For the past two years, I have been encouraging students to explore their family archive and public archives to enhance the short films they create in Film Studio 3 (documentary production) at SAE in Brisbane. Incorporating the methodologies of “archiveology” theorised by Catherine Russell and Michael Renov’s concept of “domestic ethnography” in documentary production, students are discovering the impact of the personal, and creating moments of recognisability through the collection and reorganisation of archival materials.

As a filmmaker with twenty years’ experience making documentaries for national broadcast on Australian television, I have used many forms of archive media to enhance story and to reiterate ideas introduced through interview or narration. More recently, I have used archive as an aesthetic style, building sequences of collected materials behind interviews shot on greenscreen. Doing so was also a practical choice, as location interviews can be conducted in any space, resulting in uniformity of sound and composition. The edit becomes complicated due to the time taken placing and animating the archive over the full length of the greenscreen interviews. But the outcome produces an atmosphere around the participant, highlighting the era and location where the stories are taking place. Subsequent to these production experiences, I have studied possible answers to Reece Auguiste’s call to look for ways for archive to do more than act as a ‘marker of historical evidence’.[1] In particular, I have explored observations in modernist poetry of women in 1930s’ Sydney and reimagined these scenes into videopoetry as part of an endeavour to experiment with creating archive fragments.

Throughout my career, I have taught film subjects alongside my filmmaking practice at various universities around my hometown of Brisbane, Australia. Currently, I teach a 13-week undergraduate documentary course, where most students are introduced to the subject for the first time. They come to the class with low levels of enthusiasm for documentary, but it is an essential course that has to be passed before students may progress to the final production subjects. Incorporated into the course structure is a weekly screening of a feature documentary in our small theatre. In the first week I screen Lucy Walker’s The Crash Reel (2013), which immediately engages many of the students and they quickly form a new perspective on what documentary can be. The reflective practice at SAE requires students to provide weekly submissions that detail what is learnt and how the information will be used throughout the course. Students’ comments regarding The Crash Reel have indicated their surprise that documentary can be engrossing, emotional, and memorable. Furthermore, the film demonstrates to them the blending of modes, use of archival footage, observational sequences, and interview technique, with this style providing opportunities for active discussion in the classroom.

Over the 13 weeks, the students produce a group documentary and an individual documentary. The individual documentary is only 2-4 minutes in duration, which can be any subject and any mode. I encourage the students to be experimental in their creative approach and often see poetic, observational, and experimental treatments of the subjects. For the purposes of this paper, I will concentrate on an individual documentary and a group documentary that explored personal and public archive collections. The individual documentary (password: id) was submitted by a Singaporean/Australian student who used a personal archive of his time spent in the Singaporean compulsory military service. The production is a basic montage of phone stills and clips set to M.I.A.’s music track Paper Planes (2007). The collection of archive includes images of the student in his military uniform, sometimes brandishing weapons, or with army mates. The imagery surprised the class as we saw a different person to the student aspiring to a career in set design. The machoistic stance of the young man and the nationalistic voice heard in the clips is an insight into a significant experience for the student I had come to know as creative, thoughtful, and quietly ambitious to work in film.

Early in the trimester and prior to any production, I ask students to share an image that tells a story that is connected to their lives. This session seems innocuous enough but often produces surprising and emotional reactions, setting the tone for Renov’s description of documenting the familial, coined as “domestic ethnography.” [2]The exercise elicits stories such as a beloved grandfather who suddenly passed away, an autistic son’s first shaving experience, time spent as a refugee in a camp in Africa, weddings, holidays, and milestones. The student who made the short individual film about his time in the Singaporean military shared a photo of his parents on their wedding day—his Singaporean mother and Australian father. Although he had lived a large proportion of his life in Australia, he was still required to return to Singapore to complete the military service, an idea that was unsettling for him. While this film is autobiographical, characteristics of domestic ethnography can be found in his choice to focus on the year adjusting to a culture that he had been separated from for most of his life. One of the defining characteristics of domestic ethnography’s ‘consanguinity’ is evident in the shared intimacy with his newfound brothers in arms who demonstrate a cultural kinship.[3] The images represent his grappling with the nationalism inherent in the military service, but it is representative of only half of his adult cultural identity. He is both inside and outside of this experience, and the short montage, when presented by the filmmaker, explores this dichotomy without interview, narration, or explanation.

The group project in the same course requires students to work in small groups to complete a documentary that is between 6–9 minutes. This is an opportunity to work on a more challenging subject in production scope. One group was able to loosely emulate the characteristics of Walter Benjamin’s collector, who is influential in many areas of Catherine Russell’s archiveological framework. Combining fragments of speeches from Aboriginal members of parliament into a short documentary (password: two), they extracted the materials from the large collection into a place of recognisability. The collector (or filmmaker) frees the material from what Benjamin describes as “the drudgery of being useful”,[4] in this case over fifty years of speeches detailing the minutiae of the functions of government.

Early in 2021, a group of three non-Indigenous students embarked on a film about an Aboriginal tourism venture that takes visitors on cultural tours. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 situation, the Aboriginal organisation decided it was a problematic time to commit to a student film. At a loss and then thrown into lockdown, the students became despondent about the project. While undertaking their research, they had stumbled on parliamentary footage of the esteemed first Aboriginal Member of Parliament, Neville Bonner, and discussions on Zoom with myself and the class indicated the group knew very little about Australian Aboriginal history. Having recently worked on a documentary that required the use of parliamentary archive, I encouraged the group to look for ways to continue the film in lockdown by tracing Aboriginal political figures and their speeches to Parliament. These can be found via Hansards, records of parliamentary sessions, available on the Australian Parliament’s website. We have been fortunate that lockdowns in Queensland have been short and students have often been able to resume production for completion of the work. Nevertheless, the period of archival research produced interesting fragments and the director decided to adopt a reflexive documentary mode including references to her lack of knowledge around this significant Australian history. The project could be seen to have a component of “archiveology,” as the group practiced the methodology of “collecting images and compiling them in new and surprising ways”.[5]

Parliamentary footage is mostly used in news stories to emphasise an event or current controversial subject that Members of Parliament are debating. Bringing a series of clips together in this one documentary space highlights the history of Indigenous figures of government and their longstanding arguments to a largely white parliament for greater recognition of the ongoing injustices since colonisation. By adopting the reflexive mode, the student is indicating to the audience that this is her reading of the archive, and is an example of how the pedagogical setting can encourage emerging practitioners to look beyond the traditional use of archive in documentary, as suggested by Auguiste:

In this case, looking through the parliamentary archive alerted the student to her own gap in knowledge around Australia’s Indigenous leaders, igniting a stylistic modification and placing herself in the vulnerable position of admitting this on camera for the documentary.

Conclusion

Both of the student films mentioned in this paper avoid the structural documentary norms that many students and practitioners rely on. There are no sit-down interviews or voice of god narration, and the archival footage is collected and placed within the documentary to create a new perspective. The student collectors provide an example of documentary’s potential to mitigate the ‘time-sensitive battle against the threat of dispersion’ by organizing the fragments into a new and recognisable space.[7] The first documentary moves the archive away from social media or family archive and the second away from the large government library agglomeration. Students are in a space where experimentation should be encouraged, they can free archival fragments from established collections and relocate them into documentary, pushing the boundaries of traditional style and form. By the end of the 13-week course, it is hoped students experience what Renov observes we learnt from films such as Tongues Untied—that “documentary can be visceral, sexy, funny, personal and polemical all at once”.[8] At a filmmaking level where there is no pressure to appease executive producers, broadcasters, or funding agencies, students can experiment with style more than they possibly will in their early careers.

Dr Nicole McCuaig is a documentary filmmaker with over twenty years of experience writing and directing documentaries for national broadcast in Australia. She is a lecturer in film at SAE Brisbane currently teaching documentary theory and production.

1. Reece Auguiste, "Archives and Invention: The Archives Structuring Presence in Documentary Film Practice," Journal of Media Practice 16, no. 1 (2015): 44, . ↑

2. Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary, vol. 16 (London; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 44. ↑

3. Renov, The Subject of Documentary, 16. ↑

4. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 11. ↑

5. Catherine Russell, Archiveology : Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). https://find.library.duke.edu/catalog/DUKE008346136. ↑

6. Auguiste, "Archives and Invention", 20. ↑

7. Annie Pfeifer, "A Collector in a Collectivist State: Walter Benjamin's Russian Toy Collection," New German Critique, 133 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-4269850. ↑

8. Michael Renov, "Away from Copying: The Art of Documentary Practice," in Truth or Dare: Art and Documentary, edited by Gail Pearce and Cahal McLaughlin (Bristol: Intellect, 2007), 20. ↑