Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

May 2017

Japanese theatre group chelfitsch for the past decade has advanced a distinctive form of low-key theatre, centred on the minutiae of everyday life as expressed through the bodily presence and vocalised phraseology of unassuming characters. Far from the heady heights of kabuki’s super-distilled hyper-graphic dramatic mechanics — frozen mie poses, choreographed fights, time-stretched logistics and musically mannered declamation — chelfitsch has consistently sought to observe how people behave in the everyday, and how an actor can embody and channel that observation. In the end, a similarly stylised mode of performance results, with actors extemporising infinitesimal tics and turns to frame a performance of how nobodies do nothing.

An invisible logic

Time’s Journey Through A Room (2016), a work about the impact of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami of March 2011, continues this approach wherein the actors perform with palpable restriction, moving to an invisible logic which delineates their physical presence, their vocal projection and their occupation of the stage. Three characters convene dramaturgically: a man, his new girlfriend and his recently deceased wife. Their interconnection is subtly and gradually revealed through a series of unfolded exchanges similar in tone to the cine-novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. The trio simultaneously inhabit their past and present, as well as our conjoined present through their act of narration.

Yet, unlike Robbe-Grillet’s spatio-temporal mosaics which continually reassemble the fictive potentialities of a relationship (as in the ghostly memories dissected throughout Hiroshima Mon Amour [1959] and Last Year at Marienbad [1961]), Time’s Journey is anchored in the extended passage of grieving which grips the man, embodies the dead woman and hovers in front of his new girlfriend. He hardly speaks — the ghost vocalising over 80% of the play — and the new girlfriend functions as both book-ending chorus and an occasional device for allowing the man to open up to her and disclose the weight he bears grieving his deceased wife.

Time’s Journey Through a Room, chelfitsch, AsiaTOPA, photo Bryony Jackson

Sound design as quietude

All this could easily be handled by any of our state theatre companies — indeed grieving and mourning has become a millennial trope for ‘serious theatre’ and arthouse cinema desirous of respectability through dramaturgical depth. Mostly I find it tiresome and sappy. Conversely, chelfitsch’s theatre craft demonstrates an almost radical means by which one can handle such material deftly and delicately without resorting to heavy-handed humanism. Crucially, this is done through possibly the most overlooked signifying level in stagecraft: sound design. Now, many would aver that in a glutted epoch of international festivals trumpeting innovation in the live arts, we have abundant creative sound design in contemporary theatre. As my ears hear it, we don’t. We have a surfeit of cheap dark ambient texturing, boringly obvious pop song blasting and look-at-me audiovisual triggering, resulting from excess lighting and projection. How does cheltfitsch’s play avoid this, or provide an antidote to these clichéd modish options?

Firstly, Time’s Journey is an extremely quiet production. It employs soft vocal delivery as a key metric for balancing all other sound. The result is a contra-enunciated mode of theatrical staging. All sense of volume (and consequent spatialisation and dramatisation) is contained within and upon the stage. Counter to a legacy of modernist theatre craft which trades in pseudo-revolutionary wall-breaking and audience-assaulting, Time’s Journey resolutely remains on its stage, forcing the audience (key word here) to audit the action not as something entering the auditorium, but as something irrevocably tied to a zone beyond our grasp.

The symbolism seems clear to me: the story’s thematic drive centres on the new girlfriend straining to hear through the man’s silence to what he doesn’t say but which he hears continually — his deceased wife’s thoughts and voice. Typical of Japanese integrated holistic design (as opposed to European structured hierarchical design) the softness of sound simultaneously springs from the core impulse of theatre’s voicing of narrative onstage and spirals through a circular inversion of those mechanics to intensify their effect. If theatre is essentially about voicing a story, then Time’s Journey materially adheres to this formal stricture.

Secondly, an audiovisual space is grafted and grown like a mimetic ecosystem around the controlled vocal projections of the three actors. A range of lighting sources are distributed on and above the stage, creating a matrix of ‘hot spots’ where light is registered by action or appearance. Various lamps, lights or bulbs will occasionally come on slowly, or an ‘off-stage’ spot or an under-lit background scrim will illuminate an actor. The means for the lighting is unaffected and unshowy: all the stage props are low-level domestic objects (lights as well as a water hose, a pedestal fan, a rotating turntable) while the lighting design is rudimentary and conventional.

Time’s Journey Through a Room, chelfitsch, AsiaTOPA, photo Bryony Jackson

The lives of objects

But the point lies in the rhythm as these objects fade up and fade down, switch on or off, spring into motion or rest. True to Japanese synchronism, their presence constitutes a parallel Animist energy channel where objects breathe of their own accord, cycling through passages and moments which drift into and out of synch with what appears to be narrative direction. Never does the lighting stray into arch dramatic synchrony. Further, the objects’ accompanying sounds synchronise or don’t synchronise to these slow arcs and momentary pulsations of light. They create a sonic cartography of dramatic timing which sets up relations to the lighting, on one hand, and to the narrative action on the other. The transitions between these energy channels is elegant, like a breeze subtly moving a curtain (which actually occurs a few times too). Thus, the stage embodies a conjoined breathing which fuses with the breathing of the actors. Once one perceives this integrating momentum, one can then notice that even the actors’ movements across the stage (especially the man’s strange gestural catatonia with his back often facing the audience) are responsive to this audiovisual ecosystem which the stage articulates and enacts.

Thirdly, the audible sound design follows this spatial logic. Sound textures fade up and down in cycles or pulses, sometimes recognisable as atmospheres, other times readable as abstract tones. It could appear to be affected sound art until one acknowledges the purpose of these lowercase textures: they represent, and activate, the sounds present in a domestic space when speech is halted, repressed, drained. Air-conditioning hum, fridge buzz and TV screen whine are all evoked. Impressively, this aural catalogue returns the hyper-stylised sonics of late 90s onkyokei-related musics (from Otomo Yoshihide and Sachiko M to Toshimaru Nakamura and Ryoji Ikeda) to the originating electro-acoustic fields which inspired those musicians. It makes sense: if Japanese social interaction is based around a comparative reduction in vocalisation, sounds of the enclosing and surrounding spatial environments are bound to become extended, pregnant and foregrounded. Time’s Journey is a play which speaks to this human-environment interaction grounded in cultural specificity.

Trauma’s silence

Following through with an acknowledgement of the play’s Japanese context, Time’s Journey’s core strength resides in its grappling with various private and public approaches to grieving and mourning in the aftershocks of 3/11 Japan. Trauma ultimately silences people. They become catatonic, insular, repressed, incoherent, isolated. Their experience territorialises their separation from those who do not or did not share identical experiences. Many Japanese artists have grappled with the inability to voice perspective following 3/11, questioning the role of artists in such situations, and how artists if at all could reflect upon ongoing states of trauma. It’s a no-brainer to note the dual meaning of “aftershock,” applying equally to ground conditions following an earthquake and the mental disequilibrium suffered following a severe upset to an individual. In earthquakes and similar deafening moments of destruction, the silence that follows is always devastating, but only because it’s the first time maybe you become conscious of the non-sound that surrounded you every day before the destabilising event. Time’s Journey Through a Room threads those two zones together, deliberately stalling closure in order to retain the heightened sensations of feeling which attend trauma. The fact that the play acoustically achieves this is profound.

Watch a trailer (in Japanese) of Time’s Journey Through A Room:

Read John Bailey’s response to Time’s Journey Through A Room.

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Asia TOPA Festival: chelfitsch, Time’s Journey Through a Room, writer, director Toshiki Okada, performers Izumi Aoyagi, Mari Ando, Yo Yoshida; Arts House, Melbourne, 9-12 Feb

Top image credit: Time’s Journey Through a Room, chelfitsch, AsiaTOPA, photo Bryony Jackson

Presented as a dual channel half-hour video documentary of her 2013 project, Three Teams, Melbourne artist Gabrielle de Vietri captures an affectionate collaboration with a regional Victorian community in devising a three-team footy match, inducing footy-loving Horsham residents to question the principles of binary-driven competition. With its allegorical references to Australian two-party adversarial democracy, the project is cheekily transparent in asking local AFL fans to reimagine the rules and conventions of a sacred sporting tradition to accommodate an extra team per match.

The concept that emerges in Three Teams is “productive disruption.” Derived from pedagogical parlance, it situates knowledge transformation within certain types of activity: participant access to guided learning experiences; facilitator-participant partnership-led project development; and “thinking globally locally.”

In the video documenting the process of making the game, the club presidents express their initial reservations and quiet thrill at shepherding their members into the annals of sporting history—creating the world’s first three-sided footy game. Over six months, Vietri organises pop-up community BBQs for brainstorming sessions in the streets of Horsham, inviting local residents of all ages to pitch governance models for a three-sided game to a steering committee, using models to replicate the field (with its three sets of goalposts) and canvassing the practicalities of collaboration within competition, while remembering to sustain game flow and interest.

Echoes of Christopher Guest’s small-town mockumentary antics emerge in the second video as the game gets underway. Familiar rituals like the banner-run take place while commentary is provided by Richard Higgins (of The Listies) and footy scribe Tony Hardy, who channel Roy and HG, as the three clubs—Taylors Lake, Noradjuha-Quantong and Horsham RSL Diggers—navigate the ensuing chaos, punctuated with expressions of pride and confusion from the crowd—a heartwarming outcome for de Vietri, who clearly relishes her role as understated artistic trickster. Teik Kim Pok

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Top image credit: From L-R: Nigel Kelly (Noradjuha-Quantongs), Jeames Offer (Taylor’s Lake), Nathan Hayden (Horsham RSL Diggers) prepare for Three Teams Football Match at Dock Lake Reserve, 2013, photo Thea Petrass, Wimmera Mail – Times

With proportionally fewer subsidised small-to-medium arts organisations than the eastern states, South Australia has not traditionally presented its independent performance makers with a strong or steady supply of opportunities for the development and presentation of new work. Too often the work that does get up feels unready; more often still it does not get up at all, stymied by a lack of funds or the industry partnerships vital to bringing work to stage. With no large injection of money, à la the Victorian Government’s recent $115 million arts funding boost, the driving of the state’s crucial development infrastructure has been substantially left to two modestly resourced but impressively enterprising arts organisations.

South Australia’s nurturers

Vitalstatistix, based in the suburb of Port Adelaide, offers a yearly program of residencies, developments and showings with a focus on multidisciplinary work, culminating in their annual hothouse Adhocracy. There’s also the Performance & Art Development Agency (PADA), founded in 2015 by Vitalstatistix Director Emma Webb and creative producer Steve Mayhew — a key player in the reinvigoration of Country Arts SA’s Performance Development Program (formerly the Local Stages Initiative) — to develop and present new interdisciplinary work.

The other major player is the Adelaide Festival Centre’s inSPACE program, established in 2002 to provide South Australia-based artists access to the Centre’s framework of administrative, venue and production support. This will be the first of two articles assaying the range of development opportunities available to both emerging and established South Australian artists and will focus on inSPACE.

A second article will explore Vitalstatistix’s developmental programs and the new opportunities afforded by PADA. In a blog post last year, Steve Mayhew lamented South Australia’s current unconfident, insular style of cultural leadership, contrasting it with Victoria’s: “They relate locally with a national and international perspective,” he wrote, “they have that global/local view, the ability to encourage and gently persuade with vision.” As both an observer and beneficiary of development programs in Adelaide I believe the cultural shift necessary to foment this vision is, incremental though it may be, already underway from the grassroots up.

inSPACE

inSPACE is a flexible program, responsive to the often widely divergent needs of both emerging and mid-career artists usually engaged in innovative, cross-artform practice. Each year, five to eight artists or groups are selected to develop a work over one to four weeks, during which time they are provided with a rehearsal space and sometimes supported through funds for equipment hire and artist wages. A number of additional projects are assisted to full production, either at the Festival Centre’s Space Theatre or a more suitable outside venue.

Angelique, Insite Arts and isthisyours?, promotional image by Cynthia Gemus & Sam Barratt

2017 inSPACE artists

This year inSPACE is supporting the development of eight works across a range of genres including theatre, dance and music. Each will have two public showings at the end of the development process. Three projects, meanwhile, will have full presentations: choreographer Gabrielle Nankivell’s Split Second Heroes, developed through inSPACE in 2015 and 2016; playwright Emily Steel’s confessional solo show Rabbits, the fruit of a 2012 inSPACE Fringe Development Award and presented this year as part of State Theatre Company of South Australia’s State Umbrella program; and, following an inSPACE development last year, Angelique, by all-female independent theatre collective isthisyours?

Art vs attenuation

Adelaide Festival Centre Programming Executive Ben Hambour has overseen 42 inSPACE developments and 13 full productions since taking on the role in 2013. When I ask him about the conversion rate from development to presentation in that time, Hambour paints a picture of attenuation in the wake of the infamous 2014 “Brandis heist” that saw $104.7 million ripped from the budget of the Australia Council. “We did have Australia Council funding for four years of this program,” Hambour says, “which gave us a lot more money to give to artists and freed up our resources to put into other areas of the program. We lost that after the shift to Brandis’ National Program for Excellence in the Arts and then Catalyst. We were unsuccessful in our application for Catalyst funding, so we’re doing it with fewer resources than we had three or four years ago. Our goal is to have three to four presentations a year and around six to eight developments, so on those numbers about 25% hopefully come through and present with us or somewhere else. We just want them to have a presentation outcome.”

Come September, inSPACE will be reapplying for funding through the Australia Council. In the meantime, Hambour and his team have had to make do with less, supporting around half the number of developments they were previously able to while (successfully) approaching the Adelaide Festival Centre for a larger share of their funding pool. A couple of years ago the program lost both its funding and space, a period which saw artists rehearsing in churches and warehouses — anywhere they could find. Things have at least improved since then.

In fact, as Hambour tells me, in some ways these challenges led to an invigorating phase of creativity and industry solidarity: “When we lost our space and funding things weren’t looking good for the program so I reached out to various people and organisations, one of which was the State Theatre Company who came on board to help us develop Rabbits.” Hambour also secured a long-term venue for the program — the old Ausdance studios in Station Arcade, which will most likely remain inSPACE’s home until the conclusion of the major Adelaide Festival Centre and riverbank redevelopment currently underway — and is applying for funding to partner with local management and producing duo Jones MacQueen to provide business support and mentoring for artists.

Opportunities for the development of new work seem often to be skewed towards young and emerging artists, a reflection of the arts industry’s preoccupation with the “next big thing” and, perhaps, an oblique acknowledgment of the sector’s high levels of dropout and burnout. Hambour tells me the average length of developments has in the last couple of years fallen from three to two weeks, partly because of the increasing number of artists engaged in full-time work outside of their creative practices.

Looking at this year’s program, however, it’s far from obvious that inSPACE prioritises emerging over established artists. Says Hambour: “We’ve discussed this a number of times over the years, whether or not we put a line in the sand and say this is only for emerging artists, in the first however many years of their practice and so on but it’s difficult to effectively have those cut-off points. There are a lot of grey areas. Having said that, we do generally lean towards emerging artists while at the same time looking at the strength of each application. We also consider, usually at the start of the process, opportunities for collaboration with other festivals at the Adelaide Festival Centre — DreamBIG Children’s Festival, OzAsia and the Adelaide Cabaret Festival for example — and ask if there’s a potential presentation opportunity there for any of the works at the appropriate time.”

Hilary Kleinig, The Lost Art of Listening

Two artists currently developing works with inSPACE who describe themselves as established or mid-career are Hilary Kleinig and Jamie Harding. Kleinig, composer, cellist and one quarter of adventurous string ensemble Zephyr Quartet, is developing The Lost Art of Listening, which she describes as “a research, development and composition project investigating how we give and receive music and what it means to listen in an age of 24-hour connectedness.” The inSPACE development, following a showing in last year’s Adhocracy, will result in a piece for prepared piano and audience-played smartphone choir. Writing to me by email from Amsterdam, Kleinig observes: “It is very apparent that there are not the same opportunities and venues for artists of all levels in Australia as there are here in Europe. If we don’t have programs like inSPACE how will the next generation of leaders learn their craft, have space to make mistakes and feel part of a society that validates them for their choice of career?”

Cold as Ice, Gener8, inSPACE, photo courtesy the artists

Gener8 Theatre, Cold As Ice

Mount Gambier-based Gener8 Theatre’s Cold As Ice — a grassroots-focused exploration of the effects of crystal meth use in small communities, using Google Cardboard virtual reality technology — represents inSPACE’s first relationship with a regional theatre company. Artistic Director Jamie Harding, who is co-writing, directing and performing in the work, describes the development as a major step forward for the company. “With our work,” Harding tells me, “we aim to diversify from where we’ve been and continually turn the gaze towards new ideas, new models while also making stories that connect universally. As a company we are focussed on the challenge of getting greater diversity into regional and metropolitan theatre and also to get our regional stories on stages state- and nationwide. It is refreshing to be inside a program that respects artists as well as giving us extra support, whether that be financial assistance or help with admin or mailouts leading up to vital showings, that has allowed us to do what we do best, which is focus on making work.”

Gabrielle Nankivell, Split Second Heroes

Having come through inSPACE’s development stream in 2015 and further developed last year at a research lab supported by Australian Dance Theatre and Adelaide College of the Arts, Gabrielle Nankivell’s Split Second Heroes is being fully produced for the first time this year. How critical, I asked Nankivell by email, had the inSPACE development been to the evolution of Split Second Heroes?

“The program has specifically benefited the technical development of my work,” she told me. “It is one of the only residency situations in SA with the resources to support dedicated, potentially in-theatre, technical development as part of creative process. The program creates a platform for the artist and producer (inSPACE) to develop an in-depth understanding around the rigour of a project and the artistic/technical/market requirements for continued development/presentation. Having access to a fully-equipped space (Marion Cultural Centre and the Space Theatre) and gear across two developments in 2015-16 has significantly contributed to Split Second Heroes making it to the stage as a fully-fledged show in 2017.”

Falling thought the cracks

Like Kleinig and Harding, Nankivell falls into the category of what Ben Hambour calls the artists who “fall through the cracks” — that is, those who are neither emerging (usually defined as within the first five years of professional practice) nor sufficiently established to have the weight of a subsidised company behind them. “I’ve been referred to as both ’emerging’ and ‘established’,” Nankivell says, “often within the same time-frame. I think there is an abundance of opportunities for support in the ‘emerging’ category. So what happens to these artists once they have ‘emerged’? Closer consideration needs to be given to the mid-career phase — that long span of time in an artist’s career where potential and ideas become experience and vision. Supporting this somewhat lost zone is important for developing a strong and diverse ecosystem in the arts and ensuring Australian artists have opportunities to pursue sustainable career trajectories.”

Whatever the challenges of the current funding environment, inSPACE seems well placed to continue providing South Australian theatre-makers with such opportunities. Like the artists it supports, it is defined by its resilience and adaptability—not buzzwords in this context, but strategies for survival.

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inSPACE: Gabrielle Nankivell, Split Second Heroes, concept, direction, text and choreography Gabrielle Nankivell, score, sound design and interactive software Luke Smiles/motion laboratories, Space Theatre, 27-29 July; State Theatre Company, Rabbits, writer, performer Emily Steel, direction Daisy Brown, design Wendy Todd, Plant 1, Bowden, 21 Sept-14 Oct; isthisyours?, Angelique, direction Tessa Leong, writer Duncan Graham, performers Jude Henshall, Louisa Mignone, Nadia Rossi, Ellen Steele, Her Majesty’s Theatre, 13-22 Oct

Top image credit: Split Second Heroes, Gabrielle Nankivell, inSPACE, photo Chris Herzfeld — Camlight Productions

Follow RealTime as we see shows featuring works by inspiring Indigenous artists: Robert Cook, Brenda Croft and the late Robert Campbell Jnr.

@realtime_arts

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Top image credit: Michael Cook, Mother (See Saw), IMPACT, UTS Gallery, photo courtesy the artist, Andrew Baker Art Dealer and THIS IS NO FANTASY + Dianne Tanzer Gallery

Lauren Carroll Harris and Lucy Parakhina talk feminism in film then and now with the filmmaker at the 2017 Stranger With My Face International Film Festival.

Ever committed to adventurous playing and commissioning of new music, Sydney’s Ensemble Offspring has also enlarged the scope of chamber music performance, engaging over the years with experimental film, opera, cutting edge pop and dance and installation. Now the ensemble has teamed with seven composers (Amanda Brown, Kyls Burtland, Jodi Phillis, Bree van Reyk, Jane Sheldon, Sally Whitwell, Caitlin Yeo), video artist Sarah-Jane Woulahan and writer Hilary Bell to venture into the making of a collaborative world governed by seven fundamental stories, but ones told from a distinctly female perspective.

The story types, contentiously delineated by Christopher Booker in The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (2004), comprise The Quest, Overcoming the Darkness (sometimes a monster), Rags to Riches, Fatal Flaw (or Tragedy), Comedy of Errors, Journey and Transformation (sometimes described as rebirth). I spoke by phone with Claire Edwardes, Artistic Director of Ensemble Offspring and director of Seven Stories about the making of an ambitious, highly collaborative multimedia event.

Where did the idea come from for creating a concert driven by seven fundamental stories?
Ensemble Offspring was approached by Jodi Phillis of The Clouds and Amanda Brown of the Go-Betweens. They’d wanted to collaborate with five of their musical colleagues. And we all took it from there.

Given the nature of the concert, which involves composers, musicians, a writer and a filmmaker, was there a creative development stage?
Many. In musical terms, we went through a lot more creative development than usual. Usually, the writer writes the words and the composers go off and compose and then maybe, if you are lucky, the video comes after that, kind of reacting to the music. But often, the video is made simultaneously and, as you probably know, videos don’t always synch up and are not always completely related to the music.

But in this case, we had several creative developments with the writer Hilary Bell and the video artist Sarah-Jane Woulahan who were always in the room. Hilary especially was constantly reacting to changes we made in the music, adjusting her text and reacting to feedback from the composers and musicians. Likewise, the composers would keep revising their music based on the musicians’ feedback. So it was like a total everyway stream of feedback. I’ve never really been involved in something so open and fluid in terms of the way this project was developed.

And you enjoyed it?
To be honest, it’s a more challenging mode of working for the creatives because we, the performers, are very direct in our feedback. But it’s also hugely rewarding because it became obvious very quickly that it was all in the name of honing the best possible musical outcome and that was self evident in the final works which are simply stunning!

How is the text delivered in the performance?
Sometimes the words appear on the screen with the music or like a silent film still. At other times, they’re spoken or incorporated into the songs. The text is not a narrative that runs through the whole concert—each of the stories is quite separate—but there is the poeticism of Hilary’s words.

Jane Sheldon doesn’t sing a song in every piece; her role is sometimes as narrator and sometimes as singer. For example, in Bree Van Reyk’s piece, Jane’s a conductor/woodblock-player understudy. That’s what Bree has called her. Of the seven story types Bree got Comedy and so she went for slapstick. We have to laugh and do wolf whistles. One of the movements is a woodblock concerto for me, which is hilarious, and she’s got Jane as my understudy.

Tell me about the compositions.
Jodi and Amanda are from two quite famous rock bands in the 80s, The Clouds and The Go-Betweens, so as you can imagine their starting point musically is quite different from the composers with whom we usually work, who are generally classically trained. Many of the Seven Stories team hadn’t previously notated detailed music for live instrumentalists before so the process was a new learning curve for them. But it worked out nicely in terms of musical and aesthetic balance. Then we have Sally Whitwell who is a trained classical musician and writes very accessible songs. Kyls Burtland and Caitlin Yeo write a lot of screen music and for television.

For an Ensemble Offspring concert, the scores are quite tonal. And then Jane Sheldon is writing for the first time. Her piece ends the whole show. It’s called “Transformation” and it’s an exquisite piece working on tone-colour variation, which I think is a really great way to end the concert given we’ve had simple, touching songs and then Jane’s takes you up into the aether, sonically speaking.

The compositions might be simpler ones than you usually play but were there challenges for the ensemble?
Yes. I guess this was the whole point of the creative development. We really wanted to work with these composers to make the instrumental parts so we’re all really using our skills. We’re really multi-tasking to the max. There’s a huge percussion set-up. It’s definitely not simple for us to perform this show. It’s just that tonally it’s very melodic, very beautiful and I guess that often Ensemble Offspring concerts push boundaries. This is pushing boundaries in different ways and we hope that lots of people will like it.

Did Hilary Bell’s text emerge from the creative development to-and-froing as well?
It was very much part of it. She came to the rehearsals, wrote text, sent it to the composers and myself—as the director—and then we’d all feed back and then she’d do another draft. A few months would pass and then she’d send it to us again; we’d reflect, listen to the music and then she’d do another draft. She really changed her text based on everyone’s feedback. She’s been so open to that. It’s been wonderful working with her. No ego there! She’s amazing.

The seven stories, are these micro-stories?
Sort of, but it’s slightly more esoteric than that. There are references to fairy tales without each story being a complete narrative. It’s a more suggestive approach, referencing what people remember from their childhoods and throughout their lives and that we know these kinds of stories. Hilary hasn’t been too obvious, which I think is really nice.

How seriously did the collaborators take themes like “the quest” and “overcoming darkness?”
Very seriously. They spent a lot of time reflecting on them. The interesting thing about Hilary is that she responded to the composers and their interpretation of the story rather than the other way around.

The video trailer for Seven Stories is very dramatic: roiling waves, turbulent clouds and a young woman foregrounded before them. Tell me about the video.
I gave Sarah-Jane a brief that it would never be obvious who this protagonist is or what her story was. She’s more like a person returning in each of the stories. A number of them are linked to the sea and natural elements. There are mermaids with silver tails and so on in stories and all of that is very much picked up in the video.

Christopher Booker’s book The Seven Basic Plots, which drew on the works of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, has been very influential, but it has been roundly criticised for being a masculine theory. Is Seven Stories an antidote in some ways?
Yes, we realized there was this guy who was maybe not the most supportive of women [LAUGHS]. So we’ve remade them and taken them in a more feminine direction. It’s absolutely not a feminist work; more like a female take if you will on these ‘universal’ stories.

VIVID Sydney: City Recital Hall, Ensemble Offspring and Creative Music Fund, Seven Stories, composers Amanda Brown, Kyls Burtland, Jodi Phillis, Bree van Reyk, Jane Sheldon, Sally Whitwell, Caitlin Yeo, visuals Sarah-Jane Woulahan, text Hilary Bell; City Recital Hall, Sydney, 3 June

Top image credit: Seven Stories, Bree Van Reyck, Ensemble Offspring, photo courtesy City Recital Hall

“Effective criticism is timely, and alert to the times in which it is made; it forms one strand of a wider public conversation that we are each entitled to join, by virtue of being alive. But in Australia we are all, increasingly, being denied participation in, and exposure to, art and arts criticism. The two go together, never mind the well-worn cliché that artists and critics are sworn enemies.”

“In the introduction to his new coffee-table book of oil paintings, Bush readily—perhaps pre-emptively—admits that he’s a ‘novice.’ Three years after leaving the White House, he set out to adopt the pastime of Winston Churchill, who painted to relieve the ‘Black Dog’ of depression. But age 66 is awfully late to achieve proficiency, especially for a man with a famously short attention span. Bush recalls playfully informing his first art instructor, Gail Norfleet, of his objectives. ‘Gail, there’s a Rembrandt trapped in this body,’ he told her. ‘Your job is to liberate him.’”

Don’t panic—get some real art on your phone screen. Sydney artist Louise Zhang’s Instagram is a delightful feed. She conflates Western and Chinese iconography in candy colours on circular, painted surfaces. Horror films contribute more recently to her visual language—but abstracted just beyond the figurative.

Listening to Blade Runner. This brilliant new video essay by Nerdwriter1 goes beyond an analysis of Ridley Scott’s film’s soundscape, including Vangelis’ classic soundtrack, to encompass a wider appreciation of how sci fi has sounded across the decades:

“A movie without its music is not the same movie. [In Blade Runner] the music isn’t laid over the top of the visuals, it’s baked into the DNA of the movie itself. Everything you hear—the score, sound design, dialogue—is tightly integrated with the others. This integration is really what separates Blade Runner from other science fiction films. After all, electronic music had been a staple of science fiction cinema for three decades going back to Bernard Herrmann’s use of the theremin in The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

Large, geodesic, candy-pink: at first appearance Future Method Studio’s Buckminster Fuller-inspired dome tent, filled with white pebbles and bits of flint, is a surprising presence in a gallery show about Australia’s long paddock. That phrase—long paddock—is a colloquialism, a settler-colonial buzzword for the travelling stock routes (TSRs) that once traversed and now patchwork the continent. Joni Taylor from the New Landscapes Institute has curated a show situated at the intersection of architecture and art that explores the layered histories of the TSRs at a time when access to public land is more contentious than ever. The exhibition is the first iteration of a long-term project engaging with the uncertain future of this important public resource.

Classified as crown land, today TSRs are liminal zones used for myriad purposes. Farmers, birdwatchers, beekeepers, bushwalkers, ecologists and traditional owners all have a stake in their future. Up on the gallery wall, near the dome, Future Method Studio has created a map that charts the locations across NSW where the TSRs intersect with places of Aboriginal significance. It’s an impressively detailed and important document and to my knowledge no other map like it exists.

As the artists in this show acutely understand, the problem with maps is that they formalise a kind of forgetting. By prioritising one set of concerns, others fade away. Living and working in the Riverina, The Wired Lab (see a 2014 RealTime TV interview with director Sarah Last), are particularly sensitive to this, using two different maps, one historical, one spatial, to contextualise a mesmerising soundscape featuring local activist Peter Beath speaking in Wiradjuri—a language declared extinct in 2007 but which in fact survives—and field recordings from TSRs local to the area, a lively racket of cicadas, birds and insects. It’s The Wired Lab work, Lines of movement, a Wiradjuri history, that feels the most essential; human and non-human occupants are given equal ground from which to speak.

Looking at the TSRs from an economic perspective led artist Zanny Begg to the bullwhip effect, an economic term that describes accelerating unpredictability within complex supply chains. The bullwhip is also a uniquely Australian whip and the first human invention with the capacity to break the sound barrier. Begg’s film, The Bullwhip Effect, features a virtuosic demonstration by 17-year-old Emiliqua East, one of the world’s best whipcrackers. Slowed down to 200 frames per second, she becomes a medusa-like figure, totally focused, barely blinking, two whips writhing and cracking around her with stunning precision. Shot and soundtracked in a manner that playfully engages Western genre tropes, East enters and exits the film walking slowly through a labyrinthine, stainless steel cattleyard.

In Untitled Incognito, Megan Cope and Bill Buckley present a reworked version of an Aboriginal windbreak made from a mix of traditional and non-traditional materials. Its ochre-painted surface is used as a screen, onto which two images are overlaid: rippling water from the Murrumbidgee and a map of local TSR coordinates. The work asks important questions about who the TSRs are for, and what they might become. As of April the NSW TSRs have been placed under formal review. What if this land were to be repatriated to traditional owners?

Architecture collective Grandeza offers a global perspective in The Plant, presenting a case study on similar stock routes throughout Spain. Alongside this, they have created a portable conversation arena and an adapted version of the cattle crush (a holding stall), programmed with recordings from members of the community telling their stories about the TSRs. The architectural contributions of both Grandeza and Future Method Studio bring a sense of public agency into the gallery and activate the exhibition as a site of political action.

Back to the dome, which on closer inspection represents the concept of “a keeping place” — a place where Aboriginal cultural materials are held safely. Setting aside places as symbolic space where Aboriginal systems can be honoured is a concept that has been written into bureaucratic systems; for example, there are keeping places held on-site at mining locations where artefacts have been incidentally dug up. Cultural items are stored temporarily and then repatriated once the land is no longer being used.

In Future Method Studio’s Future Acts, the keeping place marks an important moment in their research. While they were at a stock route location, artists from the Studio and their Aboriginal collaborators came across a significant number of Aboriginal artefacts sitting in the topsoil. The experience resonated in two ways: it showed just how twinned the relatively recent history of the stock routes is with the long history of Aboriginal land custodianship. And it showed just how bad whitefellas have been at seeing what’s in front of them. The pink dome, a shape that recalls the activist politics of the US counterculture movement, operates recursively, as aura and totem. Presenting and representing the concept of keeping place, a warm ethics of care washes over the gallery as a whole.

The Long Paddock, curator Joni Taylor of New Landscapes Institute, artists Zanny Begg, Megan Cope & Bill Buckley, Hayden Fowler, Future Method Studio, Grandeza, Josephine Starrs & Leon Cmielewski and The Wired Lab; Wagga Wagga Art Gallery; 6 May-17 July

Emily Stewart is poetry editor at Giramondo Publishing and a doctoral student in the Writing and Society Research Centre at WSU. She is the author of Knocks (Vagabond Press 2016).

Top image credit: Future Method Studio, Rylestone Travelling Stock Route, fieldwork for The Long Paddock, 2017, photo Rosie Krauss

In early May I flew to Hobart in anticipation of some of the most interesting dark genre programming around, at an atmospheric film festival that’s hugely supportive of women filmmakers. This was my third experience of Stranger With My Face International Film Festival, now in its fifth year (not counting a hiatus in 2015). Founded in 2012 by Tasmanian filmmakers Rebecca Thomson and Briony Kidd, Stranger With My Face focuses on horror and other genre films directed by women. The one festival of its kind in Australia, it not only provides a rare opportunity to see genre cinema from a range of thought-provoking female perspectives, but also acts as an incubator for women’s feature film projects through its intensive Attic Lab workshop for selected participants.

This year was notable for the presence of renowned New Zealand director Gaylene Preston as both featured filmmaker and mentor for the festival’s developmental Attic Lab. One of the most striking features of the two subversive Preston thrillers included in SWMF’s retrospective program—Mr Wrong (1984) and Perfect Strangers (2003)—was how resonant their commentary on sexism and gender roles remained, despite the passage of time. In a post-screening Q&A, Preston remarked on the films’ implicit feminism, “All the things you see in Mr Wrong came from a point of rage.” While there were strong films at the festival that explored themes other than misogyny, those reviewed here—bar one—contain elements of this rage. All are explorations of the perilousness of feminine archetypes: the ingénue, the ‘slut,’ the dead girl, the siren and the saint.

Mr Wrong

As Preston put it, “There’s a whole interrogation of ‘nice’” in Mr Wrong, a film about a good-natured, unworldly young woman, Meg (Heather Bolton), who buys a powder-blue Jaguar from a used-car salesman so she can drive from the city to visit her parents on weekends. Meg has a pleasant, open countenance and an Annie-like shock of red curls that suggests she hasn’t quite reached the level of urban sophistication of her city housemates. She’s softly spoken, a bit of a worrier. Despite initial reluctance to purchase the large car, she takes the wheel with a sense of optimism, underlined by the film’s jaunty opening theme. This cheerful start is disrupted on her first long drive home out of Wellington, when, drawing up for a rest break at dusk, the car silhouetted against the sea, she has a terrifying, inexplicable experience—something that’s depicted simply yet so creepily it sets us, like Meg, on edge for the rest of the journey.

Mr Wrong is gloriously multifaceted. Looked at one way, it’s a suspenseful, not particularly serious thriller, enjoyably goofy at times (as in a scene where Meg gallivants through a field in her loud jumper after romantically reconnecting with a childhood friend). From another angle, it’s artistic Gothic horror, with its vivid nocturnal cinematography and nightmarish conjuring of rain-swept roads and pale apparitions, the heroine’s face appearing half in shadow behind the wheel. What makes the film singularly compelling, however, is the constant dull murmur of sexual aggression Meg endures; something that threatens to escalate if she fails to be sufficiently ‘nice.’

The ideals of freedom and independence represented by Meg’s car and city job are undercut by the recognition that there’s no escaping harassment, be it from corporeal sexists or an increasingly malevolent vehicle. In this way, and particularly for women, Preston quite viscerally aligns Mr Wrong’s supernatural horror with everyday oppression. It’s telling that some contemporaneous reviewers failed to pick up on her subtext. In her introduction to the screening, academic Deb Verhoeven quoted from the Evening Post, which praised Mr Wrong as, “a fine film endowed with feminine intuition but free of feminist cant.” This, despite the cathartic Gothic finale, a repudiation of violence against women and demonstration of female solidarity powerful enough to reach beyond the grave.

Slapper

Everything that can go wrong in Slapper [Australia, 2017], will go wrong in Luci Schroder’s unflinching portrayal of a day in the life of Taylah (Sapphire Blossom), a teenage single mother who’s desperately in need of the morning-after pill—and is broke. The ensuing race against the clock exposes the harsh, inequitable side of hetero sex, compounded by class inequality and petty indifference; no need for supernatural horror in this short drama. Moving through grey, semi-rural suburbia and various chaotic domestic situations, Taylah attempts to hustle the money in increasingly degrading, dangerous ways, trailing her young daughter in her wake.

Schroder has garnered recognition for her music video work, including for the Alpine track “Hands,” which simultaneously deploys and subverts tropes of frank female sexuality. Slapper does away with the music-video gloss but retains the frankness with Blossom’s raw, aggressive physical performance. The fact that Taylah is capable of nastiness doesn’t lessen the empathy with her situation; it just underlines her fundamental lack of agency. Schroder and co-writer Sam West maintain a constant edge of aggression in their economic, skilfully paced narrative, with the excruciating denouement denoting the hopelessness and self-perpetuating misery of systemic oppression.

The Man Who Caught a Mermaid

With this impressively assured graduate short, Kaitlin Tinker [Australia, 2017] presents another sort of suburban nightmare in her ambiguous account of a retired Australian bloke who dreams of catching a mermaid, and succeeds—perhaps. In a seamless transition from gentle whimsy to stark horror, Tinker upends the traditional myth of the siren luring men to their deaths. In so doing, she exposes the darkly constrictive effect of romantic fantasies on women. The film complements Gaylene Preston’s Perfect Strangers, which also critiques the romantic ideal.

What Happened to Her?

Perhaps the bizarrely common filmic trope of the submerged female corpse is a successor to the mermaid. Part-video essay, part-creative documentary, Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s short film What Happened to Her? [USA, 2016] is a startling assemblage of film and TV clips demonstrating the sheer proliferation of nubile female dead bodies on our screens. There’s no identification of individual titles, but the clips derive from serious, artistic drama (Twin Peaks, True Detective) as well as forgettable forensic crime shows. On her back or face down, in the sand, in the water (of course) or exposed to the gaze of some sad-eyed (usually male) detective in the morgue, “the body” is allowed to speak here through a quiet voiceover, as an actor relays her experience playing the naked corpse (or perhaps it’s several actors, talking about several corpses; it’s hard to tell) while a seemingly inexhaustible collection of examples is displayed. To uncanny effect, she details what it’s like to be told to strip naked and float face-down in water playing dead; to have bruises painted on you by a sleazy make-up artist; to feel vulnerable in front of all-male crews; to embody a real victim on a true crime show. The voice prompts thought about all the women—fictional and real—whose murders have become an entertainment fetish.

The Book of Birdie

Not polemical so much as a transportive mood piece, Elizabeth E Schuch’s first feature, The Book of Birdie [UK, 2017], nonetheless explores an historically powerful female entity—the Christian mystic. It begins with a teenage girl placed in a snowbound nunnery by her grandmother. Played expressively by Ilirida Memedovski, Birdie has the idealised appearance of a fairytale orphan with her heavy dark hair, pale skin and enormous eyes, on which the camera dwells in close-up. Quietly watchful, she’s both childlike and otherworldly.

The hushed atmosphere of the cloister in which Birdie finds herself is enhanced by the snow falling outside. A cocoon, it magnifies the usual intensity of adolescent emotions, giving rise to extravagant visions and fancies. Two other films about adolescent girls in female-dominated institutions are brought to mind: Vardis Marinakis’ numinous Black Field (2009), set in a medieval Greek nunnery, and Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), with its dreamlike bizarreness and vivid use of colour.

A strikingly visual director, Schuch cleaves to various hallmarks of Gothic Romance: the cavernous stone nunnery with its elaborate spiral staircase, Catholic paraphernalia, wraiths, blood, snow, the heroine’s appearance, her innocence and mysticism. But she pushes into unexpected territory by making Birdie a source of great energy rather than a wan victim. Joy imbues her brilliantly coloured visions/hallucinations; she jokes with ghosts, falls in love with the groundsman’s daughter and moves through the convent beatifically. Seizing all the imagery at hand in this austere environment, she devises idiosyncratic rituals incorporating Catholic iconography, superhero comics, menstrual blood and—most disturbingly—a miscarried foetus. Through her rituals, Birdie can gain power over female bodily pain and possible past trauma by creatively transforming them into something transcendent.

Sadly, though, Catholicism places inevitable limitations on its mystics; Birdie must eventually confront the impossibility of merging spiritual and corporeal worlds—though not before offering a glimpse of an alternative approach.

It was invigorating, as always, to see distinctive filmmakers at Stranger With My Face shining such personal light on female experience, challenging the dominant narrative through captivating, angry, inspired, artistic works from past and present.

Stranger With My Face International Film Festival 2017, Director Briony Kidd, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, 4-7 May

“The history of Tasmania is a dark history,” said Briony Kidd, director of Stranger With My Face International Film Festival, to the tight community of filmmakers and their audience on opening night. “The Tasmanian Gothic is about the suffering of Aboriginal people and women and convicts. Their untold suffering is what we must talk about when we talk about a horror film festival in Hobart.”

Van Diemen’s Land is indeed the ideal, spooky setting for a feminist festival of genre cinema, now in its fifth year. Kidd’s curation is lean with an eye on the past and the forgotten, and early May brings 5.30pm sunsets and long nights of films and discussion at the Peacock Theatre, expanding beyond the strictures of horror to include mystery and suspense filmmaking. It’s an inclusive, chatty festival: a spirit of friendly camaraderie stretches beyond the screenings, aided by the involved presence of international guests (including Roxanne Benjamin, producer of the anthology film XX shown on opening night) and young filmmakers in the Attic Lab development program.

For me the retrospective programming stood out from the contemporary material. Kidd honoured the work of US cinematographer Sandi Sissel on the 1991 horror film The People Under The Stairs, saying that while many people think of it as a “Wes Craven film, it’s also a Sandi Sissel film.” It’s a fantastical genre piece, whose prologue and epilogue frame it as a brilliant satire of capitalism and racism: in a gloomy urban hellscape, white landlords are keeping their black tenants in poverty, biding their time until they can gentrify and sell their property at inflated prices. The centre of the film departs from this reality altogether. Sissel’s camerawork, largely devoid of CGI and instead resting on dynamic movement, hurls us around the haunted house of two demented slaveowner-landlords (played with hyper-theatrical relish by Wendy Robie and Everett McGill, who also both played Nadine and Big Ed in Twin Peaks around the same time), whose sadism finds a parallel in the real-life horror of systemic racism in the USA.

The grey-green slopes of the hillside city of Hobart found a perfect equivalent in the New Zealand settings of the festival’s major retrospective, a two-film stream dedicated to writer-director-producer Gaylene Preston. Coming of age in the 1970s—a time of intense feminist activity—shaped Preston’s trajectory as storyteller with a “consciousness-raising” agenda. “I suppose like a lot of people of my generation, I’d been brought up with the Hitchcock movies,” Preston told RealTime. “I also had a feminist analysis, and I felt that the way thrillers are structured is actually a danger to women. I thought the culture of thriller needed a bit of a shake-up.”

Mr Wrong

Though she’s spent the decades mostly making documentaries, for her first feature Preston flipped a common genre staple. Rather than a haunted house, Mr Wrong (1984) centres on a haunted car. Protagonist Meg thinks she has found the perfect vehicle: a gorgeous used Jaguar in top condition, which will afford her the freedom of long rides around the country and independence from her old-fashioned parents. But the Jag’s second-hand eccentricities give way to full-blown evil as it begins to exert a destructive force on her life. It emits the gasps of a dying man and delivers her human visitors who aren’t who they seem or who vanish into thin air.

Here a couple of themes come together: a satire on the delusion of the perfect man and what Preston described at the festival as “an interrogation of ‘nice.’ Meg is such a nice girl.” Men are forever invading her space and she’s forever accommodating them. When her housemate’s ex-boyfriend casually intrudes into their house, she finds herself making him a cup of tea; when the car salesman insinuates the Jag is too big for her, she’s polite in her insistence; when a strange man jumps into her car at the traffic lights, she asks him how far he’s going. Preston’s screenplay, based on a story by English novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard and co-written with Geoff Murphy and Graeme Tetley, is exquisitely attuned to the ways that sexism manifests in tiny pushes and pulls in the interpersonal spaces between men and women. The casting of Heather Bolton brings Meg’s niceness to vivid life: rather than the wide-eyed waif at the centre of many horror films, Bolton has the charisma and empathy of a regular person onscreen, and her hyper-animated expressions and transparent acting style give the sense of a young woman who’s been overlooked her whole life—who has done all the ‘right’ things, only to be left frustrated and exploited.

Meg’s niceness gives way to a quiet toughness as she comes closer to discovering the truth of her car’s haunting, a backstory that points to the film’s thematic undertow of gendered violence and missing women. Like the films of David Lynch, the true horror is realistically dark, coming not from the loopy or the insane but from the familiar and the domestic. Meg must not become the next victim.

Preston is too subtle a filmmaker to create a frame with brutality squarely in the centre: there’s not a whiff of exploitation. Cinematographer Thomas Burstyn’s camera is always slyly misdirecting our vision: you think a dangerous man is going to loom out of the background, only for him to pop out of a darker, unexpected space in the foreground. Indeed, Mr Wrong struck me as one of the few films of this type—a suspenseful thriller structured around the pursuit and capture of women—that doesn’t objectify women’s bodies in the formal ways that the camera shoots and frames them. Likewise, a sweet, sincere romance for Meg is a subplot rather than a narrative goal and a hinge for happiness, as well as a nice thematic hint that romantic contentment isn’t merely a myth. The final sequence’s message of solidarity between women—beyond the grave, of course—offers a closing flip of “the final girl” (the survivor in slasher films) horror trope and would be impossible in the films of Mr Wrong’s generic precedents by Hitchcock and De Palma.

What was most surprising to me was Mr Wrong’s arrival in 1984 when the NZ film industry was at such a nascent stage. Yet in Preston’s creation, genre knowledge, filmmaking skills and well-formed ideas are all there. This is deeply subversive and innovative filmmaking.

Perfect Strangers

For her second feature, Perfect Strangers (2003), Preston conjured another perverse fairytale—in what she calls a critique of “the Disney version of romance [that] makes us dangerous to ourselves,” and an answer, 20 years later, to the questions raised in Mr Wrong. In a swift series of scenes totalling no more than a few minutes, we’re introduced to Melanie (Rachael Blake), a no-bullshit, independent woman out with her friends for the night. In contrast with Meg in Mr Wrong, Blake appears to be a tough, smart, wry woman familiar to us from her role in the 1990s ABC crime series, Wildside. She has a weird sense of sexual charisma anchored in her opaque approach to performance; she refuses to emotionally telegraph too much, holding back a lot from the audience, which gives her considerable power. At a pub, Melanie meets an unnamed man (Sam Neill), another Mr Right/Wrong who at first seems kind and gentle. When he asks her, “Your place or mine?” she answers, “I’ve been to my place before.” He takes her to an idyllic houseboat, but when Melanie wakes, she finds herself kidnapped to a windswept, gothic island (evoking memories of Jane Campion’s The Piano), where The Man has planned a forcefully romantic getaway involving candles, pearls and a black evening dress and pearls for her. It’s a sinister game in which she’s cast in the two-dimensional role of ingénue. But like Meg, we sense that Melanie is neither passive nor a femme fatale.

The great paradox shared by many genre films is that they tell the same story the same way, which means they fail to thrill. Perfect Strangers sets up a conventional expectation that the narrative will hinge on Melanie’s characterisation as a victim either escaping or dying on the island. Preston throws out this plot forecast and cultural familiarity within the first half hour, speeding up the usual three-act structure to free a further hour of plot twists that are so thrilling that I found them fantastically stressful. Preston shows that innovating a genre involves both knowledge of and non-compliance with convention. Here, the narrative twists are based on Melanie’s realisation that The Man is her only ticket off the island. This gives way to a kind of Stockholm Syndrome that reflects a deeper truth about relationships: that they inevitably involve some level of denial, and that delusion and devotion are closer than we can ever recognise. As with Mr Wrong, the narrative perversities stem from clear-headed psychological insight about what makes us hopeful in love against all logic. After the screening, Preston told festival-goers that she likes “long shots. When you cut, you let the audience out, psychologically.” That was evident. She never let us out of the confined and increasingly mad interior world that Melanie comes to know on the island.

SWMF’s small but considered retrospective of Gaylene Preston’s work convinced me of a few things. First, she is a legitimately legendary yet overlooked figure in genre filmmaking. Fame has eluded her for any number of reasons—she’s not American and commercial distribution precludes many of the most interesting filmmakers from showing on mainstream screens. Second, gender equity in the film industry cannot just be seen as something to be achieved on- and off-screen in the production realm. Change needs to happen at all levels of the industry: distribution, exhibition and festival programming. Small festivals like SWMF do important work in illuminating the blackholes in film history’s canon and providing local, intelligent injections to screen culture and politics outside franchise-drenched multiplexes. And yet there’s no dedicated stream of festival funding through Screen Tasmania, which provided SMFW with only a very small amount of sponsorship.

Gender inequity in film criticism has also contributed to the gaps in appreciation for filmmakers like Preston. Critics originally referred to Rachael Blake’s character in Perfect Strangers as a “lame-brained horror heroine”, and, we were told at the festival, to Mr Wrong as full of “quirks and Kiwi-isms.” Rather than being taken seriously, the films were seen as the whimsy of a mere woman. But the films’ thematic and emotional logic rang true to my experience, despite their outlandish plots. When so many critics have been (sexist) men, criticism begins to coalesce around a singularity of voices and experiences. So does storytelling itself. When it comes to ending gender inequity in cinema, Preston’s work reminded me that there is even more at stake than correcting rampant workplace discrimination in the screen industry. Storytelling changes when the gender of the storyteller changes, and Gaylene Preston has brought a uniquely female and feminist perspective to a male-dominated genre. The prospect of gender equality opens up so many new avenues for cinema: Mr Wrong and Perfect Strangers offer us a momentary, pleasurably perverse glimpse of unexplored directions.

Australian and New Zealand viewers can see Mr Wrong and Perfect Strangers on the New Zealand Film Commission’s VOD site, NZ Film On Demand.

Gaylene Preston’s feature documentary, My Year with Helen about former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark screens in the 2017 Sydney Film festival on 10 and 11 June.

Stranger With My Face International Film Festival, director, Briony Kidd, Salamanca Arts Theatre, Hobart, 4-7 May

Chantal Akerman said that “there is no good documentary without a bit of fiction, and vice versa.” Of the four videos in this Almost Doco collection, Liam O’Brien’s has most in common with cinema in that it’s a sad comedy set in a fictive reality. Early April engages with film laterally, though, in that its narrative has no resolution.

A nameless, emasculated blow-up doll wakes and plods his way through a go-nowhere day, which will be the same as every one that follows. There is a total absence of other people, other lives going about other work. There’s a desire for social interactions: he tries and fails to make a Skype call, his iPhone lockscreen shows a couple kissing and he watches PornHub in bed. Though our protagonist is just a doll, O’Brien’s shaky camerawork and repeated close-ups imbue him with a surprising amount of emotion: he’s thoughtful, he’s concerned, he’s anxious, he’s let down, his brow wrinkles with sensitivity. He’s a real character.

This conflation of people with objects and objects with people takes on a deeper sense of alienation when you consider that the plastic protagonist is a surrogate for the artist, who is currently in residence in New York City. This is his bedroom, his commute, his studio. The Sterling Ruby poster on the wall came with the sublet. The plastic man is not just imaginable as an actual human, he’s modelled on an actual human.

Plentiful philosophical references abound should you care to scour the books on this plastic man’s desk and note the YouTubes he watches to get himself to sleep. You might see Early April as a droll meditation on the diminished status of artists today, a cartoon portrait of failed masculinity, or a quasi-fictional demonstration of Nihilist thought. But I read it as being about the reasons for its own emptiness: as a way of saying that life goes on. Lauren Carroll Harris

You can read about visual artist Liam O’Brien and see excerpts from his video and other works on his website http://www.liamobrien.com.au.

A grim reverie. An unspecified climate of concern. Jacobus Capone trawls a stick through indifferent Arctic snow. He’s a slight figure. Crossing from left to right, he leaves little evidence of a trail. This gruelling labour has an outcome, but it’s only implicit. The subtitle is Fathoming a Circle with a Line, but we never see the giant circle resulting from Capone’s ostensibly straight lines. It’s a visual trick: all circles are made of straight lines, if you zoom in closely enough. I imagine a hidden scene in which we see a birds-eyeview of a giant, spindly circle traced into the bleached-white snow. Another shot might show it being covered by the next gale, the cycle complete.

This isn’t the first time Capone has made a portrait of a wild place, centred on its relationship with his body. Rather than summoning scenes of natural destruction, the artist tends to create images in which humans are made redundant by the hugeness of the wilderness. He generally appears dwarfed by the scale of the landscape, repeating a gesture or staying completely still while a waterfall cascades before him or wind rustles around. They’re humble works, in which people are small and sometimes effortful. This is the first of Capone’s videos I’ve seen in which he is engaging in a form of drawing, performed in slow movements of endurance, in the snow rather than on the page. But the formal sparseness and visual language remains the same as before—a monochromatic palette, an ineffectual silhouetted figure against a vast and careless natural backdrop, adding up to a study of futility or contemplation. Lauren Carroll Harris.

Jacobus Capone is a Perth-based visual artist whose video installation Forgiving Night for Day, in which Fado singers in Lisbon greet the dawn with song, was a featured work in the 2017 Perth International Arts Festival. You can see an excerpt here.

Sydney artist Frazer Bull-Clark has made what he calls a moving postcard of Beverly Hills, Hurstville, and beyond that, what reads as a picture of the oddity of Australian suburbia. Beverly Hills is a suburb with a largely unknown history even to Sydney residents. I can find only a few online mentions of its distinctive cocos palms, which one blogger says were planted in the 1940s to exoticise the area with a Californian vibe in tune with its namesake.

As a portrait of a place, there’s a link between this work and the city symphony genre of films, such as Symphony of a Metropolis (Berlin, 1927) and Man with a Movie Camera (Moscow, Kiev and Odessa, 1929). Bull-Clark uses Super 8, a celluloid format long past its heyday, and a favourite of home-movie enthusiasts. The grain and texture of this format is unusual in moving-image art today, which has historically borrowed heavily from television and now from digital sources. Unlike digital video, celluloid film lives in the black moments between physical frames that your eyes flick over as they form the film image; film lives because of undetectable flashes of absence. In choosing Super 8 to capture the palm trees of Beverly Hills and transform that landscape through moving image (notably, through the central visual motif of zooming in and out on individual trees), Bull-Clark brings the near-deceased materials of film history closer to the vernacular of contemporary art. This bridge between the formal concerns and materials of cinema and art is a key space for Almost Doco.

The irony of Bull-Clark’s work is triple-edged. It’s expressed in its materiality—by using a lo-fi film format to suggest the work could have been made in any era. It’s expressed in the music—an upbeat track with a dreamy 1970s American sound by an Australian band. And it’s in the work’s subject—a modest Australian suburb named after a glitzy Los Angeles one, with introduced species of flora to create a visual resemblance. Long live… America? Lauren Carroll Harris

Frazer Bull-Clark is a Sydney-based filmmaker and artist. You can see his portrait of a Canberra artist and his suburban environment in Leaving Lost on the National Portrait Gallery Vimeo Channel.

There’s an internet community for everything. You haven’t even dreamed of the niches within niches out there, in the muddy depths of unpublicised YouTube channels and discussion forums. Tiyan Baker’s video portraits of loneliness have won major awards. Here, she turns her attention to create a side-glancing portrait of one internet community: people who post and watch videos of other people dying—on Reddit. Some people like to do this—881 people, to be precise. The extremely NSFW forum is highly regulated, populated with threads that must have a descriptive title, along the lines of:

“A couple having a late night kiss on a road are struck and killed by a drunk driver.” “Car sliding sideways takes out a guy, he stays upright while it shoves him into the wall.” “Woman busy texting fails to see water in front of her and drowns.”

There are further rules. “There must be a person—not an animal—actually dying in the link.” From the murk of these video links, Baker creates a guided meditation video in which the viewer is invited to feel their own death—as you imagine life departing the body, tension leaves the muscles, bloodflow slows, your thoughts disconnect from the day’s worries and you slip into a state in which life is felt rather than verbalised or intellectualised. Baker washes her low-res death clips through a soft pink and purple cast, sometimes duplicating and flipping them symmetrically to generate further abstraction, and imprints the comments of Reddit users over the top. It’s their video too.

I don’t really know what death is and I don’t think Western societies are good at understanding it. So I understand the fascination of the r/WatchPeopleDie users, why they post and watch and comment so obsessively, perverse as that seems. To me, Baker’s video is a very sincere work in an era of irony—lateral in the realisation of its themes and oddly, spookily relaxing to engage with. But there are deeper ironies: what are the ethics of distributing footage of a stranger’s death without consent, of making such footage the fodder of art? How is it possible to find catharsis in videos of trauma, and is that okay? Watching an act involves you in it in some way: do the Reddit viewers think about that? Baker herself puts it this way: “Are some engaging in a meditative act by witnessing this content and forcing themselves to be unmoved by it, and therefore unmoved by the inevitability of their own deaths? Is what they do somehow transcendental and important and honourable and brave?”

The video can be listened to without visuals for a purer meditative experience, because once you realise the video’s premise, you begin to pre-empt each death. Intelligently, Baker withholds that moment, instead letting you see seconds of danger in often mundane situations: a person perched on a ladder or a plane sailing overhead becomes a dreadful sight, the implication is everywhere. Lauren Carroll Harris

Tiyan Baker is a Sydney-based video and sound artist. Examples of her work can be found on her website http://tiyanbaker.com.

We haunt and are haunted by spaces. A woman walks purposefully through the halls and stairwells of Melbourne’s Nicholas Building. While the era of the art-deco architecture is echoed in the woman’s attire, the black and white film further situates the work in an imagined past well before the film was shot. For Hine, her medium is spectral, able to project visions of the past into spaces where they once took place, or maybe never happened.

A kind of echo runs through the work, ricocheting off the tiled walls and concrete floors. The sound of brisk footsteps bounces discordantly off shots of empty halls, only to find its source in the parallel image of the other screen. There are prolonged sequences of silence, when the echo is purely architectural. The same stairwell, the same windows, albeit observed, maybe, from a different angle.

The architectural logic of the work is complicated. At times the woman walks from one screen to the other, or appears simultaneously on both screens, waiting and walking away. She may have already walked the same hall a dozen times, we may be watching a replay or a re-enactment, but the divided screens allow the camera to linger on empty spaces and familiar corridors concurrently. The dual composition renders each sequence anew, though not without a lingering sense that we may have been here before.

The void between the screens becomes a site where logic fails and a new dialogue of difference and repetition is formed. It is a space of immateriality through which we must venture so as to make sense of the images we see, and in doing so we invest a place of transience with a sense of purpose. Elyssia Bugg

I’ve been to Chiang Mai three times with a couple more visits lined up. The first time was for a printmaking residency, the second time was for a wedding (I wasn’t getting married fortunately), the third time, at the start of 2017, was to scope out bronze and fibreglass fabrication for an exhibition in Chiang Mai.

It’s definitely not a city you need a reason to travel to. I’ve been three times but I’ve spent the majority of the time working on art. I have barely been to any tourist spots, something I normally enjoy; any downtime I’ve had is spent eating, drinking and going for a quick wander (to look for more food). I think it says a lot about the city that I have no desire to visit any of the tourist spots and I keep wanting to come back. However, Chiang Mai does have an abundance of temples, museums and ancient landmarks to keep you busy (refer to the copy of Chiang Mai Lonely Planet you have in your hand).

Chiang Mai is like a cheetah that’s ready to pounce but it’s got a turtle on its back. On the surface the city appears slow and easy-going; things take time to get done here. But it’s a city that takes itself seriously and has big ambitions. It’s been pushing itself as the Creative City of Thailand and was once the capital city of the Lan Na Kingdom (1296-1768). The contemporary art scene has been growing as the result of a combination of interest from visiting international curators, young Thai artists looking for a slower pace than Bangkok, senior-career artists setting up their giant studios on the outskirts of the city and new galleries and museums popping up everywhere.

There’s a free Art Map, pop into any gallery or bookstore to pick one up. There’s a ton of galleries on the map to keep you busy.

Gallery Seescape is an artist-run space and cafe that usually has an interesting show on. It also does a good Western style breakfast and is a nice place to have a rest and a coffee. JoJoKoBe Studios is a screen printing studio and shop that sells a combination of Thai and invited international artists’ screen prints. C.A.P. Studio (Chiang Mai Art on Paper) is around the corner, mainly focusing on etchings, but also has lithographs, woodcuts and monoprints. This studio is less an exhibition space and more an invite-only custom printmaking studio. Artists from overseas are invited to do residencies, as are emerging and established Thai artists. Director Kitikong Tilokwattanotai, an established artist himself, started the studio many years ago to foster ties with the international arts community and to push the local printmaking scene further into a contemporary and collaborative practice. Even though it is a workspace, staff are always more than happy to show visitors around the facilities and any sales from prints help keep the studio running.

The 31^st Century Art Museum of Contemporary Spirit is a project housed in shipping containers by Chiang Mai-based artist Kamin Lertchaiprasert. The museum is a conceptual project that aims to question the nature of art, what contemporary art is and how this all relates to our spirit.

There’s a new museum in Chiang Mai called MAIIAM; you should definitely visit. It’s a beautiful building with strips of mirror on the facade and it has hosted a few conceptually amazing shows so far with invited curators. The museum was founded by the Bunnag-Beurdeley family, who have built an impressive collection over the years. Rumour has it another collector-based art museum is opening in December 2017.

Kittima Chareeprasit is the Assistant Curator at MAIIAM. She also runs the Curators Lab, a hub where visiting curators can meet, collaborate and converse with Thai artists and other Thai curators. What more could you ask for as a curator than an in-depth tour into the studios of emerging and established artists? Kittima recently had a show at Seescape Gallery with Bangkok based artist Tada Hengsapkul. You can hit her up here.

Sudsanan has good food and beers; it stands out because it’s housed in an interesting old wooden building and plays live alternative blues, rock and jazz most nights. It is a little out of the city but worth the trip, especially if you’re with a big group looking to eat, drink and listen to live music.

Tawan-Dang is a Thai-style nightclub some friends took me to. I am used to the crappy clubs I visited in Sydney as a fresh-faced 18-year-old so this was a wonderful surprise. It’s a giant venue with a big band, dancers and singers belting out a variety of Thai pop classics. It felt like a combination club/musical/cabaret/pub/free Jimmy Barnes concert—not a good word combination I know, but how to explain this wonderful creature? You’ll just have to pop in and see.

I love noodles. Noodles are everywhere! Bahn Mi Nam! Bahn Mi Heng! One means noodles with soup and one means noodles without soup, I forget which is which (don’t take my shoddy advice on the Thai language). Small noodle shops are everywhere, which also serve Khao Soi, a delicious curry-like soup with chicken and both crispy and boiled egg noodles. There are a lot of Japanese restaurants to choose from as well. P’ Jangs is one in particular that’s a nice place to eat and drink. It’s casual dining Japanese food with beers and cocktails and it also doubles as a gallery. The owner is an artist who runs another restaurant in Japan with his brother, but he says the Chiang Mai branch for him is “an artwork, an experiment.” Whatever it is, it’s cool as beans (restaurant doesn’t serve beans, restaurant has edamame).

One of my favourite places is a Larb (Lanna-style) Restaurant; the food is a combo of soups and dishes all shared with sticky rice in outdoor raised huts. There is a specialty dish of raw lamb and raw lamb guts. I usually like the various raw meat dishes I’ve had across Asia, which always have a bit of vinegar or lemon squeezed on them. This was really raw and bitter and I was scared I was going to poop myself on the bike ride home. I made it without incident. Ignore those two last sentences, it’s definitely worth coming here.

Another favourite is T-Noiy Noodle, an especially spicy noodle shop and popular lunch spot. It’s located behind Chiangmai University and the same street at night is bustling with street food stands (try the fermented sausage!). I can generally handle spicy but I had three bowls and drank all the soup, which was full of chillis and I didn’t feel too hot, good joke, huh. Don’t try to drink all the soup.

I’m gonna get a lot of flak for this, but I love visiting malls in different countries. The malls in Chiang Mai all have really great art stores; this just doesn’t happen in Australia so it’s a really nice surprise. If you’re visiting in the increasingly hot summers the mall also has air-conditioning and each one has a few tacky rooftop bars with really great views of the city. MAYA Lifestyle Shopping Centre is one of these, despite the tacky name.

I’ve spent a lot of time living in smogged-out cities in China so Thailand feels like fresh air year round, but I’m told the pollution does get bad in the crop-burning season and has been getting worse for different reasons. Consider months other that February-April if you have a respiratory illness, it’s also really hot!

Curators Lab – Sirimangkalajarn road near the Italian embassy. Contact Kittima <waitingyoucuratorlab@gmail.com> beforehand.

Larb (Lanna-style) Restaurant – Doesn’t have an address, you’ll have to ask a local but it’s located in Soi Wat Lum-Poung.

I knew he was a boozing, oversized personality in the art world. I knew he gained infamy for his don’t-give-a-fuck approach to painting, slapping fluoro acrylic across the canvas with abandon. I knew he won the Archibald Prize in 2000 for a portrait of David ‘Diver Dan’ Wenham. And I knew he’d shot a journalist on his Blue Mountains property, several years before his premature death at age 47 of abundant, accumulating health problems.

But I didn’t know that badarse painter Adam Cullen had once written for RealTime—in the capacity of film critic. Once. Reviewing, of all things, Hollywood family film Free Willy—a “spineless mollusc of misplaced inspiration” involving a heartwarming cross-species friendship between a “juvenile delinquent” and a “rubbery-skinned lozenge.” Beyond being a sterling contribution to the spite-filled genre of Takedown Criticism, Cullen’s piece contains some brilliantly concise insights, including “most Americans have something wrong with their sense of self-parody.” He can write. Alas, he didn’t write for us again.

In this first installment of our new series, The Deep Archive, we highlight the weirdest, smartest, most luminescent pieces from unexpected and illustrious writers and their artist subjects, largely from undigitised editions of RealTime in the 1990s. Lauren Carroll Harris

Free Willy: or One More Time for Daddy

How long has it been since you’ve seen a movie that makes pancreatic fluid rise and swim gently in the back of your mouth as you rock backwards and forwards humming? I thought Man Bites Dog (1992) was a special offer—up to date, probably one of my favourites—but this spineless mollusc of misplaced inspiration deserves instant applause for vulgarity. Remember Salo? Free Willy makes it look exactly like what it is—an ultra-daggy 70s art design film.

On a purely narrative level, Free Willy is a jaundiced filmic lump held together by a sinewy, but brilliantly sardonic, plot. You may go thinking it’s a mere under-12s film, but be prepared to be sickened to the point of oral satisfaction. Free Willy is an emission into our collective darkness.

Enough of the praise. A filthy rich juvenile delinquent is sent to stay with foster parents. They have longings to be nuclear, but like most Americans have something wrong with their sense of self-parody and, in this case, their reproductive organs. This is the edifice from which relations between rubbery-skinned lozenge Willy and the juvenile delinquent begin. The delinquent lands a job at the poolside, meets the captive orca Willy, realises they share a rare kind of public flux and teaches him to perform a cavalcade of astounding tricks.

On opening day, Willy decides that he’s too smart to perform for this fair, so he starts acting like a dumb whale. As a result, the owners of the centre decide to get rid of Willy and claim the insurance money. Very civil. Very civic. Willy is inevitably released into the bay of a local fishing village by the delinquent, his foster parents with a martyr complex and an Indian man who collects miniature whale sculptures.

Free Willy is a filmic abomination about a squeaking, pumped-up limbless icon and the equipment of fixation and hatred. It’s high-strung, convoluted and you get the feeling your psyche will buckle at any moment. If you’re bored with art-house pretension and artistry or if you don’t feel at home with the bio-mass, go and buy the video for a unique excursion into the distillate of evil.

Adam Cullen (1965-2012) was a leading Australian visual artist and provocateur.

‘Appel à tous. Ceci est notre dernier cri avant notre silence éternel.” The English translation, not quite as poetic as the French, reads, “Calling all, this is our final cry before our eternal silence.” This was the last ever transmission of Morse Code, by the French Navy on 31 January 1997 (so recent!). The dead language and its dying call have risen again, the distress signal now fodder for artist Angelica Mesiti, long interested in capturing on video the songs and sounds of different cultures.

If communication beyond words is the theme of Mesiti’s career, in Relay League she takes the idea of translation and makes it lateral: the French Morse Code is translated into English, then into a sculpture of giant dots and dashes hanging like a mobile, then into percussion, then into dance, then taught by touch to a vision-impaired dancer.

Though the “final cry” might summon a picture of dark waves like shifting mountains, Mesiti has chosen an urban setting for her three-channel video work. On the first screen we encounter a drummer. Mesiti asked musician-composer Uriel Barthélémi to create a percussion score from the last SOS. It’s a fluid creation with a free beat: cymbals are struck on a bass drum, feathered brushes evoke the dashes, flashes of silence create their own dots, and at moments, a more distinct phrase rises out of tiny abstract pulses. Mesiti captures all of this with close shots at first, gradually moving toward a wide shot of Barthélémi on a Parisian rooftop.

The second screen, approached around semi-transparent, curvilinear white paper walls, also starts with close-ups: hands, grasping. Two people sit beside one another, captured in a shallow depth of field that accentuates the tactile nature of what they’re doing: a woman is teaching a sight-impaired man a dance routine by way of touch, guiding him through the movements and tracing her fingertips across his wrists. They have an intimate spoken shorthand, too, with occasional murmurs in some undetermined language. They’re watching something, and though we can’t see what that something is, we can hear Barthélémi’s score in the background, simmering and pulsing away.

It’s the final screen that brings everything together. We realise the couple is in a light-filled studio watching and learning from a dancer, Felipe Lourenço, who has animated Barthélémi’s percussion with his own stuttering choreography of loose gestures—punches, straightened arms, splayed fingers, swinging torso and pattering steps—that made me think of dance as a kind of annotation. Like the first two screens, this one is dominated by a soft blue colour palette, the dancer’s skin providing a warm counterpoint.

With its huge crew (a producer, cinematographer, sound designer, post-production coordinators, camera operators, sound recordists), Relay League is fascinating for what it says about the present state of video art and how it’s changing in the digital era. The discipline began with incredibly lo-fi analogue creations displayed on TV monitors in the 1960s; now works like those of Mesiti, Lynette Wallworth and Hossein Valamanesh are created at a kind of high-definition super-video junction between the art and film industries. The art sector is so industrialised and professionalised that video artists are more akin to creators of short films, with production companies (which often also produce feature films, eg Sydney’s Felix Media, a frequent Mesiti collaborator) in some ways acting as co-creators. Andy Warhol’s Factory is everywhere. While artists like Soda_Jerk will, you suspect, forever lurk in the low-tech world of sampled videos and darkened bedroom edit suites, Angelica Mesiti seems increasingly to be at the forefront of this wave of glossy, highly-produced video work.

This is not a criticism. Aided by the support of half a dozen organisations, the new work retains Mesiti’s artistic DNA. And while Shaun Gladwell, perhaps the most commercially successful video artist in this country, has been the subject of much of his own work, I find it more interesting that Mesiti casts her eye over the identities and cultures of others. A new quality evident in Relay League, compared with her past works, is that it induces a kind of synesthesia: aural and visual components begin to bleed together, gridded apartment windows become dashes of Morse Code, chimneys become the dots, your eyes become your ears. Like her 2012 work Citizen’s Band, the videos are embedded in a thoughtful installation: in Relay League, you can hear the three channels’ audio echoing each other throughout Artspace—they are arranged as three links in a chain.

I like the idea that through video, Mesiti is finding new ways to encompass other disciplines, like dance and music, while retaining what’s unique about video art. From the death knell of Morse Code, Angelica Mesiti has found a new point of departure for collaborative artmaking, for different forms brought together as one.

Relay League, writer, director, editor Angelica Mesiti, performers Uriel Barthélémi, Sindri Runudde, Emilia Wibron Vesterlund, Felipe Lourenço, producer Anne Becker/PLATÔ, cinematographer Pierre Jouvion, sound design, mix Liam Egan, curators Alexie Glass-Kantor, Michelle Newton; an Artspace commission; Artspace, Sydney, 4 May-9 July; touring nationally.

Top image credit: Relay League, 2017, Angelica Mesiti, installation view, Artspace, Sydney, photo Zan Wimberley

Nola Farman is a quirky doyenne of Australian interdisciplinary art, whose practice spans from the 1960s to the present. Her work ranges from large-scale environmental installation and media art through to smaller installations, paintings, drawings and artist books, such as those on display in Flight at Gallery East in Sydney’s Clovelly.

A Clovelly resident, Farman has been stealthily upping the neo-Fluxus quotient in the seaside suburb with this exhibition and also her regular experimental poetry and prose readings, Off Track, held at a local restaurant. There’s a sense that Farman, now in her late 70s, is bringing her career as an artist home to roost, and Flight presents itself as an assemblage of various aesthetic curios, accompanied by a series of wall texts that engage the viewer in all manner of absurdist banter while simultaneously giving a conversational coherence to the show.

While wall texts are usually austere and minimal, Flight’s paratexts put language on a level with the art objects, and in his curatorial statement the mysterious Permangelo E Regularis stresses that the key to Farman’s work, “whether she be engaged with electronic installations, digital (media works), painting, drawing, artist books or sculpture from the tiny to the monumental—can be found in her use of language.”

A banner hanging in the gallery window reads “The Ministry for the Future of Art”—the organisation that ostensibly represents a stable of Permangelo’s artists including Farman. There’s a hint that some of these artists, such as Nora Fleming and Noel Farina who share her initials and also provide the commentary on the works, may be Farman’s alter-egos. Alongside the first oil painting, Inertia (of a rather psychedelic garden snail, not unlike the kind of naïve artwork you may find in the corner of an op shop), Noel Farina free-associates about snails: “the first one now will later be last”—and another commentator, Tiny Bubbles, replies “Nola is a ‘master chef’ who has in my mind re-instated the big, fleshy escargot as simple and marvellous.” With the work’s touches of gold leaf and inflated price of $12,250 it’s clear that this exhibition is playfully tongue-in-cheek.

A conceptual centrepiece of the exhibition is an incomplete canvas, Unfinished and Untitled, a beguiling self-portrait of the artist in sunglasses surrounded by various everyday objects. An elaborate contract titled “A Whiff of the Oily Rag” has been drawn up to allow the work to be either bought outright or borrowed for periods of up to three months. Alternatively, in what seems like an analogue to and possible spoof of crowdfunding, but also perhaps a reference back to the snail and slow art, donations can be made to motivate the artist to finish the work within two years.

On a table at the front of the gallery are Farman’s artist books. Being a poet myself, these are my favourite things in the exhibition and include Kulinaria: Recipes for Disaster with food stains from various meals the artist has eaten—hence a page with balsamic vinegar or one with now rancid whole grain mustard—alongside the tongue-twisting “Parking Places I Could Have Had If I Had Needed a Parking Place in Paris.”

Flight invites us to consider the strange currents and currencies of contemporary art: from framing ripped cardboard in a work titled Artwork Not Made By An Elephant to a gaudy mirror with a small attached plate engraved with the word “Entitled.”

Phillip Adams BalletLab was one of eight Victorian companies defunded by the Australia Council in last year’s Black Friday cuts. Undeterred, the company pushed ahead with its plan to establish new headquarters and a new performance venue at Temperance Hall in South Melbourne. It’s inspiring stuff: BalletLab continues to put itself out there with the help of a diverse range of supporters, unafraid of failure; but then that has been the ethos of this sui generis company from the beginning.

The storied venue on Napier Street was built by the Emerald Hill Total Abstinence Society in 1863, and over the years has hosted a range of notable performing arts companies, including Wal Cherry and George Whaley’s Emerald Hill Theatre Company and Jean-Pierre Mignon’s Anthill. You can still see something of the history of the building in the peeling palimpsest of paints on the walls and the ancient grime in the grain of the floorboards.

Reinvented as a presenting company, BalletLab aims to support what it calls queer-orientated practice and performance. What might this mean? Well, so far in 2017 the company has presented a remount of Chad McLachlan and Milo Hyde’s HardQueer DeathPony as part of Midsumma and recently announced Shian Law as artist-in-residence. Now they present their first international guest, New York-based writer, choreographer and director Jack Ferver.

Ferver’s Mon, Ma, Mes (Revisité) is a short but expertly crafted piece of satirical dance theatre which happily confuses or obscures relations between performer and character, confession and fictional monologue. The Jack Ferver we meet in the show is an alternative projection, a persona he can either claim or disown. The work is a fantasy and a confession and something a little bit sly and guileful.

It also hangs together rather beautifully, an achievement of tensions and themes and ambiguities. There is a long tradition of performers enacting characters with a shifting resemblance to autobiography, but Ferver does it with more panache than most.

The evening begins with a parody of an audience question-and-answer session in which Ferver plays the part of an ambitious young performance artist with seemingly limitless push. “Really,” he asks himself, “how old am I? I’ve made so much work, it’s like I’m a million years old.” From here we move into a series of confessional and pseudo-confessional fragments interspersed with short routines. Originality, or lack of it, is a recurring problem and an obsession for Ferver and his alter ego.

“We’re gonna do a thing where I’m gonna have him improvise and then I’m gonna say it’s mine,” he says, plucking a guest dancer from the audience. “It’s really in right now.”

The improvisation that ensues, with Luke George, is surprisingly effective, not only because George is a graceful mover, but because of Ferver’s studied intensity. He brings a similar focus and earnestness to his own solo dance routines, where he looks like a lost chorus dancer from a Golden-Age movie musical, briskly marching and lunging.

There is a feeling of where-have-I-seen-this-before familiarity that hangs over the performance. Occasionally this crystallises in a recognisable quote. “When I was 17,” he says, quoting the Gena Rowlands character in John Cassavetes’ Opening Night (1977), “I could do anything. It was so easy. My emotions were so close to the surface.” And yet even as he borrows from others, and exaggerates, there is a kind of submerged sincerity, which is never lost entirely.

It is this basic vulnerability that justifies the performance. At least, we assume it is basic, uncomplicated, unfeigned. Would this piece—which among other things tackles rape, suicide and failure—be tolerable otherwise, if it were inspired by cynicism?

At one point Ferver tells the audience that he cut his friend Reid from the show, ostensibly because that made it easier to tour. This gets a laugh because we recognise it as typical of the kind of ruthless narcissism that some artists feel is necessary in order to succeed. And yet it is true that Ferver’s friend Reid Bartelme has been cut from the show and—whatever the real reason—it is now easier to tour.

His monologue is wide-ranging and, as it goes on, increasingly disjointed. The shiny confidence we see at the beginning shatters almost immediately. Ferver interviews himself, playing both patient and therapist, ending with a comic-sexy-awkward dance. In another scene he cleverly uses a bank of mirrors at the back of the stage to create the impression that he is out for a walk, holding his own hand and chatting amiably with himself. It could be a symbol for the performance as a whole, reaching through the mirror and merging with his own reflection or, more accurately, creating the illusion that this is what he is doing.

In a brief pre-show speech, BalletLab artistic director Phillip Adams stressed the significance of New York as an inspiration and proving ground for so many Australian choreographers over the years. Indeed, New York was where Adams made a home in 1988, living and working there for 10 years.

Jack Ferver’s Mon, Ma, Mes (Revisité) also suggests a certain temperamental connection between Melbourne and the Big Apple. It is a piece in phase with the kind of darkly ironic performance that Melbourne-based performer Nicola Gunn has made her own, albeit with a camp twist, and somehow feels well suited to the city of folded arms.

BalletLab, Mon, Ma, Mes (Revisité), choreography, text Jack Ferver, performers Jack Ferver, selected guests; Temperance Hall, South Melbourne, 4 May

The Resonant Bodies Festival has run annually as a three-day event in New York since its inception in 2013. Founded and directed by vocalist Lucy Dhegrae, who travelled to Australia for this first international edition, the festival “curates around people” rather than works. As explained by Dhegrae during the course of the concert, this gives vocal performers freedom to choose or develop pieces that “matter” and encourages them to take risks. Australian sopranos Jane Sheldon and Jessica Aszodi curated the scaled-down version of the festival and, adhering to Dhegrae’s ethos, the result was a sizeable and varied program, capturing the spirit of a festival in one evening.

The world premiere of Elliott Gyger’s A Church Made of Glass opened the concert. With imagery of the glass church in Peter Carey’s 1988 novel Oscar and Lucinda, this concise work contemplated both beauty and madness. In line with the overarching ‘old and new’ theme of this year’s pared-back Metropolis New Music Festival, Gyger’s 11-minute composition was a kind of deconstructed and distilled cantata. Recognisable textures, such as chorale, fugue and recitative, were artfully condensed into the nine short fragments which made up the work. Each of the three vocalists brought a unique quality to the performance. Particularly striking were Aszodi’s power in the low registers, Sheldon’s agility and Dhegrae’s narrative ability. When required though, a fine blend and balance was achieved—with clarinettist Aviva Endean sometimes providing a fourth ‘voice.’

The two central works in the first half complemented each other, both playing with ideas of semantics and meaning. American composer Jason Eckardt’s Dithyramb, performed here by Sheldon, is an outburst of nonsensical vocal sounds inspired in part by an ancient Greek hymn. More, a new work by Natasha Anderson receiving its world premiere by Aszodi, used more substantial textual material for a fairly similar musical effect. Anderson has taken text from medieval music, personal accounts of abuse and recollections of a woman who underwent exorcism. These sources were chosen to foreground ideas of the feminine and violence and, in turn, the shortcomings of language to communicate these experiences. The disordered layering made for thrillingly uncomfortable listening, with the performer required to draw on a range of vocal techniques and emotions. Aszodi was masterful in the way she dealt with the competing ‘voices,’ especially in sections with splits between sung and whispered text—truly giving the impression of multiple performers.

Considering Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King is nearing its 50th anniversary, it’s remarkable that its theatricality can still shock. The intimate space of the Melbourne Recital Centre Salon perhaps enhanced the confronting aspects of the work, given the audience’s proximity to Matthew Thomas’s wailing, snarling, violin-breaking King. Thomas put on a commanding display, acting the part but rarely overdoing it. His performance induced a great deal of empathy, not an easy feat considering the musically exaggerated depiction of madness. The dark humour of Davies’ parodic musical score was captured by the ensemble, providing fleeting relief from the visceral intensity of Thomas’s portrayal. Jack Symond’s thumping rendition of familiar strains from Handel drew muted chuckles, as did the bird-like duet featuring flautist Eric Lamb.

While the first half of the event focused on works that sat firmly within the sphere of contemporary composition, the audience was presented with two longer works in the second half akin to performance art. After the emotionally loaded brevity of each work in the first half, these final compositions perhaps had less impact in their drawing out and ruminating on just a handful of ideas.

Melbourne experimental music stalwart Carolyn Connors opened the half with a new work, Suite for Voice and Keyboard, typical of many of her solo performances. Using an accordion and a bass drum to accompany her vocal explorations, the work was broken into sections by a recurring drone motive—achieved by pressing seemingly random keys on the accordion on her lap and bouncing it on her knees to create miniscule compressions. These slowly unfolding instrumental bridging sections had a trance-like effect, broken by the various vocalisations that made up the Suite.

Odeya Nini’s A Solo Voice is an ongoing work, in which Nini explores the relationship between voice, body and mind. The section presented at Resonant Bodies, New Found Land, mused on Nini’s new experience of motherhood. In broad terms, the work can be considered in two sections: the first using only the voice and movement, and the second adding pre-recorded tape. A particularly effective part of the first section was a burlesque expression of sensuality and pleasure. It was disarming to see a woman gyrating alone on the stage, with no musical backing apart from her own voice, toeing a line between empowerment and vulnerability. But other parts of the work’s structure weren’t as gripping, and perhaps too much time was spent developing short riffs and repetitive breathing patterns. The entrance of the tape track in the darkened room provided a warm and comforting resonance. Nini fitted her live voice within the manipulated instrumental layers to create enjoyable moments.

The first Melbourne edition of the Resonant Bodies Festival was an exciting, thought-provoking and diversely programmed concert. Dhegrae, along with Sheldon and Aszodi, must be commended for their artistic vision—providing a rare space for performers to collaborate and take risks with new vocal music.

Metropolis New Music Festival: Resonant Bodies Festival, artists Lucy Dhegrae, Jessica Aszodi, Jane Sheldon, Matthew Thomas, Carolyn Connors, Odeya Nini; Melbourne Recital Centre, 5 May

Dancenorth’s Tomorrow Makers is a deftly curated opportunity offered by Artistic Director Kyle Page to his Townsville ensemble to stretch their choreographic muscle. The program of five short works performed by five dancers included one by guest choreographer Paea Leach, a performer with Melbourne’s Chunky Move. None of the pieces demanded a single reading; all were deliberately open to interpretation, and the sense of freedom was palpable. “We are being supported to experiment and we might fail,” reads a collective program note from the choreographers.

Paea Leach, Body Like a Neon Sign

Leach’s Body Like a Neon Sign with its red lighting and initially stormy soundtrack (Flume: An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music, Vol 3 by Fred Szymanski) produces a sense of impending disaster. Despite the large cubic space of the venue, the action is focused to the point of claustrophobia at times. Ashley McLellan, Georgia Rudd and Harrison Hall, dressed simply in androgynous black T-shirts and rusty jeans, relay anxiety as they cluster and stack themselves in co-supported shapes, open-mouthed and struggling to breathe—as though being gassed. Crying like curlews, they open the space in a cohesive trio, repeating turns and elegant extensions before clasping together again, like supplicants. They begin running, seemingly in panic, but the music changes and the heavy mood lifts. They pull their T-shirts over their heads, strip them off and don crowns of flowers and streamers. The warm lighting now suggests a summer festival sunset, but the lyrical, folksy sweetness of a Martha Wainwright song is playfully deceptive and short-lived as the chorus of “Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole” hits, just before the dancers meander offstage.

In her program note Leach writes, “For this work I drew from my current masters degree research into embodiment… the fact that we are multiple; holding, negotiating and provoking hugely divergent energies, states and presences within frameworks of form, lineage, our own personal embodied history and, of course, in relation to the larger (and aching) world.”

The work strongly suggested to me, in its first phase, an indeterminate suffering—a tone of despair and deep confusion permeating the global ether. The second phase seemed initially to embody denial, a flower child ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ response, but the song choice simultaneously undercuts the love-in with a robust and defiant ‘Fuck you!’ Leach worked my emotions across an unexpectedly broad spectrum. Dancer Ashley McLellan’s capacity to convey vulnerability through eyes and face as well as body was a decided asset to the immediacy and intensity of Leach’s creation.

Harrison Hall, Psycho: Act IV

McLellan also shone in Harrison Hall’s Psycho: Act IV, this time because of her exceptional physical precision and steely control of facial expression. Psycho is a vicarous journey into rave culture and, like a good dance party, builds slowly to controlled frenzy. Hall, McLellan, and Rudd were joined by Mason Kelly and Jenni Large under blue light, all wearing variations of white commercialised sports gear. The disconnected dancers each repeat their own set of gestures robotically and expressionlessly as the tempo increases, and just when the work is on the edge of becoming tedious, they suddenly create a series of crisp formations, smashing out perfectly synchronised semaphore while the bass pumps and the beat reverberates.

Changed positions during sudden brief blackouts keep the eye moving as does vintage footage of a horse seen onscreen galloping on a treadmill and again later in negative. The team marches forward, standing front and then side-on before commencing a series of high-kneed marching formations with sports shoes squeaking in time on the tarkett—an unnerving display of human dressage.

If achieving a bright rhythmic allure, Hall’s creation was coldly compelling, invoking a profoundly uneasy sense of contemporary alienation. Delivering the formidable precision and high energy demanded was a credit to the dancers; each, with gaze turned inward, appearing to not even notice one another.

Mason Kelly, Georgia Rudd, Together Indecision

Mason Kelly and Georgia Rudd’s Together Indecision starts with the duo so entwined and writhing as they move through the space that it’s difficult to know where one body ends and the other begins. Separating to charge towards one another and collide and reconnect, the work suggests something of the universal vagaries of relating.

Ashley McLellan, Free Dive

Ashley McLellan’s austere Free Dive, comprising solos by Hall and Kelly, is danced in silence, to focus attention entirely on the possibilities contained within movement, from minute detail to the full body.

Ashley Mclellan (foreground), Georgia Rudd in Jenni Large’s Baby Heaven Love Voice, Tomorrow Makers, Dancenorth

Jenni Large, Baby Heaven Love Voice

Jenni Large’s Baby Heaven Love Voice features Kelly, Rudd, McLellan and Hall, wearing incongruous clothing, in a very likeable work with an unlikely soundtrack (Foreigner’s soft rock anthem, “I Want to Know What Love Is”). Between each repeated sequence the dancers swap items of their clothing, strip to black undies and, finally, each dressed entirely in another’s outfit, they invade and serenade the audience.

Tomorrow Makers was not flawless, but bold and absolutely pinging with potential. Kyle Page’s investigative rigour and insatiable curiosity have set the tone at Dancenorth, and supporting his dancers to take creative risks in these diverse works is a gift to the future of dance.

Dancenorth, Tomorrow Makers, direction, choreography Paea Leach, Jenni Large, Ashley McLellan, Georgia Rudd, Mason Kelly, Harrison Hall, dancers, Harrison Hall, Mason Kelly, Jenni Large, Ashley McLellan, Georgia Rudd; lighting design Thomas Roach; Townsville Civic Theatre, 4-6 May

Metropolis New Music Festival: Resonant Bodies Festival, artists Lucy Dhegrae, Jessica Aszodi, Jane Sheldon, Matthew Thomas, Carolyn Connors, Odeya Nini; Melbourne Recital Centre, 5 May

The wearing of the veil, in its various manifestations in Muslim communities in Western countries, continues to be the subject of rancorous debate. New York-based, Israeli-born and internationally exhibited photographer Lili Almog offers a fresh perspective in a series of images for Sydney’s Head On Photo Festival that constitute a preview of a major exhibition to be mounted in Israel later this year. I met the artist and discussed the show and its other dimensions with her.

Almog’s concern is with the veiling of women in any number of cultures and religions. In a recent visit to Israel she encountered heavily veiled women whom she assumed to be Muslim. They were in fact conservative Israelis who are imposing the same dress code on their daughters. The difference between the women of two quite different cultures was, in effect, erased. Without identity, Almog said, the women “divided the landscape, cutting the horizon in two.” The distance between herself and a veiled woman seems profound: “What is she thinking? What am I thinking?” Hence the title of the show, The Space Within. This particular impact will be captured in the exhibition in Israel when Almog adds a series of landscape images, one of which was on show.

Almog’s focus in this exhibition for the Head On Photo Festival is on veiled bodies in a deep, almost metallic grey life drawing studio in which a mostly totally covered woman (often in black, sometimes in bright prints, eyes showing only once, finger nails painted yellow in one image and a naked leg exposed in another) poses amid sparely spaced easels, sketches, paintings and, strikingly, the stark white statue of the Venus de Milo and, in one image, her male counterpart.

While the juxtaposition of covered and naked is at once amusing and disturbing, there are subtler ironies at work for the alert observer in terms of posture, the deployment of clothing and references to the history of portraiture. The texture of the photography likewise works from apparent binaries of light and dark with many shades between, yielding a satisfying painterliness which the veiled figure disrupts, like a ghost in black. Lili Almog very effectively lifts the veil on a complex gender and cultural tradition.

With a palpable sense of excitement, Almog revealed other aspects of the exhibition for Israel that she’s working on. They include a video, bumper stickers (revealing the diversity of cultural veiling) and heat sensitive ceramic statuettes—covered on one side, naked on the other as they turn—that utter telling statements as viewers draw near. With an aesthetic at once deadly serious and cheekily provocative, clearly Almog feels that the ideas embodied in her art have to reach beyond the photographic frame.

Top image credit: Drawing Room #5, Lili Almog, Martin Browne Contemporary, photo courtesy the artist and Arthere

Jude Walton’s Drill Hall Project 2017 is a site-specific performance based on feelings of absence: the absence of men in a time of war, and more generally, the absence of the past in the now. It is posed from the point of view of the women left behind, and from the spectator’s perspective, on times gone by.

This is made possible through enlisting the use of a building that hearkens back to 1937—between two World Wars. Melbourne’s Drill Hall was home to the 6^th battalion of the Royal Melbourne Regiment. Its strategically central location would have been ideal for revolutionary takeover. As it turns out, this never happened. The Drill Hall sits quietly in the heart of Melbourne, a Tardis barely noticed. To enter this art deco space is to feel its white walls, polished floor and geometric mouldings as silent witnesses to the past.

A brass quartet angles towards the back of this large room, broken up by a number of female figures in retro dresses who enter and exit throughout. Jo White comes forward, working her way through a plain, repetitive phrase of simple gestures, diagonals, spirals and shifts of weight. She is joined by another dancer, Michaela Pegum, who echoes her established movement pattern. The habitual lull brought about through repetitive motion is interrupted by a plethora of small metal balls rolled across the floor. The noise of their rolling is amplified, suggesting the approach of war planes overhead. The balls introduce an element of danger and instability, of metal versus flesh. The women enter the space to ‘sweep’ the balls, using wooden planks to great acoustic effect.

The delayed entrance of the music strikes a bittersweet note, the pathos of the past perhaps. The resonance of brass instruments is more than musical, flavouring thought with emotion. A large light box is pushed across the floor, offering a further sense of duration, the circulation of memories augmented by the period costumes worn throughout. The two dancers and two performers (Beth and Sarah Rudledge) engage in a series of actions, movement-based, spatial, and with the metal balls. They express a quiet dedication to each task.

Two striking solos by a third dancer, Sally Grage-Moore, interrupt the quiet flow of events. Her face is concealed both times, by a flowered head-covering and later a balaclava. This is at odds with her neo-classical dance palette according to which she rehearses a series of poses: elegant, cross-lateral diagonals, pointed legs, long body. Apart from the mystery of her hidden face, she could be modelling a dated version of 1930s femininity. The cracks in this ideal are revealed as two women perform a series of falls, supporting each other amid grief and loss.

Walton’s choreography has that quality of the once-removed, suggestive yet spacious, allowing for a range of interpretations within a carefully constructed field. It’s elegant, pared back and enhanced by Kym Dillon’s music, a deconstructed and reconstructed set of variations on “Waltzing Matilda.” The Drill Hall Project 2017 ends with a recognisable rendition, evoking the past, yet making room for our own felt perspective.

The Drill Hall Project 2017, choreography, direction Jude Walton in collaboration with dancers Michaela Pegum, Jo White, Sally Grage-Moore, performers Beth Rudledge, Sarah Rudledge, composer, conductor Kym Dillon, scenography, design Beth Arnold; The Drill Hall, Melbourne, 29, 30 April

While the politicisation of Russian music in the early part of Soviet rule is well known, work produced after the thawing in cultural policy which followed Khrushchev is less familiar. The program presented by the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble during their recent Australian tour featured a diverse and essentially internationalist vision of Russian musical composition and performance culture.

A spectral work by France’s Tristan Murail sat alongside an intense, post-serialist composition by Edison Denisov, while Alexei Sioumak playfully referenced musical history and a work by Dmitri Kourliandski featured droning and textural flourishes. The overall tone was of austere rigor, a set of musical forms requiring close concentration. Comedic or theatrical touches tended to be muted by the uncompromising virtuosity and focus of the ensemble performance. The instrumental combinations, in which violin and piano came together with flute and clarinet, but also bass flute and bass clarinet, produced an intriguing overall sonic palette, including scrapes, buzzes and sharp attacks balanced by extended breathing.

Trio for Flute, Bass-Clarinet and Piano by Denisov (MCME’s patron and one of Russia’s leading composers), opens with layered streams of material producing a strong sense of flow as each stream successively enters and is joined by others as it rises and falls. Moving along with surprising rapidity, the work develops a kind of ecstatic density that embraces the listener. While individual lines sometimes become quite sparse, the overlap and the exchange of material among near complementary lines means that the piece never really relaxes. Not quite an urgent work, it has an engrossing edginess, both rhythmically and in being neither fully dissonant nor harmonically resolved.

Works by Sioumak and Beat Furrer (Austria) are no less rigorous, but their reception depends in part on listening past the musical material and reading their musicological allusions—essentially postmodern strategies with a musical palette otherwise far from that typically associated with postmodernism. Furrer’s Lied For Violin and Piano (1993) takes a micro-fragment from Franz Schubert’s melancholy Winterreisse (1827), looping it in a delicate set of echoes or calls-and-responses between violin and piano, stretching it to breaking point. Pedalling keeps sparse piano strikes floating throughout, while the violin attacks aggressively before each pause, the bow often coming in sideways, yielding scratching and a painful edge to the sounds before each short silence allows the work to again open out. If the work never seems to fully start, it creates a subtle landscape of gorgeous fragments portending emotional decay, just as Schubert does.

Sioumak’s CI.Air and Polka For Flute, Clarinet, Violin and Piano by contrast takes rather vibrant elements from the Eastern European polka and, in the words of MCME’s manager Victoria Korshunova, “dampens the normally joyful mood…using a rubber eraser preparation” in the horn of the clarinet, producing a slightly buzzing, low voice. Stark, long in-and-out breathing leads into the piece, but later the dampener is removed. The emergence of gypsy-ish music delivers a wonderful dancing lightness, the virtuosic tendency of that tradition evoked in a maddeningly complex rhythmic clarinet line. In a work apparently fused by Sioumak from two separate works, the polka does seem to have won out by the finale.

A publicised newly commissioned piece by Sydney’s Michael Smetanin was in fact a reworking of a 1990 composition, Spray. While I was disappointed, it’s always a treat to hear Smetanin’s work performed live. It opens with a series of near canons picked up by each instrument. The piano soon comes to ground the piece, dropping low and offering strong, slightly repetitive lines—although the program notes by Richard Toop seem to suggest that this is the role played by the bass-clarinet. Whatever the case, Spray works via the construction of a series of blocks of material that enter and then eventually repeat or echo each other. The slightly rolling feel of the piece gives it a structural tightness, with local reviewer William Yeoman noting that it offered a “musical architecture perhaps less riven with tension” than the rest of the program.

This need not be a negative observation. I found it very hard to discern structure in Murail’s invigoratingly cacophonous Les Ruines Circulaires, while Sergei Newski’s Rift For Bass Clarinet, Violin and Piano was both intriguing yet baffling. But that is rather the point. The world of art music has grown increasingly diverse since the 1960s, and it is wonderful to be introduced to such fine Russian artists who explore new possibilities without identifying with any particular school. One can only hope such diversity continues to be cherished not only in Russia, but beyond.

Editors’ note. The Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble is a leading experimenter in digital and theatrical ventures as well as a prominent commissioner of new works and performer of works by Feldman, Lucier and Reich. Read about the ensemble here and see them in a number of performances they’ve posted on YouTube, including Dmitri Kourliandski’s sussurating then turbulent White Concerto, below.

Digital media screen works by Japan’s teamLab were a highlight of Adelaide’s 2016 OzAsia Festival. Now four new works are featured at Sydney’s Martin Browne Contemporary.

In Gold Waves, a four-channel continuous loop that simulates a traditional room screen, roiling, curling and crashing waves suggest a Hokusai print come to life. Comprising hundreds of thousands of tiny ‘water’ particles which coalesce into lines of movement, the waves pound hypnotically, and as in a real ocean, unpredictably.

The water in Black Waves, a rivetting single channel loop, appears more blue than black and more suggestively akin to woodblock print colouring.

The exquisite single channel Enso (5 minutes), described by the makers as an exercise in Spatial Calligraphy, mimics the single Zen brushstroke that makes a circle but here adding a remarkable depth of field, shifting perspective and inky detail (fans of the film The Arrival will feel an immediate affinity).

Impermanent Life is a relative of the glorious, perpetually evolving Ever Blossoming Life which appeared in the OzAsia Festival. Across a four channel cluster of what appear to be gnarled tree roots, a mass of tiny blossoms drift and fall as a large circle forms and fades in another of teamLab’s celebrations of the life cycle.

These are engrossing screen works which invite reverie and contemplation, and are best seen on their big screens in a quiet gallery,

“Do you know who killed JonBenét Ramsey?” asks a little girl of no more than six or seven, dolled up for Australian filmmaker Kitty Green’s new documentary to resemble the murdered beauty queen who has fascinated the public for 20 years. So entrenched is the slain child princess in popular myth, this child may as well be asking for strawberry ice cream. Struck, strangled and probably sexually molested, six-year-old pageant star JonBenét Ramsey was found dead in her family’s Boulder, Colorado home at Christmastime 1996, and a mysterious kidnapping note left inside the house.

It was the perfect all-American tragedy—the ideal McFamily unravelling against the spectre of potential domestic violence. The unsolved case gripped the world, its surreal backdrop of sexualised children proving irresistible to armchair voyeurs. Although the case has been assayed countless times in print and true crime TV, Green (Ukraine Is Not a Brothel, 2013) proposes a new angle: what would the murder look like performed by actors drawn exclusively from the Ramseys’ hometown?

Produced by and distributed on Netflix and developed through Film Victoria, Screen Australia and the Sundance Documentary Institute, Casting JonBenét ostensibly establishes itself as an interrogation of performance. Evoking two decades of small-screen spectatorship with widescreen and 4:3 ratios, the film is structured around talking-head interviews with groups of actors enlisted to play John and Patsy Ramsey, their two children, local police and townspeople in a movie dramatising the events.

Green frames her subjects with ample overhead space, as if to allow their thoughts to escape and mingle with the wallpaper, their clipped soundbites comprising a tapestry of theories that run from obvious conjecture to unexpected personal confession. These interviews are intercut with the finished film—a slickly tasteful recreation suffocating in amber cinematography and a maudlin piano score.

Green’s high-concept gambit recalls her short film The Face of Ukraine: Casting Oksana Baiul (2015), and inevitably Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine (2016), a fascinating ficto-documentary that followed actress Kate Lyn Sheil as she prepared for the role of suicidal news anchor Christine Chubbuck. The latter film’s interrogation of performance anxiety and ethical queasiness—tending the desire to re-enact tragedy—remains beyond the reach of Casting JonBenét, though the film seems to set itself up for similar revelations. “In order to act you need to tell the truth,” announces one of the local cast, before calling John and Patsy’s public response “one of the poorest acting jobs I’ve ever seen.” Unlike Sheil, the mostly amateur performers here aren’t self-conscious enough to yield actorly insights on motivation or technique, instead blurring limited craft with the personal in discomfiting ways.

Despite the whiff of condescension towards its subjects, it’s here that Casting JonBenét reveals itself as a compelling portrait of those peripherally affected by the crime. We meet an actor whose brother was murdered, another who experienced sexual harassment and one dealing, as did Patsy, with recently discovered cancer: each experience refracted through memories of and associations with the Ramsey case. The interviews range from unpleasantly exploitative to weirdly amusing: one woman gruesomely imagines the death of her own child to summon showy tears, while a burly, goateed man who bills himself as a “fugitive recovery agent and sex educator” demonstrates his whipping skills before interrupting the interview to take a client’s call. Others cross over into the anecdotally goofy: portraying a Santa in JonBenét’s story, a fat guy in a red suit describes his yuletide vocation as “more addictive than heroin.” Give us a movie about him.

Casting JonBenét riffs on the usual true crime dramatisations and cinema’s wider license to construct whichever reality best serves as entertainment, and Green’s final bravura sequence cleverly transforms her actors’ theories into a mini cacophony of speculation. The overlapping thoughts—“Patsy was definitely involved,” “I think he’s innocent,” “Talk about putting a woman in a box”—eventually blur into a chattering simulacrum of life, as Green’s camera tracks across the various versions of the parents and their kids at home like Wes Anderson fetishising a dollhouse. When the camera pulls back, in an almost Godardian jape, to reveal the sound stage, the sight of multiple actors inhabiting this meretricious diorama is as satisfying as any ultimate “truth”—the film-within-the-film’s supposed realism rendered as pointless and hollow as a slapdash Lifetime movie.

When we finally glimpse JonBenét in her filmic performance—a tiny ballerina with angel wings, pirouetting in a sickly-lit corridor to the sound of Johnny Desmond’s “Miss America”—she’s become an elusive, unknowable icon, born of rote suburban violence but forever enshrined in the pop cosmos. Here, Green’s film finally ascends to a level that does her subject justice, equal parts chintzy and chilling.

Casting JonBenét, writer, producer, director Kitty Green, co-producers Scott Macaulay and James Schamus, music Nathan Larson, cinematographer Michael Latham, editor Davis Coombe, distributor Netflix, 2017

The key to Ambulante is found in its title—it’s a festival that travels, showing films in multiple locations within Mexico City and currently, the states of Oaxaca, Chihuahua, Baja California and Jalisco. Between March 23 and April 6, committed patrons trekked across the megatropolis of Mexico City—Distrito Federal, or DF, for those in the know—to watch documentary films in multiplex cinemas, public parks and plazas, arts centres, university campuses, the historic Cineteca Nacional, museums, a metro station and even the national Senate building.

Founded by Hollywood’s Mexican darlings Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, 2017’s Ambulante featured a program of hundreds of films from around the world, with a particular focus on content from Latin America. In announcing the dates in October last year, Bernal promised that the program would be organised around social justice themes, to raise awareness and inspire solutions to the struggle against corruption and impunity in his native land. Five months and one Trump win later, at the opening of the festival under the stars at the city’s hallowed Monument to the Revolution, Luna said, “2017 looks to be a difficult year not only for Mexico, but for the whole world and we here have to rethink many things and the documentary can help us do that.

“While we have to rethink our relationship with the United States, it also reminds us that today more than ever we have to see the South. We all have to establish bridges and reconnect with Latin America, because it seems that we forgot that we belong to something bigger.”

The festival programming is extensive, with films grouped under the headings of general programming; Por la justicia, Documentales Mexicanos, Ambulante más allá (documentaries by young directors), Sonidero (music documentaries) and the Ambulantito children’s program.

The cycle Ambulante por la justicia spanned screenings, fora, talks and debates and explored questions of authoritarianism and inequality, ranging across Eastern Europe (The Moscow Trials, Milo Rau, 2013), South Africa (The Gugulethu 7, Lindy Wilson, 2000) and the United States (the classic The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris, 1998) to shed some light on Mexico’s extensive problems. The program included the highly acclaimed and domestically very popular Presunto Culpable (Presumed Guilty; Roberto Hernández and Geoffrey Smith, 2008), which follows the process of exoneration of a man imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. It was produced by his lawyers, Layda Negrete and Roberto Hernández.

In the Ambulante más allá series, new directors who may lack the tools and opportunities for filmmaking are provided with training and funding by the festival. Portate Bien (Behave Well, Omar Zamudio) tells the story of primary school teacher María Elva Hernández, who after a 37-year career, is forced to leave her profession in the district of Chilpancingo, Guerrero, due to her participation in protests which have raged in rural locations across the country for the past two years against education reform proposed by President Enrique Peña Nieto.

Portate Bien is one of several films in the program set in the state of Guerrero, and there are certainly many stories to tell from this place right now. Guerrero is home to the Ayotzinapa rural teachers’ college from which 43 students went missing on September 26, 2014. Remains of two of the students have since been found and identified and drug cartel, police and government complicity in the kidnapping of the 43 is certain.

The Ayotzinapa case framed the content for the documentary Guerrero, made by French director Ludovic Bonleux and premiering at Ambulante. Through the eyes of three local activists, Bonleux shows the daily struggle against forgetting and complicity for so many in Guerrero where the drug war and state impunity have all but shut down the possibility of systemic justice for those who have lost family members to kidnappings and extrajudicial killings. Communities in the state capital of Chilpancingo have formed their own community policing units as well as expeditions to exhume and identify the human remains that riddle the mountainsides, casualties of the so-called “narcogobierno” which translates roughly as “drug dealer state,” referring to the entwinement of political corruption and drug cartels in the governance of the territory.

Mario, one of Bonleux’s activists, is heard saying to a young boy joining the expedition that he is an “exhumador del futuro,” a future exhumer of bodies. It’s a pedestrian moment, shocking in its ordinariness—as though this is the work of generations, and digging up the bones of murdered countrymen is the brightest honour a young boy can expect.

I went to see Guerrero at a multiplex cinema in the financial heart of the city, where Bonleux held a question-and-answer session after the film had screened. I was attending with a Guerrerense photojournalist, Jorge Dan López.

It felt surreal, as it often does when reminded of Mexico’s endemic violence and impunity, to be watching this story from inside the bubble of the DF, widely considered to be a zone of relative tranquility and prosperity in contrast to the crime and poverty and violence so prevalent in the rest of the country. Jorge felt this more bluntly than I did, saying as we snuck out halfway through the Q&A, “Well, that was just for the Roma-Condesa-Polanco set [in the city’s hip, rich neighbourhoods] to feel edgy and continue to do nothing.”

A mobile film festival may not be able to bridge audience divides like that but, in bringing the most worrying of Mexico’s ills to the heart of the city in the safest possible fashion, it might begin a conversation. In this and many other ways, Ambulante 2017 continues to fulfil its founders’ dreams of awareness-raising and solution-building—the highest callings of documentary film.

“The two dancers make their way to us in a constrained and systematic series of gestures. They wear white quilted, pleated garments and blocky black high-heeled shoes. They demonstrate a confinement, an entanglement and then a birth. Each emerges with a long steel pin in her hair. White balloons are burst and bones are flung on the floor. They play us, singing, touching, chanting at us.” Osunwunmi, Voodoo, RealTime, 1 March, 2017

In an urgent journey through the haunted territories of diaspora, Project O came to Bristol’s InBetween Time Festival with Voodoo, rigorously demanding from their audience either complicity or confrontation. London-based independent dance artists and collaborators Jamila Johnson-Small and Alexandrina Hemsley talked to me about the work and its roots in the sparkly provocations of O, their previous IBT performance.

JJ I think that O came from quite a fighty place of, like, “Grrrr, we’re here!” And we needed to say these things that weren’t being said. [After] we both went to dance school, I had the idea that I might work for a choreographer. It was horrible, all kinds of fucked up. So for me that was like “Rmph!”

And then people responded [to our work] in lots of ways, but also wanted it. They invited us to spaces, to speak; it seemed like the work was valid to them. And once that happens the fight is different. Now we’re inside, what are we going to say from here?

AH With O, it felt like display. Because, “We’re gonna show you! Because you’re looking at us in the wrong way! We’re going to transform how you look.” Whereas in Voodoo it feels less about showing and more about being or about letting things come: there’s a lot more open improvisation in its current form. Anyway, the work is still in development. It feels like we’ve expanded what we have control over, not just the body but maybe the site that our presence is orientating around. So the world of it feels more considered. It’s quite dystopian: [our] interest in darkening something, darkening the edge of something.

We wanted to hold the same questions that brought us together as a collaboration, about how to live, how to create in this world where various structures almost choreograph you out of them. White supremacist patriarchy is a tough space to exist in, for anybody, but particularly for women and people of colour. So we were holding those questions but wanted to answer them in quite a different way than led our first show.

JJ The thing is the trap of racism and racist structures that I live in and that I just thought were natural. Then you’re like, wait a minute, this doesn’t feel quite right cos I thought this, and then people are treating me like this! And then they’re treating me like that! Then it becomes confusing and you can start to feel you’re going crazy. And you can only know you’re not crazy when someone says, “You’re not crazy” or “I feel that too.” And that’s really important, I think solidarity and other people and discussing things is really important in unpacking this systematic racism. I don’t think you can do that alone.

I’m very concerned with assimilation and ways in which I have internalised assimilationist ideals, intellectually but also physically as I move. And the patterns that my body have gone through in conventional dance training. I’m trying to unpattern and let my body have access to all: trying to let my body be unruly and see what that does. But to try and do that, like how can you let go of everything and still be standing?

Not only the discipline, but to be free of everything. Like, free of the idea that a woman should sit small on a train. Like, I don’t sit small on a train. I sit like this. Now I think more about these things, I wondered when I started sitting like this and why. How that affects how I hold my upper body and what signals I’m trying to send by doing it. And how can I take space in other ways beyond: “I’m just going to take space and I feel really fine like this even though I’m a woman?” How do I just let myself be weird and [find] what makes me feel well? Or what is necessary in this moment and how can I let my body do that? But also still push—not symbolise. This is what I mean: not represent my position but be my position.

I’m interested in the question of how you can stretch anything, how you can expand anything. What else is there in that space beyond what I initially thought. I’m not interested in the conventional aesthetics of virtuosity—but I am interested in it as a concept of expansion or of pushing to the edges of things. And sometimes something falls into something else. Like doing Voodoo as an eight-hour show. I wonder what it would be to encounter that and whether it will be an eight-hour dance show or something else.

AH I think the thing about the traditional aesthetics of virtuosity is that they just exclude so much and so many. Also I feel like any sort of virtuosity is an impossible ideal and I don’t know if I want to spend my life trying to reach impossibility that way. I think the good thing about something being impossible is that it’s endless, it never ends; so if I’m improvising and I’m imagining, then I can just go on and on and on into impossible places.

In Pippa Ellams’ The Carousel, an intense portrayal of agonising sibling co-dependency, two sisters work through a kind of madness towards release without abandoning their love for each other. It’s a torturous, illogical process underlined by scene-switching between pre-adolescence and early adulthood and amplified by the years that separate the older Christa (Tasha O’Brien) and younger Jamie (Alex Francis).

Reasons for their co-dependency are not literally delineated. Most patently it’s the absence of parents in their lives—they’re just angry noises off. There’s no-one to counter the misinformation about changes in the female body which preoccupy them early on or, later, to thwart Christa’s cruel mishandling of her well-intentioned efforts to draw the regressive Jamie out into the world, which the youngster fears “is full of sadness.” Christa is isolated too—her affair with a married man is sexual, not social; she explains, “There are no dates” and she’s heard that “sex is the best kind of self-harm.” Ellams’ pared-back reality renders the girls’ naivety frantically comic when they’re not helplessly combative and their behaviour dangerously surreal when there’s a failure of care, the toxicity of the relationship embodied in a pet spider that is as symbolic as it is apparently dangerous when it does bite.

The volatility of the relationship, inherent in Ellams’ pulsing dialogue and taut scene-making, is a powerful driver of the production, with O’Brien and Francis (and director Hannah Goodwin) excelling in realising the characters’ oscillations between stultified stillness and outbursts of teenage exuberance and hurtful anger. Just when we think they’re doomed, we’re reassured by the palpability of their discrete personalities, eruptions of humour and the energy dedicated to perpetually changing clothes or Jamie’s out of the blue song and dance number for her sister, a sign of incipient release.

Other moments are anxiety-inducing: Jamie’s nigh psychotic killing of the spider or Christa’s protracted, nervy account of stopping traffic to rescue a turtle stranded on a road, but then abandoning it—driving home the ambivalence at the root of her imposed duty of care for her sister.

The play’s drive towards resolution is painfully suspenseful, but keeping track of the narrative is not always easy: a couple of scenes are confusingly repeated with variations, suggesting short-term alternative outcomes—but in whose head in a play that doesn’t otherwise give one consciousness greater sway than the other? Then there’s the melodramatic stringing out of a convoluted plotline built around the spider bite, utilising device rather than psychology. What’s stayed with me is the sheer immediacy of the writing, acting and direction, the physical and emotional palpability of diminished young lives struggling to achieve some kind of wholeness, each sister fundamentally alone, however bound by ties and a love they don’t understand, until they reach the point where the younger can say, “We have to take care of ourselves now.” This modestly staged but imaginatively large work is the creation of recent University of Wollongong performing arts graduates, guided by Shopfront and revealing their substantial potential.

Another UOW graduate, Kirby Medway, created the first work in the Treats program, Unit, in which the audience, wearing headphones, settle back into their seats or on cushions on the stage floor and listen to an unfolding tale of emotional complications and indifference overtaking an anti-development protest in a Sydney suburb. Again the focus is on young people, with Medway at his best when, and too rarely, sardonic about youthful self-interest; one of the protagonists, not keen on attending the protest, makes excuses (he’ll lower his carbon footprint) but worries that he’ll miss a “life changing” event in which he might play a key role. Another point of view is introduced: the developer who has a penchant for standing naked atop his latest, completed project. Wind sweeps away his clothes but he’s eventually rescued by one of the protesters he’d glimpsed weeping and a kind of bonding ensues.

A sense of pathos pervades Unit and although these voices reside as if inside our heads, so does a feeling of distance, of dominantly third person narration or even where more personal, of a writerly neatness that represses immediacy and formalises vocal delivery. The writing is able, the performances focused and the sound—wisely eschewing overly literal effects—well designed, save for two passages when it disappears from the headphones and is heard through the theatre speakers, presumably to suggest the outdoor space of the protest, but leaving the un-directed listener confused, sound muffled and the narrative flow interrupted. Unit is an interesting experiment, one of a number of recent works that prioritise sound in the theatre, but Medway needs to now reflect more precisely on the potential dynamics of the sound/stage nexus.

Shopfront Arts Co-op, Treats: Unit, by Kirby Medway, mentor Miles Merill, sound design mentor James Brown, performers Matt Abotomey, Steve Wilson-Alexander, Sarah Meachan, Dave Molloy, Mara Davis; The Carousel, writer Pippa Ellams, director, designer Hannah Goodwin, performers Tasha O’Brien, Alex Francis, sound design Christine Woodhouse, mentor Anne-Louise Sarks; Belvoir Downstairs, Sydney, 21-30 April

Top image credit: Tasha O’Brien, The Carousel, Treats Showcase, photo courtesy Shopfront

The Space Within has been brought to Sydney by Arthere for Head On Photo Festival.

The delectable Applespiel have finally made it to Brisbane to do… a podcast. The contemporary performance ensemble that brought the world Applespiel’s Morning Breakfast Commercial Radio Show (2010) and Applespiel Make a Band and take on the Recording Industry (2012; read the RealTime review) was undertaking yet another metamorphosis. Exploring the mythos of their own beginning, they attempt to establish the true story behind the disappearance of the elusive ninth founding member of their ensemble—Jarrod Duffy. The work is aptly titled Jarrod Duffy Is Not Dead and has been supported by the Merrigong Theatre, an Albury Hothouse residency, Vitalstatistix’ ultra-hip Adhocracy festival and is now presented by Brisbane stalwart, Metro Arts.

Like a David Lynch film, the veracity even of the central premise of the work doesn’t bear scrutiny. Was Jarrod Duffy real? Does it matter? If so, should the collective Applespiel exploit his potential vulnerability? After all, he allegedly disappeared just before a big show, ostensibly to return to the small country town he swore he would never again endure. And his fellow artists track him down to make a show about him.

The pros and cons of this invasion and the framing of this deliciously voyeuristic conundrum are explored with theatrical precision par excellence through the first half of the work with its podcast form. Five of the ensemble sit behind a long desk cluttered with laptops and microphones. Tight localised sound and lighting mirror subtle performances and underpin a clever and fast-paced script that exploits all of the hallmarks of the podcast format. The ensemble is at turns alluring, serious, self-blaming and contemplative. The frisson builds as the audience pieces together a detailed picture of Jarrod’s struggles and the potential secret relationships and rifts that exist beneath the surface.

At some point, almost unexpectedly, the work shifts form. In hindsight, this is linked to the arrival of the real Jarrod Duffy in the story when we see photos and hear a pre-recorded Skype call between him and the ensemble. But it seems to happen abruptly as ensemble members argue and disband—eventually pulling a white screen down over the stage while they dismantle the podcast set-up.

Once we’ve been entertained by a fake anecdote from one of the ensemble, the screen disappears revealing a stage full of cardboard cut-outs of Jarrod Duffy. Ensemble members wander off and on stage, donning Jarrod masks while swapping his characteristic flannel shirt. Accusations are flung and meditations on class, masculinity and identity abound. “I don’t want to live in a country town,” the ensemble chants. Shifting uneasily between performance-making tropes and parody, there is a sense that the work is itself in search of resolution. However, with true Applespiel chutzpah, the climax is rapturous. Clustered around a demented and deconstructed Jarrod Duffy clone, the ensemble sings “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Looking longingly to the door on the final note, they await Duffy’s return.

Applespiel & Metro Arts, Jarrod Duffy Is Not Dead, devisor-performers Nathan Harrison, Nikki Kennedy, Emma McManus, Rachel Roberts/Troy Reid, Mark Rogers, lighting design Emma Lockhart-Wilson, original sound composition Tom Hogan; Sue Benner Theatre, Metro Arts, Brisbane, 20-29 April

“There is no place for the dysfunctional”—these words float across Kiah Reading’s lush new video work, The Greater Sunrise, part of his inaugural solo exhibition, Kiah Reading Vs The World at The Walls Art Space and in this year’s thrumming Bleach* Festival on the Gold Coast.

The Walls’ previous exhibition, Enter the Map, was curated by Danni Zuvela with local luminaries Carlotta, Libby Harward and Scott Redford exploding out of the gallery space to create wayfinding maps built from the artists’ First Nation and queer lives and experiences. These singular documents also functioned beautifully as practical maps. A highlight was Libby Harward’s work that oriented the gaze to Wollumbin (Mt Warning) and Jellurgal (Burleigh Headland) from a kayak paddling through Tallebudgera Creek.

Game Plan [In the Zone], featuring Kiah Reading, is the second iteration of a series commissioned by The Walls to explore the “collision of art and sport via themes of collaboration, competition, performance—and enhancement,” an apt juxtaposition for the forthcoming Commonwealth Games in 2018.

Reading graduated from Griffith University QCA in 2014 and is part of a generation of globalised Australian artists currently working across the world, with collaborations and exhibitions in Peru, Paris, Belgium and Turkey. His playful text work reminds me of some of Sebastian Moody’s early text pieces: understated beauty but also kind of cool, with the distillation of specific emotions and landscapes into iconoclastic phrases that linger in your mind. The dreamlike fluidity of the video comes from a GoPro camera largely positioned on the back of a moving motorbike, with the lengthening shadows of the two riders delicately impinging on the screen at the corner of your eye.

This potential travelogue is deconstructed with witty and provocative text art (“capital out of mind”) that drops in and across the rolling landscape (“and at that moment we slipped into the jungle”) from oblique angles and with a clumsy font that emphasises the nostalgic intrusion of ideas (“family out of lust”) onto a deserted utopia. In its use of language and video the work integrates the key elements of Reading’s practice and also speaks to his manifesto “to utilise physical object-and experience-making…motivated by a strong will to open the discussion of our personal idiosyncrasies as political beings and our current contemporary desire for the economisation of non-economic phenomena (desire, language, creativity and communication).”

The remainder of the exhibition shifts into more traditional mediums, including Communication, Communication I, Communication II, a series of stylised sketches of individual figures (male and female) and groups in conversation, hand-drawn in black chalk across the white walls of the small gallery space. The iconography of the form of these sketches most resembles 80s neon signs: the women with full lips and wearing power suits, the men with blank faces and rectangular stripes to denote their hair. All of the tableaux have that cartoonish presence despite their scale. It is only the fragility of the hand-drawn lines that softens the suggestion of commercial motifs with the delicacy of the artist’s hand, visible when you look at them closely.

Dominating the central area of the small gallery of The Walls is a dramatic embroidered cloth, El Bordado, designed by Reading and sewn in Gamarra in Lima, Peru, the largest textile district in South America. The floor-length blue cloth has perky, embroidered basketball motifs including balls, hoops and the segmented outlines of courts, as well as small flourishes and white bows. The cloth is draped and sits somewhat incongruously with the sketches on the wall and the video installation in the corner of the gallery. Thematic connections between the works are clear, from a critique of globalisation’s commercial imperatives, its impact on landscape and the hollowing of art to the sport and performance curatorial impulse of Game Plan. However, there is also a feeling of temporariness in the space which is a little disquieting. Surveying Reading’s previous work, the wit leaps out: bananas carved into dolphins peeping out of cocktail glasses, frenzied performance videos like Be Your Own Boss that cut together footage from corporate videos. This exhibition seems both more sombre and more tenuous, the work of a talented artist in transition.

Kiah Reading’s Be Your Own Boss will be newly exhibited at Metro Arts Galley, Brisbane, 6-23 September. For more about the artist, including a video of the lecture performance, visit his website. Reading’s Pure Reason and Bass, for Liquid Architecture in 2016, can be seen on Vimeo.

Game Plan [In the Zone]: Kiah Reading, Kiah Reading Vs the World, The Walls Art Space and Bleach* Festival, Gold Coast, 1-15 April

“[The publication] They Cannot Take the Sky is part of Behind the Wire, a multi-platform oral history project documenting the lives of asylum seekers detained by the Australian government. The project comprises a podcast called The Messenger (co-produced by, and available through, The Wheeler Centre), and an exhibition at Melbourne’s Immigration Museum until 2 July. Behind the Wire’s team, helped by hundreds of volunteers, has been working nonstop for two years. Their mission is a sustainable infrastructure that lets asylum seekers narrate their experiences and exercise control over what is talked about, which bits enter the public domain, when, in what form.”

A woman dances on a stage with a red fan, a family poses at a giant Buddhist monument while on holidays, a sullen child in a raincoat waits for their parent to take the photo. It’s a personal approach to lost mass history. An archive of half a million negatives salvaged over the last seven years from a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing.

The show at Jeu de Paume features “a selection of video works beginning in the early 1970s and includes Campus’ most recently commissioned project in ultra-high-definition. In his now-classic video Three Transitions (1973), Campus utilized chroma key postproduction to alter the rules of perception and invert the medium’s claims to objective reality. Exploring the duplicity of the interior subject and exterior object, he pursued phenomenological experiments and questioned the fragmentation of the self until incandescence.”

“One of the ‘transitions’ uses chroma-keying to show a burning sheet of paper being replaced with Campus’s own live image—so that the artist observes an illusion of his face being burned—a combination of Magritte-like Surrealism and self-referential minimalism.”

I love films, and I especially love seeing them on a big screen in a dark cinema. I love seeing all sorts of different films: silent films, old films, new films, films from different national cinemas. And while I can find plenty to see, both at the Sydney Film Festival, and the seemingly never-ending stream of national and themed film festivals that crowd the calendar, what I’ve always yearned for is a cinémathèque to provide for Sydney something like the wonderful Melbourne Cinémathèque at ACMI has been doing: a year-round program, a challenging and diverse selection of classic and contemporary films, both retrospectives and thematic series, using archival and new prints sourced from all around the world. I’ve been aware, and jealous of, their program for years; I used to go to Melbourne quite often, and tried to catch a session or two whenever there.

Lost causes

Somehow, however, despite several significant attempts and much talk over the years, Sydney could never achieve anything similar. While it’s often been argued in debates on film culture that not only would audiences profit from such regular screenings of films from other national cinemas, curated seasons of the work of particular directors, screenings of specific genres and of rarely seen gems, but that our own filmmakers and film students could benefit from being exposed to such a rich diversity of filmmaking practice, such ideas have not been enough to make it happen. Suddenly, however, there’s a little ray of hope!

MCA briefly fills gap

Last year I discovered that the Museum of Contemporary Art was having free, curated screenings on Saturday afternoons. I’d already missed some, but I found out in time to see four films by one of my favourite filmmakers, Korean director Hong Sang-Soo, two of which I’d seen but was very happy to see again, and two that I hadn’t—and was delighted with. The next month promised four new Portuguese films curated by film writer and scholar Adrian Martin; the first to screen was Others Will Love the Things I Loved (2014), Manuel Mozos’ loving cinematic essay and tribute to the late João Bénard da Costa, who was apparently a cinephile extraordinaire and one of the most important figures in the history of the Portuguese Cinémathèque (there’s that word again!). I loved this film, even though I knew nothing about either the subject or the filmmaker.

Next in the program were four films by the wonderful Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. But the MCA did make things difficult—screenings were sometimes changed from the Saturday to the Sunday, or to the next week, sometimes cancelled altogether or perhaps played later (without telling you when). And at the end of the year, they finished; the MCA is now using the screening space for video and electronic artworks, connected to its exhibitions.

A previous try

Ironically, it was the MCA that had spent 10 years from the early 90s trying to achieve a vision of an additional building which would house a cinémathèque, encompassing a national gallery, screening venue and study centre for film, video and computer-based media. But despite many high-powered supporters from the film and performing arts sectora, and many meetings, workshops and architectural competitions, the seemingly interminable negotiations between the many interested parties eventually crashed to a halt. When the additional building finally eventuated, it had only one screening room.

A new approach

I had met James Vaughan, the film enthusiast who had been organising the MCA screenings and who was determined to find an alternate venue and some assistance to continue, and when he asked me to join the Sydney Cinémathèque, the volunteer-run film initiative that has now developed a proposal to put to the Sydney City Council for support, I enthusiastically agreed. James had also been inspired by the Melbourne Cinémathèque. As he says, “I lived in Melbourne from 2012 to 2014 and was a regular [there]. There is no debate regarding Melbourne Cinémathèque’s pre-eminence in Australia for the regular screening of rare, experimental and culturally significant cinema.”

Back in Sydney, talking to film friends and colleagues about the lack of any comparable institution here, Vaughan found many lamenting how long Sydney has been bereft of something comparable, and so, working at the MCA, he worked out a way to utilise its theatre space. That experience has led to the current proposal, a weekly guest-curated contemporary cinema program that would build on the success of the MCA initiative.

As Vaughan explains, the regular screenings would provide the Sydney community with access to rare and culturally significant cinema from around the globe. It would also aim to open a dialogue between acclaimed film practitioners, scholars, curators, and the audience. Guest-curated each month by different Australian and international institutions, filmmakers, critics and festival programmers, it should bring some of the most exciting contemporary cinema from around the world to Sydney audiences.

As Vaughan says, “We see this as a rare opportunity to consolidate and expand on what worked so well at the MCA—the creation of a space for the best curators, critics, theorists and practitioners of cinema to be part of an environment where both complementary and contradicting voices are accommodated to affirm, in all its dynamism, the awesome power of cinematic art. If funded we’ll be seeking curatorial partnerships, and we’re also committed to and passionate about everything which would support the screenings—Q&As, panel discussions and live director Skype-ins. We strongly believe that our proposed program which, at its core, is fascinated by the nebulous zone between conventional narrative cinema and long-form video art, has the potential to revitalise screen culture in Sydney.”

Why a cinémathèque?

The name and the model come from the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, which has had a chequered history since it was founded in 1936 through the passion of the legendary Henri Langlois, who started collecting and preserving films in the 1930s. Dedicated to rediscovering, restoring and conserving all sorts of cinema, to make it available for public screenings, it is the first and most famous institution of its kind and is now a cultural icon in France.

After Sydney became the second international City of Film in 2010, joining UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network, a global network of key cities committed to promoting economic development through their creative industries, filmmaker Gillian Armstrong was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald as saying that you have to feel slightly embarrassed about the fact that “we’ve been given this incredible honour: City of Film, and we don’t have a cinémathèque, we don’t have a film centre.” Surely it’s time we did.

Top image credit: Harold Lloyd, Why Worry? (1923), now screening at ACMI Cinematheque

Australian composer Kate Neal’s Never Tilt Your Chair (2017), for which she also designed the instruments, was one of the two works that comprised Never Tilt Your Chair Back On Two Legs, presented by Tura New Music and PICA. It plays on the sense of ritual that surrounds the sanctified family dinner table. The performance space has an air of familiarity with three chairs on three sides of a centrestage table and the fourth side, without a chair, open to the audience, an invitation to be involved in this mealtime.

The performance is a humorous take on the rules that we face at the dinner table, hence the work’s title. The performers lick and kiss knives, put their elbows on the table, throw napkins to the floor, sniff, rub their noses and chew with mouths open. The work utilises ‘extended’ techniques for cutlery, like striking forks and letting them ring—producing tones similar to tuning forks—and then pressing the prongs into the table to bend the pitch and using the mouth to amplify the tone.

The highlight of the staging for this piece is the shimmering cutlery chandelier hanging above the table, with spoons, forks, knives and a ladle at its centre. Towards the end of the first movement the chandelier vibrates, becoming an instrument in its own right and producing a captivatingly eerie and omnipresent dissonant hum.

The second movement sees Louise Devenish, Leah Scholes and Vanessa Tomlinson each move to wooden frames from which dangle slightly different combinations of utensils arranged in ascending pitch order. The performers play these homemade creations as if they are metallophones, initially striking with hard mallets and then moving to a mix of skewers and knives. The sound of cutlery on cutlery evokes a homely feeling reminiscent of those times at the table when everyone is too busy eating to talk, and closes the piece in a very rounded way.

The concert’s programming is masterful in its combination of the bright metallic sound world of Never Tilt Your Chair Back, with its 100 pieces of tuned, often antique cutlery, and the warmth of the wooden instruments and objects deployed in the next work, Dressur (1977). These polar opposite sound worlds successfully complement and contrast with each other, the theatrical nature of the works being their point of connection.

Dressur, a 30-minute work composed in 1977 by Mauricio Kagel, combines visual and auditory elements in a theatrical space. The title comes from the German word for dressage, described by the International Equestrian Federation as “the highest expression of horse training where horse and rider are expected to perform from memory a series of predetermined movements” [program note]. To this end, Dressur features a series of quite complex musical and stage directions to be performed from memory, putting the performers in situations in which the seriousness of the task is juxtaposed with comic outcomes. The audience can’t help but laugh.

Dressur features a multitude of instruments and non-instruments laid out at three stations. Devenish begins at the marimba (the primary melodic instrument in the work) playing quick arpeggiac patterns akin to circus music, to which Scholes and Tomlinson in turn interject with a threatening chair and castanets. Though featuring a single instrument at a time, the work’s combination of sounds and performative elements creates an onslaught of aural and visual information that is incredibly entertaining.

Dressur is instrumental comedy of sorts; the instruments are played incorrectly drawing entertaining connections—for example, castanets used to imitate a typewriter. Devenish begins the work with quick arpeggiac patterns on the marimba (the primary melodic instrument in the work) which are reminiscent of circus music, to which Scholes and Tomlinson in turn interject with a chair and castanets. Highlights include Devenish dramatically up-ending a bag of wood chips onto the floor and Tomlinson unzipping the front of her dress in order to play coconuts positioned on her stomach and chest. Devenish interrupts her colleagues’ playing, dramatically tossing a string of wooden chimes about and, finally, slinging them over her shoulder. Auditorily, Dressur appears to focus on a single percussionist or instrument at a time, but after factoring in the performative elements of the work, the piece is experienced as an incredibly entertaining onslaught of aural and visual information.

Demonstrating their prowess—with dramaturgical assistance from Rèmi Deulceux for Never Tilt Your Chair—the trio delivered immersive performances of engaging, dramatic works executed with impeccable comedic timing, making for a memorable concert experience. With any luck this program will be performed again.

Tura New Music & PICA, Never Tilt Your Chair Back On Two Legs: Never Tilt Your Chair, composer, instrument designer, Kate Neal, dramaturgical consultant Rémi Deulceux; Dressur, composer Mauricio Kagel; musicians Louise Devenish, Leah Scholes, Vanessa Tomlinson; PICA, Perth, 10, 11 April

Top image credit: Vanessa Tomlinson, Never Tilt Your Chair, Tura New Music, photo Bohdan Warchomij

Now in its second year and launching in Sydney this week, the American Essentials film festival brings together an eclectic program of new features, documentaries and classic retrospectives. From Oscar winner Mike Mills’ 1970s-set family drama 20th Century Women, new South Korean-born auteur Kogonada’s intimate romance Columbus and the 1977 Jed Johnson New York comedy Andy Warhol’s Bad, to a new documentary on the visual art of David Lynch, the program traces a rich tradition of restless independent filmmaking. I caught up with American Essentials Artistic Director Richard Sowada to discuss the shifting landscape of festivals and independent cinema, and what the Australian film industry can take away from the work showcased in the program.

LG Like last year’s program, it seems we’re seeing smaller films here that tend to fall through theatrical and festival cracks.

RS They’re becoming rarer to see on any kind of release, these films, because the industry is perhaps losing a bit of trust in the audience, and wanting to take fewer and fewer chances.

LG Is it more economically viable for distributors to bundle these films into a festival, because individually they won’t make money? Is that the mandate?

RS Well, it’s not the mandate but it’s certainly the situation. The mandate behind festivals like this is to bring to light films that would not ordinarily be screened. Often what happens is that film festivals will find themselves going to the traditional marketplaces—Berlin, Sundance, Cannes, Toronto, Rotterdam—and then everything else falls in behind that. So the gene pool of films internationally, at film festivals, is largely from the same source.

LG Do you think these types of festivals are making up for a lack of local arthouse and repertory cinema, especially in Sydney?

RS Yes, the film festivals are filling that gap in screens around the country. There’s a film in American Essentials called Columbus, which is great; but because of its more niche nature [“an architectural appreciation symposium grafted onto the skeleton of a fairly typical Sundance drama,” Jordan Hoffman, Vanity Fair, EDs] I guess business backs away and it’s left for the festivals to screen. But what do you call ‘niche’? Is it the kind of person that you think will see the film, or is it the number of people who will come and see it? My general feeling, as a curator observing the industry, is that people in the industry—whether they’re producers, funding agencies, exhibitors, distributors or even punters—will call something niche if they don’t understand it. In my opinion, the more tailor-made you make the suit, the better it looks, and the more people look at it and go, “Oh wow, that looks cool.”

LG Shouldn’t distributors be creating that need for audiences to see the good films?

RS Yeah. It’s kind of a Catch-22 in many ways, in that these films aren’t being selected for commercial release because films like them have been selected before and failed. The next hit is based on the last success—not the current good idea. It’s a constantly backward-looking industry, and I think that the film sector is suffering from that to a degree, and has been for a little while—with the added pressure now of the Netflixes and the Amazons. The industry is going to have to retrain itself to change its perspective.

LG You’ve talked in the past about the nature of these American independent films, and how they’re not defined necessarily by the size of the budget but by their spirit and ideas. There’s a through-line in American independent cinema that we see in the work here, from the micro- to mid-budget to everything in-between. What can Australian filmmakers take away from this? Why aren’t they making work in this tradition, irrespective of the smaller size of the country?

RS That’s a good question. One [lesson] is you’ve just got to take a risk. Don’t compromise on the idea thinking, ‘Oh, if I go too hard here people won’t get it,’ or ‘No one will buy it.’ People like to be looked in the eye and spoken to directly.

LG Do you think funding bodies affect that grasping for broad audience reach? Is that an outmoded thing? How does it change?

RS Yes, yes. It does come from the funding agents, but it’s not just their fault. It comes from the lack of motivation [from filmmakers], to a degree, or a lack of trust in themselves. And the way that it always changes, every single time—I’m saying with a very broad brushstroke—is by doing it, the breakthrough. As soon as there’s something that busts through with its chest out and its legs kicking, people look at it and go, ‘Oh fuck.’ And that becomes the new norm. And you can throw in so many American examples of that, be they Kevin Smith (Clerks) or Tarantino or Kelly Reichardt.

LG Reichardt’s a great example, because her films, especially the earlier ones, are very low budget—but the ideas are there and the filmmaking’s there. You can’t blame a lack of money or infrastructure or whatever; there’s something else going on.

RS No, you can’t. And when you look at them—we screened Reichardt’s first film, River of Grass [1994], last year—they’re fucking incredible. But that is part of a tradition that includes Dennis Wilson’s Two-Lane Blacktop [1971]. It’s a continuum that can be charted through the individuals and through their ideas.

LG Do Australian filmmakers lack that continuum to draw upon and be a part of?

RS Well, yes and no. There is a big gap, no question, in Australian cinema in the 50s and early 60s. But that’s its own wellspring as well; you don’t necessarily need the traditions of cinema; you need to be in tune with what is around you, in your environment, including cinema. But I think that in Australia—very broadly—there is a lack of understanding of the traditions of international cinema. You know: here are the masterworks—let’s look at the Capras, the Maysles and the Pennebakers, and let’s look at the Bergmans and the Wellses.

LG You do sense this a bit with Australian filmmakers. And again, it’s not their fault necessarily, it’s this culture that doesn’t encourage seeking things out. Although America has the benefit of having very rich cultural channels through which to investigate cinema history, I don’t know if that’s the result of training or schooling in cinema.

RS It’s a lot of everything. But ultimately it’s up to the individual. You can talk about the funding agencies and the educational institutions, but it’s up to the individual. If you are into it, then you are into it, and there’s no stopping access, and there’s no stopping reading about the history, and there’s no stopping experiencing or imitating it. All you need is the motivation to dig into the roots. Musicians do it all the time.

LG And we’re in a moment where you have access to more media than ever before.

RS True. I don’t know what it is; it’s kind of like second-guessing the audience, thinking, ‘How can we sell this film,’ rather than ‘What is this film about?’ Again, I think that filmmakers suffer from the same kind of things that distributors may—and I’m not saying that all do—in that the next film is about the next success, not the current good idea. So that’s one of the takeaways. And it’s easy for me to say, but I wasn’t given my life in the arts. I had to really live it. Don’t be afraid. And look at the traditions.

A leading film curator and screen culture advocate, Richard Sowada is the founder and director of the Revelation Perth International Film Festival (1997-present) and was Head of Film Programs at ACMI (2006-15).

Palace Cinemas, American Essentials Film Festival 2017, Artistic Director Richard Sowada, launching Sydney 9 May, Melbourne 11 May, Canberra 16 May, Brisbane 17 May, Adelaide 18 May

Spread across an ad hoc arrangement of indoor and outdoor furniture, four people huddle around a fire. A fifth person sits away from the group, both a part of it and apart. There is the sound of crickets, and of a river running. We are in the near, “post-electric” future, somewhere in the Eastern United States—an Appalachian forest perhaps. Matt (Brent Hill) is trying to remember an episode of The Simpsons, 1993’s Cape Feare, a parody of the 1962 film Cape Fear and its 1991 remake (both of which, signalling the play’s manifold layers of meta-textuality, are based on John D MacDonald’s 1957 novel The Executioners).

In fits and starts the group pieces the episode together from memory, imperfectly recalling its myriad gags and pop culture references, aping the cosily familiar intonations of the program’s voice actors. Another survivor of the catastrophe that has befallen the country—a total power outage has caused multiple nuclear plants to shut down, leading to fires and explosions (or possibly the fires came first, nobody seems to know for sure)—is assimilated into the group, having winningly provided a final, elusive quote from Cape Feare.

The American linguistics professor Mark Liberman wrote, “The Simpsons has apparently taken over from Shakespeare and the Bible as our culture’s greatest source of idioms, catchphrases and sundry other textual allusions.” It is a related idea—The Simpsons as a sort of ur-text for the post-apocalyptic era—that underpins Anne Washburn’s play, workshopped in 2008 and first produced by US company The Civilians in 2012. Much of the first act’s dialogue is based on group improvisations in which the actors were tasked with recreating a Simpsons episode from memory.

In the second act, set seven years after the first, the program’s cultural currency is reimagined as an actual economy, a post-capitalist black market trading in pop cultural intellectual property—half-remembered ads, sitcoms and hit songs—fashioned into entertainments staged by competing companies of amateur players. In this, there are echoes of other texts—Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (c1351), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and especially Emily St John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven (2014)—that similarly assert, to paraphrase Philip Pullman, the pre-eminence of story in our hierarchy of needs after food and water, shelter and companionship.

The third and final act, taking place 75 years later, dispenses with the previous act’s naturalistic and demotic modes, recasting cultural memory as liturgy by way of musical theatre (one of the many homages of Cape Feare is to Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera HMS Pinafore) and a sort of multi-generational Chinese Whispers. Anne Washburn’s pop- and rap-mining lyrics, in combination with Michael Friedman’s genre-hopping score (played live by multi-instrumentalist Carol Young), add a further layer of quotation as a chorus of shades—nightmarish distortions of The Simpsons’ principal cast decked out in designer Jonathon Oxlade’s renaissance-style costumes—blurrily recreates Cape Feare’s climactic houseboat scene. Significantly, it is the titular Mr Burns, emblem of corporate America and owner of the Springfield nuclear power plant, who is cast as the villain, replacing the original episode’s criminal mastermind Sideshow Bob.

It is an extraordinary, richly theatrical sequence—impeccably staged by choreographer Lucas Jervies and director Imara Savage, not for the first time demonstrating her affinity for high concept comedy—that signals not only The Simpsons’ primacy as an enduring cultural touchstone, but the ability of story, rendered as mythology, to outlive civilisation itself. (In The Decameron, a group of people fleeing the catastrophic effects of the Black Death hole up in an isolated villa in the Florentine countryside and swap 100 stories.) The late John Berger, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” suggested in Ways of Seeing that “[w]hen the art of the past ceases to be viewed nostalgically, the works will cease to be holy relics.” For all Mr Burns’ irreverence and teasing metatheatricality, Washburn shows us, I think, the flipside of this idea—art, in its dominant 21st century form of pop culture, as holy relic in an age when the means of mechanical reproduction have almost entirely broken down. In this way, too, I think the play can be read as a love letter to theatre, to its rituals of mimesis and collective experience. No doubt Washburn’s credible vision of a ruined United States—rendered here by Oxlade with commendable austerity and, especially in the second act, an inventive sense of making-do—is a sobering one, but this is not The Road. There is hope, even relief, in the play’s depiction of a return to a kind of primitivism, a sense perhaps of the necessary closing of a circle.

Anchored by music theatre specialists Mitchell Butel, Esther Hannaford and Brent Hill—the latter fresh from a fine performance in Sydney Theatre Company’s Chimerica, in which he played another American—the cast are uniformly excellent, convincingly transitioning from the first act’s claustrophobic unease to the play’s all-singing, all-dancing conclusion. Put like that, Mr Burns sounds like an overstretched exercise in the ironic subversion of dystopian tropes but Washburn’s writing, however knowing or freewheeling, is buttressed by a moral commitment that feels genuine. As President Donald Trump passes his 100th day in office, it’s a little too easy to say that this is a play for our times.

State Theatre Company and Belvoir, Mr Burns, writer Anne Washburn, score Michael Friedman, director Imara Savage, designer Jonathan Oxlade; Space Theatre, Adelaide, 22 April-13 May; Belvoir, Sydney, 19 May-25 June

Lauren stumbles on a rich review in Artlink by Sasha Grbich of two exhibitions at Samstag Museum, Adelaide, diving into maritime life in the age of the Anthropocene. Countercurrents and The Ocean After Nature mix political economy, migration politics, art history and natural history, and this review features strange images from both shows, summoning a vision of rising tides, mountainous creatures and a threatened oceanic sublime.

“2016 closed as the most recent hottest year on record globally. In its wake continents and islands continue to surrender to rising tides as dusty bodies to a warming salty bath. The Ocean After Nature, curated by Alaina Claire Feldman (ICI, New York), delves ambitiously into the task of exploring life in the Anthropocene. Feldman agrees that humans have superseded nature and the exhibition provides an intricate and expansive collection of critically contemporary presentations on the ocean that yet manage to retain the qualities of wonder and incommensurability intrinsic to its amorphous fluid history.”

“For a novelist, going over the same sequence of events from several different perspectives is a technical challenge to be met through changes of focus and narrative voice. In television, repeated footage is repeated footage, even if the camera angles change or the scripting is differently edited. This means the episodes must engage more fully in the personal storylines of the six characters, filling out the details of their own relationships. As we are drawn successively into the stories of Joe, Alex, Gina, Angela and Mitch, the emotional overload becomes suffocating. Rows break out in every scene; every shot seems to be a close-up of someone tearing up or letting rip.”

“Situated in New York, this post-apocalyptic film predates a fierce irony in the future, where walls separate Americans not from immigrants, but from its own prisoners.”

Lost causes

MCA briefly fills gap

A previous try

A new approach

Why a cinémathèque?

LG Like last year’s program, it seems we’re seeing smaller films here that tend to fall through theatrical and festival cracks.

RS They’re becoming rarer to see on any kind of release, these films, because the industry is perhaps losing a bit of trust in the audience, and wanting to take fewer and fewer chances.

LG Is it more economically viable for distributors to bundle these films into a festival, because individually they won’t make money? Is that the mandate?

LG Do you think these types of festivals are making up for a lack of local arthouse and repertory cinema, especially in Sydney?

LG Shouldn’t distributors be creating that need for audiences to see the good films?

LG Do you think funding bodies affect that grasping for broad audience reach? Is that an outmoded thing? How does it change?

LG And we’re in a moment where you have access to more media than ever before.

Palace Cinemas, American Essentials Film Festival 2017, Artistic Director Richard Sowada, launching Sydney 9 May, Melbourne 11 May, Canberra 16 May, Brisbane 17 May, Adelaide 18 May

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May 2017

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Lost causes

MCA briefly fills gap

A previous try

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Why a cinémathèque?

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