The River and the Filmmaker: A Journey towards a Meeting Place

Abstract

Agnès Varda’s idea of cinécriture opens up an understanding of the myriad of influences on the creation of a documentary, and its combination of malleability and certainty. For her, film is a product of exploratory walks and seemingly unconnected choices as well as the scripting, shooting and editing.

Michael Renov suggests there are four desires that influence the way a documentarian creates a film, one of them is ‘to express’. When I set out to film Rivers (2019), I was expressing anger and outrage at destruction taking place. For Donna Haraway, this ‘urgency’ arising from destruction does not create despair, rather it inspires action in response to the crisis. Thus the film became an action in response, both to the crisis the Murray-Darling river faced, and crises in my own life.

Through interviews I conducted, this article compares my own filming journey with that of two award winning filmmakers: Nicole Ma and Sabiha Sumar. I find that filmmaking involves locating a meeting place between the filmmaker, the filmed subject, and the audience.