Ambush Road: Alterities of Time and Voice Toward a Cinematic Understanding of ‘The Great War for New Zealand’

Abstract

This artistic research thesis consists of a 46 minute film sequence and a written exegesis, which inquire into the potentials of alterities of time and voice for an original cinematic understanding of local New Zealand Wars history at a metonymic Ambush Road, South Auckland, and other related locations. Informed by Māori-Moana (Tā\Vā/Wā) and ‘weird and eerie’ Euro-American temporal alterities (Fisher, 2016), a fragmented and unsettled Pākehā tauiwi (migrant) filmmaker voice has emerged during a series of exchanges with Indigenous knowledge-holders and a parallel dialogue with a generative ‘other intelligence.’ This voice is further recalibrated and focussed by a poetic process of vertical layering (Deren, 1953, in [TheStickingPlace], 2013), which chimes with the non-linear potentials of cinematic understanding, and the whakataukī (Māori proverb) ka mua, ka muri (the past in front happens, just as what will happen is at the rear).

The seven parts of the film Forever in Time alternate between autoethnography and interrogations of the “negative hallucination” (Fisher, 2016, p. 75) that has accompanied Indigenous, proletarian, and ecological despoliation and resistance in Auckland, since the building of the notorious Great South Road in 1862-3. As a conversation between the filmmaker and an ‘Anthrobot,’ the film is also a Pākehā ‘conversation with the self,’ which considers an emerging human-more-than-human retrofuture in which “the past itself, the ‘objective’ state of things, become[s] retroactively what it always was” (Žižek, 2008, p.59). Deploying still and moving image documentation, archival material, images of sculpture and other generated/generative fabulations, the thesis consciously presents an overflowing abundance of wā (appropriate moment/duration/intensity of ‘nowness’) (Mika, 2021; Wānanga TV, 2023) as it asks: what can alterities of time and voice contribute to an expanded cinematic understanding of ‘The Great War for New Zealand?’