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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 Bill Mousoulis at bill@innersense.com.au |
| Listen to Chris Luscri and Bill Mousoulis talk about "Unknown Pleasures" with Peter Krausz on the "Movie Metropolis" radio show, recorded Feb 9, 2019. Interview starts at 2 minute mark. |
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SUBSEQUENT DATES (put in your diary!) Mon, May 6, 2019, 7:30 p.m. |
PAST SCREENINGS (in 2019)
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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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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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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:
