Other Voices Grace, Who Waits Alone and New Australian Underground Cinema

A young woman, clad in loose white fabric, stands with her back to a wall, her attention devoted to the iPhone in her hand. Everything around her is sparse: a window faces onto the peeling weatherboard of the neighbouring property, its horizontal wooden slats contrasting with the vertically panelled interior. Nothing within the frame suggests the possibility of colour; only the woman’s achromatic skin definitively reveals the shot to be black-and-white.

This first, stationary, shot of Grace, Who Waits Alone (Georgia Temple, 2016), which lingers for over a minute, is both representative of one of the film’s recurring visual motifs – detached depictions of a human body and technological device encased together in mausoleum-like interiors – and indicative of its status as an underground film. Such rigorous minimalism has its antecedents in the international film canon (the cinema of Chantal Akerman, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Mark Rappaport), but it is unlikely to be found nowadays among the slate of even the most adventurous independent picture houses, let alone the multiplexes. Certainly, it’s difficult to imagine a recent Australian production with any kind of theatrical release that looks like this.

But then, this is a work that exists entirely beyond the realm of the local film industry. Shot over the course of two weeks for an estimated budget of A$1500 and featuring only one character (the titular protagonist, played by the director herself), Grace, Who Waits Alone has only had sporadic showings in Australia, most notably at the 2017 Queensland Film Festival. Other viewers, including this author, were first introduced to Temple’s feature in late 2018, at a single screening in a theatrette at the back of a cocktail bar in Melbourne’s inner