A chance encounter with a street artist resulted in Nicholas Hanson producing an award winning documentary on Melbourne’s street art community.

October 2002.

Nicholas Hansen is walking down Chapel Street at lunch time where he spots a male peeling off a sticker and placing it on a pole. Intrigued by this, Nicholas walks over to survey the newly decorated power pole and finds that it is a red stencil of a skull. He looks up and finds the street artist attempting to cross the road. Inspired by what he just witnessed, Hansen strolls over to the young man and introduces himself as a fan of street art and expresses his desire to shoot a film documenting Melbourne’s burgeoning street art community. Hansen gives DLUX his phone number and thus begins a 3 year journey into the hidden and often illegal world of the graffiti artist. The culmination of this quest resulted in Rash, a gritty documentary that investigates Melbourne’s street arts community and at the same time acts as a study of “the cultural value of unsanctioned public art and graffiti’s contribution to a very public dialogue”.

When Hansen joined Inthemix for a chat about his feature debut he is in good spirits and understandably so. His film has been received with wide critical acclaim and won the prestigious Films Critics Circle of Australia award for Best Feature Documentary and came runner up in the 2005 Melbourne Film Festival most popular documentary list. In addition, Rash has been invited to international film festivals in Berlin and the U.K.

Hansen is no stranger to plaudits, both locally or abroad. He was responsible for numerous short films which have also screened nationally and overseas. All of his short films dealt with the central theme of human rights and freedom of expression. But Hansen’s eye for visual detail was not spawned by a constant fascination with film. It was a gradual process that dates back to the 80’s where he studied painting, photography and multimedia. What he found attractive about filmmaking was the instantaneous and collaborative nature of the medium. “I think filmmaking allows for the immediate and the collaboration to occur… I find that much more electric”.

Indeed, it was the collaborative and artistic value of Rash that fuelled his enthusiasm for the project “I went into the filmmaking process in the spirit of collaboration. Because my background is in painting, I was well aware of the sensitivities that existed between an artist and their work and I knew I had to respect that”.

Hansen concedes that earning the respect and trust of Melbourne’s most respected graffiti artists was a “fairly long process”. This included attending a rogue screening of an Italian film in an abandoned warehouse where unbeknownst to him, Hanson was being ‘sussed out’ by the tight knit community. But after the initially slow process of introducing himself to the artists they eventually invited him to film them as they went about making art on the street.

The filming of Rash proved to be a challenging experience for Hansen as he was documenting an activity that is essentially illegal. Interviewing the graffiti artists proved to be Hansen’s major obstacle in the film making process. Hansen had to ensure their anonymity through the use of props and creative camera angles. His dedication to ensuring their secrecy was amply rewarded through their often frank and revealing insights into their world view, which goes against the perceptions of the authorities who summarily label graffiti artists as being nothing more than petty criminals.

It is this rare spotlight on this hidden subculture that makes Rash so fascinating and potentially illuminating to those who view graffiti artists as merely vandals. In fact, it is this misconception of the graffiti artist and their role in society that Hansen’s film centrally explores. Rash reveals that Melbourne’s graffiti subculture is not only a very tight knit community where every one knows what each other is doing. It is also governed by a set of ‘street etiquette’. When asked about the irony of this notion Hansen points out that this is an example of how this culture is in fact light hearted in spirit and nowhere near as confrontational as the public is led to believe. “There is humor in the street art and graffiti culture that people might read as hardcore conflict”.

The biggest challenge that the street arts community had to face was the much publicized ‘Zero Tolerance’ policy embarked by the Victorian State Government in the lead up to Melbourne’s Commonwealth Games. Hansen strongly opposes this political stance and believes that it will achieve nothing for not only is it not innovative, it is also a well versed slogan that the street art community is used to hearing and are very cynical off. “It’s like declaring war on graffiti. It’s saying stop this or we are going to lock you up. Its alarmist and I don’t think the graffiti artists buy that line”. Yet despite the threats, Hansen welcomes the whole graffiti debate for “what it does is that it actually includes people in the discussion”.

Looking back on the four years that it took from conception to the DVD release of his feature debut, Hansen is extremely happy and heartened with the response to Rash. But with this success, Hansen is very reluctant to take on the role of spokesman for the street arts subculture. He prefers his film to do the talking. “I think the film speaks for itself and I think the characters speak for themselves and that’s really what I wanted to foreground”. More satisfyingly, he views the success of Rash as an affirmation of Australia’s cultural identity. “I think it has been received well because maybe it says something about the Australian identity and the artist within it are reasserting what it means to be Australian”.

Rash is now available on DVD.