2007 Episode 1: Flightless - Bill Hammond's Cure For Being Kiwi
Flightless - Bill Hammond's Cure For Being Kiwi
Bill Hammond is one of the best and most distinctive New Zealand
artists, living or dead.
In his paintings, he maps dreams and nightmares peculiar to his
time and country. For most of the 1980s he created worlds of
distorted neurosis and angst: interior dystopias that are
simultaneously funny and frightening.
But on a trip to the ecologically pristine Auckland Islands far to
the southeast of Stewart Island, Bill Hammond heard a dawn
chorus of myriad birds at their full pre-human volume - loud enough
to force Hammond and his fellow travelers to shout at each other in
order to be heard just as Cook and his men did when they first
landed in New Zealand.
Within three years Bill Hammond was painting bird people:
melancholy replacements for the dozens of species and millions of
individual New Zealand birds killed off by humans.
Perched on half dead branches in the rain, winged but never flying,
staring and dangerously sexy, they are uneasily recognisable. The
artist arranges us in a zoo display of his own constantly shifting
design. Laughter is sometimes possible in the face of Bill's Bird
People, but it's usually followed by a confronting realisation
about one's own life.
Bill Hammond won't talk about his work. He isn't interested in
being filmed in his studio or anywhere else. But he's agreed to his
paintings starring in Flightless.
The film also stars Ian Hughes (Lord of the Rings) as Kevin
McManus, a man at war with his wife and his life. Kevin seeks
refuge in the peace of the Christchurch Public Art gallery but
instead is driven to psychic meltdown buy the haunting birdpeople
in Hammond's extraordinary The Fall of Icarus.
Shaken by his experience McManus decides to go in search of Hammond pictures and explanations of them. The artist's unavailability restricts him to questioning and observing those whose lives have also been affected by Hammond's paintings.
On his journey McManus meets real people.
Lois Ogilvie and Peter Evans' Lava Bar in Lyttelton is dominated by an eruptive Hammond canvas Volcano Flag. Kevin tries and fails to drink his way beyond Hammond's influence while Lois and Peter reveal the obscure corners of their restaurant painted by Bill, a regular drinker and decorator.
Mark Webster and Mandy Fraser have a major Hammond painting hanging in all their five childrens' bedrooms. Mark sees in Animal Vegetable Acrylic a reflection of the ways we often fail to communicate. Every evening he kisses his sons goodnight beneath it. Kevin encounters and is once again unnerved by one of Hammond's greatest bird paintings: Hokey Pokey.
Te Papa's chief ornithologist Sandy Bartle inhabits a basement far away from the galleries where Hammond's paintings hang. He shows Kevin some of the tens of thousands of stuffed birds in his charge. Sandy walks Kevin through the remnants of pre-human New Zealand and evokes the birdland that Hammond encountered in the Auckland Islands in 1990. Sandy introduces Kevin to Walter Buller, pioneer ornithologist and, as Hammond has called him, Bird Stuffer.
While being shown through her terrific collection of Hammond's works, Jenny Gibbs tells Kevin he has to find his own truth in the paintings. Kevin confronts his own flightlessness before heading to the Peter McLeavey Gallery and a surprising show of Hammond's latest bird paintings that just might give Kevin the resolve to return to The Fall of Icarus and reconcile with his family.
Kevin and viewers are informed throughout the film by brilliant writer and Dunedin Public Art Gallery curator Justin Paton. Paton once famously described Bill Hammond's work as apocalyptic wallpaper. His plain language insights coupled with stunning images of the work map the territory of Kevin's journey, the film and Hammond's marvelous contribution to New Zealanders' view of themselves.
