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| Unknown Pleasures: Australian independent cinema A series of regular screenings featuring the best of Australian independent cinema, both classic and contemporary, with discussions with the filmmakers. Curators/presenters: Chris Luscri, Bill Mousoulis Assistant/videographer: Colin Hodson read more |
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INFO FOR SCREENINGS: Our main venue is the Thornbury Picture House, |
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Tuesday, Oct 4, 8:15 pm Intro and Q&A with Margot Nash (from Sydney) |
Leading Australian
film-maker, writer, director, essayist, teacher and academic, the
multi-hyphenate Margot Nash has carved out a career distinctive for its
wide-ranging social analyses and commitment to forging new cinematic territory
across documentary, experimental and narrative feature film-making, pointedly
working with feminist and Indigenous subject matters at a time when concepts of
intersectionality were still on our regressive cultural drawing board. Vacant Possession remains her most widely known work – with its star performance from
a brilliant Pamela Rabe as Tessa, a woman uncovering secrets in the family home
after her mother's death – but is also one of our most powerfully, rigorously
articulated films about the sometimes imperceptible collisions of race, class,
property and lineage. Internationally awarded (it was nominated for 4 AFI
Awards including Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, and won a Speciale Mention du Jury at the 1996 Films De Femmes festival in
Créteil), Vacant Possession is also ravishingly beautiful both visually and
sonically, conveying a state of undulating haptic sensuality that imbibes the
narrative's explorations of personal and national self-images with the full
weight of a re-emergent Australian Gothic. – Chris Luscri
Growing up in Australia I never saw, much less
met, Aboriginal people until I was an adult. The history books didn't tell the
stories of dispossession and destruction of the land, the stories of injustice
and racism. While Aboriginal people live with the devastating consequences of
colonisation, many of them pity white people because we have no 'place', no
dreaming. We don't know where we belong.
I wanted to explore notions of house, home,
land, place, family and belonging from a white point of view. I wanted to
explore the image of the house as a container for dreams and memories and as
psychological space that could be possessed and I wanted to tell a story of a
dysfunctional white family ripped to shreds by alcohol and the effects of war.
I saw the breakdown of family relationships,
particularly the mother/daughter relationship, as a metaphor for the breakdown
of relationship to land, country and place." – Margot Nash
"There are moments in Vacant Possession when the past becomes a material presence.... There are stylistic shifts
between the more conventional optical representation, where the viewer watches
from a safe critical distance, and the kind of tactile looking that resonates
with Laura Marks’ concept of “haptic visuality”. Within this theoretical
model, our eyes sometimes ‘stand in’ for the sense of touch; images on screen
transcend their status as purely visual objects. This offers 'contact between
perceiver and object represented… vision itself can be tactile, as though one
were touching a film with one’s eyes.'” – Gabrielle O'Brien, Sensing the Past:
Margot Nash’s Vacant Possession, Senses of Cinema, March 2016.
"The film is concerned with the future of
black and white relations in this country, not just the past... Each of the
main characters is haunted by similar regrets. No-one in this movie is unscarred
by the past, but the ones who live here have reached a state of acceptable
denial. Tessa hasn’t been able to do that, because she’s been overseas, making
a meagre living as a professional gambler. Vacant Possession is an
attempt at a new beginning for her character, but not just her’s. The violent
storm that ends the film destroys the house, but also brings the races
together. Possession, in that sense, has been declared ‘vacant’ once
more." – Paul Byrnes, Vacant Possession, Australian Screen,
accessed 2nd February 2020.
“One of the most striking and assured
Australian feature debuts of recent years... Above all it is a
surrealist-inspired 'dream film' that evokes history of women’s cinema running
from Maya Deren to Susan Dermody’s Breathing Under Water (1991)…. Often
brilliantly directed – with superb cinematography from Academy Award winner
Dion Beebe and a compellingly atmospheric sound track – Vacant Possession is a
truly exciting piece of cinema…” – Adrian Martin, Vacant Possession, The Age, June 1995.
Vacant Possession on Margot Nash's personal website
Margot Nash and Chris Luscri radio interview
Margot Nash, Chris Luscri and Bill Mousoulis radio interview
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Stay tuned for details of further screenings in 2022
The following screening (originally scheduled for 2020 and then 2021)
will happen at some point in 2022, along with others:
Two of the
quintessential, widely acclaimed Australian films of the '70s and' 80s, John
Ruane's superb diptych Queensland and Feathers builds upon the structures and
possibilities of the miniature to ultimately craft something more mysterious
and radically open-ended. Linked across the span of almost a decade by the
presence of legendary actor, broadcaster and critic John Flaus, essaying the
same role across both films (a lead in one and a cameo in the next), Ruane
adeptly uncovers the peculiar sense of everyday drudgery and quiet desperation
that characterise the lives of many working men and women. Tonally precise yet
seemingly affectless, the films indelibly capture through recurrent, attenuated
detail what the director has called a ‘vanishing breed of Australians', a world
more rigid, less bound to happenstance and chance than they are to the vagaries
of the almost invisibly oppressive Australian cultural logic. From fractured
affective relations to the lure of the big, coastal city – with its promise of endless
sunshine and a laidback lifestyle – the struggles of Ruane's characters are
eminently relatable. To seek an 'elsewhere' – however tenuously – is ultimately
an heroic-pathetic goal. Theirs are as much acts of hope and defiance as they
are silent, desperate screams against the unyielding, punishingly cyclical
train of life. It is no coincidence that Feathers is based on a 'minor' Raymond
Carver short story – Ruane seems to have learnt that the smaller the scope, the
more pronounced the sense of existential anomie. – Chris Luscri
On Queensland --
"Ruane's characters are familiar
Australians on the screen, acted upon rather than acting, waiting for something
to happen: Doug and Aub, sad workmates dreaming of making the break from the
Melbourne grind to Queensland sun. It is the romantic lure of escape that
occupies so many '60s and '70s "road" films... Ruane's wistful theme is
the fragility of relationships, goals and dreams. With the help of some
excellent playing by John Flaus, Bob Karl, Alison Bird and others, he touches
his people with a quality almost Chekhovian – at the no-hopers' end of the
social scale. We are actually made to care." – Colin Bennett, The Age,
26th July 1976
"A great example of down-beat everyday
realism, of struggling ordinary people. Made by the then student John Ruane
(who went on to make Death in Brunswick and other films), this also set the
template for the "hour-long" indie films that existed in Australian
cinema for the next 20 years or so. The actor John Flaus
Queensland's profile on OzMovies
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On Feathers --
"The latter [FEATHERS] achieved mini-cult
status after the AFI Award screenings in July and is already sharply dividing
audience opinion. The former is a Film and Television School graduation film.
While from very different sources, the two films have a number of common
threads — a concentration on the most ordinary and seemingly insignificant
moments of life, an exploration of the possibilities of love and of the
thousand small accommodations that love demands, and unexpectedly similar
versions of a form of masculinity that is locked partly into eternal
boyhood." - Liz Jacka, Filmnews, December 1987.
"The invisible structures of society lurk
in the sub-text of Raymond Carver's American short story, now a short (48
minutes) Australian movie. Writer-director John Ruane preserves the insights,
cultural relevance and sardonic tone of the original in his translation to
another country and another medium, with fine performances from his
principals." - John Flaus & Paul Harris, The Age, 5th February 1988.
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Tuesday, Sep 13, 8:15 pm Q&A with Ivan Gaal, moderated by Jake Wilson (The Age). Hungarian refugee and Olympic athlete, Ivan Gaal settled in Melbourne in the late 1950s, and became involved with radio, photography and the cinema in the ’60s. Since 1970, he has made numerous documentary and educational films. He was also involved with film groups like the Melbourne Film-Makers Co-Op and ATOM/Metro magazine. A collection of his shorts will be shown, including the classics Camberwell Junction (1974, 5 mins) and Ibrahim (1985, 30 mins). (Bill Mousoulis) |
Ivan Gaal, like the filmmakers Anna Kannava and Giorgio Mangiamele we have featured recently, came to Australia as a migrant/refugee as a young adult, and slowly but surely built an artistic life for himself. Maybe it was his spirit and his values (fighting iron Russia in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956) that made him carve out a life of "service" to the new community he found in Australia, through not only working for the Victorian Department of Education, but also helping with film groups like the Melbourne Film-Makers Co-Op in the '70s and ATOM/Metro magazine in the '80s. Even recently, I sat in on a panel advising young film students, and there he was, Ivan Gaal, at the age of 84, sharing his wisdom with the youngsters.
It is with great pleasure that we present this particular night, to honour Ivan's spirit. Apart from having him in person to talk about his life and films (with Jake Wilson from The Age), we will screen 8 of his 30 or so short films that he has made since 1970. There is an undeniable personal touch to all his films, even the ones that were made for educational purposes. There is a gentle humanism at play, a real love of all humans and their social or emotional situations. There is politics, and criticism. There is visual experimentation and deft editing. Completely unostentatious, Gaal's work is careful yet affirming, and beautifully expressive. – Bill Mousoulis
"Ivan Gaal is clearly a thoughtful filmmaker who has reflected long and hard, over his lifetime, on the ways and means of educational cinema. It is its own form, with its own challenges: aesthetic challenges, as well as practical, ‘client based’ ones. ‘Films educate differently to the written word’, he once proclaimed. As he tells it, it is a delicate matter of maintaining a balance: too many ‘distracting film techniques’ or too much ‘pretentious editing’, and the attention of kids in a classroom is lost; but too little attention to form, coupled with a dry presentation of ‘facts and figures’, will always come off second best to the snappy types of televisual entertainment (and news/current affairs) on which the young audience has grown up .... Despite the general neglect that has kept his work shrouded in invisibility, Gaal has managed to be quite prolific – a true craftsman of the film, video and now digital media. Where other talented filmmakers have languished for long years between financed projects, Gaal has kept working, perfecting his mastery of the forms he has used: observational documentaries, fictional re-enactments of reality, lyrical collage or montage pieces carefully set to music, audiovisual portraits and essays. The time-capsule value of his work – the way he has captured the feelings, sensibilities, trends and customs of whatever time and place he filmed – is inestimable ... Ultimately, I would contend that Ivan Gaal is not just a notable craftsman, not just a canny documentarian with an admirable social conscience – but also, and perhaps above all, a poet of image and sound. Time and again, we are struck by the lyrical, expressive rightness of the way he films, cuts, places music or guides a ‘non professional’ performance on screen ... Gaal’s vision is always lucid, humanistic, politically astute and poetically apt." – Adrian Martin, Comment, Think, Analyse, Experience and Learn: The Neglected Film Work of Ivan Gaal.
Ivan Gaal & Bill Mousoulis radio interview by Melinda O'Connor, On Screen, 3CR, September 3, 2022.
Ivan Gaal & Bill Mousoulis radio interview by Peter Krausz, Movie Metropolis, WYN-FM, September 8, 2022.
Ivan Gaal profile, Melbourne Independent Filmmakers website.
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Ivan Gaal program of short films TOTAL duration 90 mins |
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The Punter |
A Man from the Other Side
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Tuesday, July 26, 8:30 pm Q&A with Mischa Baka & Siobhan Jackson, moderated by |
The low budget feature You Can Say Vagina stood out in 2018, with its understated quirky humour and atmosphere of awkwardness and innocence. Eventually, it revealed itself as a work of alchemy, between two highly individual filmmakers in their own right, Siobhan Jackson and Mischa Baka. This program presents a selection of their own (short) films, at film school (they were both VCA students) and as independent artists. And they are quite different filmmakers, making You Can Say Vagina a genuine mixture of different impulses.
Siobhan Jackson's work is firstly predicated on the bypassing of words. The narrative films like 1, 2, 3 or Donkey in a Lion's Cage are completely without dialgoue. Like all her work, they have a layered soundtrack of music and sometimes other sounds, establishing a disquieting mood throughout. We are presented with what seems like alternative realities – worlds of fragmented characters and oblique stories, and landscapes that are rich but mysterious. The films are hard to grasp, but they seep into the subconscious. There are transfigured faces (masks, bandages), surreal objects, unusual actions, and always an abundance of dread. Jackson is clearly an experimentalist, including the use of different visual textures for different films.
Mischa Baka's work is quite distinct from Jackson's. He loves music and dance, seen in such "music clip" type films like Walking Shadows and Always, so suddenly, all the time. The editing in these films is always surprising and innovative, and miraculously in step with the choreography of the actors and their dancing (when it shouldn't be, being jarring). Baka loves the human body, and he also elicits great natural but physical performances from his actors (à la Cassavetes). Most of Baka's films are pop and colourful, but Last Beautiful Friend shows his adeptness also in the longer narrative form. More conventional than Jackson's narrative work, Last Beautiful Friend is a penetrating study of several characters, again using unexpected editing. And dare I say that Baka is also a very daring filmmaker, with his explorations of intimacy and sexuality? – Bill Mousoulis
Siobhan Jackson: Profile / Website
Baka & Jackson radio interview by Peter Krausz, Movie Metropolis, July 16, 2022.
Bill Mousoulis radio interview by Eloise Ross, Primal Screen, July 25, 2022.
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Part 1: Siobhan Jackson |
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Siobhan Jackson: Burn / 1, 2, 3 / Donkey in a Lion's Cage |
Part 2: Mischa Baka |
Mischa Baka: Clothes Dance / Always, so suddenly, all the time. / Last Beautiful Friend |
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Tuesday, April 12, 8:10 pm Q&A with Maria Mercedes (lead actress) and Aanya Whitehead (producer), moderated by Simon Wilmot (Deakin Uni). |
Anna Kannava was (and continues to be) an inspiration to many in the Melbourne film scene and also many in the broader community. Born in Cyprus in 1959, she migrated to Australia in 1974, and found her niche at Deakin University (then Rusden College) studying film, acting, fine art. She settled on directing films, and made a number of short and medium-length works in the '80s and '90s, quirky shorts but also personal and inventive documentaries. Two features followed in the '00s, Dreams for Life in 2004 and Kissing Paris in 2008, but her life was tragically cut short at the age of 51 in 2011. She battled with a health condition (scleroderma) for the last 20 years of her life, and when she developed cancer in 2010, it was too much for her body. But what will be remembered forever, by those who knew her, was her passion, determination and her penetrating but generous personality. And she made exquisitely beautiful films, brimming with life (both joy and pain). Her debut feature Dreams for Life was a surprising work when it came along in 2004, shifting away from the personal and quirky nature of her previous films, and delving into a more controlled art cinema terrain. In a native and intuitive way, she came up with a quintessential "women's film", like the Sydney films featuring voice-over narration (such as Gillian Leahy's My Life Without Steve [1986] or Susan Dermody's Breathing Under Water [1993]}. But her concerns were never feminist or post-feminist. She was an explorer of humanist and existential states, her cinema one of pain and longing, and the joy that can be found in love and adventure. We here at Unknown Pleasures have celebrated her before (we screened Kissing Paris in 2019) and we will continue to celebrate her. – Bill Mousoulis. “What lifts Kannava's work beyond a kind of suburban neo-realism is a strongly lyrical aura, and an investment in the realm of transfiguring desire. Her films are built on dream-sequences, paintings, music, dance, and a whole, sensual experience of fabrics and textures – a special and intimate 'female aesthetic' proudly claimed .... Kannava is concerned with the small tremors in Ellen's life, the barely noticeable but internally powerful transformations of the spirit. Her solitary gestures of swimming or walking are just as significant as the decisions she must make about relationships. And the film, in its quiet but confident style, embodies this character's 'visionary' experience. Dreams for Life richly extends and fulfils the promise of Kannava's previous work. Cheekily taking its title from a self-help book, Dreams for Life is not afraid to confront the ersatz wisdom of the New Age movement in order to dig deep into the emotional truth of slogans about loving yourself, or coming to the peace with the past. ” – Adrian Martin, Dreams for Life review, Film Critic, June 2004. Bill Mousoulis interviewed about Dreams for Life, by Peter Krausz, Movie Metropolis radio show, April 2022. Anna Kannava interviewed about Dreams for Life, by Simon Sandall, Reader's Voice, September 9, 2005. Dreams for Life info page, Melbourne Independent Filmmakers, 2005. |
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