Novelistsdon’t write alone. The unconscious does the heavy lifting. While conscious, many writers can be like stenographers with a flair for editing.
What we say about ourselves consciously in the life writing or self histories has always to be viewed sceptically. An insight that seemed to me profound hearing it many, many years ago: it’s not what we put in diaries that counts. It’s what we leave out.
Does the unsaid in life writing count for more than the said? Some people are remarkably honest about themselves, but would I consciously leave out things in any life writing? Yes.
Autobiography is too self-aggrandizing. Fiction is more fun to do. Fiction frees up writers to find and tell truths he/she wouldn’t admit to when writing about themselves.
In the summer of 1978 I went to Tungshing and Pingshang on the border between China and Vietnam. I was the cine-cameraman for an Iranian husband and wife team for whom I was working in my first real job, running a state of the art film studio based in Hong Kong. I shot with an Eclair ACL using 16mm film stock, edited the film on a six plate Steenbeck and mixed sound on three Sondor recorders from the original sound my boss’s wife, Noushi, recorded on a Nagra reel to reel recorder. In August 1977 I had been given the chance to work in what seems today to be a far simpler media world. The Shah of Iran was still alive and Safa Haeri, a journalist, whose upbringing in France included schooling, was running one of the Shah’s network of world wide news bureaus. NIRT’s office in Hong Kong was the second smallest of these bureaus, yet became the second highest in terms of output.
In late February 1977 I had begun my film school studies at Curtin University, working under the tutoring of a theatre and then-aspiring film director, Steve Jodrell. I had just finished a three year English Literature degree at the University of Western Australia, a double major in literature Americans call it. I went straight on to a second degree, film. This is when my first career began. In my first year I concentrated on film and video production only, no academic subjects, doing only first and second year units in practical and video making. Five months later in August, I received a call saying there was a job going based in Hong Kong making films if I wanted it. I had a two days to decide.
I had just finished a twenty minute film “Lounge Bar” which I wrote, directed and produced. I was liking what I was doing enormously. 1977 was a good time to be in film in Australia. I was learning so much every day, getting to grips with the practical business of being a filmmaker. Yet this surreal offer to suddenly go to Hong Kong loomed large in my mind. What to do?
I went. I left the course, first landing in Kuala Lumpur to meet my new boss and his wife, Noushi. We flew to Thailand then drove to a point on the eastern Thai seaboard.
I became a documentary filmmaker on that day. We arrived just before a boatload of Vietnamese refugees motored in from the South China Sea, coming into the Gulf of Thailand to land at a place on the coast south east of Bangkok. On a very hot summer’s afternoon, raucous cheering and shouting all around me from other Vietnamese on other boats who had done the same thing, sweat running all over me, I clambered over beached and moored boats trying hard not to mess up my recording of the event. It was terrifying, my first real job at doing this kind of work and in the middle of hottest part of a Thai summer. With so much sweat in my eyes, I had trouble seeing what was I filming let alone focusing. Yet somehow I got it okay.
Flying to Hong Kong it was high summer typhoon season, and after processing the stock and preparing the footage for sending to Teheran for broadcast, I settled into adjusting to a completely new culture, city and lifestyle. I had never seen so many people in any street in my life as I did in Hong Kong that summer. The production money for the year had gone, so I sat around a little nervously wanting to make films, doing the occasional short Hong Kong film with Noushi.
I learned I had won the Young Filmmaker of the Year Award for 1977 at Curtin University and it gave me something to mull over, especially as I was so inactive in my new position. But with the new year and a renewed budget we began travelling again to make more films, going first into pre-modernised China, then to the Philippines, Japan, Bangladesh. In August 1978 we were invited to the Sino Vietnamese border to record a refugee impasse.
Chinese authorities took us to Tungshing and in the rain I filmed Vietnamese of Chinese origin forced out by the Vietnamese authorities. As refugees now these people stood in the rain plastic sheets over them waiting to be processed for entry into China. From Tungshing we went to Pingshang where more Vietnamese of Chinese origin were being processed by other mainland Chinese authorities. We filmed the interrogation of a man the Chinese said was a Vietnamese spy they had captured. We were the only film crew allowed in.
After the trip and the film was processed and cut in Hong Kong and sent to Teheran, I was asked by the South China Morning Post to write up what I saw. I had never been a newspaper reporter. I had no experience of writing a full page feature article. Write what you saw I was told. I did.
The following is my article and except for the cutting by a sub editor of my speculative conclusion at the end this is what I wrote, word for word, no changes, with my conclusion only removed by the SCMP – why? I’ll come back to that.
{Published 6 August, 1978 – under a title the newspaper chose, I wrote the piece in my birth name. I write now in my mother’s maiden surname of Collins – as Lew Collins.}
What was so difficult about my conclusion that it had to be cut? I speculated. I had asked myself why China was doing this and came to the conclusion they were:
1) helping Chinese in need
2) publishing to the world the harm the Vietnamese were doing
3) claiming the moral high ground in order to take punitive retaliatory action against Vietnam which China saw as a legitimate action to take.
My speculative conclusion (3) was always going to be cut. I should have woven it into my article, but even if I had, it would have been cut. Writing that China intended to punish Vietnam for its actions sometime in the future was a bridge too far in journalism, certainly at my level back then. Though I was right. In January 1979, Deng Tsiao Ping (Deng Xiaoping) ordered an invasion of Vietnam, saying it was to punish Vietnam for their actions.
My role in the National Iranian Radio and Television office ended abruptly. In December 1978 I was told by Safa events in Iran meant closure of all the NIRT offices around the world were imminent. The Iranian Revolution under Khomeini swept the Shah from power. January 1979 Safa and Noushi returned to Teheran. From there they went to live in Paris.
Grifters, sharks, wannabes, liars, creativors cruise the seaside Promenade as an enfranchising of an entire festival grows out of protest, taking voting from annual juries and giving it to the fans, without whom the festival would not be.
When I was writing this the second invasion of Ukraine hadn’t happened. When I was in the the final draft oligarchs lived only in Russia. Now they’re hard at gaming America. When I was in the final draft, political sycophancy was in its infancy now it’s fully grown.
When I was in the final draft there was still an operational Democratic Party, now a couple State governors are performing CPR on its seemingly lifeless body. When I began writing this most of America believed in habeas corpus, personal and civil rights, accountability and independence of the judiciary.
When I was writing this novel it wasn’t clear how much damage the right wing of the Supreme Court could inflict on America.
In the summer of 1981, my first trip to Greece, one late hot July evening, I wandered up the road from my Plaka hotel to the Acropolis, a young filmmaker on holiday, a working resident from Hong Kong visiting Europe.
As darkness gathered I sat on a perimeter wall and took in the summer dusk scenery all around. Facing the seaward south I stared down from my spot at the lit up Odeon of Herodes Atticus theatre way down below me. A rehearsal was going on. After watching for a short while I walked back to the entrance road, took another path the other way, hiking down the hill to find out what it was I had just seen.
A poster outside the Odeon announced that the Athens Summer Festival was showing Aristophanes’ The Acharnians. Had I seen a play by Aristophanes before? No.
I returned to my hotel, and the next day found a ticket seller in Athens. I bought a seat for the play – prices of the day ranging from $1.20 to $6. I bought a Penguin translation of the play in a bookshop and read it, and certainly no wiser, set off the following night to see the performance.
The Acharnians was first performed in 426 BC. A strident anti-war play it is credited as the oldest staging of a western threatrical (Greek) comedy. I didn’t know what to expect because the Penguin version, translated into English, did not make it clear. Still, I had seen the rehearsal. I had seen something intriguing. The play would do the rest.
The Odeon theatre is an extraordinary space but on a hot July summer’s night it is other-worldly, the night air made translucent by light alive with what looked like tiny floating tippy tips of flowers, rising in the lit-up warm evening air all throughout the amphitheatre.
In jeans, t-shirt and sandals, surrounded by Greeks in evening dress I was an outsider but nobody cared about me. They were there to see a play, an important play in the ancient Greek canon.
What truly resonates with me most now forty plus years later, is how an ancient play, interpreted, performed and directed as it was, was so relevant to me and that 1981 audience. I spoke no Greek yet the production literally lifted me off my seat. This was not a stilted ancient classic, the sort of production I remembered too well from university productions. The Penguin translation was swept from my mind.
Dicæopolis, a native of Acharnæ, and an ex-soldier, returns utterly disillusioned and deeply angered by the Persian wars, heartsick at the misery and stupidity of conflict. Not shy in making his anti-war views known he railed against his fellow citizens chastising them with lewd gestures while a chorus of indignant citizens in white masks, odd hats and fantastic sewn quilt-like costumes, rushed from one side of the stage to the other, all this happening in a cacophony of startling music and sound effects, the chorus remonstrating and arguing with Dicæopolis and each other. The audience was in stitches. I didn’t understand a word, yet understood everything.
As a writer it’s hard to communicate the effect this experience has had on me from that hot July Athenian summer’s night onward. The Archarnians is the western world’s most ancient staged comedy, its performance having Greeks no doubt in ancient times, almost rolling in aisles as Greeks were doing around me.
When the performance ended, the revered director Karolos Koun was brought on stage to receive a rousing applause. I sat stunned by what I had seen. It had transcended any theatrical piece I had been to see by multiples I can’t calculate even today. I felt the meaning of theatre not only the ancient Greek idea of ‘spectacle’ had been made clear to me, with meaning in my writing perhaps beginning that night as well.
My current novel’s main theme was always Democracy from the earliest days I began to write it, but several years ago, deep in the writing I didn’t foresee how important Democracy would become in this era.
I decided early, writing ‘Out of Competition’ set in a film festival, that it would be comic because while I believed all processes of democracy could be better promoted everywhere I never foresaw democracy facing a serious existential threat.
Democracy has always been a major part of my life. My father was in the second world war so democracy always figured in my consciousness, and while I have never experienced totalitarianism I understood it wasn’t the way of the west, or a real threat, until now.
I never thought not even after the murder of John F. Kennedy that a U.S. president, however he got into power would try to destroy democracy in order to cling to power.
Democracy has never been perfect. It’s been manipulated, not just in the United States but its demise in the US, UK, France, Canada, Australia, or any western European nation is unthinkable. Democracy remains fundamental, especially in America.
The world is watching. Everything American was once received well. Cultural power is real. John F. Kennedy understood this.
We live in a digital, post-automated mechanical world, when once many centuries ago books were written and bound by hand.
Then with some ingenious reworking by Gutenberg and others in reimagining winepress and jewellery making techniques and technologies, metal type was created and off we went to the mass-printing races. So we thought. Because it only took a few centuries to really perfect the “mass” part of it all.
It makes me treasure the hardcover more, because it is the closest we still have to the wholly hand made book. Don’t get me wrong, I too saw a lot in the 1990s advent of the digital book, for its democratisation of information potentialities, which somehow could have brought to light many texts that publishers couldn’t be bothered thinking about re-printing. Only it didn’t happen for reasons we know. Free and fair and open competition is simply a myth, with publishers even sighing and throwing withering side glances at the “damnable” used book market.
The films featuring Gene Hackman are unique. From his life filled with experiences he had to overcome through to one of his best performances in Unforgiven, he quietly made acting history. His work on David Webb Peoples screenplay under Clint Eastwood’s direction, whose technique encouraged contributors to be how they saw fit to be, created a Hollywood “white page” screenplay legend, a rare production – a film screening as the writer intended it to be when he first wrote it.
Unforgiven was perfect for Gene nearing the end of his career, and it won him his second Oscar. If Joyce wrote a novel about him its title would be, “A Portrait of the Actor as a Working Professional”.
Swimanög 