A dream, a visual diary: disruptive narrative modes in When the Camera Stopped Rolling (Jane Castle, 2021)

ABSTRACT

Dubbed ‘a forgotten trailblazer’ of Australian filmmaking, Lilias Fraser was also the mother of cinematographer, Jane Castle, who spent more than a decade piecing together When the Camera Stopped Rolling (2021), a multifaceted documentary that draws on a rich archive of photographs, home movies and film footage shot by three generations of the Fraser-Castle family. Describing her love-hate relationship with the film, Castle says, ‘The final form was found through the making, rather than having a plan and applying a plan. I didn't know what it was about until it was finished.’ In its final form, When the Camera Stopped Rolling disrupts audience expectations of a hagiographic or elegiac narrative celebrating the lifetime achievements of Lilias Fraser. Ultimately, When the Camera Stopped Rolling is Jane Castle's story: an exquisite work of autofiction and self-extraction from the Fraser-Castle family and its audio-visual archives.

KEYWORDS:

• Lilias Fraser
• Australian film pioneer
• industrial documentary
• women filmmakers
• Jane Castle
• archival documentary
• autofiction
• mother-daughter films

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Introduction

More than a decade in the making, Jane Castle's archival documentary film, When the Camera Stopped Rolling (2021), has enjoyed an extensive and enthusiastic critical reception (see https://whenthecamerastoppedrolling.film/#press). The trailer for the film promises to bring to light a forgotten trailblazer of women's filmmaking, but rather than lionise Lilias Fraser as a pioneer of Australian documentary film production, When the Camera Stopped Rolling does something quite unexpected and quietly magnificent. Jane Castle's wall-to-wall narration and the richly layered image-track (excavated from the Fraser-Castle family archives) disrupt audience expectations of a hagiographic and elegiac celebration of Lilias Fraser's unheralded contribution to industrial/factual/utilitarian filmmaking in Australia from the 1950s to 1990s. When the Camera Stopped Rolling embroils us in a multifaceted work of autofiction and self-extraction that transfixes our attention on a rich ‘visual diary’ accompanied by Jane Castle's ‘dream-like’ narration (FilmInk Staff 2022).

The disruption of audience expectations of an elegiac hagiography begins with the film's opening sequence, an extract from Water Birds of the Inland, a 1964 production from Produced by the Australian Commonwealth Film Unit in conjunction with the State Department of Education, directed by Jane's mother, Lilias Fraser, and produced by her father, Norman Castle (Fraser 1964). On-screen, water birds fly over a pristine wetland while eggs hatch in the nests below. Jane's voice-over interrupts the original, didactic, male voice-over to inform us that she was in-utero when her mother, Lilias, was shooting the footage we are watching. On the soundtrack, Jane comments: ‘It's strange how we come into being. And then, how we leave.’ It is precisely this enigma, of coming into being and then leaving, that lies at the heart of When the Camera Stopped Rolling as it moves from hagiographic and elegiac modes to autofiction and self-extraction. The supple integration of these modes was achieved through Jane Castle's decade-long process of immersion and reflection, supported by an extensive circle of collaborators, acknowledged in the film's closing credits.

The opening sequence also serves as a prelude to the key events of Lilias Fraser's life, and the circumstances of her death anticipated in an artwork made by Jane, five years before Lilias was run over by a train in 2004. The ‘slow motion sorrow’ evoked by Jane's voice-over (as we watch the flight of the water birds and listen to the story of Lilias's death) pervades the film and compels our attention. As the film unfolds, Jane's narration, the music track and the painstakingly assembled archival footage immerse us in the work of remembering and reflecting on Lilias Fraser, the family and culture that gave birth to her, and the audio-visual archives bequeathed to the film by three generations of the Fraser-Castle family. Below, I trace the film's hagiographic and elegiac modes before turning to a reading of When the Camera Stopped Rolling, informed by Claire Boyle's article on autofiction and Ross Gibson's essays on self-extraction, and instants of clarity achieved through a process of immersion/reflection.

Disrupting the hagiographic mode: pioneer/trailblazer

When the Camera Stopped Rolling

2021 1 h 14m

A daughter turns her camera onto the life of her trailblazing filmmaker mother.

The daughter of a trailblazing Australian filmmaker, Lilias Fraser, tells the epic tale of her mother's extraordinary life, her career and their challenging relationship. Director Jane Castle digs deep using the rich textures of a stunning, unseen part of Australia's cinematic history. (DOCPlay)

Jane Castle's archival documentary film, When the Camera Stopped Rolling, is easily mistaken for a hagiographic work of rediscovery that brings into the public realm the overlooked filmmaking career of Lilias Fraser (1930–2004). While hagiography is a mode originally associated with the lives of saints, its contemporary meaning entails the idealised biography of a founding figure. Here, I want to acknowledge the accolades When the Camera Stopped Rolling has won for bringing to public attention the life of Lilias Fraser as a forgotten trailblazer and pioneer, whose struggles and compromises might inspire new generations of women who grow up wanting to do ‘something creative.’ While she is recognised for the extraordinary feat of directing more than 40 industrial films, beginning in the late 1950s, well before the 1970s revival of the Australian feature film industry, Lilias is never portrayed as saintly. As ‘a forgotten trailblazer’ (see Official Trailer, imdb.com), Lilias had little choice but to work with her producer and husband, Norman Castle, to attract commissions from a range of organisations including Film Australia, Hamersley Iron Ore, Dairying in Australia, Australian Dairy Produce Board, Australian Mining Industry Council, Australian Wheat Board, Comalco, Conzinc Riotinto of Australia, M.I.M Holdings, and General Motors Holden.

A modern hagiography might celebrate Lilias as an intrepid antipodean, a pioneer who takes what she needs from Europe, returns to Australia and literally ventures into unknown territory, with Norman bidding low to win film contracts and over-spending to deliver nation-building, industrial films. Such a hagiography might shy away from the disintegration of the Fraser-Castle marriage (mired in debt, drinking and violence) but in hagiography, after the fall comes salvation. Unable to get funding to keep making films when she divorces Norman in 1975, Lilias becomes a distributor at the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op. A new generation of feminist filmmakers embrace Lilias's experience and acknowledge her early commitment to progressive issues, including Indigenous land rights and the plight of women in remote towns.

At the age of sixty, a big test for Lilias is the desire of her daughter, Jane (a film school graduate and commercial cinematographer), to make a documentary together. As Jane says, ‘it sounds like a great mother-daughter story.’ However, their collaboration on Women of the Iron Frontier (Fraser 1990) flounders because mother and daughter see things differently. The question here is the limits of hagiography for telling the story of Lilias Fraser as a ‘trailblazer’ and ‘pioneer’ whose two daughters made inroads into international filmmaking. Does Jane Castle's commitment to exposing what happened behind closed doors – in her parents’ marriage and in Jane's unstable relationship with her mother – tarnish or enhance Lilias Fraser's pioneering legacy for future generations? After all, in the genre of hagiography, saints were once sinners who seek redemption and are canonised long after their deaths. While the hagiographic mode is foregrounded in the publicity for the film, one of the surprises of When the Camera Stopped Rolling is that it delivers so much more than a glowing portrait of a forgotten trailblazer.

Disrupting the elegiac mode: water, light and shadow

Elegy has long been aligned with poetry (with Whitman, Milton, Coleridge) and has been defined as a lament for the dead, a song of mourning entailing serious reflection and self-reflection. Produced by veteran independent filmmaker Pat Fiske, When the Camera Stopped Rolling not only retrieves Lilias Fraser from a forgotten archive, it speaks to classic independent, feminist films that can be considered elegiac works of mourning that bring to light the difficulties of the mother-daughter relationship. This body of films ­(including Maidens, Thornley 1978, To the Other Shore, Thornley 1996 and The Silences, Nash 2015), evokes the intergenerational divide between the daughters of the nuclear age (born after Hiroshima) and their mothers who embraced homemaking and consumerism in the aftermath of World War II. Here, I want to frame When the Camera Stopped Rolling as an elegiac work of reflection and mourning that literally shines a light on the Fraser-Castle family archives. By repurposing and reframing still and moving images (that lull the viewer into an elegiac experience of Lilias's love of light and movement, stillness and water) Jane Castle makes an original contribution to a rich body of mother-daughter films that involve a poetic lament for the mother and her fate under patriarchy (see Collins 2001).

The elegiac mode in When the Camera Stopped Rolling engages with Jane Castle's work of rediscovering her ‘archived’ mother. Using the family album and home movies, Jane brings to light a determined young woman who sought a creative path in the 1950s, by jumping on board an ocean liner that was taking her sister to art school in London. Refusing the role of dutiful daughter ­ – taken out of school to run the family home and care for her demanding mother – Lilias is the antithesis of the stay-at-home mothers eulogised in Oliver, McMurchy, Thornley and Nash's epic documentary For Love or Money (1983), and mourned in William Yang's Sadness (Ayres, 1999). Lilias is more like Rivka Hartman's mother Dora Bialestock in The Mini-Skirted Dynamo (1996), a doctor and crusader who pays a price for going against the grain. Like Beatrice in Susan Murphy Dermody's Breathing Under Water (1991), Lilias ventures far from home, but it is her daughter Jane who descends into the underworld. In When the Camera Stopped Rolling, the elegiac work of reflection gradually extends to include Jane's father, Norman Castle. In the case of both parents, the elegiac mode, in Jane's words, involves transforming something ‘horrible’ and ‘traumatic’ into something ‘more beautiful’.

While Jane's narration does not shy away from a warts-and-all portrait of Lilias and Norman, the image-track returns again and again to the elegiac mode. This mode is evident in the film's moody interplay of water and light, movement and reflection, solitude and loss. Yet, time and again, the elegiac mode is disrupted by Jane's voice-over, excerpts from Lilias's emphatic letters and Norman's looming presence. Three sequences (featuring light and water) exemplify the film's elegiac mode. The first involves Lilias studying photography and learning to see light through the camera lens at Guildford School of Arts in the UK. Shrugging off the confines of the darkroom and the still image, Lilias discovers the moving image and returns to Australia to shoot her first film, The Beach (1957). Using specially imported film stock, Lilias captures antipodean light and shadow in black and white footage that highlights the expressive elements of coastal trees, sandy bays, ruffled waves, a solitary bird and the scurrying figures of two nuns leaning into the wind.

After this elegiac debut, at Norman's behest, Lilias goes to Paris and is accepted into the national film school which proves disappointingly old-fashioned. Opting out, Lilias spends her time at the Cinémathèque documenting the techniques of the French New Wave. It comes as a shock then, to see footage from the industrial documentaries directed by Lilias and produced by Norman from the 1960s until their divorce in 1975. As we absorb this prosaic body of work – where the emphasis is on explaining the practicalities of dairy farming, mining projects, outback towns, freight trains and the felling of forests by over-sized machines – we learn that in 1969 Lilias made This Is Their Land (see Fraser 1970), one of Australia's first films to cover a protest march from central Sydney to La Perouse, raising the issue of Indigenous land rights. To make the film, Lilias repurposed footage from an industrial film project she had refused to complete after being told to invent scenes of Aboriginal families enjoying the white lifestyle in a mining town.

In contrast with the didactic tone of films produced and directed by her parents, in When the Camera Stopped Rolling Jane's play with light and water, darkness and the harbour, has more in common with Lilias's debut film The Beach (1957), than with the Fraser-Castle films of the 1960s–1970s. In one sequence of When the Camera Stopped Rolling, Jane's fractured memory of her parents’ divorce is conveyed through time-lapse footage that adds tension to a series of low-angle shots of the family's waterside home shadowed by darkness, deserted streets lit by urgent pulses of colour; and metallic flashes of light deflected by water in a hidden cove. At the end of this sequence, the play of light and darkness gives way to a cleansing: the pain of the divorce is ameliorated by the story of Lilias and her daughters surfing their way down the coast, their spirits lifted by the swell of ocean breakers glistening in the sunlight.

A further evocation of the elegiac mode (featuring light and shadow, wind and sand) is both mysterious and melancholy. It comprises two shots, drained of colour and light, with no voice-over or music. The first shot presents a 180° view of a wintery beach, framed by a vertical structure so that the horizontal planes of the boardwalk, the sand, the sea and the sky draw the eye far out to sea. The second shot is angled up the beach in the direction of sand swirling in the wind. Our gaze is drawn to a solitary figure, jogging against the wind towards a distant headland. These monochromatic shots hark back to Lilias's first and most poetic film, The Beach (1957). They evoke the duration and passage of time, Lilias's unrealised film project Sea Symphony/Beach Culture, and the approaching horizon of ageing and death. The shots give us pause. And they remind us of the gift that Lilias gave to Jane, the 17-year-old schoolgirl who picked up her father's Super 8 camera, accepted her mother's square of red cellophane, and taught herself how to capture light. These melancholy beach shots, then, mark a transitional moment as the focus of the film shifts from Lilias and Norman to Jane, and the mode shifts from hagiography and elegy to autofiction and self-extraction.

Cinematic autofiction: ‘a transformation in the self and how it understands itself’

In a special dossier published in Senses of Cinema (Issue 99, 2021), a range of independent, personal and autobiographical films are reframed as Australian Autofictions (see Collins 2021; Danks 2021; Flaster 2021; Hawker 2021; Luscri 2021; Nash 2021). The dossier includes an eloquent essay by Fiona Villella on Bill Mousoulis's film, My Blessings (1997). Villella begins with a succinct summary of Claire Boyle's definition of autofiction:

Unlike autobiography, autofiction involves more than simply recounting the key events of one's life; rather, it is an act of self-inscription in which [in Boyle's words] ‘the self makes itself comprehensible to itself and to others.’ This process can also lead to [in Boyle's words] ‘a transformation in the self and how it understands itself.’ (Villella 2021)

Making the case for cinematic autofiction, Boyle initially draws on Vincent Colonna for whom the term autofiction ‘resists close definition because it is not a genre so much as a “posture”, or attitude, taken by the author in the act of writing. […] What all its forms share, however, is what Colonna considers the defining feature of autofiction: the idea of transformation.’ (Boyle 2012, para. 5)

The transformations of autofiction are not simply metamorphoses that the author creates on a whim, to create a fictionalised avatar of their own self (or an autofiction). Rather, it is the act of self-inscription itself, when practised as a tekhnè (or technique) of the self, that brings about a transformation in the self and how it understands itself. From this perspective, what makes autofiction fictional is that the self who self-writes as a means of self-improvement will never coincide exactly with the self it wrote. (Boyle 2012, para. 8)

In the case of cinema, ‘[m]ise-en-scene, editing, lighting, camera work: all function as techniques for rendering the self, all contribute to cinema as a technology of the self’ (Boyle 2012, 9). For Boyle, the exemplary cinematic autofiction is Agnès Varda's Les Plages d’Agnès (2008). In the conclusion to her astute account of Varda's fictional and performative approaches to widowhood and mourning in Les Plages, Boyle expands Colonna's notion of autofiction as not only ‘transformative of the self’ but also as ‘beneficial’ in the sense that ‘care of the self’ might take precedence over ‘knowledge of the self’ (Boyle, para. 17–18).

In When the Camera Stopped Rolling, two melancholic beach shots (described above) mark the film's shift from elegiac to autofictional mode. In autofictional terms, Jane Castle's acts of self-inscription through which ‘the self makes itself comprehensible to itself and others’ (Boyle 2012, 6), structure the third act of the film. In her mid-30s, Jane steps away from a frenetic career as an international cinematographer and reframes her fateful decision (taken at the age of 17) to pick up her father's Super 8 camera. In an act of self-inscription, of making her ‘self’ comprehensible to herself and others, Jane recounts her repeated attempts as a cinematographer to get closer to her mother (while her father is not yet back in the picture). Jane's first attempt to transform herself in relation to Lilias is narrated as a clash of aesthetics in the making of Women of the Iron Ore Frontier (Fraser 1990). As a director of utilitarian documentaries, Lilias wants ‘to explain things’ while Jane, influenced by observational methods, wants to shoot a story ‘as it unfolds.’ Looking back, Jane says, ‘I was so angry and now I know why. I’d become a cinematographer to get closer to Mum and it wasn't working.’ A decade after the failed attempt at collaboration, despite her international profile as a commercial cinematographer, Jane has become a ‘self’ she doesn't recognise: ‘One day I looked up from my viewfinder and found myself shooting a blood-soaked, B-grade horror film [Leprechaun 2] … Even my lighting was bad.’

From this low point, the film recounts Jane's attempts at ‘care of the self’ through a series of transformations. After quitting the international screen industry, Jane recuperates in Central Australia by making a film for the Utopia community on Alyawarre and Anmatyerre country. Rather than continue with documentary filmmaking, in search of a new ‘technology of the self’, Jane goes to art school. In response to a news item (on an order issued by British Rail to train drivers to continue to run over the body of a woman) Jane makes an uncanny artwork by freezing a poem, photographs and roadkill in blocks of ice. Not only does the artwork prefigure her mother's death five years later, it prompts further transformations of the self. In 2002, Jane directs Sixty Thousand Barrels, a film about toxic waste in Sydney's industrial suburb of Botany that resonates strongly with the industrial films made by Lilias and Norman. In a further act of self-inscription, Jane becomes a spokesperson for the Total Environment Centre, looking and sounding uncannily like her mother as she addresses the camera. Yet neither art school nor environmental activism result in the ‘transformation in the self’ that Jane seeks in relation to Lilias and Norman.

Self-extraction and a clearing: ‘how we come into being, and how we leave’

In an interview that sums up the decade-long process of making When the Camera Stopped Rolling, Jane Castle says: ‘The final form was found through the making, rather than having a plan and applying a plan. I didn't know what it was about until it was finished.’ (FilmInk Staff 2002) While the closing sequences of When the Camera Stopped Rolling might be considered elegiac, bringing ‘slow motion sorrow’ to the ageing and death of Jane's parents, to conclude this essay I want to propose that Jane's depiction of Norman's passing be considered through the lens of Ross Gibson's essay, ‘Self Extraction’ (2015a), and that the death of Lilias (depicted in the film's opening and closing sequences) be considered through Gibson's essay, ‘A Forest. A Clearing’ (2015b).

Self extraction

While for Boyle, the act of self-inscription leads to a transformation of the self, for Ross Gibson (2015a) it is the ‘transformation of given things’ (113) by the ‘ever-altering self’ (120) that gives rise to the artwork. In his essay ‘Self Extraction’ Gibson reflects on where art comes from. He concludes:

The new creation comes … from the everyday world where all that is extant is ready to be refashioned, including sentences, poems, artworks and myriad elements of culture that previous generations have produced and worked to preserve … So art comes from the transformation of given things, from relics and remembrances. And in that transformation there is usually a kind of treason, a betrayal of the given thing. (2015a, 113)

In contrast with Boyle's focus on self-inscription and self-transformation, Gibson offers ‘the ever-altering self’ that emerges from ekphrasis: ‘the practice of glossing one mode of expression with another mode. Words rendering painting, for example, or music formed in response to dance’ (Gibson 2015a, 117). Expanding on ekphrasis, Gibson offers Californian long-board surfing, glossed by Chet Baker's trumpet-playing, glossed by Dave Hickey's writing. Turning to his own ekphrastic practice, Gibson describes an ‘ever-altering self’.

So in Accident Music, I use each photo as a stimulus for poetry which is drawn from the receptacle of images, experiences, readings, viewings and writing that make up my self. I use the words to simmer the picture in some new way so the perceiver can extract some extra qualities from the imagery […] The language is meant … to extract surprising qualities or conjunctions of memory and insight from my ever-altering self. (Gibson 2015a, 120)

In When the Camera Stopped Rolling, Jane Castle's ‘authoring self’ reaches a point of crisis, encapsulated in a full-screen, black and white photograph of herself, pinned to a wall under the weight of a Panavision camera. This photograph signifies the end of Jane's international career as a workaholic cinematographer. It also marks a transition from the film's opening question of ‘how we come into being’ to the problem of ‘how we leave’. To conclude this essay, I describe the process of self-extraction that arises from Jane's ekphrastic work of mourning for her father Norman, and I evoke the film's poignant finale where Jane's ‘ever-altering self’ experiences ‘a clearing’ as she takes us back to the scene of her mother's death.

When Jane steps away from cinematography to make ‘images that exposed the darkness inside me’ her father is in decline. She turns to photography and we become privy to a montage of black and white photographs that capture Norman in tender close-ups: his hands, his face, his thinning hair are caught and caressed by light and shadow. These photographs bring us closer to Norman, revealing his vulnerability and uncertainty, but Jane's narration is wary, exposing her father's ‘delusions of grandeur’ and the conceit that he has ‘become a millionaire’. From Jane we learn that Norman dies alone. We are shown a photo of his body, laid out in an open coffin. Using words ‘to simmer the picture … so the perceiver can extract some extra qualities from the imagery’ (Gibson 2015a, 120), Jane confides that she read to Norman as he lay in his coffin. Norman's story ends with a group photo of (mostly) women associated with the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op supporting Lilias and Jane. Looking at this photo, we hear that Lilias spontaneously thanked Norman and paid for the funeral. Jane goes a step further. In an expansive, ekphrastic gesture, she scatters Norman's cremated remains on light-sensitive paper, conjuring a dark, swirling firmament of gold and silver stars forming galaxies and expanding into deep space. Extracting what Gibson calls a conjunction of ‘memory and insight from [an] ever-altering self’ (2015a, 120), Jane comments, ‘In the firmament, he was magnificent.’

A clearing

Engaging with the question of how ‘the effects of time’ can be made available through an immersive artwork, in ‘A Forest. A Clearing’ Gibson (2015b) uses the image of a clearing in a forest to convey what it is like to know a place, an artwork, an installation (and I would argue, Jane Castle's multi-modal film) through both immersion and reflection. To elucidate the argument, Gibson compares two forest stories that offer two responses to the problem of moving between ‘tacit’ and ‘explicit and communicable’ knowledge. In Forest Story #1, Gibson describes a Portuguese mariner-explorer Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, becoming catatonic in 1606 after losing his bearings in a Pacific island forest, having mistaken present-day Vanuatu for the east coast of Terra Australis Incognita. Gibson imagines de Quiros having fallen into ‘PANIC the condition of overwhelming “everywhereness”’ (2015b, 198).

Most likely, he sensed only chaos in the steaming environment and he had no way to get clear of the enveloping stimuli, no way to reflect on the forest, to rationalize it … No way to accede to a careful and orienting rhythm of investigative immersion/reflection/immersion/reflection … (Gibson 2015b, 197–198).

Confronted with the overwhelming task of investigating a vast archive, Jane Castle (supported by her many collaborators) had no choice but to overcome ‘PANIC’ and develop a rhythm of immersion and reflection. The virtuosic finale of the film testifies to the decade-long immersion of Jane and her many collaborators ‘in the forest’ of the Fraser-Castle archives. And yet, it is the process of immersion/reflection/immersion/reflection that brings us, along with Jane, into ‘a clearing’. In Forest Story #2, Gibson turns to Thoreau as an exemplar of how to develop the capacity for both immersion and reflection.

[…] when Henry David Thoreau … scraped a clearing for himself alongside Walden Pond … he made a scene for consciousness. Not only a metaphor […] Thoreau's clearing is also an unstable process in time and space, a blur between the phenomenal world and the noumenal self […] where intuition, reasoning, speculation and understanding all get a chance to work on and into each other. […] The clearing is useful because it is never completely clear even as it affords instants of clarity. (2015b, 198-199)

To borrow from Gibson on de Quiros and Thoreau, I propose that Jane Castle's decade-long immersion in the forest of memory and her family's multi-generational archive of photographs, films, voice recordings, letters, diaries and video footage, entails ‘instants of clarity’, those moments of knowing, after so long at the editing bench, what the film is about. In the film's final scenes, diary notes scrawled by Lilias reveal her frustration at not being able to fund Beach Culture/Sea Symphony, a project that would have reprised her love of film and the sea, first expressed in The Beach (1957). Turning her camera on her mother, Jane's viewfinder picks up early signs of dementia in Lilias's slightly dazed expression. A montage of black and white shots of domestic objects (a clay figurine, kitchen utensils, a clutter of files, each caressed by light and air) establishes a new feeling of equilibrium between mother and daughter. In a startling moment, this equilibrium is disrupted when Lilias grabs Jane from behind and, to free herself, Jane punches Lilias ‘hard’ on the arm. Jane's voice-over confirms the moment as not only a shock but ‘a clearing’, an ‘instant of clarity’. She says: ‘That's when I began […] to reach out for help, to forgive mum, and me. […] Our roles reversed […]. She got even speedier and funnier, and adorable. And her words began to flow like waves, unstoppable. She'd make her way to the local church every Sunday and sit up the front, singing at the top of her lungs’.

A montage of photographs shows an intrepid Lilias becoming more vulnerable and more lovable as she ventures out on urban bushwalks in her blue-striped shirt, blue trackpants, blue sunhat and blue backpack. In the film's haunting finale, Jane's camera retraces Lilias's final outing into the disorienting ‘forest’ of urban footpaths, shopping strips, slow moving traffic, a railway underpass and a train-track fenced off from pedestrians. Night falls, Jane is coming down with the flu and Lilias is nowhere to be found. Jane's phone messages go unanswered. The screen fills slowly, then more rapidly, with a profusion of moving lights, changing shape and colour. On the soundtrack we hear John Tavener's Mother and Child, a poignant choral work composed in 2002 for Tenebrae vocal ensemble. It begins with lyrics by Brian Keeble: Enamoured of its gaze The mother's gaze in turn Contrived a single beam of light Along which love may move. In the meld of colour and movement, light and music, the film arrives at ‘a clearing’ in which the hagiographic and elegiac modes converge with autofiction and self-extraction. As the last notes of Mother and Child fade, we are captured by Jane's final words and we join her ‘ever-altering self’ in an elegiac ‘instant of clarity’:

She lay under the stars, as I lay on the couch.

 Maybe the closest we’d ever been.

 I imagined that train hurtling towards her.

 And Mum in her final moment, entranced by the light.

Afterword

The end credit sequence is a vital part of the immersive experience of watching When the Camera Stopped Rolling and comprehending its scope and ambition. The extensive credits are testament to the expansive milieu that supported Jane Castle's decade-long immersion in the Fraser-Castle family archives. This milieu had its origins in Filmmakers Co-ops and women's film groups. The creative team includes stellar producer Pat Fiske, editor Ray Thomas, composer Kyls Burtland, sound designer Sam Petty, script editors Karin Altman, Ray Thomas and Alison Tilson, voice coach and director of narration Heather Mitchell, and a wide circle of independent filmmakers, archivists, musicians, donors, ambassadors and other supporters of the project. In a sequence that lasts more than seven minutes, the end credits are accompanied by Deborah Conway and a chorus of voices and musicians performing Down to the Ocean. This rousing performance evokes and acknowledges, not only the ocean and harbour beaches so vital to Lilias Fraser, but also the multitude of people who gathered to bring Jane Castle's project (and the Fraser-Castle archives) out of ‘the forest’ and into ‘a clearing’. It seems fitting, then, to dedicate this article to the memory of Ross Gibson, Sydney-based writer, academic, filmmaker, curator, installation artist and fellow-traveller, whose essays and artworks since the 1980s have illuminated and inspired so much thinking, teaching and writing in screen arts and Australian cultural history, and whose recent loss (during the writing of this article) is widely mourned.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (https://doi.org/10.1080/17503175.2023.2286568)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Felicity Collins

Felicity Collins is an Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Humanities & Social Sciences, La Trobe University. She has published widely on Australian screen culture and is the author of The Psyche of Feminist Filmmaking (PhD, 1995), The Films of Gillian Armstrong (1999), co-author with Therese Davis, Australian Cinema After Mabo (2004), and co-editor with Susan Bye and Jane Landman, A Companion to Australian Cinema (2019).