Culture
High Country Weather
by Gregory O'Brien
In 1949 an artist, a composer, a photographer and a poet made an attempt on Mt Aspiring, trying for a new form of film-making. Now, nearly 60 years later, a documentary completes their story.
Every now and again, cultural history yields one of those miraculous moments when the giants of an era, by happenstance or intention, find themselves together in one place: James Joyce and Marcel Proust both attending a soirée in 1922 Paris, Albert Einstein and Marilyn Monroe overnight in the same New York hotel or – a century earlier, and less reliably sourced – Eugene Delacroix, George Sand and Frederick Chopin weekending at the same French country house. Because of New Zealand’s relatively small population, meetings of luminaries have been more common here than elsewhere – particularly in mid-20th-century artistic circles where just about every-body did indeed know everyone else.
One of the most remarkable of these local occurrences is a little-known expedition up Mt Aspiring over the notoriously stormy summer of 1949. Photographer and cinematographer Brian Brake, aged 24, had twisted a few arms at the National Film Unit to get an unorthodox documentary off the ground. The collaborative film project was also to involve poet James K Baxter, aged 22, composer Douglas Lilburn – aged 34 and the elder statesman of the group – and the 18-year-old artist John Drawbridge.
The story begins at 7.35 one December evening with the blaring of a car-horn in a suburban Wellington street. Bags already packed, Baxter went out to join the two men sitting in the front of a National Film Unit van. The driver was Brian Brake; beside him was Drawbridge, clutching a folio of over 50 ink-and-wash images. These studies, with their whirling cloudscapes and alpine imaginings, would provide the storyboard for Brake’s intended film. The trio then sped down to the wharves where the van was loaded on to the overnight Lyttelton ferry.
In his diary, Baxter describes the beginning of the journey as “a great rush … a bit unreal”. It was an uneventful passage south apart from Baxter suffering a colossal nosebleed during the night. (Brake remembered this clearly decades later.) First-night nerves. Up early, the poet looked out at the bare grey and brown hills of Banks Peninsula and began “On Entering Lyttelton Harbour”:
_From open water moves the sluglike
ferry
Towards the land’s rough gates … _
The poem was finished later that morning at the Christchurch dwelling of Lilburn. Baxter, in a letter home, thought it “a good enough poem” and one occasioned, as he put it, by “the jolt of shifting camp”. Decades later, his widow Jacquie recalled that such a “jolt” would be a precondition for writing at many stages of the poet’s life.
With Lilburn on board, the entourage continued south in the frustratingly slow, overladen van. Overnight in Dunedin, Baxter visited his parents before the group headed for Queenstown, where they stopped at the aerodrome to check the supplies that were to be dropped onto the glacier. They also picked up two of the climbers – “friendly but somewhat dour”, as Baxter described them – who would accompany them up the mountain.
Baxter had recently been baptised into the Anglican faith and a letter he wrote to Jacquie is full of soul-searching. Having missed communion at Wanaka, some spiritual communion with Nature in the weeks ahead would have to make up for it.
Earlier in 1949, Brake had directed a short black-and-white film about the opening of the Aspiring Hut. Returning into the Southern Alps with a colour camera, he hoped to make a new kind of documentary – a film that drew on the skills and vision of his exemplary teams of practitioners (all of whom happened to be his friends): Baxter would provide a poetic voice-over commentary; Lilburn would compose a score; and Drawbridge, who had already storyboarded the entire film-shoot, would paint images for the titles and end-credits. (During filming, Brake carried with him Drawbridge’s William Blake-esque drawings, going to great pains to match many of his shots precisely to the sketches.)
For Brake, it was important that his collaborators experienced the alpine environment first-hand. Among the climbers enlisted to help their ascent – and carry the film gear – were Ed Cotter and George Lowe, both of whom would later accompany Edmund Hillary on Himalayan expeditions. There was also a camera assistant, and a stills photographer from the publicity studios, Barry Woods, who took the much reproduced image of Baxter at work on a poem/script in the Matukituki Valley.
The project was inspired, in part, by the radical documentaries made in England by Humphrey Jennings during the war years, and by the earlier Night Mail (dir: Harry Watt and Basil Wright, 1936), which incorporated words by W H Auden and music by Benjamin Britten. Although, according to Drawbridge, the assembled artists identified themselves as being, one way or another, from Scottish “high country” stock, their modernism was of a distinctly English, neo-romantic kind.
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