I have the impression [some feminists] are relying too much on an existentialist concept of woman, a concept that attaches a guilt complex to the material function. Either one has children, but that means one is not good for anything else, or one does not, and then it becomes possible to devote oneself to serious undertakings. 

– Julia Kristeva

The film explores montage techniques with playful and complex effects. Through the film's five separate segments, themes, images and sounds recur and clash in unexpected ways. The collision of images of terror and childcare is stunningly effective: the pram is used as the device which stops the industrialist's car to enable the kidnap; the pram recurs in the famous scene from Eisenstein's ‘Battleship Potemkin’ where it goes careering down the Odessa steps; and the pram is pulled laboriously up a flight of steps by a contemporary mother in a modern city. 

‘Serious Undertakings’ offers a succession of pleasurable dis­continuities and disruptions, including the literal deconstruction of the “expert” commentary as the talking heads of the four academics disintegrate into abstract colours and shapes. The myths from Australian cultural history – of pioneers, mateship and rugged (male) individualism – are dismantled as created “truths” and manufactured “history”. ‘Serious Undertakings’ engages in the continual subversion of our film and political preconceptions. And it does so with wit and panache. 

... ‘Serious Undertakings’ could be described as a film about sexual difference and national identity, maternity and terror, the place of women in Australian landscape myths, and the place of landscape in the myths that we use to create our history. But it would be more accurate to say that the film invites us to imagine connections between these problems, and to question the way that Australian intellectuals – ­writers, artists, critics – have defined them as problems, and to enjoy a sparkling demonstration of how cinema itself produces connections and definitions that we often take for reality. 

– Meaghan Morris, Financial Review 

Description source: Circles Catalogue (circa 1983). Compiled by Helen MacKintosh and Margaret Gillan. Edited by Felicity Sparrow.