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Unknown Pleasures: Australian independent cinema is a series of semi-regular screenings curated and presented by Chris Luscri & Bill Mousoulis, featuring the best of Australian indie cinema, both new and old, narrative and non-narrative, with discussions with most of the filmmakers, presented at Long Play Cinema. read more |
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Long Play is a boutique Cinema & Bar |
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INFO FOR ALL SCREENINGS: As seats are limited, please book by emailing |
Listen to Chris Luscri and Bill Mousoulis
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Tuesday, July 16, 2019, 7:30 p.m. Intro (and short video interview) by Kriszta Doczy |
THE REFRACTING GLASSES
(1992, 96 min, David Perry)
[Includes excerpts from David Perry,
featurette on the artist’s life and work by Kriszta Doczy (10 min)]
Intro by Kriszta Doczy
“I love these old
Bolexs. I suppose they’re relics of the past, like old Communists.” -
Constant Malernik
Ferociously inventive, David Perry was one of
Australia’s most important – and unclassifiable – avant-gardists, a defiant
non-conformist as attracted to every possible permutation of moving image
practice (from Super and 16mm experimental film-making to stop-motion
animation, low-grade video and new media/multimedia), as he was to drawing,
painting and print-making. These interests coalesce in The Refracting
Glasses, a dizzyingly hybridised essay-fiction cum detective tale that
self-reflexively follows the strange obsessions and roundabout circumlocutions
of one Constant Malernik – artist film-maker and Perry avatar – as his
absorption in radical 20th century art gradually feeds into a growing
fascination for Soviet-era revolutionary politics. Flat-out splendid, this is
Perry’s magnum opus.
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Monday, July 22, 2019, 7:30 p.m. Intro & Q&A with Timothy Spanos, conducted by Jake Wilson |
“Take a map of all the world’s directors and you’d find it quite easy to draw a direct route from the salacious John Waters to Melbourne filmmaker Timothy Spanos. Spanos’ films are low in budget, poetic in language and occasionally come underscored by a celebration of the improper.” – John Noonan, "Timothy Spanos: Throb Like It Just Won’t Stop", FilmInk, November 3, 2017. “An all-knowing and all-glowing action comedy of tension and violence that features a returning core of actors (the cops and Spanos' favourite, Tim Burns) with excellent eyewear firmly encased in a twisted tale of crime delivered with all the drama and aplomb we've come to know and expect from the director.” – Brooke Hunter, Timothy Spanos Throbbin' 84 Interview, Female.com.au, 2017. |
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PAST SCREENINGS (in 2019)
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Thursday, June 13, 2019, 7:30 p.m. Intro by Chris Luscri |
AYA (1990, 96 min, Solrun Hoaas) "A VIRTUOSO ACHIEVEMENT ... distinctive visual flair, rich and vividly composed images." – Cinema Papers. "Unlike other directors who have attempted films about bicultural couples and got only one partner really right, Hoaas knows both sides of the cultural equation. By the end of the film, we not only like Aya, with her gutsy charm, but feel that we know her. She is at once a very typical Japanese and a uniquely international individual ... Aya views a cultural chasm." – Mark Schilling, The Japan Times, February 11, 1992. "A compelling love story with complex emotional multi-layered performances, enhanced by beautiful and sensitive images." – Louise Keller, Moving Pictures International, 25 July 1991. Preceded by EFFACEMENT (1980, 14 mins, Solrun Hoaas) |
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Monday, June 24, 2019, 7:30 p.m. Intro & Q&A with Donna McRae, conducted by Chris Luscri |
“As a curious work born of the psychological horror genre (and yet it carves a place of its own), Johnny Ghost is succinct and generates pathos in understanding of that which is so distinctly human; fear and loss, love and remembrance, grief’s natural progression.” – Catherine Jessica Beed, "Mourning and Secret Interiors in Donna McRae's Johnny Ghost", Desistfilm, 19 July 2013. “…McRae is consciously conjuring up the theme of nihilism, an ideological principle held by the post-punk culture Johnny Ghost invokes. It is this balance between knowing and not knowing, seeing and not seeing, defining and not defining, that makes Johnny Ghost a true thriller.” – Rebecca Zantjer, Johnny Ghost review, agnès films, 9 January 2014. “McRae herself has said in a Director’s Statement that Johnny Ghost is based on the concept of “cryptic incorporation”, which “occurs when grieving is incomplete and neither the mourner nor the mourned can move on.” – Lindsay Hallam, Profile of Donna McRae on Cutthroat Women website, 1 February 2019.
“Projecting phantasy: the spectre in cinema”, McRae, Donna Leanne, 17 February, 2017 |
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Monday, May 6, 2019, 7:30 p.m. Intro & Q&A with Natalie Vella (actress & co-producer) |
KISSING PARIS is the result of the magic and grace of the cities of Paris and Melbourne. A friend has commented that KISSING PARIS is my love letter to Paris. Marc Chagall said, 'My art needs Paris just as a tree needs water and I believe that in my paintings I have always remained true to my art.' I strive to remain truthful to the art of filmmaking. - Anna Kannava
"This is a very beautiful and unhurried minimalist production tracing a romantic story – or two – between Melbourne and Paris. Lovers of Paris will see it anew through writer-director Anna Kannava's distinctive vision – even the Eiffel Tower montage overcomes cliché - but who would have imagined Melbourne's Flinders Street Station as a romantic icon?" – Frances Bonner (Brisbane International Film Festival, 2008) "KISSING PARIS is really beautiful. The story is so achingly romantic, but nicely undercut by the daughter's experiences, that whole play on the holiday romance, and that Aussie accent amidst it all." – Anne Demy-Geroe (Artistic Director, Brisbane International Film Festival 2008) "The film has an immediacy, freshness and documentary flavour to it that is wonderful. Kannava sees the Seine, grand old buildings and the cafes with a distinctive eye and the film swims in many playful French songs. Editor of the film, Natalya Beloborodova has taken the raw footage and created jazzy montages producing a satisfying film overall." – Bill Mousoulis (Neos Kosmos Newspaper) "In Anna Kannava's lovely, ultra-low-budget digital Australian feature, KISSING PARIS, we see a humorous version of the phenomenon of sudden tears: from the spectacle of the central character, Claire (Natalie Vella), alone in a small Parisian chamber, far from her male partner, making purring sounds down the telephone to get the attention of her cat back home, the film cuts to her still on the bed, but now sobbing helplessly." – Adrian Martin, FIPRESCI notes. KISSING PARIS website Natalie Vella writes about Anna Kannava |
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Thursday, May 9, 2019, 7:30 p.m. Intro & Q&A with Chris Windmill, conducted by Dirk de Bruyn |
LIST OF FILMS TO BE SCREENED (in screening order) - Queen's Birthday (1979, 5 mins, 16mm) "Quietly mad, his films begin from the charming, irritating minutiae of everyday experience - shopping, cleaning shoes, hanging out the washing, going for a picnic in the park - and enlarge them into magnificent, terrifying obsessions. Windmill's ever-modest heroes and heroines live for no higher purpose than to fill out the days and minutes of their ordinary lives. As a consequence, every imaginable flight of poetry is concentrated in these little activities." – Adrian Martin, The Windmill of my Mind. "Chris Windmill is surely Australia’s most original comic filmmaker. Though comedy is often equated with playing to a crowd, Windmill plainly has no interest in trying to second-guess audience responses, or in anything that might impede his sober and absolute dedication to whimsy. Practical yet skittish women and good-looking, barely articulate young men abound in his universe, as do handwritten messages, ritualised housekeeping tasks, and maudlin surprise endings." – Jake Wilson, The Mousoulis vision of independence. |
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Video of the Q&A discussion at the end:
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Thursday, April 11, 2019, 7:30 p.m. Recently, James Clayden has been experimenting with web-based video forms, consciously refining his practice through a unique methodology that makes extensive use of prior film and video works. The culmination of this is 55 PHASES OF LOOKING – comprised of re-filmed and digitally altered fragments (some originally shot on Super 8) from almost a half-century of film-making, “chopped and screwed” to profoundly personal effect, tremulous with anxiety and deep melancholy. (Chris Luscri) |
55 PHASES OF LOOKING The project began about
eight years ago with the working title LOOKING FOR CÉZANNE (Perception &
Illusion). After shooting material in France, I thought I knew what I was doing
but I struggled to find my way to put it together.
-- Chris Luscri (curator)
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if
life is meaningless then what does that mean.
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Monday, April 15, 2019, 7:30 p.m. Intro & Q&A with Matthew Rooke |
LIST OF FILMS TO BE SCREENED (in screening order) - Warholed (1990, Super 8, 8 mins 10 sec) plus some short little "breakers" between these titles "A desire to present stories that are stranger than fiction or that are in some way off beat or outside the mainstream has always been a driving force in my short films, experimental works, and documentaries. A play on language. Post synced dialogue, foreign dialogue or characters that speak in strange ways are present in a lot of the films, especially the most recent." Matthew Rooke, February 2019. |
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Video of the Q&A discussion at the end:
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Tuesday, March 12, 2019, 7:30 p.m. A long-time resident of St. Kilda, Maggie Fooke has made a number of films that explore the intersections of place and identity, sometimes literally from her balcony window (Pleasure Domes). Her epic, 7 year diary film Mandalay centres on the fight for the titular art-deco apartment block from demolition and re-development. Shot on Video-8, the film unfolds a rich panoply of events, textures, incidents and encounters that take on a choral and eventually incandescent quality. (Chris Luscri) |
SOLD OUT SESSION One of my favourite Australian films is Maggie Fooke's compact, lyrical animation short Pleasure Domes (1987). An indescribable, associative mosaic of colour, sound, line and ellipsis, the film was a resounding critical and festival success at the time, noted for its richly textured evocation of the liminal states between place-making and memory, moving across a potted history of one small patch of land - the St. Kilda foreshore - where Maggie was resident at the time. A sublime film. - Chris Luscri, curator. Read about Pleasure Domes on Australian Screen website.
"Culled from over 100 hours of footage shot over a 7 year period (1987-94), Mandalay is Maggie Fooke's already legendary diary film chronicling the campaign to save the ageing art-deco apartment block of the same name. The building, in which the filmmaker was a long-term resident, became the centre of a storm of debate concerning the future of St. Kilda and the nature of re-development suitable for the faded but still grand bayside suburb. Shooting on Video-8 without any additional crew, Maggie Fooke has captured the unfolding of events over such a long time with remarkable economy, a never-in-doubt authenticity, and a startlingly candid style." - taken from Melbourne International Film Festival program notes. |
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Audio (with clips from MANDALAY) of the Q&A discussion at the end:
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Thursday, March 14, 2019, 7:30 p.m. VCA graduate Bonner is building a nice body of work (a dozen shorts so far), veering from absurdist comedies to essayistic collages (with documentary footage, in Asia) to more abstract experiments, sometime combining all these forms. Fantasy is never far away, in this "irreal" world Bonner creates. A number of his shorts will be shown, including Hot Chicken (2013, 14 mins), The Comedian (2014, 16 mins), Taxi Ride (2010, 10 mins) and Arigato Gozai-Mas (2009, 6 mins). (Bill Mousoulis) |
LIST OF FILMS TO BE SCREENED (in screening order) - Hot Chicken (2013, 14 mins) "My work so far has been eclectic. Spanning short film, experimental, and essay film/travel doco. I was initially inspired by magic-realism literature, wanting to play with some of these ideas on the screen. They were always more about inner worlds and feelings than the reality I saw around me, but that always seemed more real to me. " - Iain Bonner, from Melbourne Indie Filmmakers profile. Best Achievement in Direction at VCA Graduation awards (for The Comedian). |
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Video of the Q&A discussion at the end:
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Monday, February 11, 2019, 7:30 p.m. |
It's Valentine's Day, 2012 in Melbourne, Australia. A Vietnamese prostitute named Pisces is confined to her cocoon. She searches for true love, and the search which will define her. Please Wait To Be Seated..."I was here first." The longest epilogue: The city of Melbourne has changed, the buildings now taller reaching the clouds. Pisces is now a Madam. She navigates through the morals of a land of opportunity. Directed by Matthew Victor Pastor & Lisac Pham Poetry by Khavn Australia / Vietnam / 70 minutes / 2017 |
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Thursday, February 14, 2019, 7:30 p.m. An erotic and dazzling intermingling of labyrinthine realities centred on a loveless marriage, Hughes’ 1996 meta-textual melodrama now looks – from a distance of some 20 years – like one of the great anomalies of '90s Australian cinema, an art mystery (with shades of Chris Marker and Raul Ruiz) that won great acclaim at home and abroad, before going on to be nominated for two AFI awards, for cinematographer Dion Beebe and screenwriter John A. Scott. (Chris Luscri) |
SOLD OUT SESSION NOTE FROM THE FILMMAKERS: We are looking forward to the Valentine’s Day ‘Unknown Pleasures’ screening at Long Play. Twenty-three years have passed since What I Have Written was released in Competition in Berlin. The film is a dark little valentine that keeps on giving. A screening for ’New Directions in Screen Studies' (Monash June 2015) noted the Deleuzeian moment, ’slow cinema’, the film’s time, memory and movement, but for Long Play we can host the Q&A more on story and writing, as John A. Scott, who wrote the novel and the screenplay, will also be present. John Hughes & John A. Scott, February 2019 SYNOPSIS: She knows this much. Her husband is lying in a coma. He is not expected to recover. She is reeling from the shock of reading his unpublished novella. The text reveals to her a life betrayed. A startling revelation. The story of a man at the end of a loveless marriage. His intensely erotic association with another woman. Fiction and reality have become indistinguishable, and yet she determines to somehow unravel this mystery. Her husband’s colleague gave her the manuscript…can he shed any light on the affair? See Lesley Stern, 1996, "Severed Intensities - Conjuring John Hughes' What I Have Written", Cinema Papers (February 1996 pp. 12-13). The same edition of Cinema Papers has a number of articles on the film including interviews with cinematographer Dion Beebe. See also Anna Dzenis, 1996, "What I Have Written", Metro Magazine, #107 and Barbra Luby, 1996, "How What I Have Written is written about" Metro Magazine #107. Also: John Cumming (2014) The Films of John Hughes: a history of independent screen production in Australia, ATOM pp. 155-167 The SBS Movie Show review of What I Have Written, July 10, 1996 Adrian Martin's review of What I Have Written, from 1996, published online Feb 2019. John Hughes' website notes the films’ award citations and under ’stacks’ has links to these reviews. The DVD includes as extras broadcast reviews (see video below, on Channel 9's Sunday show) and commentary, including a interview with John Scott by Phillip Adams (LNL RN 1996) CREDITS: Director John Hughes, Writer John A. Scott, Producers Peter Sainsbury and John Hughes. |
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Video of the Q&A discussion at the end:
