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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 |
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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2 screenings occurred in 2020
(before the Covid-19 virus stopped proceedings)
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Sunday, February 16, 2020, 7:30 p.m. Yackety Yack Intro & Q&A with actor John Flaus, conducted by Bill Mousoulis |
With thanks to Cinema Reborn / Geoffrey Gardner, and also Gordon Glenn and Rod Bishop.
"A dark, black and very funny comedy, Yackety Yack consistently challenges the political correctness of its times ... There really is nothing like it – a unique mash-up of brutal Monty Pythonesque parody, intellectual barbarity, film buffery and political satire ... An underground masterpiece.” – Rod Bishop (Assistant Director on the film), notes for Cinema Reborn, 2018. “The Hellzapoppin' of poor cinema, a frequently hilarious spoof on the low budget film ... a sheer delight.” – David Stratton, The Last New Wave: The Australian Film Revival, 1980. “Yackety Yack is a brilliant, scattershot satire on the dreams and delusions of radical filmmaking, referencing all the intellectual obsessions of the period: Godardian counter-cinema with its long tracking shots and droning monologues; cinephile reveries on beloved genres and auteurs (courtesy of the legendary critic John Flaus); feminist interventions. In fact, Yackety Yack does for militant film culture what Godard’s La Chinoise did for student Maoism, irreverently contradicting its pious aspirations with authoritarian realities. It is all very politically incorrect, driven by a splendidly absurdist, even ‘screwball’ sense of humour. Australia has not produced another film like it!” – Adrian Martin, A Secret History of Australian Cinema (1970-2000), 2003, republished in Pure Shit website, 2018. “Yackety Yack, a dead-pan spoof of counter-cultural film making, is one of the most dryly amusing films to have been made in Australia – a kind of Godard-meets-Warhol-Downunder ... Made with Dave Jones’s Latrobe Uni film students as crew the result is an absurdist delight with Jones mercilessly lampooning the pretensions of art film makers. Flaus and Carmody are excellent as his embattled associates unable to extricate themselves from the folly in which they are embroiled.” – Bernard Hemingway, Yackety Yack review, Cinephlia website. Great info about the film at Oz Movies website. |
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Video of the Q&A discussion at the end:
Sunday, March 8, 2020, 7:30 p.m. Intro and Q&A with Dirk de Bruyn |
The past as foreign
country, everywhere-all-at-once. The abyss from one time to the next, from
parents to children. Hanging heavy... suspended, yet absent. Conversations with my Mother is nothing in itself but a record of these contradictions. At their heart
lies a confusion. These are conversations, yes, but not really. A relationship,
a past, a shared commons between self and other, personhood and society... yes,
the film is all of these things. It is also about their negation, relationships – one present, one absent - riven with liminal anxieties, half gestures, barely
exchanged glances... whispers. Some viewers will find Dirk's Conversations intensely moving or disturbing, others unbearable or even perhaps
"artless", as Melbourne's extraordinary experimental film-maker Dirk
de Bruyn charts an encounter with his equally extraordinary mother, journeying
through the crevices of a contested memory to relive the traumatic years of
Dirk's childhood, his emigration to Australia, his father's illnesses, the turmoil
of financial and social struggles, their shared sense of isolation and
estrangement. One thinks of Eustache's film Numéro zéro (1971-5), about his
aunt, or Akerman's No Home Movie (2015), about her own mother, all sadly lost.
These are films, yes, but not really. – Chris Luscri
"For me the film is about memory and how
it directs your life, how it can affect your inner life now, who you are now. I
also discovered that feelings discarded long ago seem to be somehow lodged in
the sites where they unfolded. Is this where/how the mythologies of
"ghosts" develop in our culture?
As a male in a culture increasingly more
influenced by feminist initiatives, it is important to explore your feelings in
an uncompromising way. I do not think it is a coincidence that some of most interesting
discussions about the work have been with women. Even though I was directing
and producing the film, ostensibly in control of events, I became really
immersed in what unfolded. It gained its own momentum. Yet I also became aware
that all film is fiction, no matter how fine the tuning, encapsulation,
editing, short-cuts you take. The sentiment had to be uncompromisingly true to
what developed." – Dirk De Bruyn
"For many people, especially those
immigrants from war-ravaged Europe, the suburban home provided sanctuary from a
traumatic past... However, not every family managed to “feel at home” in the
Australian suburbs. For some migrants, these spaces felt familiar in some ways,
but disorienting in others, as de Bruyn’s film intimates, for the Australian
suburbs can be uncanny in the Freudian sense – spaces of dread haunted by a
myriad of ghosts. In psychoanalysis, the uncanny experience is marked by a
sense of anguish and foreboding... For me, de Bruyn’s film is a suburban ghost
story: it summons the spectre of de Bruyn’s deceased father and resonates with
the psychoanalytic formulation of the uncanny." – Glenn D'Cruz, Uncanny
Suburbia, Hauntology and Post-Traumatic Poetics: Conversations with Dirk de
Bruyn’s Conversations With My Mother (1990), Senses of Cinema, November 2017
"In “Uncanny Suburbia, Hauntology and
Post-Traumatic Poetics: Conversations with Dirk de Bruyn’s Conversations with
my Mother”, Glenn D’Cruz’s reflective essay stages a poignant and personal
conversation with Dirk de Bruyn’s autobiographical film, Conversations with my
Mother (1990), in order to foreground the importance of Melbourne’s working
class Western suburbs in articulating the filmmaker’s migrant identity. D’Cruz
suggests that the Melbourne suburbs, as de Bruyn’s film intimates, are uncanny
in the Freudian sense – spaces of dread haunted by a myriad of ghosts that
generate a sense of anguish and foreboding. The essay also draws on Derrida’s
concept of hauntology to situate the film within wider debates about
experimental film practice, identity politics and the suburban spaces Robin
Boyd once described as the ‘Australian Ugliness’." – Sean Redmond and Glen
Donnar, Introduction: Screening Melbourne, Senses of Cinema, December 2017.
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Video of the Q&A discussion at the end:
UPCOMING SCREENINGS in 2020
The following 4 screenings were planned for 2020 (on April 26, May 17, June 21 and July 19)
before the Covid-19 virus stopped proceedings.
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Date: to be screened in 2022 sometime. Intro and Q&A with Mischa Baka & Siobhan Jackson |
This session is MA15+, persons under 15 to be accompanied by an aduit. |
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 |
Date: to be screened in 2022 sometime. Intro and Q&A with John Ruane and
editor Ken Sallows
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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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Cancelled. Screened at MIFF 2021, with our blessing. Intro and Q&A with Margot Nash (from Sydney) |
Premiere screening of a new HD digital remaster of the film 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
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Screened Feb 23, 2021. See here. Intro and Q&A with Fiona Cochrane |
“The actors — Louise Siverson, Leverne McDonnell, Gail Watson and Nina Landis — make the most of strong but demanding roles. There is something naturalistic about the surface of Four of a Kind, but it is also quite stylised, with a quietly dark vision of human capacities. A dialogue-driven work made on a low budget, there is nevertheless something effective about these constraints; Cochrane has used and embraced them to bring out the disturbing implications that underpin the tales.” – Philippa Hawker, Four of a Kind review, The Age, June 11, 2009. “The narrative structure starts to interweave flashbacks into what happened (or what the characters claim happened) and a gradual slow-burn develops, making for intriguing watching, as we try to piece together the truth. As each scene leads cleverly to the next, showing the characters in a different role, the threads entwine and add layers to the story." – Bernard Hemingway, Four of a Kind review, Cinephlia website. “Performances are all excellent, especially McDonnell's Gina who allows us to understand the journey from victim to perpetrator with great clarity. Universal in its appeal, but with special resonance to women, this seemingly simple film is deceptively complex, and lingers accordingly." – Louise Keller, Four of a Kind review, Urban Cinephile website. |
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Archive of previous programs - 2018 / 2019 / 2020 / 2021 / 2022 / 2023
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