TIME MACHINE
While making our new film Yellow House Afghanistan I have often looked down at my feet and realised what it must have been like for an Apollo astronaut when they looked down to see their feet on the surface of the moon. No foreigner would have walked in the places where I have had the privilege to walk over these last couple of years. I feel transported out of my time and world.
A few days ago, I climbed a mountain with Murzamil, a Mujahadeen fighter who survived many battles with the Americans. He has long oiled hair and black eyeliner. He wore his camouflage jacket and had ammunition pouches over his chest and carried an AK47 rifle, but he has the heart of a poet.
Our objective was to reach a clump of ancient trees at the top of the climb. Arrived I was surprised to see that people had built a bank of stones to dam-off water making a clear pond that mirrored the sky. Goats and a white horse were drinking from it.
Murzamil went over to the nearest tree to sit where flat rocks had been placed to make a perfect bench-chair. He rested his back against the tree and looked into the pool. I thought, “for how many centuries have climbers and shepherds rested their backs on this tree and enjoyed the beauty of the reflections.”
When our filming was over, I went and sat there for a while, on my own, and felt enriched to be able to experience this. The mountains are covered by delicate, mauve lavender plants, with the most beautiful fragrance.
I could see that it was traumatic for Murzamil to recount his stories of hiding in these mountains where he had to repel ground attacks from Special Forces and evade circling drones, one of which fired a Hellfire missile that killed his cousin. Murzamil showed me a rock which had been hit by a bullet. He had been preparing for battle against the notorious and barbaric Unit 2 of American / Afghan forces when a heavy machine gun opened on his position. The large calibre round missed his head by less than an inch and splinters of the rock hit his face.
He explained that, for him, it is not possible to kill another person. He would return fire, shooting to the side or over the heads of the attackers, without aiming to kill. After telling his stories he picked a twig of Lavender flowers and pressed them to his nose, enjoying the fragrance and smiling. Then he smiled again, looking into my eyes, and placed a twig under my nose.
Everywhere on the mountains there are humanised places that have been adapted for comfort and outdoor habitation. Often the ground has been smoothed into a platform raised by rocks. I assume this is where the shepherds pray, sleep and eat. It all has an aesthetic, not like what the Japanese do with their love of cultivating spaces with rock arrangements and raking but a very Afghan sense of landscape art. Afghanistan has a great natural beauty but much of it has been moulded by hand in the most subtle ways. Old Man Time has had human hands.
A herd of goats were enjoying the shade around the trees and two shepherd boys sere minding them. The boys had some cobs of roasted corn which would have been their only meal. In the tradition of welcoming guests, they handed the corn to us. I felt embarrassed to take it but watched Murzamil, Waqar, and Arshad thank the boys and begin eating. It is an insult not to accept a gift of food or tea. The shepherds decorate their goats with deep orange coloured henna. I can tell from the way the goats rubbed themselves up against our backs and legs while I did the interview, almost wanting to be part of it, that they are much loved, like pets, and well-treated.
Back as far as ancient Greek vase painting, goats have been shown as half human in art represented by the god Pan. Goats relax with one front leg tucked under their chest and the other straight out in front of them in a very human like pose. Their strange eyes with a squashed oval shaped pupil, stare, at us humans, with an intensity that is unsettling.
In 1960, I went to see Rod Taylor staring in the film adaptation of HG Well’s Time Machine, at Rockdale Odeon Cinema. I was ten years old and it had such an impact on my imagination, it has remained a profound influence. An influence that has come to fruition in the edit of our new Yellow House Afghanistan documentary. This is our fourth film in this region, starting with Miscreants of Taliwood and covering a period of almost twenty years. I see myself get old, babies are born, and grow into teenagers and teenagers turn into adults. These four films are my Time Machine.
Hellen, Waqar and I spent six months shooting Yellow House Afghanistan in Jalalabad. In the past we have taken our rushes back to Australia to do postproduction with the legendary Sydney editor, Nick Meyers. This time I decided to return to the Yellow House and see if I could direct the edit with Waqar Alam on the computer. Waqar has been Nick’s Assistant since Miscreants of Taliwood.
When filming Waqar operates the A camera while I shoot on the B camera. Waqar has impressed me with his speed and versatility and been easy to work with because he knows all the scenes, having been there. Plus, he speaks Pashto.
My job as an artist-filmmaker is to push the boundaries of documentary which remains a very formal medium. Most documentary makers do not come through the arts but through journalism. Most follow an unwritten, conservative handbook of dos and don’ts. The ABC department, dealing with documentary, is called Factual, and any product that does not fit their strict guidelines is unlikely to get airtime. The selection team detest artists and are allergic to imagination. I have the attitude of “I would rather shoot myself in the foot than kiss theirs.” The way Yellow House Afghanistan messes with time it will seriously mess with their heads. When I arrived in New York in 1968 I was doing minimal abstract painting which had appealed to Clement Greenberg and gained me a personal invitation from him to come to the Big Apple. But the Vietnam War was raging, astronauts were getting ticker tape parades after circling the moon and Malcom X and the Black Panthers were raising their fists at white racism. It was the photographers and not the painters who were giving a face to the times. Back in Australia photography was not seen as an art form until the mid 70’s when the Australian Centre of Photography was opened in Paddington Sydney along with Brummel’s gallery in Melbourne.
No one would now deny that photography is an art form, but Documentary Making Establishment is still struggling against accepting the input of artists to the medium.
When Picasso and Braque became “Rambo’s of Form” by breaking representational imagery up, and recombining it on the picture plane, they freed painting from the restraints of realist representation. Our film Yellow House Afghanistan reconfigures linear time into kinetic juxtapositions that play with the back and forth of the years. It turns documentary making into a Time Machine.
In our film Snow Monkey two young ice-cream cart sellers, Zabi and Salahudin take me to a popular ice-cream parlour in the centre of Jalalabad city where they pitch their idea to make a drama about their young lives. That was 2014 and the boys were eleven and twelve years old and I had not fully transformed into old man that I now am at seventy-four. Recently, we returned the parlour and were filmed in the same chairs and same spot. The boys are now men with their features completely transformed.
The camera recording switches between 2014 and 2024. As we edited it together it was like making cubist portraits with time as the medium rather than paint.
We were filming Love City Jalalabad in 2011 in a tribal village near the home of our friend Assam, when we heard that his wife had given birth to a baby boy. Hellen went inside and sang the newborn baby a lullaby while Neha filmed. The baby was Amar who has joined our Yellow House team as a young teenager. He was amazed to come into our edit room and see the first moments of his life on a screen. Amar loves using our cameras and asked to be assisted to make a film about the children of his Tribal Village. Over the last two months he has been going out every afternoon and shooting it. A decade or more from now these children will watch Amar’s film and travel back in time.