Proof ROSE LUCAS
The screen was lit with Weaving, Geneviève Picot, and an unknown Russell Crowe. We agreed on how good Proof was and that now Australia had at least three outstanding women directors, that Jocelyn Moorhouse was on a par with Gillian Armstrong and Jane Campion.
– Mark Rudman1
MAIN CAST
Martin Hugo Weaving
Celia Geneviève Picot
Andy Russell Crowe
Mother Heather Mitchell
Young Martin Jeffrey Walker
PRINCIPAL CREDITS
Year of release 1991
Length 90 mins
Writer/Director Jocelyn Moorhouse
Producer Lynda House
1st Assistant Director Tony Mahood
Director of Photography Martin McGrath
Sound Recordist Lloyd Carrick
Production Designer Patrick Reardon
Editor Ken Sallows Music Not Drowning, Waving
When Jocelyn Moorhouse released Proof as her debut film in 1991, its success marked an exciting new direction for Australian cinema. This was an intriguing narrative, clearly situated in a very recognisable urban Melbourne milieu of 1990, which was playing with the definitions and structure of genre.
It was also clearly driven by some serious philosophical questions regarding the relationship between the visual image and epistemology – how we might ‘see’ and know the world and our position within it. In addition, it provided an engaging study of human behaviour through a focus on an intense triangle of characters. As Mark Rudman’s poem ‘I Think About Australia Endlessly’ suggests, Proof was instantly part of a familiar Australian cultural fabric, giving us all – at home and abroad – a new feeling of pride and understanding about how we fit into the world.
The narrative
In 1986 someone told me that they had met a blind photographer. At the time I didn’t think to ask why a blind person would take photographs, but I soon found the unknown answer haunted me. I’m fascinated by blindness and how blind people cope with not having visual knowledge – the everyday confirmations of ‘what is’ – that I take for granted. Blind people have to place their faith in others. I wanted to tell the story of a man who couldn’t.2
As Moorhouse has indicated in her director’s note, the story of Proof is motivated by a curiosity both about how a blind man might use photography to engage with the world and about the nature of interpersonal relationships in general. While blindness might constitute an extreme case, Moorhouse’s film explores how we might exercise control over ourselves and both trust in and influence other people – and the varieties of factors that determine that influence.
Proof focuses on the character of Martin (Hugo Weaving). Blind from birth, Martin now lives in his grandmother’s house in urban Melbourne, alone except for his housekeeper, Celia (Geneviève Picot), who is in an obsessive and tortured state of unrequited love for him. Martin, however, is misanthropically withdrawn from the world, paranoiacally convinced that others cannot be trusted; Celia becomes an object of this bitterness and mistrust, while also feeding it through her own perverse efforts to make Martin reliant on her.
The narrative in the present is intercut at a number of points by images or memories from Martin’s childhood, powerfully suggesting the influence of the past on where Martin now finds himself. As a child (played by Jeffrey Walker), alone with his mother (Heather Mitchell), he listens to her describe the world outside his window – the seasons, the light, the gardener raking leaves. In these episodes, we see the origins of Martin’s distrust: Was his mother telling him the truth about what was visible out in the world? Was there really a gardener? Could Martin trust his own senses? Could his mother be trusted, or was she lying to him – either ‘because she could’, as he accuses her, or because she was ashamed at having a blind child? As she pushes away his exploring fingers as they attempt to ‘read’ her hair, face and chest, telling him that it’s ‘rude’, Martin is crushed, seeing it as another sign of his unworthiness and unloveability. Even when his mother grows ill and tells him she will die soon, he interprets it as further evidence that she wants to get away from him.
The film begins with a random narrative ‘collision’, as
