AFW + NFSA #71: Three Shorts by Women Associated with the Sydney Film Co-Op

The early 1970s saw an increased openness towards film as a complex and diverse artform in Australia. In 1970, after the establishment of the Australian Film Development Corporation, the first of the federal government’s initiatives was the Experimental Film and Television Fund (EFTF). Although short lived, being replaced by the broader Creative Development Fund in 1978, the EFTF enabled a space for emerging filmmakers to begin through experimentation. It was a starting point for, what are now, household filmmaking names in Australia. Under seemingly similar fecund circumstances, the Women’s Film Fund (WFF) was established in 1975. It was reflective of a time where political awareness of women’s issues related to vast forms of inequality was increasing, and film was seen as a medium that had the potential for consciousness raising and, more generally, a tool of expression for women. At a grassroots level, the co-op movements, starting with the Sydney Film Co-Op and soon followed by the Melbourne Filmmakers Co-Op, saw community-based interaction between a diverse group of filmmakers and artists who were having their films funded by these government-led initiatives but were being exposed to the ideas in these films through the co-ops screenings. It’s generally understood that many of the filmmakers exposed to the co-ops were inevitably influenced by the formal experimentation and politics of the co-op presented films. A resurgent interest in these groups has emerged thanks to John Hughes and Tom Zubrycki’s documentary Senses of Cinema (2022) and Hughes’ writing on the co-op movements around the country. 

AFW is one of the few film co-operatives running in Australia at the moment, and in continuing with that history, we’re excited to be screening three films by women filmmakers (Margot Nash, Robin Laurie, Helen Grace, and Tracey Moffatt) who were all ostensibly involved in the co-ops at different points and to varying degrees. The three films, We Aim to Please (1976), Serious Undertakings (1983), and Nice Coloured Girls (1987) all take different approaches to exploring issues related to women’s sexuality, rights, and its relation to a colonial history of politics in Australia. We Aim Please was funded by the EFTF, and Serious Undertakings and Nice Coloured Girls were funded by the WFF. All formally experimental in different ways, these films are full of satire and humour, each respectively attempting to redefine approaches to women's filmmaking. 

Screens with AFW member Hanna Chetwin’s short Inside Outside (2024), with sound by Alexander Garsden.

FILMS

Inside Outside (Hanna Chetwin)
2024, 8 mins.
A self-portrait during pregnancy, documenting physical changes while imagining the world outside as seen in utero. 

We Aim to Please (Margot Nash and Robin Laurie)
1976, 13 mins.
A playful, satirical, and erotic exploration of female sexuality that centres on filmmakers, Nash and Laurie, themselves. Male violence looms in We Aim to Please (1976), as it attempts to reclaim the visual tools that typically subject female bodies to glamorisation, where humour is an ally in its subversive irony. The film has had a recent resurgence through the feminist film program No Master Territories, necessarily so when a rise in autocracy worldwide seems to bring with it an intense decay in women’s rights. 

“We Aim to Please is an experimental feminist film that challenged the way the image of women had been produced by and for men.” (Susan Lambert)

Serious Undertakings (Helen Grace)
1983, 28 mins.

A woman’s voice claims “she wanted to make a film about childcare”. A man responds “I’d rather make a film about the Baader-Meinhof than about childcare.” A striking irony that highlights the male voices seeming unawareness of the inherent link between the politics of class and feminism. Serious Undertakings (1983) weaves together these issues with the question of the construction of an Australian settler-colonial identity. Episodic and encased in formal experimentation reflective of the film’s attempt to deconstruct these issues as being isolated from each other, it takes on the task of laying bare the role of the medium in constructing oppressive narratives around feminism, class, race, and gender more broadly that were, and still are, present in everyday Australian society. 

“Serious Undertakings was a groundbreaking film when it was made and today remains a valuable reminder of how important form is to content in cinema and to the meaning we give to our understanding of culture, politics and history.” (Susan Lambert)

Nice Coloured Girls (Tracey Moffatt)
1987, 16 mins.
Three young First Nations women head out into Kings Cross for a night of fun. As the title playfully suggests, they use the assumed naivety to their advantage, re-appropriating colonial relations of race and gender by playing into an older white man’s expectations and desires for lust. Joining him on his night on the town, they get him increasingly drunk, slowly taking advantage of his wealth (and naivety). The film exposes the ongoing effects of perceptions of masculinity in white Australians through the use of a male voiceover that narrates excerpts from William Bradley’s accounts of the First Fleet and early settler-life. Moffatt’s hallmark traits of theatricality in set design and form make for an adventurous short film where the realities of racial and gender inequality are reclaimed through surreal, haunting, yet jovial imagery. 

“Nice Coloured Girls effectively takes the taboo subject of sexual relationships between whites and Aborigines and dares to talk about the role these 'arrangements’ have played in Australian history. It does not show Aboriginal women as victims in this transaction, but instead how women have concisely exploited male desire.” (Romaine Moreton)