Hugo de Folieto, a monastic theologian from around the 12th century, wrote that black bile “reigns in the left side of the body; its seat is the spleen; it is cold and dry. It makes men irascible, timid, sleepy or sometimes wakeful. It issues from the eyes. Its quantity increases in autumn.” And so autumn begins, and brings with it a shift in mood, a tiring fluey cold, and a certain introspection. Perhaps more than any other season it provides those Proustian triggers, and small films start to play inside the mind. Films with no titles, no credits, but occasionally with a sound track. They have that flickering quality of film - of celluloid, of the pre-digital era. More often than not monochromatic, like the films we watched as young kids in primary school … a small tin shed with a concrete floor … watching films like Wayleggo - a 1960s film about sheep stations high in the Southern Alps (’Wayleggo’ being one of the instructions that shepherds use for their dogs, meaning something like, that’ll do boy, come away), a memory of vast landscapes of waving tussock. Sometimes we were allowed to watch a film backwards, as it spooled back onto its original reel, and certain quirks of motion revealed themselves, a defamiliarising moment, a little ostranenie in 1960s small town New Zealand…
And that cerebral cinema? Now playing: a memory of seeing a wild boar hanging in our woodshed, having also seen at some stage around then, a rifle, and realising with a great sense of gravity, how those two moments connected. Innocence pulled suddenly backwards, like a receding wave, with all of the seething sound that accompanies it. And another filmic fragment, like an out-take from Steven Spielberg’s Duel… of driving home down the coast road in the pitch black that can only occur far, far from civilisation. And realising that something was following us in the dark. It was barely discernible. We’d slow down, it would slow down too. Eventually my father stopped the car, and It stopped too. Another car, without headlights, was following us closely, like a blind person holding the arm of a sighted person, through the treacherous winding road, where we seemed so very far away from every single thing ….
The coast road, Kaikoura, in the 1930s. (Christchurch City Library)
