How two ‘elderly aunties', Robin White and Gaylene Preston, made a film together

The Spinoff

2 days ago

One dame said to another dame, 'I could make a film about you'.
This Sunday a quietly powerful observational documentary, Grace: A Prayer for Peace, is premiering at the NZ International Film Festival. In the film, renowned painter and printmaker Robin White pours natural pigment over bark cloth with a group of collaborators in a parking lot, eats peaches in her home, and figures out the direction of new works in Japan and Kiribati.
A particularly arresting moment begins with White looking over a series of her now-iconic landscapes from the 1970s which made her a key figure in the regionalist movement of 20th-century New Zealand art. Buildings, cars and mountains are flattened and stylised. White looks at them and says, 'this is me as a young painter trying to figure out how to paint'.
Now, White is one of New Zealand's most significant living artists, with a career spanning 50 years and counting. In 2003 she was appointed a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to painting and printmaking. In 2009 this became Dame Companion.
There's another renowned dame behind the camera too – Gaylene Preston. She is known for presenting serious subjects with humour, warmth and compassion and for a dedication to New Zealand film and New Zealand subjects, particularly artists.
In Grace, White is relaxed and open, as if she's known the person behind the camera forever. In fact, it was through the film that the two dames came to know each other. Now, they talk like old friends, finishing each other's reminiscences and memories. So how did it all happen?
Gaylene Preston: Rita Angus put us together. I was at the opening of a Rita Angus retrospective at Te Papa in 2021. I'd had a head injury. I was avoiding noisy public places. I decided to go, but I didn't think I'd last very long. When everyone was getting a cup of tea, I saw Robin was sitting at a table over from me. I looked at her, and I thought, if that's Robin White, I want to tell her what a brilliant painter she is, and that I love Summer Grass. So I went over, I introduced myself, and I found myself saying, 'Well, I've made a film about Rita Angus, and I've made a film about Hone Tuwhare, and I've made a film about Keri Hulme. I could make a film about you.'
I heard it come out of my mouth, and while I didn't disagree with it, I couldn't believe I'd said that. At that time, I had given up filmmaking. I'd had a really nasty concussion for some years, so I thought my filmmaking days were over, and here I was telling Robin White that I'd make a film.
Robin White: Well, I'm looking at this woman who introduced herself and thinking, oh my gosh, this is Gaylene Preston, I know who you are. This is a real honour. I felt hugely privileged to be approached by this lady, but at the same time I'm looking at Gaylene and thinking, gosh, lady, I don't know if you're you – are you OK? Hopefully, my natural politeness kicked in. I can't remember how I responded.
I didn't know at this point that you'd had this head injury, but I instinctively felt there was something about this lady, that she's not herself. There was something about you, Gaylene. But I knew this is a solid lady. This is not a flake. I'm dealing with a woman with a formidable reputation for doing stuff.
It left me thinking there was more to talk about. These things require time and conversation. At the back of my mind, I'm thinking, park it for a time when we can be face to face and revisit this, which is what happened, wasn't it, Gaylene.
Preston: I was very grateful for that, because I wasn't in the shape to be making a film. It was a full year later that we got together to talk about what a film might be.
White: In December the following year I was driving up to Auckland with all my gear packed, getting ready for a period of working collaboratively with Ebonie Fifita and Falehanga 'o Laka. I was going to be in Wellington just briefly, so I got in touch with you. I think one of the first things I said to you when we finally had that coffee on Cuba Street is that I wasn't really interested in a film about me, but what I thought might be more purposeful, more useful in the bigger scheme of things, would be a film that addressed the idea of artists working collaboratively.
Preston: Film is a highly collaborative medium. So making a film about artistic, creative collaboration, particularly a collaboration of making big, huge, messy bark cloth work with a group of women, is immediately very interesting for a filmmaker.
White: It all just went 'click, click, click' from there. But it wasn't until the beginning of January 2023 that you came to Laka where we were working, is that right?
Preston: Robin, Ebonie and Ruha Fifita were working at an art space on Onehunga Mall, which I was familiar with. My camera was broken so I filmed on my phone. In my mind, I was really doing research, and I would go and get the real money to make a real film with a real film crew and high quality cameras later. We did use some very high range cameras filming Robin's retrospective, but I found once we hit the edit, there was a real lively intimacy to what I had originally filmed. I don't think documentaries are all about swanky camera work. The material I thought I was shooting for research turned out to be more valuable than I thought.
I'm still shooting. I have to keep shooting until the big Kiribati painting is finished. I'm painting a globally important artist painting a big master work. So why would I stop just because I've delivered my feature film? That'd be silly, wouldn't it?
White: People have asked me what it was like being filmed. In some of those sequences which are quite intimate and personal and emotional I was unaware of the presence of a camera. I suppose fly on the wall is not a bad description. I didn't feel nervous. Partly that's to do with trusting a fellow artist who has this amazing history of creativity. The other thing is that the context of collaborative art making is a context of a busy social environment, a lot of comings and goings, a lot of discussion, a lot of very open conversations about what is being done, the decision making, the critiquing of things. It's very different from the – quote, unquote – Western notion of the artist alone and being very protective and very secretive.
Preston: The job is to be as unobtrusive as possible – that's the filmmaking tradition I come from, and that relates right back to Barry Barclay making Tangata Whenua in 1974. If you're making a film, an observational documentary about something, if you intrude, you've just lost what you're there to do.
Robin and I were getting to know one another more deeply through this time. We didn't know one another before, but once we met, we had so many things in common. We've both been to art school, and we both came up through the public school system in New Zealand after the war, when everything was for the kiddies. It was child-based, play-based, art-based, primary education. Fortunately, we had a very progressive education.
We're the art room people, that's what we share, isn't it Robin.
White: Yeah, possibly for different reasons. I found primary school was a very lonely experience for me. I didn't enjoy going to school at all. I was much happier just at home, just doing whatever at home, but once I got to intermediate school, there was an art room with a dedicated art teacher, so I found my place.
It feels like there's also a lot in common about the way we've proceeded in our careers. Maybe it's to do with commitment and a certain fearlessness, risk taking, in a world which if not openly hostile, is at least not all that encouraging for women. I don't have anything too much to complain about in that regard, but maybe because I'm just so bolshie.
Preston: I've got a reputation for being bolshie, but I think I'm really kind of pleasant. In the end I'm not just gonna do something because I think that's what the market wants. In Aotearoa, we have made very few films about artists, and yet in this year's festival, there's three or four and they're made by women, incidentally. But they've been famously hard to fund. Mainstream networks aren't screening films about artists, let alone New Zealand artists. It took me 30 years to get the money to make a film about Rita Angus. They just kept saying, 'No, we don't do dead artists, thanks.' That's New Zealand culture for you.
Anyway, we knew a few people in common from the old days, and we know the same songs that weren't necessarily known by the others because they were too young. We were having these conversations, having a great old gossip, and the others really liked listening in.