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MHAD
Mortdale Community Services, Mental Health Arts Development (MHAD) has been providing visual arts training to adults with experience of mental illness since 2005. The workshops have included painting, drawing, Chinese brush painting, printmaking, filmmaking and sculpture.
The Exquisite Corpse was developed through the Making MHAD Movie Makers project, which gave the group the opportunity to work with Metro Screen - a Sydney organisation that provides services and support to film makers - to produce both the film and a short documentary. The collective, guided by Metro Screen staff, created props, operated the camera and edited the raw footage. The documentary, Mind, Body and Soul, was named after and discusses the mental health support group that many of the MHAD participants attend.
The term ‘exquisite corpse’ refers to the collaborative process popularised by the surrealists whereby a single work is developed through the placing together of discrete parts produced by separate contributors. The script for The Exquisite Corpse was written collaboratively by all the members of the crew using this process.
Originally developed as a word game in which each participant would contribute a word based on a formula, or by being able to view the preceding word, the MHAD collective have adapted the process to embed a dreamlike narrative into a highly stylised film. In the first scene three men stand in a dark and claustrophobic funeral parlour vacantly observing the body of a young man. In the second, one of these men sits in a car and is confronted menacingly by the image of a rabbit. The film ends with the most banal of everyday activities, watching a kettle boiling on the stove. The wildly surreal intermingles with the everyday, making it unclear to the viewer where the real experience ends and the imagined begins.