Summer reading series #2 : seeing eye to eye

Martin Rumsby’s Eye I Aye (2007) appears a straightforward, almost naive film. A camera is zoomed into a flat image of a community bench in front of a shop, with cars and some pedestrians passing by. It could be any suburban street. At times the de-facto main characters Dida and Erana or their surrogates are seated there, both are of mixed race from Māori and Pākehā parents and the soundtrack frames their ‘history’. This meditation is interrupted by the weather, with sheets of raindrops caught by the camera’s autofocus, patterning the window, wiping out the outside scene. Later Rumsby also inserts his body and face between the camera and window, his eyes in shot re-securing the camera’s position. This technical tampering registers as unsettling and suspicious.