the non fiction film
General thoughts: Stephanie Beth
11/06/2025I read my 2007 short essay about Film school at University of Canterbury this morning, the one published for the 125th year celebration of the school. I noticed the typo about Fonda having been missed, ironic to me. I do remember standing in New Orleans, profoundly reckoning in 1972, I recall. Interesting that I did think about the brother, son of Henry Fonda, whilst daughter Jane, was the girl who went into Hanoi. Being a country girl, I knew what role her father and colleagues had to play in The Grapes of Wrath. (1940) and had read what absent fathers can do for children when their feet are fumbling on the ground. It is acutely worth noting that in 1968 the Stanley Kubick film Space Odyssey 2001, was a profound and meticulous introduction to me of a world philosophically placed to consider in an Art film about humans and computers in the most unSci Fi film genre way possible to imagine. I saw this film in the months before I set off to see the large world when my personal task was to decide what I was going to do with my life, let alone that Stephen Spielberg would proceed to making the film AI. (2001) The other day, the northern fisherman took a photo of the black iceberg. (Antoniussen's berg) *
It is no wonder that I wanted to put on black stretch pants and do 1980’s dancing, a little. Now, whilst writing, I have even dropped playing Berthold Goldschmidt’s Beatrice Cenci, over and over. 22/06/2024We fill our ears with life, even the sound effects. I hear the beauty of an early morning quiet. Then someone is electrically sanding a floor across the street. I hear the computer scanner hum. There is a piwakawaka outside dancing for cobwebs off of the office wall and window. I am going for a hearing aid test in three days. I never forgot what it was like to be a curious and excited adolescent of the world. After I became a student of film, even with gaps between one film and the next, the large topics have rivitted me. Life and death and life in between. Then, as minutea topic of how we uphold life as pleasure and creativity.
11/06/2025I read my 2007 short essay about Film school at University of Canterbury this morning, the one published for the 125th year celebration of the school. I noticed the typo about Fonda having been missed, ironic to me. I do remember standing in New Orleans, profoundly reckoning in 1972, I recall. Interesting that I did think about the brother, son of Henry Fonda, whilst daughter Jane, was the girl who went into Hanoi. Being a country girl, I knew what role her father and colleagues had to play in The Grapes of Wrath. (1940) and had read what absent fathers can do for children when their feet are fumbling on the ground. It is acutely worth noting that in 1968 the Stanley Kubick film Space Odyssey 2001, was a profound and meticulous introduction to me of a world philosophically placed to consider in an Art film about humans and computers in the most unSci Fi film genre way possible to imagine. I saw this film in the months before I set off to see the large world when my personal task was to decide what I was going to do with my life, let alone that Stephen Spielberg would proceed to making the film AI. (2001) The other day, the northern fisherman took a photo of the black iceberg. (Antoniussen's berg) *
It is no wonder that I wanted to put on black stretch pants and do 1980’s dancing, a little. Now, whilst writing, I have even dropped playing Berthold Goldschmidt’s Beatrice Cenci, over and over. 22/06/2024We fill our ears with life, even the sound effects. I hear the beauty of an early morning quiet. Then someone is electrically sanding a floor across the street. I hear the computer scanner hum. There is a piwakawaka outside dancing for cobwebs off of the office wall and window. I am going for a hearing aid test in three days. I never forgot what it was like to be a curious and excited adolescent of the world. After I became a student of film, even with gaps between one film and the next, the large topics have rivitted me. Life and death and life in between. Then, as minutea topic of how we uphold life as pleasure and creativity.
* Black or dark grayish tint. This is often the result of dirt or other dark material that becomes bound up in the ice, sometimes as it rolls over a dark surface. As Antoniussen says, these icebergs look very different from the black chunk he saw in the Labrador Sea.
Another explanation, according to glaciologist Lev Tarasov of Memorial University in Canada, is that the black berg was once part of a larger glacier that broke off and fell into the ocean.
Glaciers grind along the ground as they move towards the ocean, stirring up a lot of debris that becomes mixed in with the ice. Tarasov saw smaller chunks of ice that exhibited this in Greenland.
It would take a long time for this debris to become as uniformly mixed through as it appears to be in Antoniussen's berg, suggesting that the chunk of ice is quite old – from 1,000 up to 100,000 years old, Tarasov told CBC. https://www.bing.com/search?q=Antoniussen%27s+berg&FORM=ANAB01&PC=EDGEDSE
Another explanation, according to glaciologist Lev Tarasov of Memorial University in Canada, is that the black berg was once part of a larger glacier that broke off and fell into the ocean.
Glaciers grind along the ground as they move towards the ocean, stirring up a lot of debris that becomes mixed in with the ice. Tarasov saw smaller chunks of ice that exhibited this in Greenland.
It would take a long time for this debris to become as uniformly mixed through as it appears to be in Antoniussen's berg, suggesting that the chunk of ice is quite old – from 1,000 up to 100,000 years old, Tarasov told CBC. https://www.bing.com/search?q=Antoniussen%27s+berg&FORM=ANAB01&PC=EDGEDSE
We held a panel discussion at the ARENA Cinema. * Los Angeles. 2013
Hosted by Synergetic Films who then facilitated this documentary over to continue its care at Film Hub. 2023
Thank you. Synergetic Films. Thank you Film Hub.
Thanks Sydney games fans, Durban, Georgia, Copenhagen, Norfolk and Margate fans, USC, Carnegie Mellon, developers in Montreal and more for BLU RAY screenings (by post!) through 2014 before our invitation to Steam for a good decade. People are still catching the doco on Amazon Prime.
https://www.primevideo.com/detail/Us-The-Game-Industry/0LTSOGDENFZVQE610D8BYCUJOK
IN JOY(1980)
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Stephanie Beth (documentary maker) and Emma Fitts (artist) 2021 discuss two films from the 1970's
I Want to the Joan and IN JOYInterview produced by Thomasin Sleigh in 2021: Drop the link on your browser.SOUNDCLOUDhttps://soundcloud.com/circuit-2/circuit-cast-98-stephanie-beth-and-emma-fitts.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FILM ARTS
STUDENT LIFE
I completed study at Ilam, in the Department of Fine Arts, at the University of Canterbury at the end of 1977. I studied after I had seen hundreds of feet of cinema in New Zealand, England and America. The 70s through to the 80s were propelling cinematic years. My film teacher was Maurice Askew. (1) Askew was President of the Film Society. All Society 16mm reels came into our learning facility.
Kids who grew up surviving wars had films to make. For example, imagine French film students watching Renoir*
Principle films to watch, for me as a student, were those supplied by the
French Embassy. There was a little archive material from the silent era and the Avant- Garde, by this time international supply to schooling. Documentary and narratives emerged from France, mid 20th Century. Then New German cinema. Then some American direct cinema. I got to see credulously great cinema from Fassbinder and Wim Wenders, so significant in the mid 80s.
Film artists explore themes and use motifs. We sense struggle, chaos and fear as well as waves of generosity, kindness, self-realisation and beauty.
This is the 21st Century. So much more is going on here. My instinct with this, in deliberate ways, is to think with caution, scepticism and caution.
The student film that I cut on single 16mm reels at Armagh Street in 1977 in Christchurch, were ideas for the community. I made a promise to myself to get out and show my film to the public. It was thanks to two filmmakers, Leon Narbey and Geoff Steven who set up Alternative Cinema in Christchurch, that I cut my first one. **
I hadn't then met Leon Narbey. I had reels, a 1950s era Moviola from Hollywood, an Italian splicer and a one bar heater, to get me, just, through time in a room with a cold concrete floor for a post-production springtime.
* Renoir directed The Grand Illusion. 1937' it’s a meditation on the collapse of the old order of European civilization.' Roger Ebert
** Alternative Cinema NZ
Narbey
Steven
https://www.nzonscreen.com/profile/leon-narbey/biography
https://www.nzonscreen.com/profile/geoff-steven
FOLLOWING STUDENT LIFE
After making two documentaries, I deduced that I made what I called a
' Companion pair' of films about women as a sex. I wrote this in 2018 and told this to Thomasin Sleigh when she interviewed me in 2018. I took up the idea thread of play as my subject in three documentary films. Broadly, love and play. I attended a private girl's school, IONA COLLEGE. I have always liked the symbolic notion of the trilogy in idea structure. I got handed the one, LOVE. JOY. PEACE. Since three films, I peruse and live within beautiful layers of life and the human condition.
The three films I decided to make and release in quick summary.
I Want to be Joan (1977) Christchurch
To get there, with such bon mots of wisdom, I had to make sure that I found bits of laughter in any story. I value play with irony, adrenalin and thought. Play, in the Liberal Arts, is a skill used to explore the cracks in society. Self-irony, in my firt film, came through from the interviewee Josephine, a woman who was asked about self-reflection as a mother in I Want to be Joan (1977). She had enough awareness of herself to describe her yong motherhood antics with a recall that was guilt free.
IN JOY (1980) Auckland.
With IN JOY (1980) I started with classic theatrical devices used for movement and mine to be tools to make use of for insight. Predessessors to other performance skills had been the characiaturists, the writers of farces and the like.
US AND THE GAME INDUSTRY (2013) Los Angeles.
Soon, the pre-computer rushes and then the accelerating computer rushes in the computer Industry, placed engineers to the forefront of new entertainments.
I travelled to Europe and America when I was young. When I went to Europe again, it was after raising a child. I was ready to reach out to fresh tropes by the time that our son was past adolescence. I specifically willed myself to find the financial resources to attend the Forever Godard. 2001 Conference at the TATE Modern, after which I had fifteen days in Paris, Rome, Parma, the Amalfi Coast and then back to home. *
I was home just two weeks before the New York Twin Towers were attacked.
My Practice.
It is the travel I had, when I was twenty-one, overland to Europe, before England, that gave me notification about ways to view the end of the 19th Century and the beginnings of the 20th. It was how my mother mentioned the serious themes of conscience that gave bearing to me about ways to research the world.
When I prepared to film at the the United Women's Convention, 1977, my particular objective became to send many journalists incognito to the Convention workshops. This was to invite women who had never spoken their thoughs aloud on film, to take an opportunity to do so.
For the film, IN JOY, (16mm colour negative) three years later, what the cinema camera could achieve was shots for constructions of pause, reflection and
action as a dynamic. The big theorist on realism, at the time, was Roland Barthes. He had this lovely, odd word, punctum. ** The still photographer on the job was Jane Zusters.(2) Zusters, by instinct, caught photographs with centered subjects.
In 2018 it was important to me to make an account of my own knowledge gathering.
This is project four. LIFE, SOMETIME AFTER THE HORSE WAS HARNESSED (2016).
On this site, a brief sojourn.
Q What is the year 2026 doing to us?
*Forever Godard reviewed
https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2001/festival-reports/godard_for_ever_reviewed
**Puntum. Latin. (photography) A detail in a photograph that captures the viewer's attention and evokes an emotional response or personal connection beyond the intended subject.
* Interesting back history to the ARENA CINEMA.
The Theatre I hired for the launch of UATGI was The Arena. It cost me thousands, none of which I recouped, some later sales or UATGI burrowing into some of the debt.The Arena seemed an enjoyable punt. I was happy to be on a high for release as the film had been invited into Dances With Films in 2013.The Arena. Back History.Originally opened on July 19, 1972 by United Artists as the Egyptian 2 & 3. The opening movies were Charlton Heston in “Skyjacked” & Gene Hackman in “The French Connection”. The two screens were created in an already existing former retail unit facing N. Las Palmas Avenue, alongside and east of the original auditorium of the famous Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Entrance at that time was via the famous Egyptian Theatre courtyard on Hollywood Boulevard. The Egyptian 2 & 3 closed, together with the historic main auditorium in 1992. The original Egyptian Theatre suffered damage in the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, and it wasn’t until December 4, 1998 that it was reopened by the American Cinematheque after a refurbishment.In the meantime, the Egyptian 2 & 3 had been converted into live theatre use, and was occupied by several theatre companies. In 2008 the Theatre of Arts College for the Contemporary Actor took over the building as a drama school. In 2010, commercial theatre productions were being staged.In early-2013 it became the Arena Cinema and by May 2018 had been renamed Arena Cinelounge. It was closed by early-2024. In October 2024 it reopened as the Hang On to the Dream Theatre, presenting live performances and a weekly independent movie night. The building may be in use for special events or live theatre.