational Cinema, Princeton University Press 1998

Mc Knight, George, Agent of Challenge and Defiance:: The Films of Ken Loach, Prager Pub, 1997

Porton, Richard, The Revolution Betrayed: An Interview with Ken Loach. Cineaste v22, n1 (Wntr, 1996) http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/loachinterview2.html

Reinthal, Teone, Gaia's Mouth, 2005, Lemuria

Rolinson, Dave, Controversial blend of fact and fiction, 2003-8
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/1103146/index.html

Rosenthal, Alan, & Corner, John, New Challenges for Documentary: Second Edition, Manchester University Press 2005

Strebel, Elizabeth, French Social Cinema of the Nineteen Thirties; A Cinematographic Expression of Popular Front Consciousness, Arno Press 1980

Trostle-Jones, Edward, Following Directions: A Study of Peter Brook. Peter Lang, New York. 1985.

Williams, David, Peter Brook: A Theatrical Casebook, Methuen 1988

Trad. quote Thanks for the Use of the Hall    http://www.halexandria.org/dward717.htm
"An almost mythic phrase from the legitimate theatre -- the venue for enacting tragedies and comedies on the stage -- is the parting words from a playwright who has just seen his or her play, creation, or story enjoy a "run" in a "hall" before some audience."

 

Teone Reinthal © 2008