Kuyululu Archival i-Doc: Curated Interactive Archive Featuring Transnational Creative Ayten Kuyululu

RESEARCH STATEMENT 

This research statement details the development and significance of a curated interactive archive dedicated to the transnational creative career of Ayten Kuyululu. The creative output is either the start of a longer creative process for the development of a documentary or the end of a research project, exploring new distribution ideas using the methodology of digital archiveology in documentary screen practice. Over the years, I have initiated many documentary projects that were never realised for various reasons around development and commissioning; the process can be precarious. I have been fortunate to have many broadcast hours as an independent filmmaker and as part of a network documentary unit. It is difficult to guess how broadcasters will choose stories but there are some indicators such as “modern stories” and “understanding the current moment” mentioned by filmmakers interviewed for Phoebe Hart’s book Crafting Contemporary Documentaries and Docuseries for Global Screens: Docu-mania (Hart 2024, 42). Remnants of my unsuccessful projects are resting in the pages of treatments and in plastic storage containers in the garage. How can valuable biographical documentary content that does not meet contemporary broadcasting interests be effectively preserved and presented through alternative means?

Ayten Kuyululu had an impressive creative career that spanned countries and creative fields over several decades. Originally from Turkey, Kuyululu started her career in radio, then performed in and directed theatre, and later expanded to film. Following her husband to Sweden, Kuyululu directed her first film with a small amount of funding and, soon after, the family immigrated to Australia where she directed two funded films, sang in the Australian opera, and directed theatre projects mostly at a community level. I was invited to write and develop the project through Professor Ahmet Gurata who had researched her history and diaries. Creating an interactive digital archive provides a method of curating the remnants of this story into a visible space for a biographical narrative that has largely been ignored and forgotten in our cinema history. As Zimmerman writes, “The point of the digital archive and reverse engineering is to fight the anaesthesia and amnesia of transnational capital that is ultimately authoritarian without change or mutation” (2019, 250). This highlights the importance of preserving Kuyululu's work in a digital format.

Ayten had only been in Australia for three years when she was able to secure funding from the Experimental Film Fund, a small amount that allowed her to make her first film in Australia titled A Handful of Dust (1974). Turkish immigrant Ayse (played by Kuyululu) tries to protect her only son from retribution for a blood feud, unsuccessfully, and we see a gut-wrenching scene where the mother discovers the small body of her son.

A Handful of Dust screened at the Sydney Film festival and was received well enough for Kuyululu to be supported to make her first feature film The Golden Cage (1975). Again, the film tackles some difficult themes about the migrant experience. As David Stratten (2021) has pointed out, this was only the second feature film to be directed by a woman in Australia, the first some forty years previous. The National Film and Sound Archive have a small number of production stills and one, with three young men crowded around the camera, shows a young Phillip Noyce who production-managed the film and a young Russell Boyd who shot the film. Surrounded by these young film school graduates, Ayten directed a complex narrative in Sydney and Istanbul that had limited screenings in independent cinemas.

There are years of other creative endeavours across three countries, but these films were particularly impressive due to the effort required to find funding and direct any kind of film in Australia. Armed with this research, I interviewed her son Warren and asked for Professor Gurata to send interview material of his research, outcomes that would help develop the concept. At around the time of these interviews, Warren had embarked on the enormous task of translating the many diaries she wrote about her day-to-day life into English. He managed to enlist a young Turkish woman, Yaprak, to help him, and the collaboration was and still is fruitful. I was able to spend a day with them in Sydney, recording a small session of the translation.  

The objective of this project is to preserve and present the valuable biographical documentary content of Ayten Kuyululu through an interactive digital archive, making her contributions accessible to a wider audience. According to Professor Donna Hancox in her book The Revolution in Transmedia Storytelling Through Place (2021), platforms such as interactive documentary provide transmedia storytelling spaces where:

Seemingly small stories and places can be understood as rich sites for examining our shared human experience and moments of disruption to accepted and dominant narratives about who we are, who gets to tell their stories and what can be considered important and worthy stories. 

(2021, 45)

The outcome offers an opportunity to bypass the ever-diminishing funding arena and the story requirements of gatekeepers. Using the editing and publishing software Klynt, I was able to complete a basic interactive digital archive that allowed the fragments of Kuyululu’s life story to be organised into curated spaces.

Using clips from the films obtained from the National Film and Sound Archive, interviews, images and observational sequences, I constructed the basic interactive environment. The outcomes are “mobilized to create a collaborative performative space for the imagination of new histories and new futures” (Zimmermann 2019, 250).

The project is a digital archive highlighting aspects of Kuyululu’s life that are otherwise almost entirely invisible. Catherine Russell developed an extensive study around the term “archiveology,” describing the intention of the practice as:

Exploring the potential of audio-visual fragments to construct new ways of accessing and framing history that might otherwise have been forgotten and neglected—and to make these histories relevant to contemporary concerns. 

(2018, 30)

 Russell describes the potential reaction with these projects as a means of “shocking the past to attention” (2018, 50).

The experience of viewing Kuyululu’s films embodied this experience, as we see a middle-aged woman trying to protect her young son from a ferocious vendetta while making her way in a new country. Additionally, two men struggling with the migrant experience and the gender-cultural clash. This culminates in a dramatic scene where one of the men jumps from a building to his death. It is a brave and determined creative that brought these works to the screen. The interactive archive documentary is the curation of aspects of the Kuyululu story in one place and could be dismissed as website creation rather than interactive documentary, but I would argue, having written and directed over twenty documentaries for broadcast and with significant editing experience, the site is crafted and influenced by that history and theory. But, this smaller space might also be viewed as subversive, as Hancox writes of new storytelling settings:

They do not adhere to previous forms but also actively seek to disrupt them and often deliberately sit in opposition to white, western, male approaches to communication, narrative, tone, aesthetics and politics which means that they can be easily misunderstood at best and dismissed at worst. 

(2021, 113)  

The site also benefits from the fragmented layout, as scenes that would normally be edited for time in a broadcast environment can be left long. For example, the sequences where Warren is translating his mother’s diaries are observational and we see the small exchanges with his collaborator Yaprak giving the audience an understanding of the task at hand and the moments of discovery.

It has been satisfying to locate segments of the films and some interviews in an i-doc space, even though it is basic interactivity at this point. Russell recognises this outcome, as she writes of archivealogical projects as “the dialectics of now and then are integral to archiveology, giving rise to works that are frequently infinitely incomplete” (2018, 83). It is hoped that the Kuyululu story benefits from this digital space and that the story finds its way to other platforms.

Kuyululu interactive digital archive:

https://cdn.qut.edu.au/media/ciesj/kuyululu/

PEER REVIEW 1

The i-doc produced with Klynt features archive material by Ayten Kuyululu. This “digital archive” presents the work of a migrant filmmaker, Ayten Kuyululu, who was, according to this i-doc, also Australia’s second female feature film director. Her films are introduced and discussed by Ahmet Gürata. 

It would be good if the author could contextualise the choice of i-doc through existing literature. Furthermore, it would make the research statement stronger if the author could provide a more detailed discussion on the affordances of this web-based archival format. What defines an interactive archive and its practice? 

The research statement sounds a bit like the i-doc option was a second choice, which would devalue the contributions it is making. What are the advantages of the i-doc in comparison to a broadcast form?

The formulation, “The creative output is either the start of a longer creative process for the development of a documentary or the end of a research project,” can be seen as problematic. Were the research aims and objectives achieved for the short- and long-term project and would these be the same?

The “methodology of digital archiveology in documentary screen practice” could be defined through a reference beyond Russell (2018), such as The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and the Media in the 21st Century (Richardson, Reinhard and Smith 2024) or Transmedia Narratives for Cultural Heritage: Remixing History (Basaraba 2022).

Are there similar projects that this work can be compared to? 

And if so, what makes this Kynt i-doc distinctive? 

The research question, “How can valuable biographical documentary content that doesn’t meet contemporary broadcasting interests be effectively preserved and presented through alternative means?”, needs some explanation from the author’s point of view: How are “valuable” and “effective” qualified? Or could the research question be simplified?

The notion of alternative and the citation by Zimmermann could be further elaborated through the Open Space New Media Documentary (Zimmermann and De Michiel 2017). Rather than comparing this to broadcast media and be seen as a second choice (“unsuccessful projects are resting in the pages of treatments and in plastic storage containers in the garage”), the author should take a more prominent position about the advantages of the online environment. 

It would be good to see a rationale for the choice of Klynt. Why was this interactive editing & publishing application chosen in comparison to other solutions? 

It seems that the functionality of Klynt is not explored to the full extent in this interactive archive practice. Some basic i-docs navigation, UX and UI guidelines could support shaping an online story more successfully. Not all filmmakers edit their films, so not all filmmakers need to develop their own interfaces. Some more description about the production process (and timelines) would allow us to understand why some limitations were chosen.

The presentation of this interactive archive/interactive documentary puts a spotlight onto a filmmaker who seems to be overlooked in the literature. So overall an important work that can make contributions as a NTRO (non-traditional research output). 

PEER REVIEW 2 

Ayten Kuyululu was an “outlier” in the world of 1970’s Australian cinema, namely a migrant who was a writer, director and performer. This project “revives” a pioneering artist, whose significance and work, while not completely unrecognised, has largely been ignored in both Australia and her birthplace Turkey. 

This web archive focuses on Kuyululu’s diaries and two films which preceded Australia’s “new wave”: A Handful of Dust (1974) and The Golden Cage (1975). Both are low-budget projects, shot in Sydney and Istanbul with largely non-professional cast and crew, with neither having significant box office success. But the themes, tone, language and subtitling make them distinctive, certainly in contrast to other, mainly genre, Australian films of the time. Kuyululu’s films reflect the melodramatic style of popular Turkish cinema but also incorporate avant-garde elements to explore the complexities of migration: family, domestic violence, religion, gender, home and “belonging”. As Adrian Danks notes, “they are remarkable achievements in a cinema with so few multicultural female voices” (2023, para. 5).

The video clips depicting the transcription of Kuyululu’s diaries were particularly engaging. It is unusual to see this process “live” on screen, particularly as one subject (Warren, Kuyululu’s son) could decipher her handwriting, while the other (Yaprak) provided a clear translation. The diary entries before and during Kuyululu’s production of The Golden Cage (1975) reveal the challenging, and often lonely, creative process for the independent artist who is “doing everything by herself … but she’s used to it.” It was also a process of discovery for Warren and Yaprak, for example, that the Turkish 1975 film Hashas, written by Kuyululu, was “very successful in Turkey.”

The “precarious” nature of independent filmmaking, as McCuaig notes, challenges artists to balance paid work with self- or part-funded projects that may not be completed or receive any financial compensation. This is evident in Kuyululu’s career; for example, when living in Sweden she purchased a camera and just started shooting a film with a small crew, while also working elsewhere, or later travelled through multiple countries in Europe to sell The Golden Cage (1975), spending minimal time in each city.

As a research exercise, the website materials act both as a pitch or proof of concept for a longer work, and an alternative mode of presentation, preservation and distribution. Using a self-curated platform means that the project can accumulate further content over an indefinite timeframe; it is not “locked off”, or subject to approval by festival or broadcast “gatekeepers”, who tend to favour mainstream content. This archive has potential for further exploration and discovery, and hopefully, this will eventuate through the expansion of this website.

RESPONSE TO PEER REVIEWS

Based on feedback from reviewers I have made minor changes to the i-doc. These include adding credits, fixing spelling mistakes, adding supers to the participants in the translation segments, and minor sound modifications. Due to the publishing process via the university, this is as much as I could attempt in the timeframe. But the feedback has been extremely helpful, and I will address more of the ideas and suggestions in future iterations of the work. I would also like to add segments that relate to Kuyululu’s heritage and early career in Turkey.

Kuyululu i-doc: https://cdn.qut.edu.au/media/ciesj/kuyululu/

REVISED RESEARCH STATEMENT 

This research statement details the development and significance of a curated interactive archive dedicated to the transnational creative career of Ayten Kuyululu who was a filmmaker, opera singer and theatre director. I have been fortunate, over my career, to have produced and directed broadcast documentaries as an independent filmmaker and as part of a network documentary unit. It is difficult to guess how broadcasters will choose stories but there are some indicators such as “modern stories” and “understanding the current moment” mentioned by filmmakers interviewed for Phoebe Hart’s book Crafting Contemporary Documentaries and Docuseries for Global Screens: Docu-mania (2024, 42). Because I have had opportunities in broadcast, it has seemed the only choice for distribution and has inhibited my creative practice at times. Branching out to other forms of exhibition and distribution has been liberating, first into the gallery space for an exhibition of my doctoral work and then to the i-doc format. Due to my fledgling abilities with the software, the projects are imperfect as I develop and refine the creative practice of i-doc creation. At an early stage of this research I am asking: How can the i-doc environment and viewer navigation benefit the delivery of biographical and archival content generated for a documentary story?

The choice to explore i-docs was the result of reading Professor Donna Hancox’s book The Revolution in Transmedia Storytelling Through Place: Pervasive, Ambient and Situated (2021) in preparation to deliver a lecture about digital formats in a documentary course. She includes interactive documentary in a host of storytelling platforms that are a creative vehicle to subvert traditional forms resulting in a “radical reimagining of stories, place, storytellers and audiences” (2021, 4). While reading the book I faced my broadcast myopia, mostly believing it to be the only screening avenue throughout my career. Although, for a few years I have given lectures that incorporated interactive documentaries such as Welcome to Pine Point (Shoebridge and Simons 2011) and The Industry (Dujin 2010) to engage students with other forms of delivery but hadn’t tried this in practice. I thought an interactive project would be beyond my technical capabilities. After some additional research I found I was able to navigate Klynt so I chose this templated platform to develop projects that could be a creative expression of archive and documentary segments. This is a limited attempt at interactivity on my part because I was only recently introduced to it, but the work requires viewers to at least “take an active part in the negotiation of the reality” (Aston and Gaudenzi 2012, 126).

My first attempt at an i-doc via Klynt was for my completed doctoral work that had been part of a gallery exhibition including documentary segments, video poetry and family interviews that documented the life of my grandfather the modernist poet Ronald McCuaig (McCuaig 2024). I initiated the project in late 2024 with content collected and created over five years and found the process creatively satisfying. As will be elaborated there are additional benefits to this delivery in the curation of content across pages and choice of extended clips that would potentially be cut in the process of editing and executive intervention in the linear documentary. I have limited windows to experiment with the software due to teaching commitments and other research project deadlines but consider this a long-term creative practice endeavour that I hope to return to and expand on frequently.

Having spent some years researching the life of Ayten Kuyululu and interviewing her son Warren Kuyululu, I decided to initiate an interactive space for the developing archive about her life. Ayten Kuyululu had an impressive creative career that spanned countries and creative fields over several decades. Originally from Turkey, Kuyululu started her career in radio, then performed in and directed theatre, and later expanded to film. Following her husband to Sweden, Kuyululu directed her first film with a small amount of funding and soon after the family immigrated to Australia where she directed two funded films, sang in the Australian opera, and directed theatre projects. I was invited to write and develop the project through Professor Ahmet Gürata, who had researched her history and diaries in Turkey. Creating an interactive online archive provided a method of curating this story into a visible space for a biographical narrative that has largely been ignored and forgotten in our cinema history. As Zimmerman writes, “The point of the digital archive and reverse engineering is to fight the anaesthesia and amnesia of transnational capital that is ultimately authoritarian without change or mutation” (2019, 250).

Ayten had only been in Australia for three years when she was able to secure funding from the Experimental Film Fund, a small amount that allowed her to make her first film in Australia titled A Handful of Dust (1974). Turkish immigrant Ayse (played by Kuyululu) tries to protect her only son from retribution for a blood feud unsuccessfully and we see a gut-wrenching scene where the mother discovers the small body of her son.

A Handful of Dust (1974) screened at the Sydney Film Festival and was well received enough for Kuyululu to be supported to make her first feature film The Golden Cage (1975). Again, the film tackles some difficult themes about the migrant experience. As David Stratten (2021) has pointed out this was only the second feature film to be directed by a woman in Australia, the first some forty years previous. Richard Kuipers (2020) elaborates that it was the first Australian feature film directed by a woman since Two Minutes Silence (1933) by Paulette McDonagh (Kuipers, 2020). The National Film and Sound Archive have a small number of production stills and one with three young men crowded around the camera shows a young Phillip Noyce who production managed the film and a young Russell Boyd who shot the film. Surrounded by these young film school graduates Ayten directed a complex narrative in Sydney and Istanbul that had limited screenings in independent cinemas.

The objective of this project is to preserve and present the valuable biographical documentary content of Ayten Kuyululu through an interactive digital archive, making her contributions accessible to a wider audience. According to Professor Donna Hancox, platforms, such as interactive documentary, provide transmedia storytelling spaces where:

Seemingly small stories and places can be understood as rich sites for examining our shared human experience and moments of disruption to accepted and dominant narratives about who we are, who gets to tell their stories and what can be considered important and worthy stories. 

(2021, 45) 

The outcome offers an opportunity to bypass the ever-diminishing funding arena and the story requirements of gatekeepers. Creating a project in Klynt, I completed the basic interactive digital archive that allowed the fragments of Kuyululu’s life story to be organised into curated spaces. Using clips from the films obtained from the National Film and Sound Archive, interviews, images, and observational sequences of translation, I constructed the basic interactive environment. The outcomes are “mobilized to create a collaborative performative space for the imagination of new histories and new futures” (Zimmerman 2019, 250).

The project is a digital archive highlighting aspects of Kuyululu’s life that are otherwise almost entirely invisible. Catherine Russell developed an extensive study around the term “archiveology,” describing the potential of “shocking the past to attention” (2018, 52) . The experience of viewing Kuyululu’s films embodies this assertion as we see a middle-aged woman trying to protect her young son from a ferocious vendetta while making her way in a new country. Additionally, two men struggling with the migrant experience and the gender cultural clash. This culminates in a dramatic scene where one of the men jumps from a building to his death. It is a brave and determined creative that brought these works to the screen.

The interactive archive documentary is the curation of aspects of the Kuyululu story in one place and could be dismissed as website creation rather than interactive documentary, but I would argue having written and directed over twenty documentaries for broadcast and with significant editing experience the site is crafted and influenced by that history and theory. But this online space might also be viewed as subversive as Hancox  writes of new storytelling settings:

 They do not adhere to previous forms but also actively seek to disrupt them and often deliberately sit in opposition to white, western, male approaches to communication, narrative, tone, aesthetics and politics which means that they can be easily misunderstood at best and dismissed at worst. 

(2021, 113) 

The site benefits from the fragmented layout, as scenes that would normally be edited for time in a broadcast environment can be left long. For example, the sequences where Warren is translating his mother’s diaries are observational and we see the small exchanges with his collaborator Yaprak giving the audience an understanding of the task at hand and the moments of discovery.

It has been satisfying to locate segments of the films and some interview in an archival i-doc space, even though it is basic interactivity at this point. Russell (2018, 83) recognises this outcome as she writes of archivealogical projects “the dialectics of now and then are integral to archiveology, giving rise to works that are frequently infinitely incomplete.” It is hoped that the Kuyululu story benefits from this online space and there are opportunities to expand the creative practice in future.

Please note that the creative work associated with this submission has been updated in response to the peer reviews.

REFERENCES 

Aston, Judith, and Sandra Gaudenzi. 2012. “Interactive Documentary: Setting the Field.” Studies in Documentary Film 6, no. 2: 125–39. https://doi.org/10.1386/sdf.6.2.125_1.

Basaraba, Nicole. 2022. Transmedia Narratives for Cultural Heritage: Remixing History. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003205630.

Danks, Adrian. 2023. “The Golden Cage: Ayten Kuyululu and Australian Cinema.” Senses of Cinema, no. 107. https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2023/cteq/the-golden-cage-ayten-kuyululu-and-australian-cinema/.

Duijn, Mirka, dir. 2010. The Industry. Interactive Documentary. Submarine Channel. https://theindustryinteractive.com/home.

Hancox, Donna. 2021. The Revolution in Transmedia Storytelling through Place: Pervasive, Ambient and Situated. [1 Ed.]. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/The-Revolution-of-Transmedia-Storytelling-through-Place-Pervasive-Ambient/Hancox/p/book/9780367222383.

Hart, Phoebe. 2024. Crafting Contemporary Documentaries and Docuseries for Global Screens: Docu-Mania. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666927665/Crafting-Contemporary-Documentaries-and-Docuseries-for-Global-Screens-Docu-mania.

Kuipers, Richard. 2020. “The Golden Cage (1975) Curator’s Notes.” National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. 2020. https://aso.gov.au/titles/features/the-golden-cage/notes/.

Kuyululu, Ayten, dir. 1974. A Handful of Dust. Australia. Film.

---, dir. 1975. The Golden Cage. Australia. Film.

McCuaig, Nicole, dir. 2024. Australia’s Bohemian Rapper. Klynt. Interactive Documentary. https://www.australiasbohemianrapper.com/.

McDonagh, Paulette, dir. 1933. Two Minutes Silence. Australia. Film.

Richardson, Lorna-Jane, Andrew Reinhard, and Nicole Smith, eds. 2024. The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and the Media in the 21st Century. 1st ed. Oxford: Taylor & Francis Group.

Russell, Catherine. 2018. Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices. Duke University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11smp1q.

Shoebridge, Paul, and Michael Simons, dirs. 2011. Welcome to Pine Point. National Film Board of Canada.  Interactive Documentary. https://pinepoint.nfb.ca/.

Stratten, David. 2021. “Ayten Kuyululu: Australian Cinema’s Forgotten Pioneer.” The Australian, 2021. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/ayten-kuyululu-the-forgotten-pioneer-of-australian-cinema/news-story/9ee1f0fb9584849155c649fff10980f1.

Zimmermann, Patricia R. 2019. Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics. Indiana University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvpb3xb3.

Zimmermann, Patricia R., and Helen De Michiel. 2017. Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice. Milton: Taylor & Francis Group. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rmit/detail.action?docID=5179616.