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    Cutting ordinary: an ABC true story
    RUTHERFORD, JENNIFER ( 2003)
    The 2002 Caroline Chisolm Lecture, Chisolm College, La Trobe University, 8th October 2002. I’m honoured and particularly pleased to return to La Trobe University to speak about ‘Ordinary People’. The last time I was invited to speak at this university I had just begun shooting Ordinary People and I spoke at the time about the film as an imagined object. Tonight I am going to speak about it as a lost object. There’s a repetition in play here which I rather like. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan said that repetition was a missed encounter with the real, and that is my subject: a missed encounter. The Australian journalist Peter Manning, who knew the history of cutting ‘Ordinary People’, said to me last year: ‘what is going to be unbearable for you is that when the film is released, it is going to receive a lot of critical acclaim and you’re going to be left standing in the sidelines saying, but –’. Manning’s comments have proved prescient. ‘Ordinary People’ screened on the ABC in March this year to critical acclaim. It has been selected for a number of local and international festivals, including Mumbai, The Real Life on Film Festival, and the inaugural Aus Fest, the Australian Digital and Video Film Festival. Before making Ordinary People I’d never held a camera, never done a film-making course and wasn’t even a surreptitious wannabe film-maker. Now I’ve made a film reaching an audience that my academic work will never see, I’ve been paid quite handsomely for it, and nobody has had a bad word to say about the film. So why would I want to jeopardise this almost mythical success by speaking against my own film? Because that’s what I want to do tonight: raise a series of ‘buts’ about the film you’ve just seen.
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