“The Second Woman is disgusting,” says artist Anna Breckon. It’s not what you expect the creator of an acclaimed work of theatre to say about their own piece – particularly when that work has played in festivals around Australia, received rave reviews, and just had its international debut.
“It’s quite gross to watch, and you just feel quite gross after it,” she continues.
Her co-collaborator, actor Nat Randall agrees. Randall’s performance in the show was a feat of endurance: working over the same scene 100 times in 24 hours, with 100 different men.
“The feeling of it is pretty rough, as women watching, as women working on it,” she says. “It’s a really important piece for us – it’s the first major project we’ve worked on that has extensive legs – but as two women that identify as queer, we were like, what is a different mode in which to explore and to present certain character types that are maybe not regarded on main stages or mainstream media?”
The experience of women is a central preoccupation of the two Sydney-based artists. The Second Woman has just premiered in Taiwan, but the duo is currently focused on Melbourne, where they have just launched a new collaborative film work, Rear View, at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). Part of The Theatre is Lying, a suite of works in ACCA’s a new commissioning stream supported by the MacFarlane Fund, Rear View’s central thematic concern is how film creates and perpetuates particular ideas about female identity. But while the work plays with key elements from Breckon and Randall’s oeuvre – fusing cinematic techniques with the theatrical; unpacking sexist tropes and stereotypes; pairing endurance performance with audience autonomy – those who expect to see a repeat of The Second Woman will find themselves confronted by something quite different.
“We started off thinking about, partly off the back of The Second Woman, what it means to write a script back to front,” Breckon tells Guardian Australia.
“The Second Woman is like, men, men, men, and there have been pieces written about it when the male participants are talking about their experience and I’m like, who cares what you think? There’s just too many men.”
The resulting 90-minute film is not a feature in the conventional sense. Directed by Breckon, the script is essentially a collage of hundreds of extracts from the dialogue of other films, performed by Randall and actor Linda Chen in a single take. The setting is the front seat of a moving car; on a green screen behind the actors, in a callback to classic Hollywood driving scenes, scrolls footage of the 200 km stretch of road between Broken Hill and Wilcannia. It’s a landscape famous for its use in films such as Wake in Fright and Mad Max 2 – films associated with a quintessentially masculine idea of Australia.
By contrast, the duo was interested in how cinema contributes to a social understanding of what it means to be a woman. “There are lots of theories around the way in which film works to produce what we understand to be female identity,” Breckon says. “It teaches us how to feel through various genres, and teaches us how to move and pose.”
To build the script, the artists wanted to use only lines from scenes featuring two women in a car. But they immediately came across a very practical problem.
“There weren’t enough two-women-in-a-car scenes to draw on,” Breckon says. “[The film] would have been like, two minutes long.” Given that one of their concerns was the limited way that women are represented in film, excluding scenes with men in them became a political problem too – if they only included dialogue from female characters, then they’d be merely reproducing that limited range of emotion and behaviour.
“In that logging of hundreds and hundreds of films, the rule became at least one woman in a car,” says Randall. Across the 90 minutes, both characters in Rear View take on male and female dialogue – drawing from around 100 films as diverse as The Big Sleep (1946), To Catch A Thief (1955), Pretty Woman (1990) and American Honey (2016) – a process that both mimics and subverts the intended meaning and gendered implications of the dialogue in the original films.
The project was also something of an experiment: what kind of characters could be produced using only snippets of dialogue from Australian and American cinema? Even though Rear View includes little by way of plot, the dialogue still had to hang together in a meaningful way.
With the film being shot in a single 90-minute take, Randall and Chen’s performances couldn’t be controlled in post-production. As a consequence, with its severely restricted scope and constantly present cast of two, the film takes on an increasingly theatrical sensibility as it rolls on. Cinematic conventions are further complicated by the film appearing in a gallery space with its proportions deliberately distorted. The screen is so large that in order to take in the whole image it’s necessary to stand some distance from it, but that distance makes it hard to hear dialogue. “There’s no ideal viewpoint,” says Breckon.
The audience is free to come and go as they please, engaging with the work in their own way: viewing it as something akin to a photograph on the gallery wall, or dipping into a section of the dialogue, or letting themselves be swept up by the passing landscape during the lulls in conversation, in the way that often happens on long drives, soundtracked by Nina Buchanan’s moody, meditative composition.
Breckon and Randall also wanted to complicate hierarchies of cinematic and artistic taste, or the idea that there are particular things that should and should not be seen in a gallery – including queer female relationships. The first scene in Rear View, accordingly, is based on a bawdy moment from the 2002 Cameron Diaz and Christina Applegate gross-out romcom, The Sweetest Thing, in which it appears as if Diaz’s character is performing oral sex on Applegate while actually looking for something dropped under the driver’s seat. The butch/femme dynamic in Rear View further complicates the scene that, in The Sweetest Thing, is played for laughs based literally on the interpretation of a man.
For all its cerebral undercurrents, Breckon and Randall nevertheless hope that those who commit to travelling with the two characters in Rear View from start to finish also experience the pleasure of what they see as something of an extended moment of possibility.
“It’s this beautiful space that you experience where any conversation could occur,” says Randall. “There’s no exit, there’s no progress in any way aside from the actual physical journey, but the emotional, relational space is completely up for grabs.”
• Rear View by Anna Breckon and Nat Randall is showing as part of The Theatre is Lying, which also includes works by Sol Calero, Consuelo Cavaniglia, Matthew Griffin and Daniel Jenatsch, and is showing until at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, until 24 March 2019
