Public Water

The Antipodes of Propaganda

*This post expands on some notes written for a screening of Waters of Time and The Hungry Miles as part of Solo Show at Reg Vardy Gallery, Sunderland, 23 April — 17 May.* 

left: Waters of Time right: The Hungry Miles

 Waters of Time and The Hungry Miles as more or less contemporaneous documentary films, share an attempt at the illusion of truth in their portrayal of aspects of docklands and their work. In both these are clearly spaces and practices produced by Capital and Empire, however the two films occupy markedly different political and aesthetic positions in relation to waterside spaces and industry.

Norma Disher, Keith Gow, and Jock Levy made The Hungry Miles for the Australian Waterside Workers’ Federation Film Unit in 1955. As befits the concerns of a trades union the film foregrounds the workers, the hazardous nature of their work, their importance for trade and industry, dramatizing their struggles for fair employment conditions, countering negative perceptions of the wharf-side workers and the doubtful reputation that they enjoyed, parodying the greed of the ruling classes, while celebrating the sentimental resonance of the concept of ‘mateship’ - the Australian male bonding that had sustained historical workers’ struggles such as the ‘Eureka Stockade’, considered to be the birth of Australian democracy – and the ultimate success of the Union in the face of shipping company neglect and the continual struggle for reform.

The Waterside Workers’ Federation Film Unit is credited with crossing “the two intentions of ‘art’ and ‘message’… harnessing the formal innovations of the new documentary, [speaking] …for a group not otherwise represented in the mainstream media, engaging in cinema as a form of direct action mirroring the industrial and political campaigns which provided the content of some of their films.” [1]

The Film Unit had earlier, in 1946, worked with Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens to make Indonesia Calling in Australia, which documented the refusal of Sydney dockside workers to allow arms and ammunition to be sent for the Dutch colonial government’s suppression of Indonesia’s independence movement. Ivens arrived in Australia as The Netherlands’ East Indies (NEI) Film Commissioner. The NEI government was resident in Australia at this time due to the occupation of the Dutch colony by the Japanese.  Ivens’s job was to make a series of films documenting and supporting what the NEI government anticipated would be their reoccupation of the colony (now know as Indonesia) following the defeat of the Japanese, and to establish a nation building educational film agency. However, following a mutiny by Indonesian seamen government office workers’ and dockworkers’ refusal to load Dutch ships was supported by Australian trade unions, demonstrations, petitions and actions to stall the Dutch were organised, and seamen refused to man the ships. Ivens also walked off and resigning his commission joined the anti-colonial movement, and started to document the events unfolding on the wharves.[2]

Bill Launder and Basil Wright made Waters of Time for the Port of London Authority (PLA) in 1951. It begins rather portentously with a quote from Tagus Farewell written by Thomas Wyatt, a 16th-century English lyrical poet and ambassador in the service of Henry VIII, credited with introducing the sonnet form into English. 

“…with spur and sail for I go seek the Thames,

Gainward the sun that show'th her wealthy pride,

And to the town which Brutus sought by dreams,

Like bended moon doth lend her lusty side…”

Ostensibly following the passage of a ship from the sea to the docks as orchestral music sooths and stirs, the film’s prose poetic voice-over rhapsodizes in the clipped 1950s Received Pronunciation intonation favoured as representative of the reassuring voice of authority.  Here with Romantic allusion and simile we are in negotiation with nature: the sea is made by God, the docks by man. The sea has given up “her own”; the ‘landlubbers’ will swarm over the ship like ants, taking the spoils from the lands of exotic far-off Empire back to their anthills. A list of the names of port workers’ jobs (those ‘ants’) is a breathless rhythmic mechanical prose poem, and like ants in the nest the workers are the cogs in the machine of this great industry, the list is read with an obvious relish that belies the workers’ perilous labour and exploitation.

In this mercantile centre of Empire the shipping companies are benign engines of industry compared to the greedy and criminally neglectful shipping companies and their owners described in The Hungry Miles, all part of a teleological continuity moving on the tick-tock of the waters of time. Nothing in the film, not even goods brought in, escapes the over-weening lyricism of both the language and the roaming camera “…from grape to barrel, from barrel to hold, from hold to deck and from deck to dock… tick-tock, tick-tock…” …and the ships set sail back out to sea to their cycle of inevitability.

This ‘International Realist’ production describes a romantic vision of a vanished world and industry without which Capital and Empire could not have been sustained, glossing them in the name of progress and the consolidation of London as a modern world city.

Waters of Time is literally and figuratively shot from the god’s eye view of the Ruling Class and Empire, its clerks and managers are benign officiators, it gives itself the ability to imagine Docklands from the point of view of a gull in flight. The Hungry Miles presents the view from the Working Class, echoing the bawdy humour of the music hall, the sharp tongue of political satirical, and the militant collectivity in the grime of the dockside. Waters of Time is the propaganda of a ruler that has nothing to loose, The Hungry Miles that of the exploited with everything to fight for.

Without the ability to traverse the oceans, without the might and the will to dominate and exploit the colonies that it had established, often, as in Australia, by subjugating the indigenous population, Empire had little chance of survival into the Twentieth Century. The docks are significant in this relationship, as places of arrival and departure for the colonizer, whether deportee, émigré, or government, and for the dispatch and receipt of goods for the enrichment of the imperial homeland.  The colonial relationship of Britain to Australia could be thought of as characterized by the differing approaches of these films, their thematic and their formal and aesthetic approaches.

Basil Wright started his career with John Grierson, who is often credited with the invention of documentary (at least as a term) and with a particular intent to represent ‘reality’ as a corrective to the damage done by fiction and as a means for social reform.  Where The Hungry Miles’s call for social justice in the form of waterside workers’ rights is militant, perhaps revolutionary, there is no evidence of 'corrective' concerns in Waters of Time, which speaks with the assurance of a position that all is right with the world, progress truly is benign and workers willingly participate in the colonial machine.

To accuse Modernism of an aestheticism that tends to the hermetic and apolitical has become something of a cliché, and while Wright et al may have been bringing a new formally inventive approach to the documentary form, as a promo for what is effectively a QANGO it is no surprise that Waters of Time is a lyrical romantic meander with good reason to avoid overt class politics.   

To read the film contrapuntally, as Edward Said might have had it[3], is complicated by the fact that it is already intentionally propagandist, its pernicious idealism consists precisely in the fact that the pictorial and lyrically poetic are used as aestheticized political tools by a dominant ruler quietly convinced of its superiority in the class struggle. It is just as propagandist as the more strident, in-your-face militancy of the The Hungry Miles.

In considering these two films together it is possible to think of an ‘antipodean’ relationship, which is not to simply characterize geographical, class, or colonial binaries in historical connection between Britain and Australasia - in this alone we have already identified three binaries, or six points of reference immediately upping the complexity ante. In this the ‘antipodean’ describes a line that links two different, but crucially not opposite, points, characterizing the symbiotic relationship of Empire to that which is exploited to sustain it, a line once borne on the trade winds, traced across water.

 

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[1]Ansara, M & Milner, L 1999, ‘The Waterside Workers Federation Film Unit: the forgotten frontier of the fifties’, Metro Magazine vol. 119, pp. 28-39.

[2] ‘Indonesia Calling: Joris Ivens in Australia’ Senses of Cinema, 2009 http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/51/indonesia-calling/

[3] Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 1993.

Waters of Time dataset

Waters of Time as described by the City of Future Documentary Films which would appear to be an subset of orphaned data from vads.ahds.ac.uk - which is the now defunct AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service)

�Highland Princess' unloads, reloads at King George Dock. Measured from end of cert. (U). Still in �London on Film� [� Museum of London in Docklands]. Reel 1: 'The Port of London Authority presents'; 'A film of LONDON RIVER'; 'Produced for INTERNATIONAL REALIST by BASIL WRIGHT'; ph. Reg Hughes, camera asst. Cyril Moorhead, sound recording Ken Cameron; words Paul Dehn, spoken by James McKechnie, Paul Dehn, Felix Felton, John Slater, music Alan Rawsthorne, conducted by Muir Matheson, script direction and editing by Basil Wright and Bill Launder; 'WATERS of TIME'; 91ft, fade up on quote; 141ft, picture opens < > on water, bow wave, passing Middle Blyth buoy; gulls, tug etc., oil refinery, 'Bruce', 'Lake Winnipeg', Asia' (ships). Sun Tugs Office (Gravesend): man puts telescope to hole in window, man with hat; 'Highland Princess', Sun XVI, Sun XVII; King George Dock Office; 'Highland Princess', big 2 funnel ship (registered in Belfast); Galleon's Reach, power station; 3 tugs haul to lock, where to put it?; open lock gates, directed by whistle; lock fills, ship rises (high), raise bridge, open inner gates; ship into dock, bridge closes; tugs move ship to berth (2 cameras? - 1 on tug, 1 on distant dockside - or perhaps different days); tugs let go; insert on cargo, places of origin; ships: 'Ashanti Palm', Liverpool; 'Loch Ryan'; 'waiting . . . morning', fade (~1332ft). Tower Bridge, Richmond (top of tide), 'slack water'; Westminster; 'God looks down on the waiting river' etc.; 'man wakes with them . . .'' end of reel (1577ft inc end leader). Reel 2: PLA mobile canteen, dockers etc. come to work, very long list of trades etc.; Police (Great Western Railway Company office behind); Scammell truck; shunting, PLA train; bales of cotton, carcasses of meat (Highland Princess cargo); ships: 'Corfu', London; 'Chindwara', London; 'Eva Peron', Buenos Aires; 'Troilus', Liverpool; 'Daghestan', Newcastle on Tyne; 'Kracujevac', Rijeka; 'only one of hundreds'; sacks, hooks; dry dock; label: 'Ford - vehicle for EXPORT Casablanca. Exported on Drawback' (van); pallets of canned fruit, fork lift; 'hatchie' guides crane; 'Beaverdell' leaves; camera in crane; camera on rolls of paper lowered by crane; in hold; camera flying over dock; PLA building, interior, chronometer; Orient Wharf, Morocco Wharf (smells etc.); barrels from Spain and Portugal (Port), batswing fungus above 'the roof of an ogre's mouth the morning after'; 'we leave on the ebb'; Highland Princess departs; Middle Blyth buoy again; dock � river � estuary � sea; THE END, AN INTERNATIONAL REALIST PRODUCTION' (~1648ft).

Dockland

ed: RJM Carr, pub: North East London Polytechnic/Greater London Council, 1986

Waters of Sound

Isolated elements from Waters of Time (Bill Launder, Basil Wright for Port of London Authority, UK, 1951) soundtrack:

music  (by Alan Rawsthorne) 9:15 mp3

location sound  11:07 mp3
narration  (Paul Dehn) 10:40 mp3
prose poem sound collage  5:08 mp3

"A gull could fly for eleven miles up river, on the back of a sea wind, and never leave Dockland…"

Extract from Waters of Time (Bill Launder, Basil Wright for Port of London Authority, UK, 1951).

The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up 1838 by J. M. W. Turner

The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up
painted by J. M. W. Turner, Bermondsey, 1838

Surrey Docks to London Bridge from We Was All One 1972

There must be a hell of a lot from Rotherhithe, that's the Surrey Docks, right the way down to London Bridge, a lot of jobs lost there wasn't there, yeah right the way down, and how many worked in the Surrey Docks at one time…

London, Canary Wharf & South Quay, 22 March 2011 - binaural sound

London, Limehouse Cut to River Lee Navigation, 9 January 2011

captured on iPhone on an afternoon walk

London, Southbank, River Thames, 15 October 2010

A sketch of plans for night-time reflection captured on iPhone between 18:05 and 18:15, inverted, shuffled and layered.  The superimposition of different sequences may be structurally symbolic of a conception of place as containing multiple temporalities.

Operation Orange Tree RNLI video

RNLI video of Operation Orange Tree mock rescue, 30 September 2010

London, Wapping Stairs, River Thames, 18 September 2010

London, Wapping Hermitage Moorings, River Thames, 18 September 2010

London, Victoria Embankment, River Thames, 14 September 2010

Last week, while reading about reflecting pools - those static waters of literal and metaphorical reflection [of which more notes imminent] - the reality of the weather in London made the Thames anything but reflective, instead I could only use a polarising filter to shift between its murky churned up mud and the steely monotone of the reflected light from the grey cloud dominated sky.

Operation Orange Tree

On the 30th September 2010 a major exercise code named ‘ORANGE TREE’ will take place in the Upper Pool from 2030(BST) to approximately 2230(BST), simulating a collision between a commercial non-passenger vessel and a Class V passenger vessel in the area off St Katharine Pier - HMS PRESIDENT. The event may involve the use of smoke.


more here:
http://server2.pla.co.uk/notice2mariners/pdf/M55_of_2010_w_-_Upper_Pool_-_Exercise_Orange_Tree.pdf

video recce, London, Greenland Dock, 9 August 2010

Here at the west end of Greenland Dock, near Surrey Quays, the water is a little choppy in the steady wind; when the clouds move away and the sun shines the Canary Wharf complex is reflected quite well, albeit abstracted by the water. In future I should consult the weather forecast for the predicted wind speed. Wind speed can become an observable phenomenon contributing to the description of species of spaces and help me to assess good conditions for water video capture.  Should I look for the stillest and most sunny days?

Alternatively, I have also been considering capturing images in London at night, so that the reflections are of lit buildings; I imagine that the lights on the building would reflect quite spectacularly on the water. So Melbourne: diurnal, London: nocturnal, following time zone differences and following a pattern I used in Nightlight, but this time more precisely.


Walking along Cunard Walk on the south side of Greenland Dock, the names of the places are clearly a historical legacy detached from their original significance. What significance is attached to, or detached from, place names around the Docklands in Melbourne?


Greenland Dock is very much private water, containing a residential estate. The choppiness of the water is not helped by the use of it by recreational boating.

Walking around this place I feel as though I’m in an alien environment, as though like Thomas Jerome Newton I’ve fallen to earth, observing these peculiar places and phenomena that I’m finding.  During the day here it’s very quiet, just a few people around, some on the water in their little sailing boats, some sitting around the water, women with children in pushchairs, very little else.  A while ago I heard the sound of a vacuum cleaner in an apartment, and couldn’t help thinking that was probably the cleaner who was in, while the resident is out at work. Where?  Perhaps in the City, or just over there in the Canary Wharf complex that looms on the immediate horizon.

Towards a nomenclature of water

Having never read it, but having long been aware of its existence and perhaps pertinence to this and other of my projects, before I left London I bought a copy of Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec.  It is a wonderful book, full of Perec’s observations of otherwise unremarkable places and suggestions as to how to explore, examine and describe them.

I have noted in Species of Spaces correlations with his interests in formal concerns and those of some of my own approaches. For example early in the book he quotes Paul Eluard’s Children’s song from Les Deux-Sèvres from Poésie involontaire et poésie intentionelle (itself a title that I’d like to adopt):

In Paris, there is a street;
in that street, there is a house;
in that house, there is a staircase;
on that staircase, there is a room;
in that room, there is a table;
on that table, there is a cloth;
on that cloth, there is a cage;
in that cage, there is a nest;
in that nest, there is a bird.

This bears a close resemblance to the lyric of my song Aroundabout. I have never knowingly read the Eluard poem, and of course it’s possible that, like me, he was influenced by the old traditional English song The Green Grass Grew all Around which was reworked with a fecund twist as The Maypole Song in the film The Wicker Man.

Perec’s descriptions of bedrooms also reminded me of my description of a Brussels hotel room in Direct Language 3.

Of course there is always the anxiety of influence, something that I’ve been conscious of in many forms in developing this project, but also something I’ve decided not to be overly concerned about, and it’s something I’ll deal with in another post.

There is something of a descriptive zoom, or a pan, a cinematic descriptive in Perec’s writing as it shifts focus from the microscopic, the macro view, travelling across space; as he writes: “force yourself to see more flatly”.

There are interesting and often oblique connections to Public Water.  In writing about street numbering conventions Perec discusses the Parisian model where odd numbers are on the left, even on the right, relative to the direction of the street, but then a third determinant being a fixed point that dictates the direction of the ascension of the numbers.

“Streets parallel with the Seine are numbered starting upstream, perpendicular streets starting from the Seine and going away from it (...one might reasonably suppose that analogous solutions have been thought up for other towns).”

Have they?  Well a cursory glance at my wholly inadequate street map of Melbourne suggests that this might be the case in relation to the River Yarra, but the map is not detailed enough to be definitive.  If it is the case, what is the meaning of this numerical grid placed upon the physical grid that Hoddle superimposed on this township in the distant colony in the middle of the nineteenth century: a persisting, perhaps permanent marker of colonialism?

Perec suggests that  “...rather than visit London, stay at home, in the chimney corner, and read the irreplaceable information supplied by Baedecker (1907 edition): ...If one is in the vicinity of London Bridge, one should take advantage of every available moment to visit the port and its environs, the ships arriving or departing and the enormous traffic in the docks.  For those wishing to enjoy a grand spectacle, unique in the world, the excursion to Gravesend is especially recommended.”

Perec quoting from Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino: “... so the world and space seemed to be the mirror one of the other both minutely stored in heiroglyphs and ideograms, and in each of them could equally well be or not be a sign: ...one scratch out of eight hundred thousand on the creosoted wall between two docks in Melbourne...”.  I am looking for that scratch.

Listings. Typology. Perec is concerned with species of spaces, categories of observations, I am concerned with categories of water as public space, and I have looked in vain for a way of categorising ‘species of water’, beyond the purely generic (“creek”, “canal”, “river”, etc) in terms of describing types of waves in order to standardise observations relating to the same conditions in various places, other than the likes of “calm”, “choppy”, “flowing”, “tidal”, etc.  Maybe this nomenclature is enough for my purposes; conventional sources tend to range from the ultra-scientific, physics-based descriptions of waves and particles, etc, to surfing vernacular.  Perhaps there are better terms, maybe meteorological ones, but I’ve yet to find them.

Docklands

London

Melbourne

email to John

Dear John,

I want to thank you for your interest in my work and to point you in the direction of this blog, which I am using to develop ideas for the exhibition project.  The (working) title for the show is Public Water, it will be a multi-projection and sound installation, at least that’s how I’m currently thinking of realising it.  Things are very much in process though so it’s perfectly possible that it will change quite a bit by the time it’s exhibited, which should be sometime later this year.

The initial ideas come from thinking around public space, something that has been much contested recently; notions of what constitutes ‘public’ space have become shifting, provisional, and contingent.  In the aftermath of the 7/7 bombs in London (and I guess by extension of 9/11) there has been a distinct change in the way urban ‘public’ space has been policed.  To qualify, ‘public’ space is defined as space to which the public is freely admitted, however we know that this space is often not strictly speaking public or publicly owned, it is often in private ownership and as such subject to the dictates of private security companies and their guards.  An example of this in London is Canary Wharf.  In addition to the ambiguity that surrounds what is or isn’t permitted in private public space, there has been a change in the way that public public space is policed, and the law allows for the apprehension of, for example, photographers who might be thought to be behaving in a ‘suspicious manner’.  Press reports about photographers being apprehended have appeared regularly and there has become something of a movement against this. This is in addition to, in London at least, a continuing increase in the amount and number of CCTV.  The sum total of this is an ongoing increase in the surveillance and apprehension of people in public and private, public space for behaviour no more sinister than taking snapshots, or simply being in a certain place at a certain time.  This increasing paranoia has resulted in a culture, not of safety, but of inculcated fear.  This is well documented and unpacked, particularly in books such as Anna Minton’s Ground Control.

With this as the background against which contemporary ideas around the nature and the reproduction of images of public space circulate, it seemed to me interesting to speculate about how one might conceptualise around the notion of Public Water, considered here as large bodies of water in physical urban environs, so rivers, canals, bays, lakes in parks, and so on.  On one hand I was thinking, in quasi-legalistic terms, about what is the status of water, urban water, as public space, where does it fit in the regime of what is or isn’t public space being, as it is, in the public realm but, presumably, in terms of property, owned by, or at least under the authority of, somebody, or some body.  On the other hand, more imaginatively and conceptually, what does it mean to create images, photographs, moving images, of urban water, specifically urban space and architecture reflected in water?  There is, in the security driven world described above, the implicit question, not of what one is photographing, but where one is photographing, in other words the question is not about representation, but of the nature of space.  This begs the question though, if where, why not of what?  Why is there an objection to taking a photograph here, if there isn’t an objection to the subject of photography? 

While I’m not interested in the work becoming overtly about these political/legal questions, they are informing its development as the background to how one negotiates the reproduction of images in urban space.  So when one takes a photograph of water, one is also photographing whatever the water is reflecting if it is indeed reflecting something, and the question then becomes about the status of the reflection as a subject for photography when water becomes a reflective medium of the reproduction of an image.

Water as public space, water as a medium.

In the way that my own personal connections link experiences of Melbourne and London as urban spaces that are familiar to me, in the way that Figuring Landscapes links Australian and UK artists’ landscape works, so I’m drawn to considering the two places, the two cities, in this work, constructed from the thinking around, and producing images of, Public Water in London and Melbourne; eventually I hope it to be exhibited in both places.

The function of this blog is to work through the ideas and sketches for the work as I develop it.  There is something interesting to me about making this ‘sketch book’ public.  Unlike some artists, I’ve always rather shied away from the practice of showing the notes and sketches associated with realised works, however in this case it seems appropriate, an interesting thing to do, making the process transparent and documenting interesting ideas and diversions that might not necessarily make it as far as the final work.  Also, whether anybody is reading it or not, the blog becomes a kind of public commitment to the work.

I’m now in Melbourne and starting to cast around for particular sites to visit and to capture video and audio, and to describe in text.  In earlier posts to this blog I’ve experimented with ways of writing, descriptive writing which is also in some ways ‘poetic’, influenced by Barthes idea of Writing Degree Zero and the poetry of Francis Ponge.  This involves careful use of language and in particular metre, which determines how the text might be spoken, if I choose the option of using a recorded voice over reading.  This is something I’ve explored in other recent work such as Aboriginal Myths of South London.

No doubt the very different meanings of water will inform the work in some way, which is to say the significance of water is quite different in Australia where drought is a familiar condition, but at the moment I’m concentrating on the Species of Spaces, as Perec would have it.  I’m particularly interested in contemporary transformations of Docklands in both places, in both their transformation from spaces of industrial labour to mostly exclusive residential use and leisure activity, and their connection of the two places through colonialism and trade.  So here in Melbourne these will probably be the first places I’ll be exploring.  The results of my research, no doubt will be posted to the blog.