Farewell To A Dear Friend
Our friend Nigel Buesst.
A friendship of so many years, 62 years since we first met.
Plenty of water under the bridge.
Nigel at home with his minder, Jedda
photo by Ivan Gaal
I was just starting out in my life as a filmmaker, working at the State Film Centre in the library section. One day I was on counter duties, receiving films returning from borrowers and handing out films to other borrowers.
In walked Nigel with a bundle of films under his arm, returning them from a film society he was involved with at the time. I think it was the CSIRO film group and Nigel was collecting another bundle which they would run in an upcoming programme.
In those days were all worked on many other projects with many other people. Melbourne was abuzz with young people trying to make films, some like Brian Davies's "Puddin' Thieves" were feature length low budget films, most were shorts about 10-15 mins.
Nigel filmed "Nimmo Street" for Tom in 1962.
In 1963 Tom filmed my first serious foray into filmmaking,
"And He Will Rise Again".
Nigel filmed half of "On The Ball" for me, then later that
year Tom filmed "Beethoven... and all that jazz".
So you can see were were all very busy in those days, especially as were were all holding down other jobs and our films were made on weekends.
Nigel and I shared many years teaching at Swinburne, many staff-room morning teas, lots of snooker at the Red Triangle, while continuing to make our films, with no funding from government grants because until about 1969 there were very few of these to come by. Then came the Experimental Film Fund and I was one of the lucky ones to get a grant to make "A Woman Of Our Time", a film portrait of Myra Roper.
Nigel helped me greatly in the production of this film. He had recently bought an Arri BL 16mm camera and that enabled us to film some scenes of Myra addressing students at a speech night in Mornington in sync sound. That was my first use of sync sound in any of my own films. I was really impressed that we got that scene in the camera as it formed a major part of the film. Nigel and I were both incredibly impressed about Myra's role as a mentor for young women reaching out into a men's world where women had very few opportunities.
But Nigel was busy working with many other filmmakers as well as continuing to make his own films and then followed his contribution as a lecturer at the new film school being set up at Swinburne Tech.
Over the years many of
our friends have
visited Nigel
and Diane
in their kitchen at
Rathdowne Street.
In 2012 I started to make a film about our friend Paul Cox. Nigel was the editor of this film. However Nigel had installed a new editing platform which he was not really familiar with and that gave us a lot of tech problems to solve so we required heaps of technical support from our friend Alix Jackson.
After many robust arguments during the editing stage, when we finally completed this film "The Nude In The Window" I was amazed to see Nigel weeping at the end of our first viewing of the finished work. Without Nigel’s gracious assistance I don't think I would ever have completed that film.
Nigel assisted many other filmmakers in his life’s journey. The list is far too long, so I will not attempt to list them all as I will most probably overlook too many.
Nigel the collector and conservator.
Throughout his life Nigel collected many items. The first I'm going to mention here is his wonderful habit of preserving films which he gathered along the way, and which he later showed to people of this generation because he had bought his own copies of those film.
In his early days teaching at Swinburne there were some fine films made by F&TV students such as Greg Dee and Rob Corry and John Ruane. Nigel had copies made at his own expense so "George and Needles" and "Paper Boy" were preserved for future generations by Nigel on his own. They were exhibited at a screening set up by Bill Mousoulis and Chris Luscri a few years ago at the Long Play Cinema.
There was another film shown that night by Antoinette Starkiewicz... an early animation called "Puttin' On The Ritz". Antoinette created this remarkable little film while a student at the London Film School, and she was present the night Nigel showed these films. Because Nigel personally collected and preserved these works I was able to post them on my YouTube site as a tribute to the filmmakers and to Nigel.
Nigel also forced me to do a similar thing with "Here's To You Mr Robinson" which I made with Garry Patterson between 1973-1976. Nigel paid for it to be digitised so I had to get active and restore it with the best audio track available, not just the optical soundtrack which was on the film print
Some of these titles are available on my YouTube site
For many years Nigel assisted Diana Allen, recording and making videos of a series of jazz performances at the Bentleigh Club in Melbourne.
He also collected countless jazz works from the 1900's right through till recent live performances and I have a large box filled with CDs he gave me over the years, hundreds of CDs with say 20 tracks on each one! I don't think this side of Nigel's life was generally well known except for close friends, but I sure thank him for introducing me to so many wonderful artists and bands I had never heard of previously.
What would my life have been like without the numerous artists or bands he introduced me to?
e.g.,
Erika Lewis and Tuba Skinny, "Jailhouse Blues"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBSuEiyoUt4
or
Leon Redbone and Robert Gordon "Melancholy Baby"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onzZu-K5g7k
Well Nigel and I tried to do these songs but I couldn't sing like Erika or Leon, and Nigel couldn't play clarinet like Robert Gordon. But who could tootle along on a clarinet like Robert Gordon? Well Lazy Ade Monsbourgh probably could have!
And Nigel was very fond of Lazy Ade's playing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ade_Monsbourgh
I accompanied Nigel on a few trips to Ballarat for the Jazz Festival and on one of those trips he created a short film of that day, Ballarat Jazz Convention 2015 which I posted for him on my YouTube page:
It's incredibly difficult writing this farewell to Nigel!
It's impossible to do justice to the many contributions Nigel has made to my life since our chance meeting in 1962!
Through all those years, through thick and thin, Nigel was the most generous and wonderful of friends.
Peter Tammer
ps.,
A wonderful tribute-in-progress Peter. I can imagine the difficulty in capturing everything you want to say, so the open-endedness of it seems the like ideal solution! Having not really known him myself, it's fascinating to see the bigger picture coming together; you mentioning films and connections starts to help me piece together the puzzle of how your and his lives overlapped and the significance of this in your own story. I look forward to ongoing updates...
ReplyDeleteWell said Richard. rest assured, updates are coming!!!
DeleteA wonderful start Peter! His life was such a network of related interests which permeated the lives of others; I'm sure this will surface and manifest over time, slowly revealing many essential truths about ideas, the arts, and the broader cultural fabric of Australia. A "tiny corner" of Australian creative history, yet somehow far more poignant for it's "quiet whisper" amongst the rebels and pioneers freewheeling here and there, outside the "established" institutions of the film world. I'd imagine film makers everywhere will recognise and feel the resonance of his contribution one day.
ReplyDeleteThanks Amanda, as you see I've taken the liberty of adding your name. Your dad was definitely outside the world of "established" institutions of the film world, and as I told you yesterday, even apart from us when we were in the Co-op movement. He was always on his own pathway!
ReplyDeleteI'm trying to find a file of "Fun Radio" so I can include it in the blog.
Nigel's death is another reminder of that time now long ago when a few pioneers just went out and made movies. Nigel; chronicled the age himself in his documentary cum memoir Carlton + Godard = Cinema. There you can find sympathetic and insightful reportage on the activity in the 50s and 60s of the likes of Giorgio Mangiamele, Brian Davies, Peter Elliott and Buesst himself among others.
ReplyDeleteBy my count these days there are hundreds of people stashed away in Federal and State Government film offices with the power to dole out money or rebates to make movies, to decide which movies are made, which film-makers are supported and most importantly, ensure that proper procedures are followed in the writing, preparation, drafting, redrafting, re-redrafting, casting and more.
When Nigel started making movies in the sixties there were no people who had such responsibilities. There is now also a tax law that allows investors to gather quite a rich reward and return for any money they toss at a film project. So now we make a lot of movies, most of them still destined to remain almost invisible. Which is ironic in a way because back in the day of making films with your own money about the only places that regularly showed films like Nigel’s were the tiny theatrettes of the Film Co-ops and the annual binge at the city's big film festival.
Nigel started making films in 1963 with his terrific short Fun Radio. From then through the The Twentieth (1966), The Rise and Fall of Squizzy Taylor (1969), Bonjour Balwyn (1970) and Dead Easy (1970) he did them all from his own resources using his own camera and no doubt paying the inflated (tariff protected) price for film stock. In 1973 he made Come Out Fighting with some finance from the Experimental Film Fund.
I was never close enough to Nigel to sit down and talk to him about the future of an Australian film industry nor about what it was that was the driving force in his mind to make movies where no one got paid, the films were hardly ever shown and the biggest payday was to win a prize at the Sydney or Melbourne Film Festivals.
Those days were about labouring for love, for the sheer enjoyment of making a movie, getting the team together again. People wanted to be on board and usually accepted when Nigel asked. The mark of someone people admired whom people went out of their way to help.
Vale…a life in film well lived.
Well thanks for that Geoff! In case our friends do not recognise your reflections, all came from our friend Geoff Gardner, a long time supporter of independent filmmakers like Nigel and me and so many others.
DeleteI realise a lot of people are being caught out by Blogger's "anonymous" trick, but I don't know how to fix it.