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Profile: Bob Connolly, a life of observation

After a long absence, director Bob Connolly returns with Mrs. Carey’s Concert. Miguel Gonzalez spoke with him about his life in documentary.

Connolly was not the type of child that dreamt of working on TV or film. When he dropped out of an Arts Law degree in 1964, he joined the ABC as a cadet journalist. He did “reasonably well” and ended up doing a stint in New York. When he returned in 1968, he joined a current affairs program, first as an assistant producer, and ultimately working as an on camera reporter.
“But I was hopeless at the studio, like a stunned mullet, terrified of live stuff. My brain used to go blank!” he admitted.

So Connolly was sent to work on the show’s “Sunday stories”, doing five-minute reports until, three years later, he was asked to do a half-hour story for the documentary series A Big Country. It was his first  observational work, about a scheme in the Sydney affluent beachside suburb of Avalon, where Indigenous children were invited to live by the sea for a few days. Connolly spent time with one of those boys, then with the family, and finally he watched them come together to document their reaction. “It was the first time I actually got to do a little meaty film,” he said. “It was observational filmmaking. I was just scratching the  surface of it then, but what I realised is that if you’re patient and document these microcosmic events, they can really say something about important things such as, in this case, black-white and crosscultural relations.”
A few years went by and, burnt-out, Connolly took a year off and went to the US. When he returned and joined the documentary section at the ABC, the one that had given him that first observational opportunity, he didn’t know he would find more than a job.
Enter Robin Anderson, a young researcher just back from Columbia University, where she had done a postgraduate course in sociology. She brought back with her a theoretical understanding of the process of  watching and documenting people which, among other things, Connolly – with his journalistic background – found fascinating.
“I was absolutely blessed and it was one of those things that if you’re lucky, it happens to you. We just happened to mesh beautifully. I was living in Mosman at the time, and within 10 days, she moved in,” recalled Connolly.
After more than 10 years at the ABC, he felt his work there was done. Anderson persuaded him to quit, and so he did. They started working together as independent filmmakers in 1978. Their first film was  commissioned by the National Parks and Wildlife Service in Tasmania; a 35mm cinema short created to show the audience what would be lost if the Franklin River was flooded to build a dam. With a team of six others, Connolly and Anderson went down the river in a raft, but things got dangerous. It was one of the few occasions in which work became irrelevant and his concern about his partner took precedence. Most of the time, they “got on like a house on fire”.
“Our work and life together was just wonderful. She was once asked, you’ve been working together for more than 20 years, what’s your secret?’ She said ‘Well, I think he’s better than me at what we do, and he thinks I’m better than him’.  That perfectly summed up the mutual respect we had for each other,” said Connolly.
Their first feature documentary First Contact – a recount of the 1930s first encounter of the natives of the interior highlands of New Guinea with the Australian gold-seeking Leahy Brothers, and its effects in the region over the years – was nominated for the Oscar in 1982.
“A lot of people want to be documentary filmmakers because it’s so much fun, but it’s always been hard to make a living out of it,” said Connolly. “We were very fortunate; First Contact did very well around the world. It was funded by Dick Smith, and when he made his money back he handed back the rights to us. I still have an income from that film; that underpinned our later observational work, which has never made heaps of money… but enough to have a career.”
All their other projects were critically acclaimed, both in Australia and overseas; they ranged from two follow ups to First Contact (Joe Leahy’s Neighbours in 1989 and Black Harvest in 1992) to projects about a council election (Rats in the Ranks, 1996) and the struggles of the music department at the University of Sydney (Facing the Music, 2001). Tragically, Anderson was diagnosed with terminal cancer two days before the premiere screening of Facing the Music at the Sydney Film Festival.
“We stood on the stage, facing a standing ovation but dying inside. It was a terrible experience,” said Connolly.

According to Connolly, Robin Anderson taught him two things. The first one was integrity.

“When you’re dealing with observational film and you actually get good at it, you hold those lives in the palm of your hand; you can do anything. Robin was always guided by a tremendous sense of personal respect towards the people she was working with, and people pick up on that. I’m not saying I was disrespectful, but I was a brash journalist used to an ethic of ‘get the story or come back on your shield’.”
The second one was intellectual rigour.

“When you’re making a long-term observational film, you’re with people over the period of a year or 18 months, and you want to make a film that has something significant to say. You have no control over unfolding events, so you have to think very hard, clearly and rigorously about what it is that’s happening in front of you. She was brilliant at that and I picked up on it, and I think that was the whole mark of our work. We subjected the situations we were in to relentless analysis, and we ended up making the right decisions about who to cover and what to cover.”

A NEW KIND OF MUSIC
After Anderson’s untimely death, and with the challenge of raising two girls (aged 10 and 4), the last thing in Connolly’s mind was making another film: “I didn’t have time to do anything else. I didn’t want to make any films with anyone else and I didn’t want to make them by myself, because it’s too difficult,” he admitted. During those difficult years, he wrote a book about the year they spent making Black Harvest (“but that was therapy more than anything else”). Eventually, he had another fateful meeting as part of the jury at the Amsterdam Film Festival in 2005: his current partner and co-director of the new documentary Mrs. Carey’s Concert, Sophie Raymond, who was there with a short film.
“I didn’t’ think too much of it. One day she just dropped by; she was a filmmaker and I had vague thoughts about doing another film, but I wasn’t driven to it. I was too busy raising the kids and doing consulting work and other writing.”
Inspiration finally came from the biannual music concerts at his daughter’s school, put together by Karen Carey, who insists upon a classical repertoire and demands high performance standards, with the participation of all students.
Carey had previously asked Connolly to do video coverage of the 2005 and 2007 concerts, and it was then that he witnessed the behind the scenes drama that would make an interesting film.
Also a singer/songwriter, Raymond had experience as a sound recordist, so Connolly invited her to join the project: “By this stage, we were sort of partners, so I said ‘Do you want to do sound? What about being the co-director?’ It was a very clever decision, because what people remark on this film is the level of the sound recording,” he explained.
Last year Connolly received an Outstanding Achievement Award for his body of work from the Australian Directors’ Guild. When asked about his contribution to Australian filmmaking, he’s modest, but admits that he gets satisfaction when people say they want to make a film like one of his, or that they decided they wanted to become a filmmaker after seeing one of his works: “I was walking on air for about a week afterwards! But I never saw my job as ‘directing’; my job is to capture something, not to direct it and there’s a profound difference between the two. That’s what I’ve basically spent 35 years doing. When I started doing  observational filmmaking I realised that I’m not here to change the world, but to observe it as it is. You have to throw your pre-suppositions and moral judgments out the window, because If you’re abiding by what you think is the situation, you can go wrong and turn people into pawns to serve your purposes, and then you miss everything – what’s really going on, which is invariably more interesting and more profound.”

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