Barry Jones In Search of Lost Time - A Film Story

Abstract

Barry Jones In Search of Lost Time - A Film Story (hereafter Barry Jones) examines the unique power of film as a medium for political biography using the extraordinary Australian polymath politician as the focus of the film and exegesis. As Australia's longest-serving Science Minister (1983-1990) and two-time National President of the Australian Labor Party (1991-2000, 2005-2006), Barry Jones's life has elements of an orthodox political career. Yet his ambition was thwarted and his political career stalled in the outer ministry. This reality, together with his multi-stranded journey and multi-talented nature, makes it difficult to evaluate him in traditional political or biographical terms.

As the first cinema release documentary feature of an Australian politician, Barry Jones contributes insights to a career not easily confined. It uses film as a medium for doing and conveying political biography. Film suggests itself in Jones's case because of its acknowledged influence in his formative years. The medium serves to animate and bind the many representations of Jones already collected: photographs, paintings, drawings, cartoons, posters, archival footage, his many books, edited collections, articles, Press Club addresses, parliamentary speeches and book launches. It captures these elements of his life by projecting them through and with film, while adding moving footage, narration, sound, music and effects.

What Barry Jones brings is a compression of Jones's story to its essential springs and thereby tells it in a way that gives clarity and emphasis to the elemental forces shaping him and pushing him to politics. The film illuminates these forces in Jones's younger life and sees them as a means of understanding his later political career. It seeks to highlight film as an ideal medium for rendering the essential underpinnings of a long and complex political career in a way that makes it comprehensible. The exegesis elaborates on the making of Barry Jones by highlighting film editing as a unique compression technique able to bend time and cut clutter, while layering detail with multiple elements of thick description and effect. Such compression capacity is but one component of film's ability to engender an emotional response evocative of what it might be like to think and feel like the political figure being examined and to gain an impression of what the world feels like through their skin. This in turn lends understanding and insight to political lives. Barry Jones and this exegesis argue that film is a means of bringing this attribute to the terrain of political study.