Beyond all Utterance: Reflections on the making of the films Memoirs of a Plague and Locusts: Creatures of the flood

Abstract

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.- Herman Melville, Moby Dick1This paper reflects on the making of two very different films by the author. Both films were on the same subject: our relationship with locusts. One film, Memoirs of a Plague, was a personal inquiry, informed by an ethnographic filmmaking approach. The other film, Locusts: Creatures of the flood, was created from the same source material as Memoirs of a Plague, but was made for an international cable television channel, according to the demand for a magazinestyle documentary.2BackgroundIn 2008 I started making an independent film called Memoirs of a Plague. The numerous journeys I undertook to make the film over the next three years took the form of a personal and idiosyncratic inquiry into locust control around the world. My initial thesis was that our reactions to the natural phenomenon of locusts may arise from long-held prejudices and myths, rather than the reality of the threat that they pose. The film was based on found situations where individuals and governments were confronting what they perceived to be a locust menace. The bulk of the funding for Memoirs of a Plague came from Screen Australia's Innovation Program.In the course of my filming of Memoirs of a Plague, National Geographic became interested in the project and commissioned the making of a television version. This was to be a bespoke film, which came to be called Locusts: Creatures of the flood. It was to be made from the same source material as Memoirs of a Plague.1While the cinematography in both films was inspired by National Geographic's leadership in natural history filmmaking, the film that I was to make for them would have to conform to a style to which their audiences had become accustomed. A commissioning editor explicitly told me that the form of Memoirs of a Plague was completely unsuitable for the audience to which they marketed their films; however, there was no manual to explain this difference or the process by which Memoirs of a Plague needed to be reconfigured for television.The stark difference in logic instantiated in Memoirs of a Plague and Locusts: Creatures of the Flood, and the approaches to filmmaking they stand for, is revealed when we reflect upon the way the two films were constructed. In what follows, I will compare and discuss some aspects of the making of the two films. I hope this discussion may contribute to critical understandings of how different the process of filmmaking can be when confronting the same subject. My own filmmaking practice has been strongly influenced by ethnographic films, modelled on the approach of filmmakers such as Jean Rouch, David MacDougall and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. In this spirit, I approached the filming of Memoirs of a Plague as an open-ended inquiry. I attempted to incorporate a sense of the process of filming as well as acknowledging my own relationship to the subject.In the case of Creatures of the Flood, the approach was to be very different. I was aware that this film was to be created as content for a market dominated by television-style documentary films, and where it is expected such films will provide an audience with both questions and answers.Filmic BeginningsMoby Dick inhabited my mind in 2007. I was nearing the end of three years of work on my film End of the Rainbow.* Reading about whales and the ocean was one way of escaping the intensity of finishing the film. I was fascinated by Ahab's obsessive pursuit of Moby Dick. The white whale speaks for many hounded creatures. This association led me to develop an idea I already had for a film on locusts - a subject that had interested me since my employment as a field officer with the Australian Plague Locust Commission when I first left university. I chose to ignore Herman Melville's advice. He cautioned against casting a character such as a locust: 'To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. …