Albie ThomsDigging out a Classic: Albie Thoms’ Sunshine City Dirk de Bruyn November 2024 Feature Articles Issue 111 In Australia it has been impossible to elicit much sympathetic appraisal from critics who seem distressed by the relation of personal film to amateur home movies. Even those proselytising for the New Cinema have underrated the personal film as a worthy antidote to the mass market assumptions of Hollywood (Thoms, 1978 p. l46) In February this year, the Artist Film Workshop (AFW) screened Sunshine City (1973, 118 minutes) by Albie Thoms at the Brunswick Green microcinema as a 16mm film borrowed from the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra. The audience consisted of mainly young locals and artists, all interested in and committed to analogue film production in some way. 50 years on, industrial film production has now moved into the digital. Conversely, as well as embracing the new, artists globally, like the AFW group, have also claimed abandoned analogue equipment to set up their own film processing labs and printing tools. Thoms’ generation had similarly taken up the use of redundant 16mm film cameras and editing machines in the ‘60s. Film Artist and AFW organiser, Paddy Hay included the following in his blurb on the film for this screening. This is what the audience came in with: In equal parts a work of non-fiction, autobiography, and visual experimentation, the National Film & Sound Archive of Australia describes Sunshine City as “a structured diary film which investigates the process of living in Sydney, which uses a repeating light modulation to intensify experiences of light, heat, colour”. Featuring interviews with local friends and acquaintances including Martin Sharp, Aggy Read, Brett Whiteley and Germaine Greer. Thoms: “SUNSHINE CITY will be a record of my responses to the people and places of the city of Sydney. It will show the visual environment and synthesize the sound environment. It will allow the people to speak and will try and relate their lives to the environment, to try and express the way the environment, the light, the sunshine, the visual stimulation, the cultural history of the city, conditions the lives of people and creates their character. It will be an analytic film, determining its own aesthetic, forcing attention to the filming process, to the materials of the film experience.” PLEASE NOTE! Photosensitive viewers are warned that this film contains intense sequences of flicker and strobe lighting. End of blurb. I had first seen Sunshine City when in Sydney in 1973, 50 years ago. I was planning a trip to Bali and Asia and working as an oiler in the Redfern railway yards for finances at the time. It was my first encounter with Experimental Film. Living in a share house in George Street Redfern, the film was advertised in a local rag found at the Forest Lodge Hotel which our group frequented with an unlikely season at the Valhalla Cinema in Glebe Point Road. A group of us went to a midday screening to escape the heat. We were the only ones there. The intentional out of sync interviews, the film running out while the interview continued (also mischievously intentional) and listening to Jumping Jack Flash while driving around a flickering Sydney left impressions that remain with me fifty years on. Its intermittent flickering was harsh. It was like the light and heat outside was seeping in through the cinema doors into my body, a perceptual experiment that caught me by surprise. I was enamoured with Godard’s New Wave period at the time (Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), Week-end (1967) and Wind from the East (1970)) but Thoms took my senses one step further into the here and now. The Australian accent and its rhythms was part of my daily life. Thoms interviews performed the local Oz lingo and character I encountered in inner suburban backyards, then rental accommodation. I thought, I can do this and I can explore these effects. I did not go to Bali and bought a Beaulieu 16mm camera instead. Germaine Greer in Sunshine City What I did not understand at the time was that I was witnessing the end of something. For Thoms this film signposted the aftermath of the screening of the impressionistic Marinetti at Wintergardens in 1969. Notoriously half the audience left the screening, and a barrage of criticism hit the press. The Sydney Sun had called it ‘a tin-pot film about nothing’ (Shirley and Adams, 1985 p.226) and playfully renamed the film Macaroni. Thoms escaped from this situation by touring Marinetti successfully internationally. ‘I realised that much of the Australian response to my film derived from ignorance.’ (Thoms, 1978 p.13) On his return he began Sunshine City, with a little help from his friends. He planned to montage Pink Floyd, Rotary Connection, Soft Machine, Beautiful Day, Frank Zappa and Steve Miller on the soundtrack (Thoms, 1972 p.57), all prominent members on my own pre-digital playlist. The film had formed as a fragment ideogram in the middle of the night in Oberhausen: (Thoms, 1972 p.48) Sunshine City, baby, do you know what I mean? Sunshine City, baby, that’s the place for me. Sunshine City, let it all hang out, Sunshine City, that’s what it’s all about. Sunshine City, baby, it’s just a scene, Sunshine City, baby, do you know what I mean? (April 1970) Thoms noted in an interview with Kriszta Doczy that his professional work dried up after this Marinetti event, which, for survival, shifted him further into documentary. This timing also interested me because it synced in with the emergence of the government establishment of the Experimental Film and Video Fund. Thoms’ Polemics for a New Cinema (1978) republished many of the international reports appearing in Lumiere, Westerley, Planet, Lot’s Wife and so on, on Experimental film way before such works were available here. ‘Returning to Australia at the end of 1970, I found many people anxious for me to recount my adventures. Struggling to make my second feature, Sunshine City, I was often able to support myself with these polemics for a new cinema.’ (Thoms, 1978 p.13) This may explain the use of the word ‘experimental’ for a cultural project that was really about something else. The Experimental Film and Video Fund was designed to assemble a mainstream Australian Film Culture from the ground up. There were multiple approaches to the definition of ‘experimental’ uncoupled from Thoms’ avant-garde film art use. “The word experimental should not be considered as totally descriptive when watching the work of new filmmakers. A film with raw acting talent could be considered as experimental as the one where the director has never looked through the lens before.” (Rosser, 1972 p.8) Peter Mudie’s meticulous and valuable book on Ubu Films Sydney Underground Movies 1965-1970 ends with Marinetti and thus omits Sunshine City. Thoms own book, My Generation, published in 2012, (not long before his passing away in the same year) mentions the completion of his editing on Sunshine City, but documents none of its cultural life, presence or impact. What sort of full stop is this? What sort of gap has this feature fallen into? Demonstration in Sunshine City The film was part of the premier season at the new premises of the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op, ‘The Filmmakers Cinema’ in 1973, for example, with Bert Deling’s Dalmas, Nigel Buesst’s Come out Fighting and Jim Sharman’s Shirley Thompson Vs the Aliens. (Education, 1973, p.13) Thoms was prominent enough in John Hughes and Tom Zubrycki’s documentary about the co-op movement focusing predominantly on the Sydney scene, Senses of Cinema (2022). There is a section in there, about 5 minutes in, where Albie talks about a two-screen presentation of his abstracted hand-made film Bluto (1967) next to Kit Guyatt’s Doco Vietnam Report (1966): ‘and the two seemed to be in absolute synchronisation. The flickering colour was affecting the agitation of the protesters.’ (Thoms) Understandably, like Mudie’s opus, Sunshine City is not cited in the Hughes/Zubrycki narrativization of the co-op movement foregrounding an emergent Feminism. Thoms’ description does link abstraction to a body-centred politics, a possibility dismissed by many documentary filmmakers via Peter Wollen’s Two Avant Garde’s (1975) but present in Sunshine City in his use of the flicker seeping through the Sydney landscapes, linking the sync sound interviews. Wollen’s ‘two avant-gardes’ are resident side by side in Sunshine City. Wollen’s first avant-garde comprises non-narrative and formalist (materialist) work residing in the multi-voices and collective emphasis of the artisanal “co-op movement” emerging out of the fine arts (painting, sculpture) and the second embodied a more politicised narrative practice employing psycho-analytic and Marxist ideologies in its analysis, with a relation to literary criticism, theatre and the margins of commercial cinema. For Wollen, that abstracted avant-garde expressed through Thoms’ flickering landscapes, was dismissed as utopian and a-political: “It is as if they felt that once the signifier was freed from bondage to the signified, it was certain to celebrate by doing away with the old master altogether in a fit of irresponsible ultra-leftism and utopianism. (Wollen 1982: 99). This position was productively reinforced by his then partner Laura Mulvey’s view that ‘Feminism is bound to its politics, its experimentation cannot exclude work on content.’ (Mulvey, 1978 p. 9) Thoms’ embrace of this discounted avant-garde arm was about filmmakers ‘exposing their own inner lives, with their anguishes and excitements.’ (Thoms, 1978 p. 254) This move is still understandable as a partial alignment with Feminism’s “the personal is political” mantra. One avant-garde focuses on vision, perceptual processes and the image and the other emphasises the text’s and language’s social implications. Wollen identifies Jean-Luc Godard’s work as the contemporary exemplar of the avant-garde’s political arm, in which he also situates his own collaborations with Mulvey. Under the title of ‘Why My Eyes Throbbed in Painful Protest’, Matt White’s review of the 1973 Bonython Gallery Sunshine City launch extended the views of the walk out audience of the Marinetti Wintergardens screening. ‘When that person cops $6000 from the Government’s Experimental TV and Film Fund, to inflict what I consider badly filmed trash on unsuspecting audiences, fury mounts within me.’ (White, 1973) Alternatively, Don Anderson, who had been critical of Marinetti, lauds Thoms for capturing Sydney’s light and light-heartedly describes his need to wear sunglasses during the screening. “I wish to assert that “Sunshine City” is the most exciting Australian film I have seen since I started looking at them in the mid 1960s. It is the most truly, and most valuably, “personal” film I have seen since Godard’s “Sympathy for the Devil.” (Anderson, 1973 p.86) Brett Whiteley in Sunshine City As with his earlier Marinetti overseas getaway, Thoms retraced his international steps with Sunshine City. In the Grant-In-Aid Report (Thoms, 1973) on this trip he noted successful screenings in Cologne (p.3), Stuttgart and Berlin (p.6), the London Filmmakers Co-op (p.13) and two screenings at Anthology Film Archives in New York. (p.16) In London John Du Cane noted: “As Albie Thoms commented, the film is like a long hot day in the sun: the serious seems to vaporise out in the headlines of the good life. Nice Watching.” The film’s ambivalent reception in Australia compared to its international profile and Wollen’s Two Avant-garde move three years later, discounting the abstracted and structural elements in the film, all contribute to its current invisibility. What is the value of revisiting this work now? Perceptual habits and skills have generationally shifted since 1973. The sonic mobility of the transistor radio of Thoms’ 60s has shifted into the I-phone’s mobile visual forms. A contemporary eye may be more easily bored but surplus internet grazing’s perceptual training has enabled the contemporary eye to efficiently unpack complex imagery’s meanings. We can now enact Thoms’ two immersive overseas sojourns online as a superficial graze. Vilem Flusser’s (2011) theorising on the ‘Technical Image’ pronounces Dziga Vertov’s Kino Eye as the new norm. In “Knights Moves” (de Bruyn, 2015) I argued for Wollen’s split as servicing a historic Feminist moment that has passed with the emergence of digital technologies. That the two avant-gardes mesh is traceable through film work of Maya Deren, James Benning, Martin Arnold, Peter Tscherkassky and Mike Hoolboom, Ben Russell and Ben Rivers. Rivers and Russell particularly continue to produce their work in analogue form and Rivers also showcases it as celluloid film. Within the digital’s malleability and accessibility, the personal visual diary has expanded and mutated its forms. The documentary form now incorporates animated truth-telling narratives. Personal/political amalgams proliferate, some integrated into the algorithms shaping our consumer habits, shaping our personal content. So how did the AFW screening go down? The discussion afterwards was lively. Why had this film been so difficult to access given the availability of Thoms’ other work? When Thoms prompts and interacts with his subjects, there was a familiarity and intimacy noted by the audience not masked by any veil of political correctness. The flawed personalities had an honesty and openness that defied some of the racist and sexist undertones voiced and common at the time. These flaws did not trigger any form of cancel culture in the audience response. There was no need to unpack any double-speak that contemporary identities are cloaked up in through social media. Greer referring to Thoms as ‘mate’ being a simple trace of such lost honesty. The flicker permeating the landscape, dissipated its visceral impact over time (for those of us with no epileptic vulnerability). You got used to it. It was as if you were being perceptually trained to a new normalcy. Unpacking the technical “aberrations” was an engaging exercise rather than an irritant, adding narrative depth and historic knowledge about how Australian identity has evolved. The film was received as an authentic historic artifact of our own culture addressing our current everyday lives with political force. In the generational shift from written textual analysis to its visual performance in the Deren to Rivers line of artists mentioned above, we shift from one way of thinking to another (Flusser, 2011). Even with the compacted times we negotiate, we can now all sit in front of the editing machine, the video download, the streaming app or a digital editing program thinking critically, thinking visually, creatively performing. This space and its ‘thinking’ is implicitly imposed on us by every mobile device, every active computer screen at our fingertips, inserted into public space and everyday life. Sunshine City can be productively viewed through this shift. This evolved approach, evident in the audience analysing the film, is also present in the creative approach to the redundant technologies available to and manipulated by some AFW members. Aggy Read in Sunshine City In future decades, such technological shifts will once again unwittingly force us to re-balance our sensory cluster, to re-think the way we think once again and to re-use the discarded in politically productive ways. What one generation of cultural power brokers dismisses as irresponsible tin-pot trash is unerringly recycled creatively by the next. When screening my work at a New York microcinema recently I was asked if I knew of another Australian filmmaker, Albie Thoms, who they deeply admired. I was glad to be able to recount my Valhalla Cinema story, that his work had fatefully triggered my own journey into personal film. References: Anderson, Don (1973) ‘Light on Sunshine City’ Bulletin March 31, 1973. p. 86. de Bruyn, Dirk (2015) ‘Knights Moves’ Found Footage Magazine #1 October 2015. Flusser, Vilém. 2011. Into the Universe of Technical Images, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Mudie, Peter (1997) Ubu Films: Sydney underground movies 1965-1970. UNSW Press Mulvey, Laura (1979), ‘Feminism, Film and the Avant-garde’, Framework, vol. 10, no. Spring, pp. 3-10. Rosser, Edward (1972) ‘Looking for Talent” Lumiere. No. 15. p.8 Melbourne. Shirley, G., and Adams, B. (1985) Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, Sydney: Angus and Robertson and Currency Press. Thoms, Albie (1972), ‘From Sunshine City Logbook (1970-72)’ Westerly No 3. September 48-54 Perth. Thoms, Albie (1973), Report on Grant-in-Aid trip to Europe and US April-September AFTS. Sydney Thoms, Albie (1978) Polemics for a New Cinema. Wild and Woolley. Sydney Thoms, Albie. (2012) My Generation. Media 21 Publishing Pty Ltd. Sydney. Unknown (1973) ‘New Cinema Opens’, Education: Journal of the N.S.W. Public School Teachers Federation. 54 (10), p. 13. White, Matt. (1973) ‘Why My Eyes Throbbed in Painful Protest’ TV Mirror. Sydney Wollen, Peter (1982) [1975], ‘The Two Avant-Gardes’, in Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies, Verso, London, pp. 92-104.
