Time for a bit of local colour. This is an Aussie documentary by Sonia Bible about Rosaleen Norton, an artist and provocateur whom the media had dubbed ‘The Witch Of Kings Cross’. Kings Cross itself is quite an infamous stretch of the Sydney landscape, so it really says something when Norton’s exploits were enough for that kind of honorific. And as someone who knew sweet F.A. about her going into this, I found myself fascinated by what this doco had to offer.
The presentation here strikes a nice balance between interview footage and dramatised footage, with art critics, historians, and even a few people who knew Rosaleen personally making up a lot of the interviewees. Their insights help connect Rosaleen’s artwork and media shenanigans to her creative influences, the movements of the time (and especially those that came after), and it helps bulk up the mystique behind the artwork itself. Said artwork gets plentiful screentime throughout, and it’s all quite captivating stuff. They’re the kind of drawings and paintings that delve in demonic and sexual imagery, which at a time when conservatism was the name of the game (which has remained the case for most of our nation’s history, even today), it’s easy to see why she got as notorious as she did.
There’s also the other contributions from Rosaleen shown here, mainly taken from her personal journal with Kate Elizabeth Laxton narrating passages and portraying her in the film’s theatrical vignettes. Maybe it’s because I’m going into this with a fascination for the occult as is, but I am now officially convinced that more movies need to include interpretative dance orgies between witches, Pan, Lilith, and Lucifer (all of whom have their own performers in these scenes) that are set to Ode To Joy.
As for the content being presented, the Witch is shown to be a proto-Satanist in how she embraced how the media and government perceived her. She took hold of the idea that acknowledging sexuality and a woman taking charge in her own path in life was somehow inherently wrong, and did what all good Australians do and took the piss right out of it. And with what is shown from her writings, her artwork, and even some rare snippets of herself on early film, she truly meant every word and image to do with her pantheistic approach to witchcraft. She was a bi queen at a time when any non-straight sexuality was flat-out illegal (I will never not laugh at how no-one at the time noticed that “buggery” is a word that is impossible to take seriously), and for as much as she played the media at their own game, someone this inescapably interesting was seemingly destined to grab attention regardless.
At 75 minutes long, it’s a tightly compacted look at a local legend, but it gets across all the essentials, from her art to her philosophy to her place in Australia’s alternative art history. It easily dodges the ‘Wikipedia article at 24 frames/second’ trap with how Sonia Bible arranges the information, not to mention how beautiful its visuals regularly get. It’s the story of an artist who basically turned their own life into a work of art in how it intrigued and made spectators question the culture around them. That’s the kind of raison d’etre I can really get behind, and someone who has also devoted themselves to a singular passion and just pushed forward with it, I relate to this pretty damn hard.
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