Tessa Spooner, General Manager of La Mama Theatre, had this copy made so the film could be exhibited at La Mama Theatre's "War - Rak" celebration event Saturday evening, 11/12/21.
Following is a commentary which John Cumming intended to present at the screening but John was side-lined by an exposure to Covid so he could not attend the screening. That was most unfortunate as John has done a lot of research on the film to date.
A Woman of Our Time is a unique portrait of a
renowned author, Myra Roper, social commentator and
educationalist and a role-model for a whole generation of Melbourne
women, made in 1972 by pioneering Australian independent filmmaker
and film educator Peter Tammer.
Born in England, Myra Roper moved to Australia in
1947, at 36 years of age, to serve as principal of the Women's
College at The University of Melbourne. She is fondly remembered as a
mentor to many young women. In 1960 Myra left the university to
pursue a public life that influenced the course of Australia’s
relationship with China, the development of national cultural
institutions, adult education and, especially in the media, the
status of women. Peter,
whose father was Lebanese, entered filmmaking as a young,
second-generation migrant worker and emerging filmmaker in the almost
exclusively male, Anglo-Celtic domain of film production in early
1960s Melbourne. In his first job as a library assistant at the State
Film Centre of Victoria, he adapted 16mm film-checking equipment for
the purpose of editing his own short films.
Both Myra Roper and Peter Tammer were engaged in cultures of
community enterprise and cooperative action. When they met around
1969, Peter was a young freelance editor. His client work included
campaign advertisements for Gough Whitlam’s progressive and soon to
be elected Australian Labor Party. Myra needed help to edit 16mm
footage she had filmed, to illustrate her lectures on Communist
China. Accounts from both Myra and Peter
indicate that some
men in positions of authority could and did go ‘out of their way’
to foster their emerging talents as writer and filmmaker. In the
absence of policies, guidelines, training, and professional
development programs, it appears that the simple and expansive
sociability of peers, employers and informal mentors was critical to
the induction of these new entrants to their respective fields.
Peter has said that when he explained to Myra why he
saw her as being worthy of such a film he felt that she was thinking
in her natural humility … “Oh but I’m not that interesting”’.
In her first book 'China - The Surprising Country' she writes of her
recovery from self-doubt with reference to a stereotypical and
gendered self-image as a ‘misguided female’ and an alternative,
gendered image of herself as an ‘enterprising woman on an unusual
venture’. Myra encountered several male allies who recognized and
affirmed that alternative image. Peter was one of them. Sadly,
however, most of the difficulties facing women that Myra identifies
in this film persist. She and this little film are still of our
time.
During the 1960s, student arts organisations at The University of
Melbourne and a vibrant immigrant Italian community in the inner
suburb of Carlton stimulated a burgeoning post-war art, theatre and
film scene. Carlton soon became a social destination for young
people, including students from the new outer-suburban Monash and La
Trobe universities and technical and teachers colleges across the
state. Its share-houses, cafés, cinemas, and small new theatres
became a focal point of cultural activity around the anti-war
movement, feminism, and an internationally engaged effort to develop
Australian culture independently of colonial influence and British
and American commercial interests. By 1971, when Peter and fellow
filmmakers officially incorporated the Melbourne Filmmaker’s Coop
(MFC, 1968-1976) a wider movement for cultural experimentation and
the democratisation of media was also underway in print, radio and
community video. The Coop films were notable for their diversity of
form. Peter’s filmmaking was, and continued to be, literally
experimental. As an artist, he has never repeated himself but has
sought to push into new dimensions of what film can be, structurally
and spiritually.
With A Woman of Our Time, two committed non-conformists
provide a unique, unadorned window on early 1970s Australia, inviting
comparison with the status of progressive ideas in filmmaking and
gender politics today. The film brings into sharp relief the lack of
progress towards gender equity in general, and in Australian film
production specifically, both in terms of the diversity of on-screen
representations and with regard to entrenched gender imbalance in
many professions. It is a personal work, rather than the work of a
producer, a director, and their ‘crew’. Out of necessity and
enthusiasm Peter conceived, organised, did most of the
cinematography, the sound, all the editing and even the negative
matching for this film.
In his several unique portrait films, and A Woman of Our Time
in particular, Peter explores the idea that a film about someone
can, in a painterly and poetic sense, be turned to modernist
portraiture (think Cubism) rather than being locked to the narrative
logic of biography. Peter frees himself from the documentary routine
of ‘talking heads’. The central organizing principle is neither
narrative nor rhetorical – it is dialectical. A Woman of Our
Time engages its viewer-listener at the level of ideas
and emotions: ideas about power, sex and gender, about representation
and about filmmaking; emotions of love, compassion, respect and
dignity. All this is achieved while being playful with images, with
sound and with the subject. The film threads images and sounds
together densely into a rich tapestry that encompasses and
interweaves the everyday, world historical events and a whole complex
of political, philosophical and aesthetic concerns and ideas. This
little film is sensitive and dense, the result of a rich working
relationship between Myra and Peter and of the richness of their
creative engagement with the world.
As often happens with independent films that avoid sensation and
adhere to no tradition, genre or orthodoxy, A Woman of Our Time
‘fell
between
the cracks’ of programming categories and fashions. After
a short season at the Co-op theatre in 1972 it
had no public screenings. In 2018, Melbourne’s
Artists Film Workshop held a retrospective of Peter’s films.
For me this film was a revelation. Together with his Flux
(1970) it revealed a level of innovation, especially in its
editing, that I believe is of historical significance in world
cinema. The screening at La Mama Theatre presents a wonderful film
about someone who despite the passage of fifty years remains a woman of our time.
John Cumming, 11/12/2021
Sources:
Cumming,
J 2014, The films of John Hughes : a history of independent screen
production in Australia, The moving image: number 12, 2014,
Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM).
Roper,
M 1966, China: The Surprising Country, Doubleday, New York.
Roper,
M 1989, Myra Roper interviewed by Amirah Inglis [sound recording],
Recorded from May 4-5, 1989 in Canberra.
Roper,
M- 1973, Myra Roper interviewed by Hazel de Berg (sound
recording], 1973 July 16
<https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-220874394/listen>.
Tammer,
P 2011, Early Days interview by John Cumming and Richard Leigh,
Kyenton.
