“The greatness of Cinema is that it
is dammed to the modesty of photography” (Jean-Marie Straub)
First of all, Redfern is a photo film.
If I am not mistaken – a short moment of floating clouds is the
only part of the film with moving images.
The sound and the images are
complementing each other but keep a kind of autonomy.
Trang Nguyen´s film is both, a
formalistic work and at the same time an amazing precise portrait of
a small community, a community of uprooted people in Redfern, a part
of Sydney. Most of them are descends of Aborigines, those native
Australians who are now a minority of around 2 percent of the whole
population.
Even though the film tells about a
community which is in danger to disappear, lost their language or got
named by the British with false names, it is more a film about people
who begin to reconstruct their history fragment by fragment.
The film arises from two seemingly
opposites, images which does not allow at all the illusion of moving
images and a soundtrack which moves through these collection of
single images like a river.. What we will remember are faces of
people, places in this quarter called Redfern and the stories of some
people who went through drug addiction, alcoholism or other
sufferings.
As the films seems to be a
re-construction of a journey the filmmaker once made. It is also
about a community which tries to reconstruct the history of the
people´s culture including the personal stories of its members.
What the film in its strange beauty
evokes in the dreams and hopes of these people comes from the people
and things the film reveals itself. I feel a bit reminded in the
pioneers of Cinema like the Lumiere brothers, sometimes in one of the
central ideas of André Bazin (that the beauty unfolds in the things
itself) but as well in the seismographic sensibility and tenderness
in her view to the people like a Yasujiro Ozu. That Trang Nguyen
seems at the first sight to take everything away from what we call
Cinema – it has no other effect than finally offering us pure
cinema.
Redfern, once an important industry
region in Australia is now in a bad state, drug dealing, high
unemployment and a high crime rate. The remains of industrial
buildings witnesses the disgrace of landscapes and people. The
uprooting of the aborigines once hired as cheap labors is part of it.
These uprooted people are now
abandoned, lost. But Trang Nguyen´s Redfern tells also about
how this uprooted and abandoned people begin to find back their place
in the world.
In an environment of destruction,
neglect and despair, the film shows people who resist in their
vitality and in their hope and their dreams.
Trang Nguyen´s perception is without
the smallest trace of sentimentality but she also never betrays the
hopes and dreams of these people.
Actually Redfern consists of the film
we see and the film which is evoked in our head. The soundtrack
creates another space than these single photographs. Even though
this film is as well a work of montage, the final editing will take
place in our imagination.
I saw this film now three times and it
becomes more beautiful with each watching. Call it another
minimalistic approach if you like but I have doubts if it is the
correct definition. Redfern has this strange beauty of
abandoned industry landscapes where once abandoned there will be grow
plants and flowers which were supposed to be lost. To recognize a
sense of beauty in this disgraced landscapes, Trang Nguyen´s
“minimalism” is nothing else than an instrument to focus on the
essential. I can hardly believe that this film which evoked so much
thoughts, ideas and feelings in me about the world, the people and
last but not least cinema – is just 30 minutes long. I am looking
forward to see her next films.
Rüdiger Tomczak
more about Trang Nguyen at her website.
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