The Beehive: Who Killed Juanita Nielsen? ACMI film turns on mystery
The loops of mystery surrounding the murder of Juanita Nielsen in Sydney’s Kings Cross are shown anew in this film.
Fifty years ago, conservation was still regarded as a conservative cause. Sentimental middle-class people, highbrows and what would now be referred to as the elite loved old buildings of aesthetic or historical significance and believed in preserving unspoilt nature. Politicians and businessmen were happy to bulldoze them all in the name of economic progress.
There was a hatred of old buildings: developers and planners considered inner-city Victorian terraces breeding grounds of vice, crime and disease, and thought the masses would be healthier, happier and better-behaved if they lived in modern tower blocks. In Sydney, the Rocks, Paddington and Surry Hills could easily have been razed. Mansions and handsome city buildings were demolished to make way for office skyscrapers and carparks, which would be knocked down and replaced in their turn.
Anyone familiar with Victoria Street in Sydney, one of the roads forming the cross of Kings Cross, will know it was once lined with substantial houses, those on the west side enjoying expansive views across Woolloomooloo to the Botanic Gardens and the city. Now, in most cases, even when the houses themselves survive, these views have been obliterated by extraordinarily ugly blocks of apartments.
But their construction coincided with the start of changing attitudes towards urban and architectural conservation, and the shift could be seen in the unexpected alliance between middle-class conservation activists, many of them women, and the Builders Labourers Federation under the leadership of Jack Mundey. The union imposed the so-called green bans that protected many urban areas from the developers, much to the frustration of the latter.
The green ban in Victoria Street was imposed in 1972 and was followed by a campaign of harassment by thugs in the employment of the developers, particularly Frank Theeman, but with some complicity on the part of corrupt police and NSW politicians. In 1974, the federal leadership of the union, under Norm Gallagher, in league with the government and developers, sacked the state leadership and lifted the bans.
Theeman had spent a great deal of money buying up property for redevelopment and was paying huge amounts in interest, so was desperate to end the impasse. With the lifting of the green ban, he faced only the opposition of the residents. They were led by a young woman called Juanita Nielsen, who lived at 202 Victoria Street and published a local newspaper, NOW. She was a glamorous though unconventional figure, heiress to the Mark Foy department store fortune, where she worked for many years.
Nielsen, whose surname came from a brief marriage to a Danish sailor, convinced the head of the Water and Sewerage Employees Union, her lover, to impose a new green ban: no building could proceed without connection to the water and effluent networks. In July 1975, aged 38, Nielsen was invited to a meeting at the Carousel Club, home of the Les Girls transvestite cabaret show that for years was the most famous attraction of the Cross, and one of several bars and brothels owned by Abe Saffron, a notorious figure in the Cross’s underworld.
There it is presumed Nielsen was murdered by thugs working for Theeman, perhaps by Edward Trigg, whose transsexual lover was the receptionist of the Carousel; or by James Anderson, who worked for Saffron; or by former detective Fred Krahe. Her body was never found, but her story is part of the mythology of the Cross, epitomising the spirit of the time as well as the almost blatant corruption tolerated in a part of the city segregated from the respectability meant to reign elsewhere.
These events have been the subject of films in the past — The Killing of Angel Street (1981) and Heatwave (1982) — and are now again evoked in a work that uses the film medium without being a film in the conventional sense of the word: Zanny Begg’s The Beehive. The metaphor of the hive as a model of social life allows for the most visually arresting passages in the film: the flight of bees, their work in the hive, and flowers opening and closing.
There is much talk, by various actors, about the life and behaviour of bees, at times interesting but digressive, at times portentous, as when speaking of the death of the queen bee — the implication being that Nielsen was the queen of the Kings Cross beehive. We hear about bees’ communal approach to work, their remarkable way of communicating the location of flowers through dance (a cue for a transsexual islander to perform a dance in a bee-coloured dress).
But bees have a sinister side, too; the selfless community is also a kind of totalitarian state that tolerates neither inefficiency nor individuality. The safety of the hive is paramount, and bees will sting to death any small intruder and then, since they cannot remove the cadaver, encase it in wax. In this sense, the corrupt community of the underworld and the nightclub is a beehive that eliminates Nielsen: this is hinted at when the transsexual dancer repeats his performance in the bar of the Carousel where, in a hypothetical scenario, Nielsen is shot by Trigg. But this aspect of the theme does not seem to be fully explored, as though the filmmaker were reluctant to characterise the whole world of the Carousel, or the whole underworld of prostitution and bar life in the Cross as a corrupt beehive. So none of the lengthy commentary about the behaviour of bees appears to mention the critical point about the killing of intruders, without which it is impossible for viewers to reconstruct the whole pattern that I have described.
So the underlying metaphor, as far as I can tell — and I will explain the caveat shortly — seems to remain incompletely developed.
Multiple actresses are used to play the role of Nielsen. While this seems initially quite suggestive, with the sense that she is a kind of everywoman, it is ultimately somewhat overdone, especially as one or two of the actresses do more work and are more effective than the others. There is a lengthy sequence, which becomes indulgent and laboured, in which the actresses reflect on their experience of the role.
The film is full of digressions, including a discussion of the transsexual culture around Les Girls when homosexual acts and even cross-dressing were still illegal — they were decriminalised in South Australia in 1975, but in NSW only in 1984 — and when exposure was a disgrace that could lead to dismissal from employment. At the same time, there was in practice more tolerance than we might imagine.
Another long digressive sequence is about the business of prostitution in the Cross, and an interview with Julie Bates, who has long been a leader and activist in the business. She explains, among other things, how she and her colleagues convinced the owner of the Nevada brothel, one of the most important establishments in the Cross, to start enforcing the use of condoms in the mid-1980s, as the AIDS epidemic spread panic; the reform served to protect the health of the girls and to restore confidence in a business whose clientele had fallen away drastically.
The reason it is possible to countenance these lengthy digressions is that not all the footage is included in every showing. Like most video art, The Beehive is shown in a continuous loop projection although, unlike much work of this kind, it does have a beginning with a title and an ending with credits. This is essential if the audience is to understand its most unusual feature: that the sequence that unfolds between title and credits is different each time. This sequence is governed by a computer algorithm, so even the director cannot be sure what is coming next. The principle is an interesting one, especially as we are all increasingly concerned about the way algorithms will work.
As for The Beehive, after watching it through 2½ times, the basic pattern was clear enough. It always has to start with the opening and close with the ending sequences, and has to relate the underlying narrative in approximately the same order. But the digressions on the social life of the hive, the peculiarities of Australia’s native bees, the social situation of homosexuals, being chosen for the role of Nielsen, brothels and the use of condoms, the history of the green bans and so on, will appear selectively to flesh out the main story, and the vignettes of gamblers in the club or the reconstructions of Nielsen’s death may vary in length and detail.
Referring to my caveat earlier, perhaps there was a reference to the hive destroying invading creatures, which did not appear in the runs that I saw; but that would also be a defect in the algorithm, since the point is a crucial one.
So the algorithmic order does not entail shapelessness, and the individual sequences are all directed, shot, edited and produced in the usual way, but as modules that can be differently assembled. The interest of this approach is to remind us that stories can be told in different ways, from different points of view, in different orders, and that there is no single inevitable and compulsory formula. The algorithmic structure is unlikely to supplant the more decisive structure of a normally edited film, but it makes sense in a case like this, We do not know exactly what happened to Nielsen; she undoubtedly was murdered, but we do not know by whom, at whose instigation or with whose compliance. Nor do we know what became of her body. None of the important figures in the story are alive: Nielsen’s death remains hidden in the darkness of the hive.
The Beehive: Who Killed Juanita Nielsen?
Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, to November 4.
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