Review of Asylum Pieces (Dudding, 2010).
Review of Asylum Pieces (Dudding, 2010).
One of the pleasures of films is that moment when they gather you up and take you somewhere different. Kathy Dudding’s Asylum Pieces is the first of his year’s International Film Festival to do this for me.
This deeply personal film, which is framed in a historic, and visual investigation of the old hospital/asylum at Porirua, transported me into a journey that in turn deeply affected me. Having worked at the hospital in the early Eighties it brought back memories- some of whom I still meet in the street as ex-patients are now housed out in the community. The history of the hospital is explored in archival film, narration and images collected by Dudding and through photos left behind by an old lover. This relationship is pivotal to the film and yet never overwhelms it. The images of the decaying hospital exemplify the deterioration of the health service that began it. A sober witness of how these services are now held hostage to the profit gods rather than the healing angels of yesteryear- as discussed in the archival footage, not always right but well meaning.
Dudding invites us to see in these images a stark beauty, a melancholy ode to the ephemeral. Her simple narration and the use of quotation from former patients and officials clearly trace how the care of the mentally ill has been torn from a search for self worth and meaning into a regime of drugs, often ill-prescribed and badly described to patients and families. To say more is to give too much away but by the end, as it is in the beginning, we are invited into the most personal of experiences.
I found myself fascinated by the images presented, sometimes unable to discern the moving from the still and in thrall to the words taking me through the journey. It was a privilege to watch this film, a moving experience that stayed with me long after I left the cinema. For me, a true example of fine filmmaking.
One of the pleasures of films is that moment when they gather you up and take you somewhere different. Kathy Dudding’s Asylum Pieces is the first of his year’s International Film Festival to do this for me.
This deeply personal film, which is framed in a historic, and visual investigation of the old hospital/asylum at Porirua, transported me into a journey that in turn deeply affected me. Having worked at the hospital in the early Eighties it brought back memories- some of whom I still meet in the street as ex-patients are now housed out in the community. The history of the hospital is explored in archival film, narration and images collected by Dudding and through photos left behind by an old lover. This relationship is pivotal to the film and yet never overwhelms it. The images of the decaying hospital exemplify the deterioration of the health service that began it. A sober witness of how these services are now held hostage to the profit gods rather than the healing angels of yesteryear- as discussed in the archival footage, not always right but well meaning.
Dudding invites us to see in these images a stark beauty, a melancholy ode to the ephemeral. Her simple narration and the use of quotation from former patients and officials clearly trace how the care of the mentally ill has been torn from a search for self worth and meaning into a regime of drugs, often ill-prescribed and badly described to patients and families. To say more is to give too much away but by the end, as it is in the beginning, we are invited into the most personal of experiences.
I found myself fascinated by the images presented, sometimes unable to discern the moving from the still and in thrall to the words taking me through the journey. It was a privilege to watch this film, a moving experience that stayed with me long after I left the cinema. For me, a true example of fine filmmaking.
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