Journal articles on the topic 'African Epic poetry'

The first chapter provides a short introduction to the Turkic oral epic of Central Asia (Bref aperçu de l’épopée orale turque d’Asie centrale). Among the various traditions of Turkic oral poetry, this and the following chapters focus on the epics of what is termed the « central traditions », i.e. the oral poetry of the Uzbeks, Uighurs, Kazakhs, Karakalpaks and Kirghiz. In these traditions different types of singers can be distinguished: baxši, aqïn, žïraw, manasči and others; these singers are in general professionals who have acquired their art and their repertoire in the course of a more or less formal training with one or more master singers. Although there are many similarities between these traditions, there is also a fair amount of variety as to the form, the genre and the manner of performance of the epics. Epics can be in verse, they can be in a mixture of verse and prose; the verse can be in octosyllabic lines, often alliterating, or in lines of eleven/twelve syllables, often rhyming; in the singers’ repertoire there are both heroic epics and lyrical love romances (dastans); the singer might perform the epic in chanting without the accompaniment of an instrument (as the Kirghiz manasči), he might accompany himself on a plucked or bowed instrument, and he might be further accompanied by another musician or even a small ensemble. In the second chapter the influence of Islam on the Central Asian oral epics is discussed (Le héros et le saint: l’influence islamique sur l’épopée turque d’Asie centrale). Islamic influence is found in epics and oral narratives of an overtly religious persuasion as well as in secular heroic epics and romances. The former (called džañnāma in Uzbek) celebrate the deeds of the Prophet and his followers and successors, their wars against the infidels and their achievements as Moslem leaders. These narratives have also influenced non-religious epics such as for instance the Uzbek dastan of Yusuf and Ahmad. An important role in these and other epics is given to various helper saints, in particular to ‘Alī, the Forty Saints, the Twelve Imams, and various pirs and holy men. In discussing the heterodoxy in the invocations of these saints it is argued that the most important source of religious inspiration in the epics must be sought in the popular Islam of Central Asia, which incorporates many pre-Islamic elements. In the third chapter the pre-Islamic strata as found in the Central Asian epics are further examined (Le héros et le chamane: les strates archaïques de l’épopée turque). It is shown that there is an intimate connection between epic singer and shaman. This emerges from the use of terms like baxši for both the bard and the shaman, from the symbolism of the singer’s instrument, comparable to that of the shaman, and from initiation visions and sicknesses found both among bards and shamans. A closer view at two Altaian epics (Kögütey and Altay Buučay) shows that in this tradition the world of the pre-Islamic Turks is well preserved, but similar archaic strata can also be detected in the epics of the central traditions, among them the transformations of the hero and his horse, heroic adventures in the underworld, various mythological figures and the reanimation of the hero. The fourth chapter is concerned with questions of interpretation (“Sens” et “conjointure”: problèmes d’interprétation). With reference to the distinction between sens and conjointure as made in the introduction to Chrétien de Troyes’ Érec et Énide it is argued that an oral epic such as Qoblan or Manas should not only be interpreted on the textual level but must also be interpreted from a pragmatic point of view. While a close reading of the epic as a work of verbal art (plot, characterisation, style, narrative structure and narrative technique) is indispensable for its analysis, a fuller understanding presupposes a knowledge of the function an epic performance has in an oral (or partially oral) society and the place an epic occupies in its value system. Heroic epics like Qoblan or Manas are felt to be historical (by singer and audience) and they play an important role in identifying the roots of an ethnic group and in re-inforcing its identity. While these heroic epics are believed to reflect historical truth, they have nevertheless undergone considerable transformation in the course of their transmission, thus conforming in the plot and motif structure to mythic patterns as described by M. Eliade. The final chapter examines the actual performance of Central Asian oral epics (La voix vive: aspects de la performance). With the help of the terminological apparatus of the ethnography of communication the various constituents of an epic peformance are described and the event character of oral epic poetry is underlined. By the same token, the comments on the musical aspects of performance in the first chapter are elaborated, with examples from the various central traditions of Turkic epic poetry. While the recitation of epic contains many dramatic elements, the performance of Turkic epic poetry does not cross the borderline to drama as in some African or Asian traditions. It is stressed in concluding that as an oral art the performance aspects of Turkic epic are of the utmost importance for its full appreciation.

This paper sets out to put Kenneth Burke’s thought on language as representative of symbolic action into conversation with Aimé Césaire’s epic poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. The paper is divided into three main sections that set the stage for Burke and Césaire’s work to converse. The first section lays out an overview of Kenneth Burke’s thought on language paying particular attention to his definition of man, understanding of symbolism and symbolic action, and thoughts on poetry and poetics. The second section provides a working history of African philosophy, the Négritude movement, Césaire as a philosopher, politician, and poet, and provides an overview of main themes and intentions present in Cahier. The third section works to put Burke and Césaire into conversation by using Burke’s understanding of symbolic action and his notion of order and identification to examine key passages from Césaire’s Cahier. The paper works to present an informative and textured engagement between the work of Kenneth Burke and Aimé Césaire.

This paper theorizes on the function of language and embodiment in northern European storytelling through a self-reflex analysis of the author’s experience performing Beowulf in its original dialect, as a solo, while dancing. Beowulf is Min Nama involved memorizing approximately 80 minutes of the medieval Beowulf epic in its original West Anglo-Saxon dialect (lines 2200—2766, Beowulf’s encounter with the dragon). Grappling with bardic verse for recitation in experimental live performance uncovered new facets in ancient performance texts. Working with the Beowulf poem for stage revealed the mnemonic quality of alliteration, the pervasive use of rhythmic patterns to signal shifts in ideas (a strategy similar to West African dance), and perhaps “deep rhythms” present in medieval northern Europe. As impetus for choreography, the verse contains rhythmic information, corresponding to musical/dance concepts such as pick-ups, counterpoint, and syncopation. Beowulf is Min Nama also required a theory of dialect for Old English, which the author based on modern Swedish, medieval Frisian, and modern Frisian — especially the voices of Frisian poets Tsjêbbe Hettinga and Albertina Soepboer. The project thus provides an entrée into the nexus between ancient and modern storytelling, and concludes that contemporary Frisian poetry represents a direct inheritor to ancient solo performance forms.

In any consideration of theatre in the French Caribbean, the name Césaire is bound to be mentioned. Aimé Césaire's La Tragédie du roi Christophe (1963) is the most widely- known play in French by a black dramatist, and is now even in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française, and his plays figure widely in checklists of ‘African’ theatre. A revealing contrast can be made between the epic dramas of Aimé Césaire, written for an international audience, especially the newly independent black nations of the 1960s, and the work of his daughter, Ina. He tackles from the standpoint of Négritude major themes of historical drama: the nature of sovereignty, the forging of nationhood; he storms the heights of tragic poetry in French. She is attentive, not to the lonely hero constructing his Haitian Citadel of rock, but to the Creole voices of the grassroots. She brings to the stage the lives of ordinary women, the lore and legends that sustained the slaves and their descendants. Her achievement should of course be assessed away from her father's shadow, but the ‘divergent orientation of the two generations’ also suggests the greater confidence today in the role of Creole language and oral literature, and in a serious theatre within Martinique.

Resumo: Tomando como ponto de partida o poema-livro Odisseia Vácuo do performer, artista plástico e poeta contemporâneo Renato Negrão, o presente artigo pretende discutir questões relativas ao cânone artístico-literário, as possíveis relações entre a apropriação como procedimento de escrita e de criação e a apropriação cultural no contexto da diáspora africana e, por fim, como tais questões interferem nos próprios atos de nomeação. Para tanto, são construídos uma série de diálogos: com a epopeia fundadora de Homero; com o modernismo antropofágico; com a literatura de apropriação contemporânea estadunidense; com as propostas de Wölfflin e Valéry de histórias da arte e da literatura “sem nomes”; com o enredamento do primitivismo vanguardista e da invenção da colagem no primeiro cubismo; com a crítica contemporânea da apropriação cultural. Palavras-chave: escrita de apropriação; apropriação cultural; poesia brasileira contemporânea.Abstract: Taking as a starting point the poem-book Odisseia Vácuo (Vacuum Odissey), by the performer, visual artist and contemporary poet Renato Negrão, this article intends to discuss questions related to the literary-artistic canon, the possible relations between appropriation as writing and creation process and cultural appropriation in the context of African diaspora, and lastly, the way in which those questions interfere in the very acts of naming. For this purpose, I build dialogues with Homer’s founding epic, with Brazilian anthropophagic modernism, with American contemporary appropriative literature, also with Wölfflin’s and Valéry’s proposals of “nameless” art and literary histories and with the intertwining of avant-gardist primitivism and collage creation in early Cubism, as well as the contemporary criticism of cultural appropriation.Keywords: appropriative writing; cultural appropriation; Brazilian contemporary poetry.

The epic poem about the Soweto uprising, “Laboraro le lesoleso”, written in Sepedi (Northern Sotho) by H. M. L. Lentsoane has only recently been translated into English by Biki Lepota as “Black Wednesday” and published in the anthology Stitching a whirlwind (2018). In this article I suggest that, by discarding English, some crucial shifts from the bulk of protest poetry written in English must have taken place. Lentsoane wants to speak directly to fellow mother tongue speakers and not a national or broader African or international ear. It becomes clear that, by deploying various strategies based in orality, the poet manages to contribute new material and new approaches to creative texts of black protest during the apartheid years, e.g., a release from specific apartheid content about their oppression that every indigenous speaker had common knowledge of; an adherence to orality in terms of presentation, vocabulary, and form; and a linkage with the ancestors and a release from trying to reach the conscience of whites. This manifests through the poem’s particular perspective and emphasis as narrative, as telling, combined with vivid visceral poetic imagery of the event. The poem evocatively captures the unfolding of incidents while at the same time shifting the focus to an ancestral demand to stand up for righteousness in a universal field of justice.

The early history of the Mali empire is known to us from two sources: Mande oral literature (epic and praise poetry) recorded over the last 100 years and Ibn Khaldun's Kitab al-ʿIbar (Book of Exemplars) written in the late four-teenth century. The list of Mali kings presented by Ibn Khaldun is precise, detailed, entirely plausible, and recorded not too long after the events it purports to describe. For scholars attempting to reconstruct an account of this West African empire, no other medieval Arab chronicler or, indeed, any Mande oral traditions provide comparable information for its formative period.There is, however, reason to question the historical reliability of Ibn Khaldun's account precisely on the grounds of its narrative richness. When read in relation to the general model of political development and decay which Ibn Khaldun worked out in the more theoretical Muqaddimah (“Prolegomena”) of Kitab al-ʿIbar, as well as the larger context of the work in which it is imbedded, the Mali kinglist takes on some characteristics of an instructive illustration rather than a fully empirical account of the past. Indeed Ibn Khaldun himself, in his contemplation of the basis for asabiyah (group solidarity) among bedouin peoples, cautions us against literal interpretation of genealogical accounts:For a pedigree is something imaginary and devoid of reality. Its usefulness consists only in the resulting connection and close contact.Ibn Khaldun is certainly not as ideologically engaged in constructing the royal genealogy of Mali as a bedouin spokesman might be in reciting the list of his own ancestors. Nevertheless, this great Arab thinker has something at stake in this story which needs to be given serious attention by all scholars concerned with either the events of the medieval western Sudan or the process by which they have been incorporated into more recent narratives.

Morris Hoffman (1885-1940), who was born in a Latvian township and emigrated to South Africa in 1906, was a brilliant example of the Eastern European Jewish maskil writing with equal fluency in both Yiddish and Hebrew. He published poetry and prose in South African Yiddish and Hebrew periodicals. His long Yiddish poem under the title Afrikaner epopeyen (African epics) was considered to be the best Yiddish poetry written in South Africa. In 1939, a selection of his Yiddish stories under the title Unter afrikaner zun (Under the African sun) was prepared for publishing in De Aar, Cape Province (which is now in the Northern Cape Province), and published after his death in 1951 in Johannesburg. The Hebrew version of the stories was published in Israel in 1949 under the title Taḥat shmey afrikah (Under the skies of Africa). The article deals with certain differences between the versions using the example of one of the bilingual stories. The comparison between the versions illuminates Hoffman’s reflections on the relations between Jews and Afrikaners with a rather new perspective which underlines their religious background

Refracted Modern Greek reception of Ancient Greek poetry and George Seferis’ poem ‘Upon a Line of Foreign Verse’The term ‘refracted’ describes instances where Modern Greek reception of Ancient Greek poetry is mediated through one or more intertexts, like Italian-Latin or French-Latin. After treating briefly Dionysios Solomos’ poem ‘The Shade of Homer’ (1821-1822) the paper focuses on George Seferis’ ‘Reflections on a Foreign Line of Verse’ (1931). Each of the two poets claims the Homeric heritage for himself as a Greek poet through a poem that constitutes a refracted reception of Homer. The former opens a chain of three literary windows one after the other: first the appearance of Homer to the character Ennius in Petrarch’s Latin epic Africa; next Cicero’s ‘Dream of Scipio’; and finally the appearance of Homer to the Latin poet Ennius, who in the proem of his Annals represented himself as a reincarnation of the Greek poet. In responding to Solomos about a hundred years later Seferis treated the subject of Homeric Odysseus’ sea wanderings by commenting on ‘Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage’, the opening line of Joachim du Bellay’s famous sonnet XXXI of the collection Les regrets (1558). Most probably Bellay reached back to Homeric Odysseus through a passage of Ovid’s collection of elegies written in exile and entitled Ex ponto. Ovid conceived his banishment from Rome to a region of modern Romania as the analogue of Odysseus’ wanderings away from Ithaca and became a source of inspiration for Du Bellay and other poets.

In literary tradition, some of the innovative and formative trends that characterise production and consumption of mimetic art in most third World countries of Africa focuses extensively on formation of the personal agents- specifically, the protagonist.This phenomenon has characterised most of the 21st Century texts and classed them under the literary sub-genre known as Bildungsroman. Bildungsroman is viewed primarily as a nineteenth-century literary phenomenon and the term is used so loosely and broadly that any novel – and even an epic poem like Iliad and Odyssey by Homer – that include elements of coming-of-age narrative might be labelled as a “Bildungsroman”.It is true that the type of novel commonly referred to as the “Bildungsroman” flourished in British literature in Victorian age, and was extremely popular among the realist writers. This accounts for early British publication of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and others who employed the pattern, for their novels of character formation into the fictional model of the Bildungsroman literature; a genre that consists of the literary treatment of the process of development and formation of a character in relation to society. As it were, the variety of Philosophical Bildungsroman is an advance variant of Bildung that offers the necessary extension and complexity to the phenomenological literary concern of Martin Heidegger, who posits the philosophical experience of the individual as the “Dasine”. Dasien is Heidegger’s philosophical concept which means “being there”. As a concept in existential philosophy, Heidegger employs it to explain the very concept of personhood. The philosophical quest in this case is attained through the process of “unconcealment” meaning “the disclosure of truth”. Meanwhile, in rethinking Ambiguous Adventure and Dead Men’s Path as typical Bildung texts, the real unconcealment will be extricated from the “thingly character or the constitutive elements” (Poetry Language Thought, 54)of the protagonists, so as to determine, and have a clear vision and beauty of a (realist) representation of these agent (s) maturing in relation to the modern demands of society woven in universalistic model of growth and development via social background. Thus, ‘‘beauty becomes one way in which truth occurs as unconcealdness’’ (The Origin of the Work of Art, 55). This is because in philosophical Bildung, the attainment of successful maturation remains the object of our inquiry and concern, and this is framed within a large-scale diachronic model of human existence; who engages in the act of “thinking a thought, this kind of thinking concerns the relation of being to man” (Letter to Humanism, 1) and remains the prototype of a true Bildung character and texts understudy, namely: Ambiguous Adventure and The Dead Men’s Path. Therefore, this paper opens up a new pattern of thought by investigating philosophical quest and growing up motif in this two novels using Heidegger’s notion of dasien and unconcealment.

Abstract How has water shaped the history of a region that is bordered by ocean, brimming with ephemeral rivers, and yet prone to drought? This article explores water histories in Southern Africa over the past two hundred years. Using oral traditions, epic poetry, archival sources, and secondary anthropological and archaeological literature, I examine how Africans and Europeans related to, claimed, and used different bodies of water. In the first section I discuss how water was central to isiNguni conceptions of social and political life. In the second section I discuss how European empires used water to enclose and dispossess African land and to build hydropolitical colonial orders over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I conclude by reflecting on afterlives of these water histories in the present.

There are many ways to look at the making of American poetry. The author begins with the land and Native Americans in the New World, including what is in the United States, decentring or defamiliarizing the Anglo-American tradition by beginning with the Indigenous peoples and their languages and discussing poets of aboriginal, African, and Asian backgrounds in poetry and translation. With settlers, the author begins with Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, a Creole writing an epic in Spanish, and ends with Forrest Gander, also born in the United States, including a poem that mixes English and Spanish. In between, a mixed group of poets is discussed to show the richness and diversity of American poetry and culture: Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Langston Hughes, Joan Kane, Marilyn Chin, Russell Leong, and the translation of Shuri Kido by Gander and Tomoyuki Endo. These are some alternative makings of American poetry in one strand among many, then, now, and going forward.

Like most epic poetry Derek Walcott’s Omeros concerns itself with the fate of a nation or people, in this instance ‘our wide country, The Caribbean Sea.’ Engaging with the epic genre, a form commonly identified as an ‘imperial genre’ highlights a problematic area for the postcolonial writer whose identity is necessarily ‘split’ or ‘hybrid’ as a result of the vicissitudes of colonial history. Marking an inner struggle, his troubled relationship to Western canonical texts has proved a most fruitful zone of inspiration for the poet whose own divided heritage causes him to frequently question how to choose ‘between this Africa and the English tongue I love?’ Seamus Heaney has made the point that Walcott has made a career out of the impossibility of choosing either. Omeros then, maps a program of cultural integration that has been a fundamental theme of his writing for decades. Assuming an entitlement to all the diverse cultural traditions available in the region he freely draws from African and European sources, and is irreverent in his ironic reconfigurations of mythic themes and figures. This article examines the role of the sea-swift as both transatlantic guide and as a central transcendent metaphor for cultural integration within the poem. Crossing east-west meridians the swift explores the cathartic potentiality of the journey, a trope that the poet continually invokes in his writing. For Walcott, the swift is a comfortable hybrid able to inhabit a mixed society, without forgetting the individual cultures that compose its heritage.

Abstract In 1932, Basil Bunting was lodging with the Pounds in Genoa when he first encountered a French manuscript translation of Abul-Qasem Firdausi’s classical Persian epic the Shahnameh (1010). Upon realizing that the manuscript was incomplete, Bunting decided there was ‘nothing to do but learn Persian and read Firdausi, so I undertook that’. By 1942 his knowledge of Persian was good enough for the Ministry of Information to send him to Iran with the Royal Airforce, at which point he toured the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of Africa. Through these travels, and in particular his time in Iran, he discovered renewed possibilities for his personal and poetic life. His engagement with classical Persian literature over the 1940s was extensive and allowed him to eventually compose masterful translations of canonical classical Persian poets. I argue that his later translations, especially those written from 1947, demonstrate how translating Persian poetry refined Bunting’s Poundian poetics of condensation. I show that this synthesis produced formally and generically pluralistic poems that straddle multiple cultures, such as Odes 35 (1947) and 36 (1948). Through an analysis of The Spoils (1951), I explore the way in which Bunting’s own poetry was inflected by the Arabo-Persian ‘bait’ such that its literary traditions were made resonant with Anglophone ones. I then conclude by illustrating how the translations, the later odes, and The Spoils enabled him to write his irreducibly multiple magnum opus Briggflatts (1965).

Phillip Noyce is one of Australia’s most prominent film makers—a successful feature film director with both iconic Australian narratives and many a Hollywood blockbuster under his belt. Still, his beginnings were quite humble and far from his role today when he grew up in the midst of the counterculture of the late sixties. Millions of young people his age joined the various ‘movements’ of the day after experiences that changed their lives—mostly music but also drugs or fashion. The counterculture was a turbulent time in Sydney artistic circles as elsewhere. Everything looked possible, you simply had to “Do It!”—and Noyce did. He dived head-on into these times and with a voracious appetite for its many aspects—film, theatre, rallies, music, art and politics in general. In fact he often was the driving force behind such activities. Noyce described his personal epiphany occurring in 1968: A few months before I was due to graduate from high school, […] I saw a poster on a telegraph pole advertising American 'underground' movies. There was a mesmerising, beautiful blue-coloured drawing on the poster that I later discovered had been designed by an Australian filmmaker called David Perry. The word 'underground' conjured up all sorts of delights to an eighteen-year-old in the late Sixties: in an era of censorship it promised erotica, perhaps; in an era of drug-taking it promised some clandestine place where marijuana, or even something stronger, might be consumed; in an era of confrontation between conservative parents and their affluent post-war baby-boomer children, it promised a place where one could get together with other like-minded youth and plan to undermine the establishment, which at that time seemed to be the aim of just about everyone aged under 30. (Petzke 8) What the poster referred to was a new, highly different type of film. In the US these films were usually called “underground”. This term originates from film critic Manny Farber who used it in his 1957 essay Underground Films. Farber used the label for films whose directors today would be associated with independent and art house feature films. More directly, film historian Lewis Jacobs referred to experimental films when he used the words “film which for most of its life has led an underground existence” (8). The term is used interchangeably with New American Cinema. It was based on a New York group—the Film-Makers’ Co-operative—that started in 1960 with mostly low-budget filmmakers under the guidance of Jonas Mekas. When in 1962 the group was formally organised as a means for new, improved ways of distributing their works, experimental filmmakers were the dominant faction. They were filmmakers working in a more artistic vein, slightly influenced by the European Avant-garde of the 1920s and by attempts in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In film history, this era is also known as the Third Avant-garde. In their First Statement of the New American Cinema Group, the group drew connections to both the British Free Cinema and the French Nouvelle Vague. They also claimed that contemporary cinema was “morally corrupt, aesthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, temperamentally boring” (80). An all-encompassing definition of Underground Film never was available. Sheldon Renan lists some of the problems: There are underground films in which there is no movement and films in which there is nothing but movement. There are films about people and films about light. There are short, short underground films and long, long underground films. There are some that have been banned, and there is one that was nominated for an Academy Award. There are sexy films and sexless films, political films and poetical films, film epigrams and film epics … underground film is nothing less than an explosion of cinematic styles, forms and directions. (Renan 17) No wonder that propelled by frequent serious articles in the press—notably Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice—and regular screenings at other venues like the Film-makers’ Cinemathèque and the Gallery of Modern Art in New York, these films proved increasingly popular in the United States and almost immediately spread like bush fires around the world. So in early September 1968 Noyce joined a sold-out crowd at the Union Theatre in Sydney, watching 17 shorts assembled by Ubu Films, the premier experimental and underground film collective in 1960s Australia (Milesago). And on that night his whole attitude to art, his whole attitude to movies—in fact, his whole life—changed. He remembered: I left the cinema that night thinking, "I’m gonna make movies like that. I can do it." Here was a style of cinema that seemed to speak to me. It was immediate, it was direct, it was personal, and it wasn’t industrial. It was executed for personal expression, not for profit; it was individual as opposed to corporate, it was stylistically free; it seemed to require very little expenditure, innovation being the key note. It was a completely un-Hollywood-like aesthetic; it was operating on a visceral level that was often non-linear and was akin to the psychedelic images that were in vogue at the time—whether it was in music, in art or just in the patterns on your multi-coloured shirt. These movies spoke to me. (Petzke 9) Generally speaking, therefore, these films were the equivalent of counterculture in the area of film. Theodore Roszak railed against “technocracy” and underground films were just the opposite, often almost do-it-yourself in production and distribution. They were objecting to middle-class culture and values. And like counterculture they aimed at doing away with repression and to depict a utopian lifestyle feeling at ease with each imaginable form of liberality (Doggett 469). Underground films transgressed any Hollywood rule and convention in content, form and technique. Mobile hand-held cameras, narrow-gauge or outright home movies, shaky and wobbly, rapid cutting, out of focus, non-narrative, disparate continuity—you name it. This type of experimental film was used to express the individual consciousness of the “maker”—no longer calling themselves directors—a cinematic equivalent of the first person in literature. Just as in modern visual art, both the material and the process of making became part of these artworks. Music often was a dominant factor, particularly Eastern influences or the new Beat Music that was virtually non-existent in feature films. Drug experiences were reflected in imagery and structure. Some of the first comings-out of gay men can be found as well as films that were shown at the appropriately named “Wet Dreams Festival” in Amsterdam. Noyce commented: I worked out that the leading lights in this Ubu Films seemed to be three guys — Aggy Read, Albie Thoms and David Perry […They] all had beards and […] seemed to come from the basement of a terrace house in Redfern. Watching those movies that night, picking up all this information, I was immediately seized by three great ambitions. First of all, I wanted to grow a beard; secondly, I wanted to live in a terrace house in the inner city; and thirdly, I wanted to be a filmmaker. (Ubu Films) Noyce soon discovered there were a lot of people like him who wanted to make short films for personal expression, but also as a form of nationalism. They wanted to make Australian movies. Noyce remembered: “Aggy, Albie and David encouraged everyone to go and make a film for themselves” (Petzke 11). This was easy enough to do as these films—not only in Australia—were often made for next to nothing and did not require any prior education or training. And the target audience group existed in a subculture of people willing to pay money even for extreme entertainment as long as it was advertised in an appealing way—which meant: in the way of the rampaging Zeitgeist. Noyce—smitten by the virus—would from then on regularly attend the weekly meetings organised by the young filmmakers. And in line with Jerry Rubin’s contemporary adage “Do it!” he would immediately embark on a string of films with enthusiasm and determination—qualities soon to become his trademark. All his films were experimental in nature, shot on 16mm and were so well received that Albie Thoms was convinced that Noyce had a great career ahead of him as an experimental filmmaker. Truly alternative was Noyce’s way to finally finance Better to Reign in Hell, his first film, made at age 18 and with a total budget of $600. Noyce said on reflection: I had approached some friends and told them that if they invested in my film, they could have an acting role. Unfortunately, the guy whose dad had the most money — he was a doctor’s son — was also maybe the worst actor that was ever put in front of a camera. But he had invested four hundred dollars, so I had to give him the lead. (Petzke 13) The title was taken from Milton’s poem Paradise Lost (“better to reign in hell than serve in heaven”). It was a film very much inspired by the images, montage and narrative techniques of the underground movies watched at Ubu. Essentially the film is about a young man’s obsession with a woman he sees repeatedly in advertising and the hallucinogenic dreams he has about her. Despite its later reputation, the film was relatively mundane. Being shot in black and white, it lacks the typical psychedelic ingredients of the time and is more reminiscent of the surrealistic precursors to underground film. Some contempt for the prevailing consumer society is thrown in for good measure. In the film, “A youth is persecuted by the haunting reappearance of a girl’s image in various commercial outlets. He finds escape from this commercial brainwashing only in his own confused sexual hallucinations” (Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative). But despite this advertising, so convincingly capturing the “hint! hint!” mood of the time, Noyce’s first film isn’t really outstanding even in terms of experimental film. Noyce continued to make short experimental films. There was not even the pretence of a story in any of them. He was just experimenting with his gear and finding his own way to use the techniques of the underground cinema. Megan was made at Sydney University Law School to be projected as part of the law students’ revue. It was a three-minute silent film that featured a woman called Megan, who he had a crush on. Intersection was 2 minutes 44 seconds in length and shot in the middle of a five-way or four-way intersection in North Sydney. The camera was walked into the intersection and spun around in a continuous circle from the beginning of the roll of film to the end. It was an experiment with disorientation and possibly a comment about urban development. Memories was a seven-minute short in colour about childhood and the bush, accompanied by a smell-track created in the cinema by burning eucalyptus leaves. Sun lasted 90 seconds in colour and examined the pulsating winter sun by way of 100 single frame shots. And finally, Home was a one-and-a-half-minute single frame camera exploration of the filmmaker’s home, inside and out, including its inhabitants and pets. As a true experimental filmmaker, Noyce had a deep interest in technical aspects. It was recommended that Sun “be projected through a special five image lens”, Memories and Intersection with “an anamorphic lens” (Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative). The double projection for Better to Reign in Hell and the two screens required for Good Afternoon, as well as the addition of the smell of burning leaves in Memories, were inroads into the subgenre of so-called Expanded Cinema. As filmmaking in those days was not an isolated enterprise but an integral part of the all-encompassing Counterculture, Noyce followed suit and became more and more involved and politiced. He started becoming a driving force of the movement. Besides selling Ubu News, he organised film screenings. He also wrote film articles for both Honi Soit and National U, the Sydney University and Canberra University newspapers—articles more opinionated than sophisticated. He was also involved in Ubu’s Underground Festival held in August and in other activities of the time, particularly anti-war protests. When Ubu Films went out of business after the lack of audience interest in Thoms’s long Marinetti film in 1969, Aggy Read suggested that Ubu be reinvented as a co-operative for tax reasons and because they might benefit from their stock of 250 Australian and foreign films. On 28 May 1970 the reinvention began at the first general meeting of the Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative where Noyce volunteered and was elected their part-time manager. He transferred the 250 prints to his parents’ home in Wahroonga where he was still living he said he “used to sit there day after day just screening those movies for myself” (Petzke 18). The Sydney University Film Society screened feature films to students at lunchtime. Noyce soon discovered they had money nobody was spending and equipment no one was using, which seemed to be made especially for him. In the university cinema he would often screen his own and other shorts from the Co-op’s library. The entry fee was 50 cents. He remembered: “If I handed out the leaflets in the morning, particularly concentrating on the fact that these films were uncensored and a little risqué, then usually there would be 600 people in the cinema […] One or two screenings per semester would usually give me all the pocket money I needed to live” (Petzke 19). Libertine and risqué films were obviously popular as they were hard to come by. Noyce said: We suffered the worst censorship of almost any Western country in the world, even worse than South Africa. Books would be seized by customs officers at the airports and when ships docked. Customs would be looking for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. We were very censored in literature and films and plays, and my film [Better to Reign in Hell] was banned from export. I tried to send it to a film festival in Holland and it was denied an export permit, but because it had been shot in Australia, until someone in the audience complained it could still be screened locally. (Castaway's Choice) No wonder clashes with the law happened frequently and were worn like medals of honour in those days of fighting the system, proving that one was fighting in the front line against the conservative values of law and order. Noyce encountered three brushes with the law. The first occurred when selling Ubu Films’ alternative culture newspaper Ubu News, Australia’s first underground newspaper (Milesago). One of the issues contained an advertisement—a small drawing—for Levi’s jeans, showing a guy trying to put his Levis on his head, so that his penis was showing. That was judged by the police to be obscene. Noyce was found guilty and given a suspended sentence for publishing an indecent publication. There had been another incident including Phil’s Pill, his own publication of six or eight issues. After one day reprinting some erotic poems from The Penguin Collection of Erotic Poetry he was found guilty and released on a good behaviour bond without a conviction being recorded. For the sake of historical truth it should be remembered, though, that provocation was a genuine part of the game. How else could one seriously advertise Better to Reign in Hell as “a sex-fantasy film which includes a daring rape scene”—and be surprised when the police came in after screening this “pornographic film” (Stratton 202) at the Newcastle Law Students Ball? The Newcastle incident also throws light on the fact that Noyce organised screenings wherever possible, constantly driving prints and projectors around in his Mini Minor. Likewise, he is remembered as having been extremely helpful in trying to encourage other people with their own ideas—anyone could make films and could make them about anything they liked. He helped Jan Chapman, a fellow student who became his (first) wife in December 1971, to shoot and edit Just a Little Note, a documentary about a moratorium march and a guerrilla theatre group run by their friend George Shevtsov. Noyce also helped on I Happened to Be a Girl, a documentary about four women, friends of Chapman. There is no denying that being a filmmaker was a hobby, a full-time job and an obsessive religion for Noyce. He was on the organising committee of the First Australian Filmmakers’ Festival in August 1971. He performed in the agit-prop acting troupe run by George Shevtsov (later depicted in Renegades) that featured prominently at one of Sydney’s rock festival that year. In the latter part of 1971 and early 1972 he worked on Good Afternoon, a documentary about the Combined Universities’ Aquarius Arts Festival in Canberra, which arguably was the first major manifestation of counterculture in Australia. For this the Aquarius Foundation—the cultural arm of the Australian Union of Students—had contracted him. This became a two-screen movie à la Woodstock. Together with Thoms, Read and Ian Stocks, in 1972 he participated in cataloguing the complete set of films in distribution by the Co-op (see Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative). As can be seen, Noyce was at home in many manifestations of the Sydney counterculture. His own films had slowly become more politicised and bent towards documentary. He even started a newsreel that he used to screen at the Filmmakers’ Cooperative Cinema with a live commentary. One in 1971, Springboks Protest, was about the demonstrations at the Sydney Cricket Ground against the South African rugby tour. There were more but Noyce doesn’t remember them and no prints seem to have survived. Renegades was a diary film; a combination of poetic images and reportage on the street demonstrations. Noyce’s experimental films had been met with interest in the—limited—audience and among publications. His more political films and particularly Good Afternoon, however, reached out to a much wider audience, now including even the undogmatic left and hard-core documentarists of the times. In exchange, and for the first time, there were opposing reactions—but as always a great discussion at the Filmmakers’ Cinema, the main venue for independent productions. This cinema began with those initial screenings at Sydney University in the union room next to the Union Theatre. But once the Experimental Film Fund started operating in 1970, more and more films were submitted for the screenings and consequently a new venue was needed. Albie Thoms started a forum in the Yellow House in Kings Cross in May 1970. Next came—at least briefly—a restaurant in Glebe before the Co-op took over a space on the top floor of the socialist Third World Bookshop in Goulburn Street that was a firetrap. Bob Gould, the owner, was convinced that by first passing through his bookshop the audience would buy his books on the way upstairs. Sundays for him were otherwise dead from a commercial point of view. Noyce recollected that: The audience at this Filmmakers’ Cinema were mightily enthusiastic about seeing themselves up on the screen. And there was always a great discussion. So, generally the screenings were a huge success, with many full houses. The screenings grew from once a week, to three times on Sunday, to all weekend, and then seven days a week at several locations. One program could play in three different illegal cinemas around the city. (Petzke 26) A filmmakers’ cinema also started in Melbourne and the groups of filmmakers would visit each other and screen their respective films. But especially after the election of the Whitlam Labor government in December 1972 there was a shift in interest from risqué underground films to the concept of Australian Cinema. The audience started coming now for a dose of Australian culture. Funding of all kind was soon freely available and with such a fund the film co-op was able to set up a really good licensed cinema in St. Peters Lane in Darlinghurst, running seven days a week. But, Noyce said, “the move to St. Peters Lane was sort of the end of an era, because initially the cinema was self-funded, but once it became government sponsored everything changed” (Petzke 29). With money now readily available, egotism set in and the prevailing “we”-feeling rather quickly dissipated. But by the time of this move and the resulting developments, everything for Noyce had already changed again. He had been accepted into the first intake of the Interim Australian Film & TV School, another one of the nation-awareness-building projects of the Whitlam government. He was on his “long march through the institutions”—as this was frequently called throughout Europe—that would bring him to documentaries, TV and eventually even Hollywood (and return). Noyce didn’t linger once the alternative scene started fading away. Everything those few, wild years in the counterculture had taught him also put him right on track to become one of the major players in Hollywood. He never looked back—but he remembers fondly…References Castaway’s Choice. Radio broadcast by KCRW. 1990. Doggett, Peter. There’s a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and the Rise and Fall of ’60s Counter-Culture. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007. Farber, Manny. “Underground Films.” Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies. Ed. Manny Farber. New York: Da Capo, 1998. 12–24. Jacobs, Lewis. “Morning for the Experimental Film”. Film Culture 19 (1959): 6–9. Milesago. “Ubu Films”. n.d. 26 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.milesago.com/visual/ubu.htm›. New American Cinema Group. “First Statement of the New American Cinema Group.” Film Culture Reader. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York: Praeger, 1970. 73–75. Petzke, Ingo. Phillip Noyce: Backroads to Hollywood. Sydney: Pan McMillan, 2004. Renan, Sheldon. The Underground Film: An Introduction to Its Development in America. London: Studio Vista, 1968. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of Counter Culture. New York: Anchor, 1969. Stratton, David. The Last New Wave: The Australian Film Revival. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1980. Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative. Film Catalogue. Sydney: Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative, 1972. Ubu Films. Unreleased five-minute video for the promotion of Mudie, Peter. Ubu Films: Sydney Underground Movies 1965-1970. Sydney: UNSW Press, 1997.