I went to the relaunch of Melbourne community video institution Open Channel last Thursday. OC is a not-for-profit production house and member based screen organisation, set up in the mid-Seventies and supported by an austere gruel of State and federal agencies. I had a strong connection with it for fourteen years, including four on the Board, and made my first long film while I was employed there to provide script and project development support.

Called Locked Up and Looked After, it was an observational project shot and finished on VHS, about the power and autonomy issues around an OC project to help a group of people with intellectual disabilities to make a film about power and autonomy. And yes, the recursions were ironic. I think the program might have disappeared entirely; occasionally someone startles me by telling me they saw it in the training department of some government bureaucracy.

I posted a story about the launch on Screen Hub, which I have let out of captivity:

Open Channel, Melbourne’s partner in the loose gang of grass-roots production resource organisations supported by the AFC and whatever can be burped up by State agencies, made history last night. It has perhaps the strangest re-launch in the long, weird story of Australian media.

The good will was palpable, the audience bright-eyed, the staff enthusiastic. It’s just the event that was exceedingly odd.

Open Channel moved to Docklands two years ago, to adorn this huge tower-toothed development with some community and artistic credibility. It was promised a funky space, with architect-designed workspaces created from containers, all in honour of the original harbour useage, in a place which has embraced the water and spurned the history.

Instead, it ended up with a demonstration house on the water, a pretend apartment kind of modified to house educational facilities. Working there was extremely difficult, though students cheerfully endured the crowded rooms and toilets with warnings that they weren’t connected to anything, and an administrative workspace that would have baffled a rat on a colonial prison hulk.

The container idea has evaporated, leaving Open Channel with a lease on the space. Various people fret for the inner-city ambience of the old Fitzroy building across town, though long-term staff will tell you it housed a demon which fed on creativity which it stole from the fresh minds of eager filmmakers. In fact, there was no parking, and the last local who came in was drunk and on the run after assaulting a malignant traffic light.

Docklands is dead trendy. The sea heaves at the wharf only metres away. The sun sparkles on the awnings of the trendy caffs on the other side of the water. On this side, however….

To get to this particular relaunch meant driving cautiously into the dark over the railway lines, past muffled figures scuttling towards the vague outline of a distant building. A journey into emptiness, Le Carre’s border zone lit feebly by headlights, the Warsaw Pact just beyond a chain-link fence.

Deep in this industrial wasteland is the shed, a huge hangar with groups of figures like chess pieces dwarfed by the vast space, echoing between the concrete and the shadowed galvo. We could have had a circus. Parked an Antonov transport plane. Something from the space race. It was very big and very cold and potentially forlorn.

As CEO Andrew Garton pointed out, it is the largest clear industrial space left in Melbourne, and OC is making an ironic living renting it out to people who need to play with Really Big Things, like opera set builders.

A string of people stood on a podium beneath clips from Open Channel’s past and shouted into a microphone. It felt like a Brechtian production of 1984. With all the reverb, not a word made sense. As small lit figures bellowed into the dark, various industry oldsters were startled by pictures of their youth, modest moments almost forgotten in the relentless march towards something with a decent budget and a commissioning editor.

From the clips, it was very obvious that the work has become much more visually sophisticated in the last ten years, presumably from some combination of a new generation of members and the consolidation of wonderful computer tricks.

As a disconcerting reminder, OC ran a clip of Kim Dalton in 1984, hunched over a telephone in his manager’s cubicle. He was probably trying to gouge an endlessly recalcitrant Film Victoria to provide a bit of dosh beyond its niggardly allocation for education. We presume that running ABC Television is different.

Whether Open Channel and its sister orgs were an important way of opening the medium to new points of view we will leave to the historians. It is certainly true that OC is woven through a large number of resumes; most freelancers in this town would have received cheques from projects it at least executive produced.

It has provided a heap of good, bread and butter work. Careers probably didn’t start at OC, but it did provide challenging work that enabled many people to take on much larger writing, directing and producing projects than they had encountered before.

Ironically for an apparently radical organisation, it has been a great normalising force – the point at which people discover standard industrial practice, the power of routine, the necessity of an audience, the legitimate demands of a client.

For nearly twenty years, Open Channel provided a coalition between community groups, advocacy organisations and grass roots educators and sympathetic filmmakers. The work was often difficult. The clients were demanding, the financiers unsympathetic, the filmmakers learning the craft.

But the vault contains dozens of tapes about housing, disability, ethnic issues, trade unions, gender, urban development, health and safety and empowerment. These tapes may record the most directly useful work that Melbourne’s independent community has ever done.

There are many historical question which remain unanswered. Should OC have gone directly into community television, as a significant member group wanted? Was there a way of positioning it at the forefront of the online revolution? Has it been strangled by small-minded bureaucrats? Could the broadcasters have been more sympathetic? What place does Open Channel have when productions can be run and completed on a home computer?

These organisations surely have a future. Their role as equipment providers has largely disappeared, but this takes them back to the ultimate point – not the machines, but the people.

That is a whole other story.

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The OC announcement is here.

(For once, I have pinched a copyright protected image from Flickr. Some protection is just incongruous).

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 8th, 2007 at 10:03 pm and is filed under visual media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.