Title: Off the Record

Author: Samara McDowell

In: Sport 32: Summer 2004

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, December 2004

Part of: Sport

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Sport 32: Summer 2004

Composing (one's face): Zen and the Art of Documentary

Composing (one's face): Zen and the Art of Documentary

Later they will discover the beauty and space of the men's room, which unlike the women's is tiled and startlingly spacious; it's here they will end up smoking joints, telling jokes, playing percussion on the hand-dryers and the urinals; right out in the open, in full view, you're watching them, and yet still somehow secretly, keeping your face pleasant, composed, neutral, concealing how, in brief flashing moments gone too fast in the scramble between schedule and equipment and unanswered messages, this job is making your heart twist or jolt in your chest with loneliness and furious envy: of their musicality, of their ease with and pleasure in each other, of their very maleness, actually. Men seem to you sometimes to move so easily, so comfortably through the world: if they think someone is looking at them, what they are allowed to do is turn and look directly back. Sometimes on this job you find being female tiring, alienating, disheartening, and lonely. —It's because, very quickly, after the first few weeks or so, you are the only one: none of the musicians are women on most of the gigs, and on most of the gigs none of the film crew are either. —Being the object of even fleeting sexual curiosity or speculation when you're working is disconcerting to the point of unpleasant, and yet what else have you? When what you do well does not interest them, and what they do wonderfully well, you cannot do at all? What else makes you interesting enough for them to turn toward you enough to tell you what it is you need to know, and to trust you enough to tell you, at least some of the time, on camera? —Every interview is the secret, compressed, infused product of the hours, and hours, and hours you have spent listening, watching, listening again, keeping your face open, neutral, composed, making notes and drawing diagrams in your head, weaving links, connections, and theories; right there, in full view, and page 102 yet still somehow secretly; your eyes recording, your mind whirling, never in neutral, your face composed, while before you they play, rehearse, occupy without question or hesitation that central space that waits in every collection of people, together; there is in every interview a deep and secret pleasure in asking the one question you know—you suspect, but also, you simply know—is going to make the subject draw in their breath sharply, look at you like they only just saw you, stumble or flow on their answer.

In Taupo, the very first morning, you get up early, hours before anyone else, go to the phone booth on the lake, and ring Charles. Charles, by virtue of the kind of coincidence that given a quarter of a chance the world most likes to operate in, is both Alda's husband and a friend of yours since you and he were both eight. You don't know you are going to do this—you were merely calling to ask when he was arriving—but as soon as he answers the phone you burst into tears. It's horrible, because you can't talk and the minutes on the phone card are running out. Charles makes startled but soothing noises from his pillow. ‘I can't do it, it's too hard, I didn't know it was going to be this hard,’ you say, in between these awful ratcheting breaths. Hiccupping, with the light flattening itself across the lake. You can't explain it, this thing like grief that has overwhelmed you, the very first morning on tour. You are so lonely you feel like you could die of it: and you would, you feel you would die rather than let any of the (all male) musicians, any of the (all male) doco crew, see you cry, or have the slightest indication why you might. —This thing, this thing that woke you so early, is both absurd, and serious: you can feel the two working together, and you pincered between them, sleeping or not sleeping in the tiny room you and the two camera boys are sharing, three bunk beds stacked like Weetbix against three walls, listening or not listening to each other breathe, the smell of men's bodies, how the three of you marooned in this tiny room seek together, the secret frightening ways in which you fear you will fail. —Charles—who has, remember, known you since you were a child, who has worked for years in film, whose partner has worked for years in music—picks his way through the gasping half-sentences and works it out. ‘Boys and equipment, huh,’ he says, with so much kindness he could be Steven and Rio when you got too cold page 103 and had to be wrapped in a blanket, as briskly and carefully as one of the instruments, and put in the van with the motor running—‘boys and equipment.’ The accuracy of this assessment in itself startles and soothes you. The phone card runs out as Charles is saying, urgently, ‘Go for a walk by the lake. Take deep breaths. You're okay.’ You go for a walk by the lake, you take deep breaths. You think, dryly, in Charles' voice, boys and equipment, and you think about that, you think about boys and equipment, you think about film sets you have known and hated (‘It's a fucking boys' club,’ you tell your friends in the public service, which has actual and enforceable laws governing this issue; they are incredulous at some of your stories, and so are you), you think about boys and tools, you think about boys and instruments, you probably think about boys and pissing standing up. You come up with some fairly creaking theories about all this—and yet it is, genuinely, really very odd, how women overwhelmingly don't play instruments. Why not?—For the same reason they overwhelmingly don't play (with) cameras, sound equipment?—Film boys. Music boys. Boys and tools; equipment; and instruments.

Jonathan and Riki, in particular, won't be the ones to lead you away from this alarming, simplistic and, anyway, well-worn train of thought. Jonathan and Riki make penis jokes with vocational fervour. The first time they do it in front of you you are so startled you don't know where to look, or what to do with your face; you keep your eyes on your plate, and chew on grimly. Alda, on your right, is the only other woman present, but Alda's English isn't quick enough this time for the innuendo; you glance at her and see she didn't understand. God, you bastards, you think crossly, don't say that in front of me, and keep your face smooth and neutral, your elbows tucked well in; you'd like to punch Jonathan in the ribs with the left one, and simultaneously kick Riki, who is across from you, as hard as you can under the table with your right foot.

Jonathan and Riki make wanking jokes endlessly too—there's a particular, frenetic, unfriendly slapping sound they recreate with their palms that it takes you a couple of unwitting audiences, puzzled by why it's funny, to identify. —Oh ick, you think to yourself primly, getting it.

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And keep your eyes wide and innocent of thought, your face neutral and composed.

—For there is another time. There is a time at dawn, when everything is still, and the light comes up behind the mountains and floods the sea, that heart-catching blue, when they forget you are in the van at all; you have been with them for hours and hours and hours, setting up, performing, drinking, recording, smoking dope, eating at Kenny's, smoking cigarettes, drinking more, playing with the instruments in the huge freezing Post Office Building after the gig, out of too much energy and joy to stop; Jonathan and Alda have been recording. Alda exhausted, on the point of leaving for Brazil, lying flat on the dirty carpet listening to the playback with her head pillowed on her coat, most of the light coming from the little wooden organ or the computer; you have been so still, or moving so smoothly into the interstices and between the notes, you have made yourself variously useful or silent, you have been listening and watching so intently for so long that you have rendered yourself invisible. The van drives past your apartment, and keeps on going. You glance across. No one looks at you. You don't know what to do; you can't break this rich encoded silence. After about a mile you reach over and wind down the window; and then you are there again, and people laugh, and on the little winding coast road the van stops and turns around and takes you home.

Maybe this shouldn't feel like a personal victory. Maybe this shouldn't feel like an accolade. Maybe you shouldn't go to bed, finally, wearily, with your blood singing with pride, that you have, finally, made yourself disappear. Maybe being there, and not being there shouldn't feel to you like such an accomplishment; being ignored like, finally, the best kind of acknowledgement.

But it does.