In 2010, Gavin Hipkins took a major turn; he became a filmmaker. It was not just a change of medium; it was a change of code. His work in still photography had long been haunted by cinematic references and associations, and he had made a few video works, but now he aimed to become a real filmmaker. No longer content with making moving-image works for galleries, he aspired to make films to show in cinemas, to cinema audiences, with cinema-audience expectations. Partly, his new interest was artistic; he was intrigued by the medium. Partly, it was professional. At the time, he was frustrated by the politics of the art business, where progress depended on the patronage of curators, museums, and galleries. Making films offered new opportunities for production and distribution, especially international distribution. But it meant he had to start again, learning to translate his ideas into this other medium and establishing himself as a filmmaker.

In retrospect, it makes total sense that Hipkins would gravitate toward filmmaking. Tourism has always been at the heart of his work and cinema is the ultimate in virtual tourism, transporting sedentary audiences to other places and times, real and imagined. From the beginning, Hipkins was understood as a tourist of photography.¹ He was always a photo-tourist (out and about, photographing things in the world) and a tourist of the medium itself (navigating its history, modes, manners and mechanics). Many of his projects developed out of photographic pilgrimages: across Germany for The Blue Light (1997), to Chandigarh in India for The Trench (1998), through New Zealand and Australia for The Homely (1997–2001), and then through the Pacific Northwest for The Next Cabin (2000–2). At the same time, he treated the history of photography as something analogous to a landscape to be traversed, quoting from a range of established photographic approaches, oscillating between populist pictorialism (The Homely and The Next Cabin) and avantgarde abstraction (The Field, 1994–5, and The Colony, 2000–2).

We habitually distinguish the tourist from the traveller. Tourists are sightseers, exploring places of preordained significance, photographing the already photographed, while the traveller veers off the beaten track, expecting the unexpected. In reality, Hipkins is a committed traveller, yet his work wallows in touristic déjà vu. It’s always about revisiting the old new frontiers, not about opening up new ones. But he’s not nostalgic. His returns are never reassuring; they’re always melancholic, uneasy, haunted by skeletons in closets. For Hipkins, the present is tainted by the past, by the history of colonialism, modernism, fascism, empire—and photography is implicated, it’s ideological. Hipkins leaves us with the suspicion that we can’t see photography outside of this history, nor this history outside of photography.

From the outset, Hipkins’s still-photography work was riddled with cinematic suggestion. Typically starting with the definite article, his titles recalled those of horror films. The Blue Light, borrowed its title from the 1932 movie starring Leni Riefenstahl (who would become Adolf Hitler’s go-to director) and included a still from Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940). In his more abstract photographic works, Hipkins would mass identical or near-identical images to generate jittery pseudo-cinematic effects. In Zerfall (1997–1998), the images were commercially printed on lengths of photographic paper—one per roll of film—and hung, like footage at a film editor’s desk, waiting to be ordered, assembled, reanimated. Similarly but differently, the pictorialist images Hipkins was also shooting around this time would be edited together as a frieze in The Homely, suggesting a meandering cinematic narrative.

Despite such cinematic references and qualities, it wasn’t until The Pack, his 1999 residency show at Artspace, Sydney, that Hipkins made his first moving-image work. The Relay was simple, crude; a long take showing spherical bath bombs dissolving in turn in a tub of water. Later that year, he incorporated another entropy-themed video into his Dunedin Public Art Gallery show, The Circuit. His monitor-bound video diptych, The Rim, observed coloured jelly crystals dissolving in milk. Both video works were literal (documents of studio-based experiments) and suggestive (of The Rim, Justin Paton observed, ‘crystal-sodden plates of milk bloom to resemble both wounds and eyes’).²

With The Host (Part II) (2003), Hipkins entertained a wider range of filmmaking techniques: editing and voiceover. He dissolved his way through a sequence of still-life photos of polystyrene cones ‘hosting’ parasitic accretions. He described the cones as ‘phallic’ and compared the add-ons to ‘barnacles’ and ‘penile warts’. In the voiceover, a man and a woman read what sounds like an old prayer: a litany of teats, in alphabetical order by name.³ The man recites the female ones, such as ‘Teat of Albertine’ and ‘Teat of Mary’; the woman the male ones, ‘Teat of Arthur’, ‘Teat of Jack’, and so on. They talk over each other, neutralising each other. The Host (Part II) conflates male and female (penis and breast), Madonna and child (Mary’s breast and Christ’s body—the Eucharist), sacred and profane (sacrament and sex), ye olde and contemporary.

Hipkins also plays up the innuendo in The Field (Part II) (2004), while returning to a single long take. In the studio, his camera negotiates a field of suspended coloured polystyrene balls, prodding them. The only illumination comes from a light mounted on the camera itself, recalling the amateur film look celebrated in the indie horror movie The Blair Witch Project (1999). Hipkins explained: ‘The (hidden) lens in its phallic glory probes and toys with the suspended balls in a sexually charged (and at times) aggressive manner. A rhythmical rimming and swaying occurs as polystyrene balls spill around and around the lens hood … in a prolonged tease.’⁴ It’s like point-of-view pornography.

After that, Hipkins stopped making moving-image works for six years.

By the time he began making real films, he was a mid-career artist. Nevertheless, Hipkins took the pathways expected of rookie filmmakers: writing scripts and pitching for arts council short film grants. Where his artist videos had been basic and abstract, his early shorts featured actors and were made with crews.

The first, The Master (2010), was surprisingly conventional. As a first-time filmmaker, Hipkins followed the manners of the old masters of transcendental cinema, Carl Theodor Dreyer and Robert Bresson. Shot at Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts—where Hipkins had studied and was now teaching—The Master is a portrait of a tormented young artist (the antithesis of Hipkins himself). After some agonising, the young man confronts a Suprematist square-on-square canvas hung in a corner. With a knife, he makes a single Fontanaesque incision down its middle, then forces his hand through, as if reaching into the void, or a vagina, or a wound. The accompanying voiceover seems biblical, but is adapted from Oscar Wilde’s prose poem ‘The Master’ (1894). In it, a sad young man claims he too has performed miracles, but hasn’t been recognised as the Messiah—hasn’t been crucified. We identify the young man we hear with the young man we see. Then, Hipkins transitions from artsy black-and-white to colour, showing the painting now miraculously intact. Has it been healed or was it never really cut? Is the young artist truly the master or just a deluded student on a Christ trip? Is Hipkins being sincere or snide?

In 2013, Hipkins made another angsty psychological portrait. His third film, The Dam (O), was shot in two days, improvised, without a script. It stars Matthew Sutherland, known from New Zealand films and TV. For no apparent reason, he wanders around the Waitakeres, passing by various dams. Sometimes this lonely man seems a bit demented. Is he oppressed by nature or by culture? There’s no dialogue, though he portentously intones ‘dam o’ three times at one point; his open mouth recalling that of Munch’s screamer. The film’s blurb explains: ‘The film traces a physical and psychological journey through interconnecting waterways, native bush, and small-gauge railways … navigating the metaphor of the dam as a psychological block.’ But, despite its often compelling shots of bush and water, The Dam (O) doesn’t fully deliver on the press release, and Hipkins quickly rejects this way of working.

Actually, it’s Hipkins’s second short, This Fine Island (2012), that shows the way forward. It develops the voiceover idea. The text comes from Charles Darwin’s account of visiting the Bay of Islands in 1835, in The Voyage of the Beagle (1839). The film follows a young couple—Pākehā girl (Florence Noble), Māori boy (Joe Dekkers-Reihana)—camping, in the Bay presumably.⁵ They visit an old kainga, pitch a tent, explore the landscape, enjoy a spliff, and juggle. Over these images, we hear Darwin’s condescending observations of unwashed Māori followed by his pleasure in discovering an English farmhouse ‘placed there as if by an enchanter’s wand’ with ‘large gardens with every fruit and vegetable which England produces and many belonging to a warmer clime’. This fills him with hope for the future of ‘this fine island’, though he goes on to observe the annihilation of the bird population by the introduced rat. The couple stands in for us, as viewers, pondering colonialism from the other end of history.

This Fine Island is coherent, demonstrating Hipkins’s abilities as a cinematic storyteller, but it’s over-engineered. He dots the i’s, crosses the t’s. For instance, as we hear Darwin’s words, we see the girl reading them in a book, clarifying why we’re hearing ‘then’ but seeing ‘now’. It’s all spelt out. However, in the first minute, things aren’t so clear. We open on a moody shot of a rough ocean; we pan across an old entomological illustration; there’s a shot of falling water, then views of the Moon. At the same time, we hear a disconnected litany of suggestive section descriptions from Darwin’s book: ‘blue haze, wasp killing a spider, sacred tree, driving horses, return to the ship, second visit, fire made of bones, scenes of violence, religious feelings, return to the ship, edible fungus, zoology, frozen carcasses, hummingbirds, great earthquake, the sea black, red snow, locusts, leafless bushes, terrestrial lizard, succession of waterfalls, New Zealand, Bay of Islands’.

It’s only after this introduction that intertitles indicate the source of the voiceover, that actors are introduced, and that the voiceover becomes expository. But it’s this opening sequence—combining heterogeneous words and images in an intriguing, fractured montage—that will become the germ of Hipkins’s subsequent films, his MO. He stops working with actors and crews (though he continues to engage collaborators on his soundtracks). He starts to shoot everything himself. Instead of depicting disoriented characters, as in The Master and The Dam (O), he focuses on disorienting his viewers, typically without a person in shot.

The Quarry (2013) combines a voiceover from John Ruskin’s meditations on architecture and beauty in The Stones of Venice (1851–3) with views of Christchurch. It is read by a child, a girl, who struggles with articulating words that are clearly not her own. In the wake of the traumatic 2011 Christchurch earthquake, Ruskin’s words take on new pertinence. In describing the elements of nature for culture to imitate, he explains: ‘It may be asked why I do not say rocks or mountains. Simply because the nobility of these depends, first, on their scale, and, secondly, on accident. Their scale cannot be represented nor the accident systematised. No sculptor can in the least imitate the peculiar character of accidental fracture. He can obey or exhibit the laws of nature but he cannot copy the felicity of her fancies nor follow the steps of her fury. The very glory of a mountain is in the revolutions which raised it into power and the forces which are striking it to ruin. But we want no cold and careful imitation of catastrophe.’

The accompanying images encompass straight, relentlessly locked-down shots of both grand, elemental nature (rocks, mountains, clouds) and of Christchurch culture (parks and gardens, suburbs and building sites). People barely figure, except as specks in a few shots. The film’s almost oppressive coherence (its Christchurch conservatism) is broken when Hipkins intercuts inexplicably reversed-out shots of landscapes and building sites. By inserting these jarring elements, he exemplifies the use of non-naturalistic, experimental film language to indicate the deranged or uncanny. He suggests his film is itself both a convulsion and a building site ‘under construction’—a ruin and a ruin-in-reverse. But does The Quarry illustrate Ruskin or contradict him?

Hipkins hones his illustrated voiceover approach in The Port (2014). It’s ambitious. The blurb explains: ‘The Port has been described as ‘apocalyptic’ and aims to negotiate a plurality of spaces including utopian urban planning, charting of the solar system, time travel, ecological fragility, the hesitancy of memory, and an uncanniness of revisiting sites.’

The Port scrambles images from India and New Zealand. It juxtaposes India’s Jantar Mantars (its eighteenth-century architecturally scaled astronomical instruments) with the suburban architecture of Stonefields, Auckland’s new master-planned community—as if equally weird—and it works in more besides. The voiceover—drawn from H.G. Wells’s 1895 science-fiction novella The Time Machine, and read by Mia Blake—describes the time traveller’s sense of dislocation, as if describing our own dislocation as viewers of Hipkins’s film. Wells’s hero experiences different landscapes by travelling in time rather than space, as Hipkins’s film takes us to different places (and, by implication, different moments in history) while we remain stationary.

Hipkins took a playful approach in presenting The Port, emphasising the idea of things coming unstuck. In addition to creating a cinema version with a synchronised soundtrack, he made a gallery version with separate looped video and audio components of different lengths. In this iteration, Wells’s words align with Hipkins’s images at random, differently each time. The Port has also been shown as live cinema, with electronic music by Torben Tilly and Mia Blake reading bits of Wells’s text from cards drawn at random.⁶ Perhaps here Hipkins shows his hand, suggesting that any coincidence of words and images might be portentous and/or bewildering.

Hipkins also made his first feature in 2014. Erewhon is a tour de force. It shows that his voiceover/montage approach can hold audience attention for ninety-two whole minutes. Like The Port, its voiceover draws on early science fiction—Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel, Erewhon. This book was informed, in part, by the years Butler spent working on a New Zealand sheep station. Frequently compared to Gulliver’s Travels, the novel is an account of an exotic land (Erewhon being an anagram of ‘nowhere’) and its people (the Erewhonians). Their peculiar values and beliefs invert those of Butler’s own Victorian society. According to their law, criminals are treated as ill and the sick as criminals, vegetarianism is compulsory, and machines are banished for fear that they will become conscious and take over (which caused the Erewhonians to regress technologically). After sketching this fascinating culture, Butler’s account ends with a twist, outlining a scheme for profitably converting the Erewhonians to Christianity and exploiting them as labour in colonial Queensland. Hipkins’s voiceover, which cherry-picks sections from the book, is faithful to the novel in retaining this bleak postscript.

Despite its coherent first-person prose, the novel is disorienting—it takes us to another place. Hipkins’s adaptation doubles down on that disorientation. Laurence Simmons has described it as ‘a film of continual interruptions, juxtapositions and breaks in perspective and mood’.⁷ It sometimes seems like a sequence of more or less unrelated or arbitrarily related shots. Like The Quarry, Erewhon opens with reassuringly straight images, then introduces treated, manipulated ones. The film is sedate in pace yet lurches back and forth between the naturalistic/pictorialist and the manipulated/abstracted. Even its gorgeous scenic landscapes seem framed by ominous scare quotes. The camera is generally static; there are few camera movements to weave shots together. Movement within shots is negligible. Some shots look like stills—indeed, some are. Despite the grounding consistency of the voiceover (another male account read by a woman—Mia Blake again), the accompanying images do not establish any coherent register—which is precisely what compels our attention. Where will it go to next?

Erewhon is a study in montage. It feels as if Hipkins might have shot his subjects without a script, and then organised his images alongside the words as well as he might—like a bricoleur.⁸ It’s like an accumulation of second-unit cinematography (establishing shots and details), without the main event action to link them. Images seem to illustrate the voiceover, but obliquely, feeling like stand-ins, the next best thing. For instance, when the narrator describes first contact with the Erewhonians (‘The people were of a physical beauty which was amazing’), we don’t see people, we see flowers. We hear descriptions of Erewhonian colleges of unreason yet see brutalist New Zealand university buildings. We learn of that bleak plan to dispatch Erewhonians to toil in Queensland yet see the Wheel of Brisbane and an idyllic Gold Coast beach with iconic high-rises. There are also apparently random images, which add to the confusion: an unmanned electric sander jiggling on a wooden floor, a grotesquely decorated cake, a kid in a rubber mask, female faces from pin-ups, medical models, a bat, a skull, an aeroplane propeller, a box of extracted teeth, a gas mask, a toadstool, tendrils of electricity, and so on. We don’t know if the images are connected to the words. Are we making connections that aren’t there or missing ones that are?

Is Erewhon a work of fact (Hipkins’s documentary images) or of fiction (Butler’s fanciful text)? Are we even in New Zealand? Although we might assume it to be a film about New Zealand, some footage was shot in India (soaring birds, industrial machinery, a screaming steam engine) and in Queensland (including that flowers sequence). This recalls the way The Homely combined images shot in Australia and New Zealand, so we couldn’t tell which were which. It also recalls a familiar filmmaking practice: the way movies set Vietnam, say, are shot in the Philippines and Thailand.

Hipkins moves back and forth from views of nature (that could be from any time) to views of culture (historically specific). There are elements of infrastructure: a train, a bridge, a dam, a windmill, a radio transmitter, a factory. There’s a suburb with cars on a road. There are Orwellian touches: a mainframe computer, a drone. We don’t see people. The landscapes are empty. There are quaint museums, deserted workshops, ruins, junkyards—New Zealand as the Marie Celeste. By flicking between nature and culture, Hipkins constantly underlines the ‘settler’ dimension, prompting us to think of the colonial past as somehow implicit in the present, reminding us that ‘invasion is a structure, not an event’, as Patrick Wolfe put it.⁹ And yet, it isn’t clear whether Hipkins is equating Butler’s fictional then-and-there to the here-and-now, or contrasting them. What’s the relation between Butler imagining another culture and Hipkins filming his own? Are we the Erewhonians or did we supersede them? And who will supersede us and write our anthropological obituary?

As with The Port, Hipkins has presented Erewhon in different ways. It’s been projected in cinemas. He’s shown a segment as live cinema, with Rachel Shearer performing the music and Mia Blake reading the text.¹⁰ In galleries, he’s exhibited a looped chapter on a flatscreen. He’s also shown still photographs lifted from the film, arranged in frieze-style sequences. So, Erewhon is at once a film that recalls still photographs and a series of stills that evokes a film.

With Erewhon, Hipkins could have called it a day. It feels like the culmination. But he’s made two short films since, in the same idiom. New Age (2016) expands his subject matter, combining a voiceover drawn from an English spiritualist manual from the 1870s with images of Avebury’s stone circles. New World (2016) is an enquiry into genre—a deconstructed Western. In it, Hipkins rejects voiceover. This time, the text, excerpted from a Victorian travel report encouraging emigration to Texas, comes as intertitles. These are interspersed with still images appropriated from a variety of print sources and digitally treated, aerial views of Texas from Google Earth, and basic flag-like abstracts. Although it’s mostly silent, there are sporadic sound-effect elements. New World demonstrates how little is required to cue us to read a film as a ‘Western’, and, having anchored it there, how this determines and skews our consideration of every other element.

Hipkins’s films belong to and comment on a tradition of travelogue films as old as the medium itself. They counter both national-pride promotions (like Hugh Macdonald’s This Is New Zealand, 1970) and soulful globetrotting spectacles (like Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, 1982, and Ron Fricke’s Baraka, 1992). They share more with the alternative-cinema tradition of personal essay films, such as those of Chris Marker and Patrick Keiller, which are often portraits of places. But, unlike them, Hipkins doesn’t write his own voiceovers and illustrate them. Rather, he borrows someone else’s words and interferes with our understanding of those words through his choice of images. Hipkins-the-filmmaker is not identified with his narrator. For him, the film essay is a trope.

Throughout Hipkins’s films, we find similar images, similar treatments; images and approaches seem interchangeable. And, as Hipkins presents his films in different ways, nothing is exactly finished, definitive. We are left with a sense that any presentation is provisional and that works themselves are porous. It’s as if they open up onto one another and onto his other works. A film about Texas is, by analogy, also about frontier New Zealand and about contemporary New Zealand. Butler’s Erewhonians could be Darwin’s Māori or they could be us. Darwin could be Wells’s time traveller. Colonialism could be science fiction and science fiction could be colonialism, and both are Westerns. Avebury’s stone circles are Auckland’s Stonefields. Erewhon is homely. And so on.

Hipkins’s project is voracious, ever-expanding and complex, but it’s also claustrophobic. No matter how much it absorbs (in techniques and genres, sources and references), everything becomes snared in its historical imbroglio. If Hipkins started out making works of still photography that were haunted by cinema, he has ended up making films that look like photo sequences. Now, he operates in a nowhere land, an uncanny place between cinema and gallery, between the moving and the still, between life and death. If his foray into filmmaking once seemed like an aberration or a detour, it now makes complete sense. He has come full circle.

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[IMAGE Gavin Hipkins Erewhon 2014]

 

Gavin Hipkins filmography
The Relay 1999, VHS, 60min
The Rim 1999, two-channel monitor-based installation, VHS, 60min
The Host (Part II) 2003, digital video, 8min 27sec
The Field (Part II) 2004, digital video, 11min 21sec
The Master 2010, shot on Super 16mm transferred to digital video, 6min 4sec
This Fine Island 2012, shot on Super 16mm, digital video, 12min 10sec
The Dam (O) 2013, digital video, 7min 46sec
The Quarry 2013, digital video, 11min 30sec
The Port 2014, digital video, 17min 24sec
Erewhon 2014, digital video, 92min
New Age 2016, digital video, 10min
New World 2016, digital video, 12min 38sec