Annie: My Mensch, Jackie Wolf
“I first met Jackie at the Australian Film Television School in 1988. It was the Bicentenary of Colonisation and Invasion.
There had been no Aboriginal students or Tutors before I arrived. My admission to the film school was not because I had degrees nor because I could face all the required forms. I was making a short documentary and was admitted after I’d finished that thanks to the initiative and support of two very wonderful older and wiser feminist filmmakers.
It wasn’t long before I felt like I’d known Jackie all my life. We bonded over sexism, homophobia, humour, racism and the idiocy of white, western filmmaking all perpetuated by the film school.
As you can see, I was appallingly ungrateful.
Jackie and I intuitively and viscerally understood each other. As much as I could. How could I really know? Jackie had a genius I couldn’t grasp but I knew it was not for me to grasp nor to envy. It had come at too high a cost, one I cannot comprehend, over millennia.
Millennia I can only sense
in Rock
Sandstone
Sea
Country
and all the Blood in that Water.
In 1988 and I would argue still today to be a Woman, Lesbian, Jewish or Aboriginal was too ‘Other’. After a long fight and a year off Jackie was finally allowed to do Cinematography despite the fact she did not have a penis. I did editing and took a year off as well to get sober, which was unheard of!
Mercifully for both of us, AFTRS had a Romanian head of cinematography. He understood and backed our vision, instincts and histories. Jackie’s Ancestors were Hungarian and Romanian and her parents were Jewish Holocaust Survivors. They helped a lot especially when the writing department said of my film, “ You can’t have incest and Aboriginal content in the same film……” and the editing department said “More close ups more cutaways. You must explain….” I heeded much of the advice but not quite.
Jackie’s first year film was ‘The Illustrated Auschwitz’.
Microcellular Visceral Voices.
Yes Ashes and Ancestors
Blow all through the Earth.
These Ashes, this Ancestry imbued Jackie’s expressive Storyboard of Separation that was to become my third year film Terra Nullius . Despite the funds and all the equipment I did not possess the courage nor the trust to make a film before my third year.
I had been taken away
had no mob
no one to say
Hey don’t give this Away.
When I had no language Jackie’s Oxygen persisted. It was Photosynthesis in the Dark.
25 years later I met Jackie again. We rekindled our connection, and now, from the inside of AFTRS, Jackie gently pushed and pushed to get “my” film remastered. After 4 years we did it. And all the while I’m saying, “please Jackie please get your film remastered too.”
Finally now ‘The Illustrated Auschwitz’ has been remastered. After decades of cinematography Jackie is now a hands on Cinematography Lecturer at AFTRS. They are very lucky students especially the women.
These days we just know together, walk and talk together, but always but within the company of her namesake, an old Wolf descendent named Evie.
Love is Country. You can’t quite frame Country. Thank you, Jackie.”
Jackie: For the love of Annie P…
“The year was 1988, the year of the Bicentenary. Annie, me and the rest of that year’s intake at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School would joke that we were the school’s answer to their diversity optics. Unbelievably or believably, depending on your perspective, Annie was the first Indigenous student to be accepted into the school.“
Another rare and improbable stat was that out of the six women accepted that year, four of us were queer and out of that four, two were Annie and me. With our double indemnity outsider status as our point of departure, Annie’s fierce sense of funny, political smarts and radical kindness were irresistible to me. We were to be buds and that’s all there was to it.
Fast forward to our final year in 1991, Annie who had specialised in editing, had the opportunity to write and direct her graduating film, Terra Nullius. A searing experimental piece that sought to go where no-one else had gone before either in its content or it’s form. It was a work that explored the very real conflation of the political lie that was terra nullius with the idea of terra nullius as an emotional strategy. The strategy to vacate one’s body as a way of fending off the annihilation of childhood sexual abuse within the abyss of cultural dispossession.
During preproduction, Annie and I sat together at her kitchen table for what seemed like weeks as I did my best to channel her vision into the storyboard that would become the blueprint for her film. Annie was exacting in that every frame had to speak her truth as she knew it. It was an unparalleled education in both emotional literacy and consummate grace.
I am still blown away by Annie’s generosity and trust in allowing me to help tell this story. Inevitably, this time also sparked my first real reckoning with the genocidal history of this place that I call home. But it was also when I recognised the full depth of the connection between us. We were and remain daughters of genocide after all. Each of our stories containing important differences but with an unequivocal throughline that leaves me wondering how many people know my heart as well as my Annie P.
Another fast forward through the nineties and the noughties when life and love took Annie away from the film industry and towards bush regeneration and South Australia and we stupidly lost touch. Only to next see her beautiful face in 2016 when we both had our films curated into a retrospective of 90’s feminist films called Femflix. I remember glimpsing her at the opening through the crowded sandstone colonnade of Sydney College of the Arts, finding her, reaching her and holding tight with the stories of our lost years cascading out like so much water. Like no time had been lost, a tonic for my soul.
Since then my Annie is back in my life where she belongs. In 2017, Annie travelled to Europe and having sought my and another Jewish friend’s blessing, she made the trip to Auschwitz. And inside those walls, in a gesture that all but undid me, my Annie sang Dona Dona for my family who had survived and for those who’d been killed. If that weren’t enough, aside from our regular times walking and talking together, every Yom Hashoah, Seder and Rosh Hashanah I will receive a thoughtful and loving message from her. I often tease her that she is a better Jew than me.”