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John Waters' PSA for the Landmark Nuart in Los Angeles...


Ecoplex cinema program for the 2010 Golden Plains Festival is here

Marinetti OST CD launch, Weds 9th December

Marinetti (ACMI screening, & OST CD liners)

Albie Thoms' Marinetti was the culmination of the synthetic environments that the UBU group had pioneered in Australia; festive public 'happenings' that combined the energy and volume of creative rock and jazz with the mesmeric effect of multi-dimensional lightshows. Another kind of culmination: Marinetti records most of the principal collaborators in the UBU film group, like Aggy Read and the Perrys. Uniquely valuable as a document of Australia's late 1960s counter-culture, the soundtrack provides the best indication of the unrestrained liberty that bands like Tully and the John Sangster Underground band - some of whose members perform on this recording - were famously achieving in their improvisations of the period.

This is the sound of the acid-stained Down Underground. Led by the irrepressibly eccentric multi-instrumentalist, John Sangster, the sextet of players included veterans of Sydney psych ensembles Tully and the Nutwood Rug Band, as well as accomplished sidemen from the Don Burrows and Bernie McGann groups. By the time they improvised the soundtrack recording to a screening of the film, guitarist Michael Barnes was performing alongside Sangster for the Harry M Miller production of Hair. Tully mainstay, Rick Lockwood, can be heard on flute, sax, and a raucously untutored violin. New Zealand expatriate, Dave McRae, would further explore the sound of organ enhanced by outboard effects in his later work with UK jazz-prog group, Nucleus, and Daevid Allen's post-Soft Machine Matching Mole; for several years he was musical director for British comedy series, The Goodies. Drummer, Alan Turnbull, was a member of the classic Burrows quartet. George Thompson, on bass, would record again with Sangster in support of Sister Janet Mead's landmark album of inspirational christian pop.

The inital tone of the soundtrack is idyllic in its gentle lyricism, and the naive candour of overheard conversation. Across the next 80 minutes Harry Medax builds the mix - up to 6 additional tracks woven over and around the musicians - towards a crescendo of cacophonous simultaneity... Birdsong and the barking of dogs collide with fragmented needle-drops of The Doors and The Beatles. There are whispered reassurances, anguished shouts, and the wholesale reprise of Thoms and Gerry Dupal's musique concrete composition, De Moon Service, originally realised as accompaniment to sculptor (and computroid, from ABC TV's SciFi series, Interpretaris) Gordon Mutch's film, Hallucinagenia. A moment of Ravel's Bolero, start of reel 3, wryly harkens to one of Thoms' earliest shorts.

Beyond the threshold of conscious perception, Thoms launches his audience into a maelstrom of sound and vision. The group delirium unspooling in the dark is consistent with his notion of a 'cinema of cruelty': the resort to a course of homeopathic madness prescribed by Antonin Artaud. The film certainly has people; 'characters' even, and aplenty - but no actual characters as such. Rather than something as facile as telling a story, the film is a distilled concentrate of lysergic impression, a sacrament of celluloid metaphysics.

(et cetera etc!)

40th anniversary screening, Saturday afternoon at the ACMI. Director, Albie Thoms in attendance. Not for the puny-lobed!

And: premiere release for the soundtrack, on CD from Roundtable - new joint venture of James from Votary, and Jeff from Round and Round Records. Available at the screening this weekend.

Details of launch party to follow...

Shortly: even more unimagined Sangster gems, pried from the archives...

Aus TV hosts 2: local shocker prompts breathless apoplexy

speaking of the living dead...

Here is Bill Collins losing his mittens over one of the greatest films ever made in aus:



... apologies for sketchy quality of the video; this is off-air from the solitary tv broadcast of 'Wake In Fright', 10 network in 1989.

More info on the film: entries at imdb & wikipedia

Bill Collins has always creeped me out a little. I think he reminds me of Mr Joyboy, from Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One (a top read, & recommended)

Aus TV Hosts 1: Hideously yours, Deadly

Very little by way of information available about this one...



Deadly Earnest was a late-night television host on the 0-10 network to Australian capital cities at 1960s' decadal cusp. For reasons presumably involving the state of the network back then, there was a different Deadly for each city (tho' Perth & Adelaide both shared Hedley Cullen in 1975)

Most prominent among them, & seemingly progenitor of the idea, was the Sydney Deadly; a young drama student, UK expat, name of Ian Bannerman.

By way of ancillary merchandising, this LP - now horribly obscured by history. I spent an age scaring one up; eventually, I landed 2 in the same week. High sherrifs of both the record labels I work for have heard it, but I think we're all in agreement: this is more interesting as an historical artefact, per se, than as actual music. If neither of those companies will be licensing it for re-issue, I figured at least to restore it to public attentions (however small they might be).

Producer, Ron Wills, was a life-long champion of Australian music and had recorded Slim Dusty's 'A Pub With No Beer' in 1957. Co-lyricist & occasional backing vocalist, John Brindle, was a radio announcer for 2CH. No available information on the session players, tho' they might include members of Max Merritt's backing group, The Meteors (whose 3rd LP Wills was also producing around this same time)

You can download the album rip, here

Melbourne's Deadly was Ralph Baker; that link will direct you to infos on a personal appearance from 1993.

oh... you're a "reader"

docs on the DL:

English translation of Michel Chion's Guide des objets sonores: Pierre Schaeffer et la recherche musicale (via EARS)

Gene Youngblood's Expanded Cinema

Sheldon Renan's An Introduction to the American Underground Film

... Sheldon Renan is an interesting character: founder of the Pacific Film Archive, he's also the director of some powerful experimental cinema. Most of those titles do not appear on imdb, but his The Killing Of America is a scarifying montage of USAmerikkkan verite violence - a big hit for Palace Video (or maybe Roadshow?), back in the halcyon days of VHS home rental.

Caperucita y Pulgarcito contra los monstruos

elsewise: Germaine Greer has been weighing in on fairytales closer to home, & more recent...

Listen w/ Henson

Fortuitous ebay score: a Jim Henson novelty 45 from 1960 - "Tick-Tock Sick" & "The Countryside"; 2 sides of crypto-beatnik wordjazz riffage w/ amply swinging utility percussion in back... DL the audio here.

Jim Henson retrospective happens at the ACMI in September: encompassing most aspects of his work, from early anarchic commercials (see below), experimental routines with electronic music pioneers Raymond Scott & Walter Sear, thru to more familiar muppets movies & tv shows. Program details after that link...

some correspondences: Grandieux>>Lynch>>Bunuel>>the Spanish Civil War

(reverse order)

Y/day, one of the local op shops yielded up a book on the Spanish Civil War. Interesting fact at p. 53:

"... after the collapse of the Bourbons in the Napoleonic Wars, the Church, gaining popularity from its championship of the opposition to Napoleon, became the centre of resistance to liberal ideas. Its most violent protagonists grouped themselves into the Society of the Exterminating Angel."
(Hugh Thomas, "The Spanish Civil War" 1961 Penguin p/b)

Which would merely serve to confirm something already well known (I guess): Bunuel's films are taking place in all kinds of amazing metatextual arenas. The quote above provides a wry joke on the 'protagonists' of another Spanish drama, his El Angel exterminador (1962) - suggesting a sinister motive for that seemingly innocent bourgeois dinner party. Bunuel's fantasy of revenge on Falangist conspirators? Maybe...

Anyways, Bunuel was alike to David Lynch (and very few others) in that he often took responsibility for sound chores with his films. Lynch is more given to ominous timbral mass; Bunuel's soundtracks are punctuated by a sly form of sonic surrealism. I treated with some of this for the 'cognitive dissonance' series for The Night Air (ABC RN), & Aranda makes mention of it in his Bunuel bio-crit... But listen to some of the off-camera but diegetic sound effects in (especially) The Milky Way or The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie & you'll hear what I mean.

Whether consciously or not, Lynch's most recent (& remarkable) feature, Inland Empire, owes a considerable debt to a film by Philippe Grandieux of a couple years previous: La Vie nouvelle. This is true not just of both the audio-image technique, but also of its seedy reckoning with a sexuality that might encompass prostitution and violence, and a disjointed narrative structure that never completely explicates just WTF?!? is actually going on. Both films might be surveying a certain kind of mental landscape; the margins of LA, in the case of Lynch's film, and a darkly visioned underbelly of former Iron Curtain countries (the presence of the UNProFor peacekeepers suggests Sarajevo) in the Grandrieux... what the situationists used to call 'psychogeography'.


Lotsa links:

Exterminating Angel review on Slant

some Bunuel action from senses of cinema

Calanda's Bunuel Centre

Religion in the films of Bunuel

Inland Empire homepage

Adrian Martin on La Vie nouvelle, at KinoEye

An interview with Grandrieux, from Martin's Rouge

Another piece on La Vie nouvelle and more, here

Toronto Psychogeographical Society

Psychogeography and the derive, by Sadie Plant

DIY cinema notes (local)

Nice coverage in today's Age for my friend (one-time Brisbane art/punk compeer), Dean McInerny. A link to the article is here

... Had the pleasure of dinner w/ Dean twice in the last week; an avuncular cat & possessed of a rare and lucid intelligence. Timecapsules is his regular intervention into local screen culture & his venue, a muy simpatico bar/gallery within a Collingwood warehouse conversion, is probably the most agreeable local forum for film screenings.

Irving Gribbish celebrated 10 years of continuous screenings with his Splodge! Film Society at the Empress of India Hotel, late last year - a milestone that passed seemingly unremarked in the local media. (Irving probably needs to do something about maintaining his on-line presence, but it is also remarkable that he should be so casual about it...)

Anyways, Dean related to me part of his interview/conversation (missing from the published text), & he made the point that a contemporary audience is accustomed to the phenomenon of a DJ choosing a mix of tunes; why not a film curator doing the same thing in a public space, but with the moving image? And while Dean is quick to acknowledge the evident differences in the social functions of music & cinema, he has a point - Irving has exhaustive historical smarts on US comedy & animation (among other things); Dean has an acute sensitivity to radical politics & camp aesthetics. The audience at their screenings is assured of revelations, even when viewing seemingly familiar films. Those epiphanies proceed from the respective curatorship.

... Of course I tend to think the whole thing is essentially unsustainable at a personal level - the audiences are typically modest and diminishing all the time. How much time & energy (not to mention: your own money) can a curator commit to a project like this? Thankfully, they persist.

(An historico-legal aside: film societies in Australia began in the 1960s on university campuses. While film societies presume a measure of, unnh, "discretion" in the application of copyright law to their activities, the law as-such only provides formal exemptions to strictly "educational" screenings...

So what happened? Well, after the original drafting of Australian copyright law in 1968, social agitators of a cultured persuasion recognised that film societies were a productive means of building and supporting creative communities. This trend is exemplified by the Workers Entertainment Association, operating out of Sydney...

If they changed their name to the WEA Film Study Group to facilitate some limited state funding, they never compromised their unique (imminently oppositional) political stance. Extreme art, as workingpeople's culture. For cheap! And with trade union affiliation!)

* & not defunct, as previously stated - check the link...

I think everyone that persists at this particular endeavour shares some variety of that politic. The point is: cinema is a social phenomenon.

The alternative? Atomised individuals staring into their mobile phones...


... which finds a certain correspondence with this great bit of investigative journalism into the politics & commercial interests behind facebook, from the Guardian

More in this thread, "shortly". Meantime, some links:

Unlike to ACMI - which arguably deserves to be the subject of an ACCC lawsuit in the Federal Court because its commercial operations (repertory cinema, festival venue) are both state-subsidised and in direct competition with commercial cinema operations (the government isn't supposed to compete with existing private industries!) - the new Australian Cinematheque is showing some remarkable programs; imported prints, curated for a local audience...

Head of film programming at ACMI is Richard Sowada; interesting character with some fascinating perspectives on cinema exhibition in Australia. He really needs to think on ACMI's breach of Federal law, but...

Jack Stevenson is one of the most prominent champions of this area internationally. Here's a link to my review of his book (which is great: mostly (the book, that is)).

Senses of Cinema's Film Culture Forum, from a couple years back.