Feisty Freda Freiberg (1933-2024)

Freda Freiberg has passed away at 90. She was central to so many circles of vibrant film culture in Australia, so active in her involvements and engagements: writing (she was a superb, clear writer, who proudly eschewed all jargon and loudly abhorred the mere “word games” of much contemporary highbrow theory), teaching, consulting, networking (in the best sense), bringing people together ...

Freda had a special lecturing style: extremely teacherly, spelling everything out, getting the point across insistently, and making sure everyone in the room was keeping up with her – even when that room was full of academics at a conference of her supposed ‘peers’. But that approach was just as well, since very few of the things that Freda spoke about – I recall, especially, an illuminating discussion of the benshi commentators accompanying film projections in Japan – were known, in any detail, to almost any of us beforehand. She taught us all so much.

And she was a feisty soul who never stood for any bullshit; whenever the occasional honour in the film field came my way, for instance, she would be the first to say to me (in person or an especially posted, elegantly handwritten note): “Don’t let it go to your head!”

But Freda was extremely loyal in her life-long friendships – such as with Ken Mogg, who also left us a little while ago, in 2023. And I could tell that she was genuinely proud when her friends – such as Barb Creed or myself – took hold of ‘mainstream’ platforms such as film reviewing for The Age newspaper and displaced the former resident know-nothings. (Barb stayed for 2 years before Philippa Hawker took over; I managed 11 years.)

In fact, I treasure a vivid memory of Freda, from the audience, taking on one of those pseudo-critics during an event in 1991. Freda wasn’t the kind of person who assumed that an academic degree guaranteed the special skill set required to be a critic in the popular media (she would herself have been, indeed, an ideal person for the job); but she sure respected hard-won knowledge and informed sensibility. And the ability to write engagingly.

I often recall the image of a wonderful cross-generational mirroring whenever Freda enthusiastically engaged with Vikki Riley (who died at age 50 in 2012) in the foyers of film events: seemingly from two utterly different worlds (Vikki was proto-punk and atheist), both of them were sharp, critically agitated by whatever they had just seen or heard (and thus not quite looking you in the eye when they addressed you), and always busily racing off somewhere else – sometimes abruptly, without the merest word of farewell. They just suddenly turned away at an extreme angle, and disappeared! Not to mention, of course, the incessant cigarette smoking: which seemed, for both, a way of managing their ever-nervy, immense, inner energy …

I’d never describe Freda as a prude (she took a scholarly interest in Japanese pornography!), but she did have, I must say, a slightly moralistic streak. Doubtless from the vantage point of her long, happy marriage (61 years) to husband Martin, she tended to look down on the general sexual obsessions (aka ‘promiscuity’) of many of those around her as just, ultimately, a silly waste of time and energy – far better to do something useful and productive, like learning a foreign language, aiding a community service, or watching a movie!

I discovered this aspect of Freda’s character in my early 20s, when, in a fit of belles lettres affectation, I had appended a series of flowery and/or cryptic personal dedications to my ongoing articles in print. “Hmmph!” Freda snorted when I ran into her somewhere. “I always know who your current bed partner is from reading your dedications!” Nobody could spit out the words bed partner with quite the disdain managed by Freda, and on many occasions across roughly 45 years. (And let me tell you, I was very careful and parsimonious with my literary dedications from that moment forth.)

This also happened whenever almost any intellectual luminary would land on our shores from abroad; Freda was always the first to inform me that “Oh, that person X only got a free ticket to here because they are the bed partner of local academic Y!” I shall not, here, divulge any names on that X/Y axis … But I can reveal that, once when wielding the bed partner routine, one of her grown-up daughters was present at her side and exclaimed, with mock surprise and shock: “Oh, Mother!”

Freda published in many places: in small magazines, bigger magazines, chapters in significant books (like the 1987 Don’t Shoot Darling! on Australian women’s cinema, which she co-edited), reviews in the Jewish newspapers, in Photofile (I gave her a cover story there in 1988) and Artlink, online in Senses of Cinema or Screening the Past, more recently in Film Alert 101 ... Did she ever want or plan to write a book on a single theme, or collect some of her essays together? I’d be interested to find that out. Strictly ‘academic’ career success, at any rate, appeared to mean little to her. She had her basic security figured out, and too many interesting projects going on, already, to pursue …

Freda and I were together on the editorial team of the short-lived film RMIT-funded magazine Buff back in 1980, and that was when I first grasped how central family, feminism, and religious values were to her very full, rich life. I shall never forget the presence of an increasingly exasperated Freda seated beside me, as part of a film culture initiative of those years, when we tried negotiating with a local distributor who kept trying to push his trashiest product onto us: “I really think you should program our most popular title, The First Nudie Musical!”

And, likewise, Freda’s deeply ingrained feminism rose to the surface when she recalled a late ‘70s local meeting to decide print acquisitions for film courses in schools and universities: for her, the fact that John Flaus expended his (considerable) energy arguing for the purchase of a 1945 slapstick comedy named Getting Gertie’s Garter (director Allan Dwan) constituted the last straw. “Getting Gertie’s Garter!”, Freda exclaimed. “That tells you everything you ever need to know about the inner life of the typical male film buff!” On the reverse side of that masculinist coin, Freda displayed, all through the 1980s and ‘90s, a rare openness (rare even among academics) to viewing, writing about and publicising the frequently experimental and/or short works of young Australian women filmmakers.

To fully appreciate the tenacity (sometimes ferocity) of Freda’s feminist stance in those years, you need to understand the general tenor of Australian film culture in 1980. It was a frustratingly blokey scene, for the most part. Shall I ever be able to forget the sight of a certain prominent Departmental Head of the time, one midnight during the first film conference I ever attended, delivering (to a spontaneously assembled bunch that included young feminist students) a despairing monologue, worthy of Eugene O’Neill, about the increasingly sapped virility of Aussie culture – before he stripped off, howled at the moon, and ran naked through the lawn sprinklers? That’s an indication of the context which the feminism of Freda and her comrades in the Lip magazine collective mightily reared up against.

Ah, Lip! Hard for me to avoid mention, here, that, at the age of 22, I published a harsh and somewhat ill-judged critique of an issue of the magazine in one of the hip venues of the time, the tabloid The Virgin Press (which later morphed into Tension magazine). Anne Marsh immortalised (with my permission!) an excerpt from it in her superb anthology Doing Feminism: Women’s Art and Feminist Criticism in Australia (2021). This was just one incident (i.e., it’s a long story) in a series of polemical thrusts-and-parries occurring across Australia’s art/theory scene during that heady time; Meaghan Morris (on Facebook) recently recalled my role in those proceedings as (ahem) “monstering feminists just a few years older than him”. (There was, indeed, a sorry tendency in the air back then to exaggerate some imagined Great Divide between ‘1970s people’ and ‘1980s people’. I plead guilty to that charge!)

As a result of that often querulous whirlwind, a sizeable number of female friends and acquaintances (and a few guys, too) stopped talking to me for a while after the appearance of the Lip piece. I’ll never forget – and never cease being appreciative for the fact – that Freda was the first to reopen verbal, seen-in-public communication with me, thus making it OK for others to follow in their own good time. Freda castigated me for my adolescent-style foolishness, of course, but at least let me know that she considered I had something better inside me that was worth cultivating. I hope to have subsequently lived up to her faith!

As everyone knows, and as I’ve already indicated, Freda spoke her mind. And she didn’t suffer fools, or foolishness, lightly – even from those in her many social circles. Most of my recollections of her are variations on exactly the same moment: her exit from a screening (or a lecture), immediately offering, when she was barely past the doors, a praising or damning comment. I remember when Chantal Akerman’s ‘audition’ film for Golden Eighties (1986), confusingly titled The Eighties (1983), was shown at MIFF; this splendid collage (which Freda greatly enjoyed) ended with a deliberately offhand shot of an urban skyline, with Akerman’s voice-over concluding with a lilt: “See you next year in Jerusalem!”. Whoever wrote the program note for this session interpreted this as a hopeful sign that Akerman was about to finally make the complete musical “with Israeli backing”. Freda volubly scoffed at this in the foyer: “They obviously don’t know the meaning of the Passover saying ‘see you next year in Jerusalem’!” (I had to go educate myself on this: see here.)

Similarly, there were no Sacred Cows on Freda’s wide turf. Striding out of a talk by one celebrity lecturer from overseas, she huffed: “Images of ecology, ecology of images … it’s all just word play!” Adrian Danks tells the wonderful story of Freda’s abiding provocation at a RMIT seminar on Yasujiro Ozu, where she obviously got her all-time revenge on Flaus for Gertie and the garter, deeply shocking him with the leading assertion: “Ozu was a hack!” Or: bouncing out of a screening of the already cinephile-deified Hou Hsiao-hsien film Good Men, Good Women (1995), Freda announced: “So Antonioni! It’s all Antonioni!” Then she leaned into me and offered, more softly, this nugget from her global field research voyages: “It’s true, you know. Every cinephile in Taiwan loves Antonioni”. It made me wonder what she told them there about the people back home: “It’s true, you know: all the boys in Melbourne love Getting Gertie’s Garter!”

When I began as a film student in 1977, I already associated Freda, in my head, with a mythical, pioneering group that Australian cultural history would do well to recall: the gang at Coburg Teachers College who got their first go at teaching cinema and media under the wise tutelage of John C. Murray. Freda was part of a revolving group of staff there in the 1960s and ‘70s including Ken Mogg, Barb Creed, Tom Ryan and Geoff Mayer. Think of all the later, essential works that came out of this incredible seedbed: on Mizoguchi, Sirk, genre, national cinemas, The Monstrous-Feminine …

Freda wrote one of the first important publications in English on the role of women in Kenji Mizoguchi’s films (she possessed a superb knowledge of Japanese language, history and culture that she went back to university as an adult to get), and – as I mention in my 2024 DVD commentary for Mikio Naruse’s Floating Clouds, the British Film Institute re-release of which is co-dedicated to her and Paul Willemen – she excitedly brought the news about the discovery in the West of Naruse to the readers of Filmnews after a partial Australian retrospective. In fact, some of the filmed discussions I did with Freda in 2007 (she was not quite in her mid 70s then!) for the earlier Naruse boxset from BFI are recycled on the new release; it’s a very touching experience to rewatch them today.

Freda’s family members have set up, in record time, a superb tribute website that is already full of stuff, and is sure to grow over time: https://www.fredafreiberg.com/. And there’s a special Film Studies Library (containing her lifetime’s collection of often rare materials, plus much of my own book and magazine collection before I moved to Spain, and Ken Mogg’s library as well) named after her at Monash University, where she and I both taught in different periods. I hope that the students and researchers who use this library in years to come will be inspired to continue the depth, range, lucidity and passion of Freda’s magnificent legacy. I will miss her deeply.

The last time I saw Freda in person was, in fact, during the public opening of that library in 2018. Freda met, for the first time, my partner – yes, my bed partner! – Cristina; Freda commented approvingly to Cris that she was obviously making me healthier and happier than she’d ever seen me before. Then her eyes shot to the ceiling and she went into associative mode for a split-second: a comparison was forming in her mind. She commented aloud on one of our mutual acquaintances: “You look a lot better than him, that’s for sure. I ran into him the other day; he now resembles Nosferatu”. Oh, Freda!

© Adrian Martin April-July 2024