Intersecting archives and Gaylene Preston’s War Stories Our Mother Never Told Us (1995, New Zealand)

ABSTRACT

Analysis of Gaylene Preston’s War Stories Our Mother Never Told Us (1995, New Zealand) reveals an intersection between three archival mediums: film, photographs, and oral histories. Preston’s ‘deceptively simple’ documentary is comprised of interview footage of seven elderly New Zealand women – Flo Small, Pamela Quill, Tui Preston (the filmmaker’s mother), Jean Andrews, Rita Graham, Neva Clarke McKenna, and Mabel Waititi – who recount, one-by-one, their experiences during World War Two. As each woman speaks, the mid-shot to close-up footage of the interviewee is crosscut with photographs and film clips from national archives in New Zealand, Great Britain, and the United States, as well as personal photographs from the women’s family albums. Despite its seemingly simple formal construction, I propose that Preston’s film is a new type of archival document that not only juxtaposes the public/official history of the archive with the private/personal testimony of oral traditions, but also weaves together these fractured histories into a new cultural text. Created by a filmmaker who insists that the only difference between documentary and drama is ‘the process,’ War Stories Our Mother Never Told Us provides a distinctly new public narrative of World War Two New Zealand.

KEYWORDS:

• Global women’s cinema
• oral histories
• archive
• New Zealand
• Māori
• World War II

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For example, in New Zealand courtrooms (as in most European/Western legal proceedings), written documents carry the weight of ‘objective’ evidence, while oral testimonies are considered inherently ‘subjective’ – despite the fact that oral histories serve as official ‘documents’ in Māori tradition, preserving and communicating events, dates, and facts critical to Māori ancestry. Giselle Byrnes’s ‘Jackals of the Crown? Historians and the Treaty Claims Process’ addresses this issue in relation to the Waitangi Treaty and Tribunal.

2 For example, Preston’s filmic style contrasts Soviet montage, which specifically seeks narrative and formal juxtaposition to generate meaning.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leah Vonderheide

Leah Vonderheide is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at Oberlin College. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, and M.A. from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Her research interests include global women’s cinema, feminist film theory, film and ethics, and strategies of resistance across fiction, documentary, and experimental film.