Work journal page 7

28 September 2009 - The Unplanned Masterpiece

Saturday night was the first screening (at the Town Hall!) of The Unplanned Masterpiece, a film I’ve made with Amelia Harris about the history of Auckland. It has been nearly four months of solid research, interviewing and editing. The result is a feature-length talking heads doco with some zippy graphics by Markus Hofko (aka Rainbow Monkey) and a soundtrack based on music by Felix O’Connell (aka James McCarthy):

The idea of the film was to have commentators simply speaking - no narrator or interviewer. I felt that this would give the film greater immediacy. In fact the speakers were so compelling to watch that I ended up abandoning the extra visuals I had collected to ‘illustrate’ their points. It’s fascinating simply to compare the different styles of delivery aside from the contrasting viewpoints offered.

Given the typically-Auckland production timeframe it was a challenge to construct something with a sturdy fabric that really would do justice to the history and also the people we interviewed, who were in many ways equally as interesting as the stories they told. Then again, making a history of Auckland whilst under the strain of its epitomising haste may have yielded a certain authenticity to the film.

In any case, the sort of account we’ve put together is not so much ponderous or hurried as discriminately fluctuating. This is intended to mirror the film’s themes: instability, movement, expansion, boom and bust, flux. Auckland, as Russell Stone pointed out in our interview of him, was conceived by it’s founder Governor Hobson as an oceanic terminus; a remote place of comings and goings. In a sense we’ve built our film as a series of comings and goings too, a loose orchestration of verbal traffic.

In the process of forming this collage I sense that things have been ‘revealed’. I can’t put my finger on it actually. I think it might come down to the beauty and lyricism of the place (“the song of Tangaroa and a thousand beaches” as Baxter put it) against it’s mercantile ethos (“the farting noise of the trucks as they grind down Queen street”). Nothing new in that, except perhaps that we’ve come to it in our own weird way through all these essentially irreducible voices.

It was a little deflating to have the film derided by one member of the audience as “left wing”. Of course I wouldn’t say it’s above politics, it’s just that I wasn’t investigating politics in that rigid sense. The film delves into the nuances of varied perspectives. I never really asked myself if they had “right” or “left” agendas. In fact I was highly dubious of those arguments put forward by the commentators which were clearly marked by that old rigid dichotomy. I would say that one political agenda of the film is to render such Jurassic categories obsolete.

Where there was divergence I consciously desisted from setting up adversarial polarities. Polarisation often disables the viewer from seeing the underlying similarities in apparently opposed viewpoints. A good example of this in the film is the respective opinions put forward by Hamish Keith and Alan Johnson on the Ports of Auckland. While the two clashed on the question of the economic value of the Ports, both were pointing to the larger issue of the heavy reliance of the regional economy on imports.

The screening event itself was verging on glamourous with many of the illustrious members of the cast present. They seemed to enjoy the show too, so I was cautiously pleased. I have to confess that I will be re-editing the film slightly before the next screening at the Auckland City Art Gallery (Free, next Sunday at 11am and 2pm). Another flattering experience is this real-proper poster Amelia and Markus have just emailed me:

Much love and respect to you Amelia and thanks to all those who have helped create something that will hopefully generate some new discussion on this unwieldy town. I’m now looking forward to creating The Unplanned Masterpiece website, which will include longer interviews of the commentators as well as some of the commentators who weren’t included in the final cut of the feature film.

- si monumentum requiris, circumspice
If you seek a monument, look about you