Documentarian Jan Sharp reflects on her life from the precipice of death
“I’ve got to change my life from the inside if I want to survive,” Jan Sharp says simply within the first minute of her starkly honest autobiographical film, which explores her recurring bouts with advanced breast cancer, with which she was diagnosed for the second time in July 2004. She began filming two weeks after the diagnosis; the result is Damage Control, a direct, unflinching narrative of her journey over the next two years that invites the viewer into the most extraordinary experience of a person’s life—her negotiation with death. The film itself is uncompromising—utilizing often-harsh, strong directional lighting when Sharp matter-of-factly addresses the camera, intermixing family photographs with stark footage of her native Australia. It is a personal narrative that has been likened to Proust for its thoughtful reminiscences on the past and its connection to the present.
What strikes you initially about Sharp is how disarmingly down-to-earth and engaging she is. Like the artist Hannah Wilke, who stunned the art world in 1987 when, at the height of her career, she was diagnosed with cancer and proceeded to document the dramatic transformation of her once-enviable body, Sharp, a former model, is a truly lovely, elegant woman of the sort to which, one thinks, things like cancer simply do not happen. Ours is a culture obsessed with youth, wealth, and beauty, and those fortunate enough to have any—or all—must lead charmed existences that the rest of us can only envy. Sharp calmly and thoroughly strips away that mask, reminding us of her basic humanity.
A true aesthete, Sharp remarks upon the artistry of her doctor, “an extremely fine craftsman,” she notes, in his skillful removal of tumorous tissue and fourteen of her lymph nodes. She is also not without humor—in another scene, as her locks are shorn, she laughingly remarks, “who would have thought that my destiny was to be a hair liberationist?” Sharp’s seemingly objective candor is disarming; her almost clinical detachment from the emotional tugs of her story can perhaps be attributed to her long and successful career as a documentary filmmaker and producer. As a young woman from a small agricultural town in the Australian outback, Sharp, at twenty-one, became the first woman apprentice (trainee director) at Film Australia and went on to win the Australian Film Institute Award in consecutive years for directing two series of documentaries on the problems of adolescence, which also resulted in legislative change. “It was a marvelous time to be Australian,” Sharp recalled of this exciting moment of governmental funding of the arts during which she and her politically-minded friends spent weekends and nights planning social change. “Australia was a marvelous place to be, [one of] enormous opportunity,” she recalled, and Sharp was, in her words, the recipient of “‘positive discrimination.’ I was fantastically lucky.”
In 1980, Sharp started her own film production company, producing her first feature film, The Good Wife, starring Rachel Ward, Sam Neill and Bryan Brown. Her next production, from her original screenplay, was Echoes of Paradise, starring John Lone as a Balinese dancer and Wendy Hughes. It was released worldwide. In 1995 Sharp wrote and produced perhaps her best known work, Wide Sargasso Sea, which she completed as the film’s director.
Along the way Sharp married director Phillip Noyce, who initially came to work at Film Australia as her apprentice. Noyce met with increasing success; the worldwide success of Dead Calm became the couple’s ticket to Los Angeles. However Sharp knew that, financially, she couldn’t make films at same time; to earn a living, she continued to work as a documentary director. The daughter of “an alcoholic father and demented mother,” whose “whole life has been about damage control,” Sharp found herself in a tumultuous marriage to Noyce. “I had always joked that living the life of a Hollywood wife was like living in the court of Versailles,” she remarks of her experiences traveling the world for film shoots and entertaining for some of the most talented and creative people on the planet. Pulling back the curtain on what appeared to be a dream life, Sharp speaks candidly about the toll taken by Noyce’s infidelities, drawing a connection between their sometimes toxic relationship and the cancer that has ravaged her body. Friends believe the root of her cancer is her “cancerous” relationships, and suggest that the power to overcome it lies within her. “Cancer of the left breast is almost always associated with some frustration or problem in your immediate family circle, whether it’s with children, or a husband, or the combination of the two,” she relates. “It’s not caused by bad relationships at work; it’s always your most inner family circle and it’s an absolutely proven connection, and if you can’t make immediate efforts to change that—I’m not saying that women with breast cancer should immediately divorce their husbands—I’m not talking about divorce, I’m talking about taking time out from your situation to heal yourself.
“All of the women in my primary circle—they’re all dead, and in each case I felt that if they had changed their circumstances they would be well and wouldn’t be dead. Any doctors will talk about the emotional stress. In every case, cancer of the left breast has something to do with problems with a primary relationship, and for the women who died this was the case. That’s what Jackie Onassis died of, according to [photographer] Peter Beard, who was close to her.”
As a result of this highly personal journey, Sharp reflects on the impact her life’s work has had on the subjects she has filmed and her decision to turn the camera on herself. “All my life I’ve been making documentaries that were intrusive, where I’ve seduced people into revealing themselves for the good of others.
“The last documentary was about the making of a beer commercial—for school children—advertising agencies manipulated masculinity to get young boys to drink more and drive, and end up killing themselves. I conned this guy to speak frankly about the process about how they deliberately manipulated [them]. I wanted to put it on the opening night of the Sydney film festival, but it’s a small community, and the people, who would be his peers, would sit there laughing their heads off, and I thought, I cannot do this to this man, and I said if you don’t show this, I will not make any more documentaries.
“I thought it was fitting that I should offer myself up as the victim for the good of others. I was so distressed about all these women I felt had died unnecessarily. When I started, I was not making it with any intention,” she says of her film. “Also, you never remember anything when something’s bad. You don’t remember anything. I thought it would be interesting as a record, and about halfway through I thought it would be useful. This time I was able to make enlightened choices. I thought this would be helpful.”
Of the cancer, Sharp says, remarkably, “it has been quite a gift in every way. I have a much more generous view of my subjects.”
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