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 Guest programmers: none as yet for 2025 Assistant/videographer: Colin Hodson read more |
Thank you to our supporters Unknown Pleasures is self-funded by Chris Luscri and Bill Mousoulis. It receives no government funding and it has no sponsors. |
INFO FOR SCREENINGS: Our main venue is the Thornbury Picture House, |
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Saturday, February 15, 4:00 pm |
Jeni Thornley (1948- ) is one of Australia's landmark feminist filmmakers, along with other Sydney figures such as Margot Nash, Martha Ansara, Gillian Leahy and Digby Duncan. These filmmakers have "lived in interesting times", as the old Chinese proverb warned. The decades of the '60s and the '70s were indeed interesting times, tumultuous and changing. And now, in the uncertain 2020s, these filmmakers are living through problematic times once again, with wars and fascistic despots again raging. The main difference for these filmmakers now though is that they are approaching the end of their lives. Thornley acknowledges this in her sublime film Memory Film, openly calling it a “death poem”.
The Super 8 film medium, developed in the 1960s, was always a revolutionary medium in a way. The cameras were so small you could pack them in your handbag as you went out for the day. And then film anything you wanted, anything that came your way. Thornley did this, from the early ‘70s to the mid ‘00s (when it finally became unfeasible to have the film stock processed). The nominal “home movie” camera for your average family became a handy tool for many of the international experimental filmmakers of the time, such as Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage. In Australia however, Super 8 was used primarily by a younger wave (Gen X even), in the ‘80s, with all the political and documentary filmmakers of the ‘60s and ‘70s not seriously considering it as a cinematic tool. But Thornley obviously intuited the value of the medium, and thus did her furtive little shooting, capturing various moments of her life as she lived through them.
- Bill Mousoulis (programmer)
Jeni Thornley tribute at Melbourne Cinematheque
Memory Film: a Filmmaker’s Diary: In Conversation with Jeni Thornley
Memory Film: A Filmmaker’s Diary
Jeni Thornley Talks About the Evolution of the Mind |
Tuesday, March 18, time TBA (around 8:30 pm) We present the World Premiere of a new feature film from Melbourne independent film legend Peter Tammer. Titled Trip of a Lifetime, this is a unique family footage film, Tammer being handed (in 1988) some unwanted 16mm. footage shot in 1950-51 of a seemingly ordinary older couple, as they travelled the world and recorded the sights they saw and the people they met up with. Stunningly restored by Tammer to a pristine high defintion, this is a heartfelt and exquisite film, honouring the existence of the people we see on screen, even if no-one (including Tammer) now knows who they are. A film one watches with awe and wonder. (Bill Mousoulis) |
World Premiere
Peter Tammer (1943- ) is one of Australia's most storied filmmakers, and no-one would begrudge him if he simply settled down these days in retirement and wisdom-dispensing elderdom, but an indefatigable spirit drives him on to keep making films. After a semi-retirement of sorts in the late 1990s, in the past 20 years he has made or completed projects such as his John Flaus portrait Flausfilm (2009), his Paul Cox portrait The Nude in the Window (2014), various short digital works, and also restorations of some of his earlier films. This new film however, Trip of a Lifetime (2025), is a truly special work, a work 75 years in the making.
In a nutshell, Tammer, whilst working at the Swinburne Film and Television School in 1988, received some cans of 16mm. film footage from a couple of strangers, the contents purporting to be home movie footage shot by a man in the years 1950 and '51. These strangers did not know the man. All they knew was that the man and his wife were now both deceased, and that they had no children or anyone else to pass the film cans on to. Tammer decided to keep the cans, intrigued by them. When he first opened then, he found the contents to be very fragile. He could not run them on any projector or film viewer so he had to wait until 2007 when he found a way to digitise them without damaging the film. A further and final stage of restoration was then begun by Tammer several years ago, and concluded this year. What we now see in Trip of a Lifetime are brilliantly sparkling high-definition images.
I myself can't think of a single film I've ever seen that is anything like Trip of a Lifetime. Firstly, Tammer has no personal investment in or connection to the people portrayed on the screen or the seemingly-average "man with a movie camera" who shot the images. Tammer is not related to them, he doesn't know anyone who even knew them, he has no idea even what their names are. Because of this, Tammer's completed film here, and the presentation of such to an audience, is an extraordinarily selfless act, an act that bestows great honour to the people filmed (and to the footage itself, as a record of the people).
Most "found footage" films that filmmakers have made over the years are acts of artistic creation in themselves, taking and shaping the images according to an intellectual or artistic concept the filmmakers have. Otherwise, the only other time we see home movie footage from the past in films is when the footage is of direct personal relevance to the filmmaker (biographical films). So, Trip of a Lifetime is unique, especially as Tammer completely resists any urge to edit the footage in any artistic way (he leaves the images with their original scatter-shot rhythms), or accompany them with music or voice-over (he leaves them silent). Apart from prologue and epilogue bookends by Tammer, the images run just as they would have been shown to family and friends in 1951.
This is the kind of film that brings up questions and mysteries around the entire cinematic apparatus itself. "What is Cinema?" as André Bazin once asked. There is a layering of "gazes" here in particular that is quite fascinating. Our gaze on this film takes in multiple gazes: we see Tammer's gaze (as an archivist in a way), we see the cameraman's gaze (as a recorder of events), and then we also see the content itself, as it renders itself into our minds in 2025, with all our cultural and historical perspectives interacting with it.
I think Peter Tammer is also asking "What is Cinema?". Or, more precisely, he is offering his own personal answer: "Have a look at this, isn't Cinema a wonderful thing, a thing of immense beauty and resonance?"
- Bill Mousoulis (programmer) |
Tuesday, April 15, time TBA (around 8:30 pm) 50th anniversary screening Pure Shit (1975, 77 mins, Bert Deling) Also screening in Adelaide |
Warning: Strong drug use.
One of the most unclassifiable of Australian films, a rollicking heroin narrative, B-grade yet still clearly with artistic integrity. No subsequent drug film in Australia has been able to match its energy, wit, humour, or sheer joie de vivre. Reviled by many, it's also been celebrated by many, and had a great (but limited) 2009 DVD release. Featuring a killer cast led by Gary Waddell, it is one of only 3 features made by Bert Deling (1942-2022). Rolf de Heer calls it "the most kinetic Australian film ever". “Made on the run, on 16mm, on a tiny budget, over four weekends, its rambling, episodic script harvested from the experiences of addicts and focusing on their manic 24 hour quest for a definitive 'hit’, Pure Shit is a piece of cinematic graffiti, that functions as doco-snapshot of Melbourne’s inner city drug culture c. 1975 all delivered without moral alibis, existentialist poetry or neat sociology.” – Peter Galvin, Pure Shit review, SBS website, June 10, 2009. “Deling’s bat-out-of-hell style combines snappy editing, killer music (recorded in one day, mostly by local Melbourne bands the Toads and Spo-dee-o-dee) and unconventional compositions. There are shots through cracks of doors, out of car windows and there is a stylish use of hand-held cameras long before the technique became fashionable. One short carwash scene shows the film at its most frenetic, comprising about a dozen images lasting about a second each. That staccato rhythm encapsulates the film’s wigged-out energy.” In Search of the Good Stuff: Pure Shit, Adrian Danks, Metro Magazine, Issue 149, 2006. Original Pure Shit poster, Bob Daly, Pure Shit: Australian Cinema, March 4, 2021. Interview with Bert Deling, director of Pure Shit, Luke Buckmaster, Crikey, June 5, 2009. Great info about the film at Oz Movies website. |