Freda Freiberg was central to so many circles of vibrant film culture in Australia, so active in her involvements & engagements – writing (she was a superb, clear writer, who proudly eschewed all jargon and loudly abhorred the mere “word games” of much contemporary highbrow theory), teaching, consulting, networking (in the best sense), bringing people together ...

And she was a feisty soul who never stood for any bullshit; whenever the occasional honour in the film field came my way, for instance, she would be the first to say to me (in person or an especially posted, elegantly handwritten note): “Don’t let it go to your head!” But she was extremely loyal in her life-long friendships – such as with Ken Mogg, who also left us a little while ago, in 2023. I often recall the image of a wonderful cross-generational mirroring whenever she enthusiastically engaged with Vikki Riley (who died at age 50 in 2012) in the foyers of film events: seemingly from two utterly different worlds (Vikki was proto-punk and atheist), both of them were sharp, critically agitated by whatever they had just seen or heard, and always busily racing off somewhere else …

Freda published in many places: in small magazines, bigger magazines, chapters in significant books (like the 1987 Don’t Shoot Darling! on Australian women’s cinema, which she co-edited), reviews in the Jewish newspapers, online in Senses of Cinema or Screening the Past, more recently in Film Alert 101 ...

We were together on the editorial team of the short-lived film RMIT-funded magazine Buff back in 1980, and that was when I first grasped how central her family, feminism, and religious values were to her very full, rich life. I shall never forget the presence of an increasingly exasperated Freda seated beside me, as part of a film culture initiative of those years, when we tried negotiating with a local distributor who kept trying to push his trashiest product onto us: “I really think you should program our most popular title, The First Nudie Musical!”

And, likewise, Freda’s deeply ingrained feminism rose to the surface when she recalled a local meeting to decide print acquisitions for film courses in schools and universities: for her, the fact that John Flaus expended his (considerable) energy arguing for the purchase of a 1945 slapstick comedy named Getting Gertie’s Garter constituted the last straw. “Getting Gertie’s Garter!”, Freda exclaimed. “That tells you everything you ever need to know about the inner life of the typical male film buff!”

Freda wrote one of the first important publications in English on the role of women in Kenji Mizoguchi’s films (she possessed a superb knowledge of Japanese language, history and culture), and – as I mention in my DVD commentary for Mikio Naruse’s Floating Clouds, the re-British Film Institute release of which is co-dedicated to her and Paul Willemen – she excitedly brought the news about the discovery in the West of Naruse to the readers of Filmnews after a partial Australian retrospective. In fact, some of the filmed discussions I did with Freda in 2007 (she was not quite in her mid 70s then!) for the earlier Naruse boxset from BFI are recycled on the new release; it’s a very touching experience to rewatch them today.

And there’s now a special Film Studies Library (containing her lifetime’s collection of often rare materials, plus much of my own book & magazine collection before I moved to Spain, and soon Ken’s library as well) named after her at Monash University, where she and I both taught in different periods. I hope that the students and researchers who use this library in years to come will be inspired to continue the depth, range, lucidity and passion of Freda’s magnificent legacy. I will miss her deeply.