Rolleston Avenue. /Botanic Gardens. Christchurch
Otakaro/Avon Walkway eels. 19.
Otakaro/Avon Walkway eels. 19.
ART BITE
BELOW
Director Jeremy Leatinu’u
TE WHAKAWHITINGA (2022)
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References
19
ART BITE
Te Whakawhitinga by Jeremy Leatinu'u | Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o WaiwhetūTE WHAKAWHITINGA (2022)
11 mins. Original Black & White 16mm film. Cinemascope.1.6:1 Aspect ratio.Or Anamorphic widescreen (Landscape format 5 x 3)Single Channel digital video.Director Jeremy Leatinu’u Art Bite. Sept
(3053)5/09/2022
Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa
TE WHAKAWHITINGA (2022)
TE WHAKAWHITINGA carries the narration of a man who enlisted once in the New Zealand Army, circa mid 20th Century. He travelled from Northland to the South Island to be trained. Elements of whenua, the land, enter his story. The man feels a sense of isolation in a different place. The film becomes a haerenga, a plausible “everyman” journey, as much as a film of this type runs …we journey away, we experience life, we live life, we return home... maybe. We take into account the female contribution too. Or, to take into focus the redundancy of defining life by gender simplification, we talk here about principles. What substantiates the delights of this eleven minutes for us is the knowledge that we are stepping out as an audience in a small universal fiction fully in Te Reo Maori on film.
I am from the North Island via English roots of origin. I remember coming down to the South Island first for a holiday when I was four. I remember seeing tussock for the first time. We all see tussock as a South Island thing. After being used to winding hills and tree cladded valleys, the wide flat distances of the south land, we all know, are quite affecting to a newcomer.
There is not one in my generation that can forget the secondhand six cylinder Chevy BelAir cars that started throating their way through the New Zealand streets from 1963 on, available in America from 1955. It was not, by the way, until American cars came in to be assembled in New Zealand that North Islanders had the opportunity to actually drive over and around the South Island in safety. The average little English car didn’t make it over the mountain passes. Listen hard for the throbbing purr of the car’s exhaust here on this film next time you see the screening again. A nod here to John Gray, the film’s sound designer.
Short films usually must stand out for their techniques. They usually start as Art film, a form compelled to carry one idea only as far as theme or motifs are concerned. This is a real film with a narrative intent. This is a big leap for Leatinu’u to be a Film Director for the first time and work at this scale in a team practice. He has several times created digital video, the usual instant contemporary. But, there was a Twentieth Century time before him - cinema. I wished for this Art Bite to be on its own cinema screen. My first three films were shot on 16mm. I will never forget what it meant to quit a job, go to University and achieve my own goals in 1975.
We must delight in this individual’s energies. His recent immersion in Te Reo language classes in 2020, gave him a significant desire to make a Te Reo language film. Young Westerners such as me were sparked by films in French with subtitles. The point here is that we got closer to the treasure that language is for its diversity. Until we get to translation in films that harness multiplicity as literature we can still see, comparatively, visual artists as pretty isolated. The film was a curatorial commission and now has gained some security by formally entering into the custodianship of Te puna o Waiwhetu.
There are two kai korero ( narrators) Poata Alvie McKree, Black Maori Artist, Poet and Playwright, who is cast in the role of the father’s daughter. Poata comes from Northland and uses her Northland accent. We hear her voice at the introduction of the artwork and at the completion. Hunaara Kaa is cast as the father who narrates the male character. Kaa is Ngati Porou from Tokomaru Bay. I was happy to have had a holiday up there in the Bay just last October, 2021. I slept in the old 1914 Post Office before the bridge got washed away in the March 2022 flood. I went to school near Te Aute College in Hawkes Bay. Hunaara said in the korero when this film premiered in 2021, that he once acted in a Thornton Wilder Play, “ Happy Journey” at Te Aute as an adolescent. It prepared him to be a character for Jeremy’s film in these decades later. What he had learned back then was that he knew that he must deliver what Jeremy wanted. It is important to know this. A Director works at the film apex. This film voice track along with its soundscore and visuals, has an effusiveness. It is a second decade twenty first century object on cue as an allegory about existence and is rare. Something like this won't happen quite like this again. The Film industry is full of people with expertise. Apropos training and economy the path must be, go to feature film. All films are expensive to make. The feature film is shot on 35mm wide gauge. ( Now, as we know, digital is often dominantly used ) 16mm gauge came available during World War II when countries wished for frontline war footage. Portable cameras were then invented. All other categories of use for 16mm since war have been in the Arts, e.g Animation also became first possible on 16mm projection stands. I see that the Cinematographer for this film has wanted to attempt to revive Super 8 cinema clubs. If only Kodak were still viable.
Most amateur artists who pick up on film fall for its alchemy. Most DOPs, Directors of Photography, do years of qualifying - to Masters Degrees. Moving Image short films are poetic or abstract. An original and veritably important soundscore to accompany these is laid in if the artist can afford it. Invariably they are viewed as cultural objects and are funded by Internal Affairs budgets from government departments. Here, as in all Industrialized countries, such departments take on the role to support cultural creativity within populaces.
This is the context. Films made are cultural objects. They celebrate and are valued for the contribution they make both to local community, cultures at large and Internationally, if this be possible, with Exhibition and distribution. The artist / Director here is Jeremy Leatinu’u, a Tagata Moana artist. As well as from Samoan and German ancestry, Leatinu'u has Ngāti Maniapoto whakapapa.
I take as my quote for this project the phrase, “ The artist must find his own techniques of constraint” 1 Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag, a mid Twentieth Century novelist and essayist, made this observation when referring to literature. Others have discussed the Arts, or Jazz or theatre Improvisation on this account as a generic truth. In Latin it is the phrase, multum non multa which translates to much, not many.2
The Director and Cinematographer had their limits given to them. They only had 20 minutes of film stock for their shoot. That’s a 1:2 ratio. Business managers in the Contemporary world ( Contemporary is defined as after 1970), apply theory of constraint to industry, from milk production to car manufacture. TOC, Theory of Constraint, has been applied since the 1970’s. It focuses on elements for progressions and repetitions. It’s something to do with soft and hard dynamics and not about rational thought. Now it is even being applied to the Health Industry.
Constraints well used move a project into movement flow. Movement in cinema can touch us. And so, here we are, having seen this, a script that explores movement of the mind as an interpretation through cognition.
This project draws upon the 2nd Dimension, images on a surface. It enters the Fourth Dimension when you take in distribution portability. It draws upon language, voice, music, photographs and effects. It has peak movements. The substrate of storytelling in literature comes from the depth of the narrative elements. An eleven minute Moving Image must exercise constraint, yet imply enough in its particular language of purpose with time, movement, pacing, repetitions and cultural engagement.
Second quote:This project doesn't get made by one person. It's a team. Jeremy Leatinu’u.
To technical practice: stop frame photography slow motion action photography the use of black and white Editing i.e.cutting and structuringFilterslaboratory
One Example. Slow motion is an effect in filmmaking whereby time appears to be slowed down. Slow motion as an example, has been significant. The first example (or at least first notable example) of intercutting between slow motion and normal speed is in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai ( 1954 ) in the introductory scene of Kambei in which he deals with a troublesome and hungry thief.
In TE WHAKAWHITINGA , a mere is held up. It pauses. Suspends. It plunges to a cut to a garden digging instrument, a timo, loosening the earth. Before Colonialism, before Industrial Society, Tangata Whenua male responsibilities were demarcated seasonally by mere or Kō.3When the moon sees the sun, by Jeremy, was the first of his digital projects here at Te Puna o Waiwhetu. It was made in 2019. He honours his grandfather through the visual poetics of one’s relationship with the land. The moon shines through the dusk sky across the ocean. We see the earth being turned ready for planting. Jeremy appropriates the same thump to earth with the timo from this film and puts it into the next, this one in 2022. This is how personally connected he is with his films. One might progress to another. Now, in TE WHAKAWHITINGA he has decided to work with themes of life as apparent. To experience apparancy one had to experience a crossing into a perception of the structure of existence. Psychologically, this takes the form of “ crossing” in its own way. He was given the challenge of the word “crossing” as a prompt for how he commenced his concept. And this got him over Cook Strait.
I met Jeremy briefly in Auckland at the screening, for the seminar, Truth or Consequences. 4. of his first narrative work, Mai i te kei o te waka ki te ihu o te waka, 2018. 8 mins. Translated this says, “from the back of the canoe to the front of the canoe,” After that screening the film went on to the 69th Berlin Berlinale, a substantial International Film event. Note. That Event’s founding origin has had recent historical scrutiny. The Alfred Bauer Silver Bear film Award has just been withdrawn in 20215 ,6.. After the screening I saw in Auckland, I stood beside Jeremy for a few words. Four members of his whanau stood nearby and looked at him until we finished our conversation. Their faces glowing in the low light, the moment felt special. The whanau showed real regard and gratitude, let alone some awe for him. I want to tell you about that film as I quickly realised that the artist is exploring quite prolifically. The 2018. Film is inspired by narratives he heard and read about of the journey of the Tainui waka. Stories from oral tradition have entered written history in translation in several forms.The first part of this eight minutes is the artist speaking in te reo Maori with English subtitles; the second the reverse. Jeremy read aloud each version for this. All the footage is from the point of view off shore or from on the periphery of foliage on the first edge of the land. His offshore point of reference is from Manukau Harbour, telephone poles protruding and single story houses in the distance included. Photographs from that project are cited on page 101 of the Te Puna o Waiwhetu published text, Maori Moving Image. 2022.7It is translation, then, that is a large feature of Leatinu’u’s work and where he is applying his efforts. It was fascinating to see him having worked to provide image film length in each cut in the 2018 video - there to aim to fit the balance of text superimpositions with voice over. Also, to take in the low angle pov, as in the implication of the thinking being from the point of view of a waka. The result was a 50% split of Maori to English and English to Maori on a monitor or cinema screen. That 2018 project Indulged the vast vibration of a mind at work considering arrival eight hundred years ago. This film, TE WHAKAWHITINGA, is a continued draw on amazement for language. His keenness to korero seems to be pushing him to explore idea tropes with an unaffected, almost earnest sense of a seeking for purity. We don't know, yet, whether he stays poetic or wants to actually explore narrative more, or develops comedy, or leaves Art and join up with cinema. We don't know.
TE WHAKAWHITINGA is crafted technically to convey Mātauranga - ( ma tow ranga ) place-based values and practices shown in the project that are distinctive to a Māori worldview. The shots that include people show discretion. People in visuals are shown as unidentified for they stand as representative figures; either the man representing the father in the South Island or the men on a break on the line duties for the Electricity Department; or the daughter as photograph holder. The daughter is also represented in the back view standing on a deck above the west sea as the film opens. The male faces are faces kept in the shadows.
We can respectfully value that the partnership between director and DOP/ cinematographer, was also a partnership in post-production. This truly is a major eleven minute work filled with many decision making processes. Leatinu’u and Powell, Ian Powell, clearly committed themselves to horizons and hours together, shaping ways to not be ego driven. Script implication by Leatinu’u on the matter of ancestral war pasts come through with a quite delightful reticence.
There is one pivotal shot on the scene that references Tangi tradition. It is the mid shot of the Wahine singing the maimai aroha. Only the wahine arms and hands in front of the torso are in view. The shot applies the theory of Mātauranga . From an essay on Maori Performance, I quote: “During the wailing for the dead, a person might call out "Hapainga te maimai. “Maimai aroha. posture dance, the women indulged in the swaying motions of the body and arms known as aroarowhaki. This is a sentence from Elsdon Best, a mid history Ethnographer (1856 - 1931) It will be interesting to get feedback on his observations.8
The male character senses the health of acts of ritual that bind him within custom and tradition. By the way, vis a vis health, or at least fitness, did you know that in 2015, Leatinu’u was out at Avondale Racecourse, the original site called Waiatarua for training soldiers for World War I. He was running his Military Training camp. There were time recorded fitness tests going on.There is video of it. Portfolio number 463.9
The question will be… well, several questions will be going on….like, what imagery and what sounds originally carried ideas. There were wooden power poles for people in employment in electricity, circa 1924 to 2004. Transpower New Zealand is now a company over 100 years old.
Where to have more visions?
I will end on sound score.
Composer Tim Prebble. Prebble?, a ‘modular synth noodler’, is one label of Tim Prebble’s style. We have heard his scores in the films, Boy ( 2010) , The Orator - O Le Tulafale ( 2011) , and many films and TV shows . He was Spartacus R back in 2009. A Wellington-based psychedelic-progressive-rock six-piece,10 Or, in 2013 he created The Birdsong Preludes in the Waitakeres.11 Here is his IMdB file.12You may take from this scrutiny that Jeremy Leatinu’u has worked very hard from 2008 - 2022.Since his immersion in a year of Te Reo in 2020, we sense that he is doubling his mana through language as his tool .
Finally, back to the title, WHAKAWHITINGA. In legalisation it is defined as conveyance.WHAKAWHITINGA is conveyance.13 We reap what we sow with the conveyance of any action. It is not only the exposure of knowledge we have about the facts of existence- biodiversity as a requirement. When we see, feel and measure sustainability as essential, it is our cultures that translate the stories of existence. It is crossing this truth that gives us insight as to why each generation requires to know their whakapapa.
Thank you.
Readings.
0IJEM99a.pdf
Elam Art School, Auckland.in a piece largely ghostwritten by Turner (1997), reiterated that the School faces an unprecedented demand for art education, not in a time of growth and optimism, but during a time of severe cutbacks and crippling fee increases ... in 1989 there were over 330 applicants for only 40 places in Elam‟s first year intake. Demand at another level has caused overcrowding and has restricted access to the most popular subjects ... The signs point to the need for expansion ... Without expansion how can we possibly serve the huge number of students taking sixth or seventh form art? How can the needs of Maori students be adequately met without Maori staff? There is also a pressing need to expand opportunities in the high-tech areas of film, video and computers. Expanded art history and complementary multi-disciplinary options must be considered (p. i).
References1.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mmRPfQOJ5o&ab_channel=BlackCreativesAotearoa2.https://www.artistsjourney.com/blog/constraint-in-art 3. https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/discover-collections/read-watch-play/maori/maori-gardening-tools4.https://www.circuit.org.nz/work/truth-or-consequences-trailer5.https://www.berlinale.de/en/archive/jahresarchive/2019/02_programm_2019/02_filmdatenblatt_2019_201919490.html#tab=filmStills6. https://www.berlinale.de/en/archive/jahresarchive/2019/01_jahresblatt_2019/01_jahresblatt_2019.html 7. https://www.nationwidebooks.co.nz/product/maori-moving-image-97818773757368.Best. E. (1856- 1931) p 96 https://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-BesGame-t1-body-d4-d1-d7.html
9.https://jeremyleatinuu.com/portfolio/463/10. https://www.last.fm/music/Spartacus+R/+wiki11.“ two months embedded in the Waitakere Ranges Regional Park as an Artist in Residence”. https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/AK1312/S00317/the-music-of-sound-the-magic-of-place.htm
12. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0695670/13.https://www.legalmaori.net/dictionary?omni=whakawhitinga
We must delight in Leatinu’u’s individual energies. His recent immersion in Te Reo language classes in 2020, gave him a significant desire to make a Te Reo language film. The film was a curatorial commission and now has gained some security by formally entering into the custodianship of Te puna o Waiwhetu.
There are two kai korero (narrators) Poata Alvie McKree ( Maori artist, poet and playwright) and Hunaara Kaa (Ngati Porou from Tokomaru Bay. Poata is cast in the role of the father’s daughter. Poata comes from Northland and uses her Northland accent. We hear her voice at the introduction of the artwork and at the completion. Hunaara Kaa is cast as the father who narrates the male character. Hunaara said in the korero when this film premiered in 2021, that he once acted in a Thornton Wilder Play, “ Happy Journey” at Te Aute as an adolescent. It prepared him to be a character for Jeremy’s film decades later. What he had learned was that he knew that he must deliver what Jeremy wanted. It is important to know this. A Director works at the film apex. This film voice track along with its soundscore and visuals, has an effusiveness. Jeremy Leatinu’u, a Tagata Moana with Samoan and German ancestry. Leatinu'u has Ngāti Maniapoto whakapapa.
In TE WHAKAWHITINGA , a mere is held up. It pauses. Suspends. It plunges to a cut to a garden digging instrument, a timo, loosening the earth. Before Colonialism, before Industrial Society, Tangata Whenua male responsibilities were demarcated seasonally by mere or Kō.When the moon sees the sun, was the first of his digital projects at Te Puna o Waiwhetu (the Christchurch Art Gallery. It was made in 2019. He honours his grandfather through the visual poetics of one’s relationship with the land. The moon shines through the dusk sky across the ocean. We see the earth being turned ready for planting. Jeremy appropriates the same thump to earth with the timo from this film and puts it into his next one in 2022. This is how personally connected he is with his films. Progressing on to another, in TE WHAKAWHITINGA he has decided to work with themes of life as apparent. The experience was a crossing into a perception of the structure of existence. Psychologically this takes the form of “ crossing ” in its own way. He was given the challenge of the word“crossing” as a prompt for how he commenced his concept. And this got him over Cook Strait. I met Jeremy briefly in Auckland at the screening of Truth or Consequences. 1. Which was his first narrative work, Mai i te kei o te waka ki te ihu o te waka, 2018. 8 mins long. Translated this says, “ from the back of the canoe to the front of the canoe,” After that screening the film went on to the 69th Berlin Berlinale, a substantial International Film event. After the screening I saw in Auckland in 2018, I stood beside Jeremy for a few words. Four members of his whanau stood nearby and looked at him until we finished our conversation. Their faces glowing in the low light, the moment felt special. The whanau showed real regard and gratitude, let alone some awe for him. I want to tell you about that film as I quickly realised that the artist is exploring quite prolifically. The 2018 Film is inspired by narratives he heard and read about of the journey of the Tainui waka. Stories from oral tradition have entered written history in translation in several forms. The first part of this eight minutes is the artist speaking te reo with English subtitles; the second the reverse. Jeremy read aloud each version for this. All the footage is from the point of view off shore or from on the periphery of foliage on the first edge of the land. His offshore point of reference is from Manukau Harbour, telephone poles protruding and single story houses in the distance included. Photographs from that project are cited on page 101 of the Te Puna o Waiwhetu published text, Maori Moving Image. 2022.2It is translation, then, that is a large feature of Leatinu’u’s work. It was fascinating to see him having worked to provide image film length in each cut in the 2018 video - there to aim to fit the balance of text superimpositions with voice over. Also, to take in the low angle pov, as in the implication of the thinking being from the point of view of a waka. The result was a 50% split of Maori to English and English to Maori. That 2018 project Indulged the vast vibration of a mind at work considering arrival eight hundred years ago.
This film, TE WHAKAWHITINGA, is a continued draw on amazement for language. His keenness to korero seems to be pushing him to explore idea tropes with an unaffected, almost earnest sense of a seeking for purity. We don't know, yet, whether he stays poetic or wants to actually explore narrative more, or develops comedy, or leaves Art. We don't know.
TE WHAKAWHITINGA is crafted technically to convey Mātauranga - (ma tow ranga ) place-based values and practices shown in the project that are distinctive to a Māori worldview. The shots that include people show discretion. People in visuals are shown as unidentified for they stand as representative figures; either the man representing the father in the South Island or the men on a break on the line duties for the Electricity Department; or the daughter as photograph holder. The daughter is also represented in the back view standing on a deck above the west sea as the film opens. The male faces are faces kept in the shadows.
We can respectfully value that the partnership between director and DOP/ cinematographer, was also a partnership in post-production. This is a major eleven- minute work filled with many decision- making processes. Leatinu’u and Powell, Ian Powell, clearly committed themselves to horizons and hours together, shaping ways to not be ego driven. Script implication by Leatinu’u on the matter of ancestral war pasts come through with a quite delightful reticence. There is one pivotal shot on the scene that references Tangi tradition. It is the mid shot of the Wahine singing the maimai aroha. Only the wahine arms and hands in front of the torso are in view. The shot applies the theory of Mātauranga . From an essay on Maori Performance, I quote: “During the wailing for the dead, a person might call out "Hapainga te maimai. “ Maimai aroha, posture dance, the women indulged in the swaying motions of the body and arms known as aroarowhaki. This is a sentence from Elsdon Best, a mid history Ethnographer ( 1856 - 1931) It will be interesting to get feedback on his observations.3
The male character senses the health of acts of ritual that bind him within custom and tradition. By the way, vis a vis health, or at least fitness, did you know that in 2015, Leatinu’u was out at Avondale Racecourse, the original site called Waiatarua for training soldiers for World War I. He was running his Military Training camp. There were time recorded fitness tests going on.There is video of it. Portfolio number 463.4
The question will be… well, several questions will be going on. Example, What imagery and what sounds originally carried ideas. There were wooden power poles for people in employment in electricity, circa 1924 to 2004. Transpower New Zealand is now a company over 100 years old.
Where to have more visions? I will end on sound score.
Composer Tim Prebble. a ‘modular synth noodler’, is one label of Tim Prebble’s style. We have heard his scores in the films, Boy ( 2010) , The Orator - O Le Tulafale ( 2011) , and many films and TV shows . He was Spartacus R back in 2009. A Wellington-based psychedelic-progressive-rock six-piece,5 Or, in 2013 he created The Birdsong Preludes in the Waitakeres.6 Here is his IMdB file.7You may take from this scrutiny that Jeremy Leatinu’u has worked very hard from 2008 - 2022. Since his immersion in a year of Te Reo in 2020, we sense that he is doubling his mana through language as his tool .
Back to the title, WHAKAWHITINGA. In legalization it is defined as conveyance. WHAKAWHITINGA is conveyance.8 We reap what we sow with the conveyance of any action. It is not only the exposure of knowledge we have about the facts of existence, of biodiversity as a requirement. When we see, feel and measure sustainability as essential, it is our cultures that translate the stories of existence. It is crossing this truth that gives us insight as to why each generation requires to know their whakapapa.
Thank you.
Readings.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mmRPfQOJ5o&ab_channel=BlackCreativesAotearoa.https://www.artistsjourney.com/blog/constraint-in-art.https://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-BesGame-t1-body-d4-d1-d7.html 3. https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/discover-collections/read-watch-play/maori/maori-gardening-toolsReferences1.https://www.circuit.org.nz/work/truth-or-consequences-trailer2. https://www.nationwidebooks.co.nz/product/maori-moving-image-97818773757363. Best. E. (1856- 1931) p 96 4.https://jeremyleatinuu.com/portfolio/463/5. https://www.last.fm/music/Spartacus+R/+wiki6. Tim Prebble. 2013. “ two months embedded in the Waitakere Ranges Regional Park as an Artist in Residence”. https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/AK1312/S00317/the-music-of-sound-the-magic-of-place.htm7. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0695670/8. ://www.legalmaori.net/dictionary?omni=whakawhitinga
Berlinhttps://www.berlinale.de/en/archive/jahresarchive/2019/01_jahresblatt_2019/01_jahresblatt_2019.html
websiteJEREMY LEATINU'U
Te Whakawhitinga | Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū