THE COAL CLIFF

A brief historical context to The Coal Cliff.

The Coal Cliff came after four years of making Standard and Super 8 films at Alexander Mackie art college. A class mate Andrew Clegg introduced me to the wonders of 8mm in 1975. His father was a keen amateur in the 1960s (the golden age of 8mm) and passed on his equipment to us. At college we were watching ground breaking films by Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, Andy Warhol, and Michael Snow. At the Film Makers Co-op in Kings Cross we were exposed to Fluxus, Dada and Constructivist films. Andrew and I had only screened our films at art school and parties, often only once or twice. Super underground. At the time, Super 8 was not taken seriously by the 16mm Marxists who ran the Sydney independent film scene. Not social or real enough – too arty or home movie. Worst of all, ‘experimental’ – that translates as wanky or bourgeois.

Us reactionary experimental film makers were into the absence of linear narrative, and the use of what I term distracting techniques such as out of focus, post-production painting or scratching, constructing films backwards to be projected forwards. Most of my films were silent or were played with a synchronised cassette tape recorder. When I could afford sound film it was asynchronous (non-diegetic) sound that dislocated conventional expectations. The goal was to place the viewer in a more active and more thoughtful relationship to myth, in a cultural sense. I preferred the freedom of working alone or with one or two friends. I had worked as an extra on Summer City, a Hollywood style production, in 1976, and it cured me of ever working in what us anarchists like to call ‘the cinematic industrial machine complex.’

In 1980, I heard about a new festival of Super 8 films being screened at the Co-op (a mini-revolution had taken place led by a few young feminist punks) and entered Greetings From Sydney, a short comic murder film playing with rear projection illusions featuring Sheona White and Duncan McLay. It caught the sharp eye of Kate Richards, one of the directors of the festival. We decided to make a few films and splice a relationship together. First, Kate acted in my Party Tricks, a magic performance starring a rebel scratch (post-cut into the film) that danced and performed disappearing tricks. The Coal Cliff was next. In a humorous fashion, we strategically edited found images and dialog recorded off TV with ‘live’ voice, SFX and home movie footage to reset safe historical and cultural reference points. Arabic titles rolled across Illawarra postcard views; pompous English narration toasted mundane kitchen scenes; Kodak colour theory dictated the south coast bush. These dyslexic moves were not aimed at rhetorically producing any ‘effect’ as such. The film was an expression of how we were editing our post-structural lives; a humorous position description on how we thought and felt about the world. For me, The Coal Cliff was contiguous with painting, photography, performance and writing – all being sympathetic yet unique modes of engagement. Each medium called into question by an other’s reading of events.

The Coal Cliff screened, together with Party Tricks, at the second Super 8 Festival in 1981. Shortly after, Kate and I left for Europe for a few years – shooting Super 8s along the way. As it happened The Coal Cliff was the last serious film we produced together. We followed our separate paths in 1983 – Kate into other multimedia collaborations while I worked with Kit Edwardes on the Natural Histories exhibition that toured to Australia in 1983/4. Some thirty years on The Coal Cliff remains a vivid record of those dynamic times and ideas that helped shape our subsequent careers. [enter dust & scratches filter effect]

Kurt Brereton, Bulli, 2011