Looking forward and back
A young girl’s inscrutable regard; a wall of waves; a horse-led journey to the shoreline. DEAREST FIONA, the third feature film by artist Fiona Tan, introduces these story-like fragments of life at the precarious juncture between sea and land in its opening images, each presented with an immediacy that belies the measured care with which they’ll be deployed in the nearly hundred minutes that follow.
The film adheres to a deceptively familiar conceit: one-part archive film—its images dating from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s drawn from the holdings of Amsterdam’s Eye Filmmuseum—and one-part personal history, its narration taken from letters sent to Tan between August 1988 and September 1990 by her father Soen Houw Tan in Australia. What results is a powerfully personal account of her artistic formation abroad and a story about generational change, one that looks not just back but also ahead, to a future of rising seas and water management.
Through stories about birth, aging, life, and death, the film layers a story of generational change onto a more visible one of industrial development.
Alongside the letters a minimalist soundtrack gives additional life to the otherwise silent images, at times recalling Peter Jackson’s THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD (2018). But DEAREST FIONA’s closer counterpart is Bill Morrison’s DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME (2016), another project concerned with how film came, so quickly and powerfully, to shape and circulate social experience in the early twentieth century and how surviving material of that era continues to impart history a century later.
Palimpsestic pasts
The epistolary form adds another layer of mediation that puts pressure on the viewer’s ability to interpret DEAREST FIONA’s layered histories. For the images, as quickly becomes clear, don’t directly illustrate the content of the letters, even if they sometimes share places, subjects, and themes. Instead, the viewer is left with the task—at first disorienting, then absorbing—of simultaneously watching one past (the filmed) and imagining another (the written). The experience evokes Hollis Frampton’s 1971 short, (NOSTALGIA), in which old photographs are burned on a hot plate, one after the other, while a narrator describes the content of the ensuing image that has yet to appear.
This sound-image discord requires a mental manoeuvring to unpack its subtle temporal politics. That work begins with the film’s base of archival imagery, which roughly documents the transition from artisanal labour and handicrafts to modern industries and infrastructure. We see the handcarts that give way to railcars, sailboats that become steamships, and windmills that become coal factories. The changes happen slowly, then all at once, as seen in a slow panorama of a massive shipyard, a sequence that ends with dramatic footage of a newly finished vessel sliding into the sea for the first time.
Capturing it all is film, the technology whose unique and critical role in this process made it what Lewis Mumford called, at the time, a “specific art of the machine."1Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934), p. 337 Among its other virtues, DEAREST FIONA demonstrates that machine art’s enduring value as a motor for historicity.
It’s hard not to read a parable about climate change into this inter-generational exchange.
In the shipbuilding sequence, the interplay of sound and image operates at its most literal. As we scan the wooden skeletons of future vessels and the dock work labour that accrues around them, a letter from Tan’s father briefly recounts the history of canals in the Netherlands and their intimate connection to the spice trade from Indonesia. Up to this point, Dutch colonialism has been at most latent in the filmed images, but here it appears wholly illuminated. As the letter continues, Tan’s father offers a rich metaphor for the film’s method. Having recently visited the optician, he is now wearing bifocals. “The accommodation from distance to close viewing is most abrupt,” he writes, a fitting description of the film’s telescoping of the past into our present. “I can play games,” he continues, “by focusing at the junction of the two lenses.” And it is precisely at that junction of two “lenses” that the film operates—one literal, looking onto the Dutch past we see, and the other figurative, evoking the mostly Australian but also international political present about which we only hear.
Intergenerational exchange
Tan père, a geologist by training who left his native Indonesia when Fiona was a child and worked, we learn from the letters, for the Australian government, is an erudite narrator of current events. But we get just as much out of his banal descriptions of everyday life, which emerge as something quietly profound when set in dialogue with the filmed past. Through the stories he recounts about birth, aging, life, and death, the film layers a story of generational change onto a more visible one of industrial development. Its “bifocal” effect in turn weaves together not just the past and present but also the personal and political, the local and global. The new generations—embodied by “dearest Fiona” and her infant nephew, whose incessant questioning crops up repeatedly in the letters—demand of their elders some account of not only what they have been left, but why. For its part, the older generation Tan’s father represents asks that the new one keep them in its thoughts and plans—the request with which he concludes the film’s final letter.
It’s hard not to read a parable about climate change into this inter-generational exchange. The film begins and ends with water, from that girl who—through Tan’s montage—appears to stare down the wall of waves, to seawall construction managed one heavy stone at a time. In between, the letters from Tan’s father describe heat waves, droughts, floods, and oil spills. “Murphy’s Law is being overworked,” he laments at one point. The images in turn narrate a longer struggle to manage water as the tides ebb and flow, with the famed Dutch capacity to control the sea revealed to be a Sisyphean task of brute force—terraforming by hand—as much as a genius feat of engineering. Similar to the shifts the film traces from pre-industrial technologies to their modern counterparts, DEAREST FIONA’s juncture of the filmed past and the epistolary then-present gestures towards an era in which weather must be understood as climate, and local practices of water management presage a global struggle against rising seas.
Brian Jacobson is Professor of Visual Culture at the California Institute of Technology.
