Melbourne on Film: Cinema That Defines Our City |
BOOK: MELBOURNE ON FILM: CINEMA THAT DEFINES OUR CITY
Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF)
A collection of bold new writing capturing Melbourne's identity in cinema
Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) is Australia's most revered celebration of cinema. It is one of the world's oldest and most storied film festivals, continuously running since 1952. To commemorate MIFF's 70th anniversary, Black Inc. has partnered with the festival to produce an exciting collection of essays on Melbourne-made cinema.
Melbourne has a long, rich and diverse film history. It was the city where the first ever feature-length film was screened in 1906 - The Story of the Kelly Gang. It was also the birthplace of classics like Monkey Grip, Ghosts ... of the Civil Dead, The Castle and Mad Max, plus many fascinating shorts and experimental films. Melbourne on Film is both a celebration of filmmaking in Melbourne, and a tribute to the city's unique creative history.
The first collection of its kind, it includes personal reflections on the legacy and influence of these key films by some of the city's favourite writers, including Christos Tsiolkas, Sarah Krasnostein, John Safran, Osman Faruqi, Tristen Harwood and Judith Lucy. Melbourne on Film will be treasured by cinephiles and readers of intelligent essays on arts and culture.
Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) is a not-for-profit organisation that has been continuously running since 1952, making it the leading film festival in Australia and one of the world's oldest film festivals, alongside Cannes and Berlin.
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Melbourne on Film
Cinema That Defines Our City
By: Melbourne International Film Festival
Published: 2nd August 2022
ISBN: 9781760643928
Number Of Pages: 320
Format: Paperback & eBook
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REVIEW
Reviewed by OWEN RICHARDSON
This collection of essays has been published in connection with the Melbourne On Film strand of this year's Melbourne International Film Festival. There is an introduction by Christos Tsiolkas, but no editor is listed. As many of the opening sentences show, the brief, wherever it came from, must have included an encouragement to take the personal approach.
" As a child, many of our family holidays were spent driving our brown Ford Falcon station wagon across the Dukes then Western Highways, from Adelaide to Melbourne' ' (Kylie Maslen on The Club); " As a child, I wanted to be a nun' ' (Fiona Giles on Noise); " I first saw Dogs in Space at the Pitt Street Cinema complex in Sydney's CBD on a muggy, cloudy Saturday arvo in 1987'' (Tim Rogers); " I once met a bush poet who told me that there are two poets in Australia who make money from their poetry, and they both write about Australia' ' (Mish Grigor on Death in Brunswick); and " I didn't see the movie Malcolm when it came out in 1986 because I was too busy being an adulteress' ' (Judith Lucy on Malcolm).
Sometimes the cine-memoir approach is fruitful - a scene-specific cult movie such as Dogs in Space will enter people's lives in a particularly personal way; sometimes, as with Judith Lucy, funny and charming though her piece is - of course! - it seems like a way not to talk about the movie at all.
In Ronnie Scott's essay about Monkey Grip, though, the personal comes through not in reminiscence but in recreating spectatorship: although he writes that " I wanted to try to see, if I could, the thing itself'' , in the process he creates another thing, a writerly, imaginative evocation of the experience of the thing.
Osman Faruqi (who works for this masthead) also begins in personal mode, talking about his taxi-driver father's love of The Castle, but this is a way into a discussion of the film's politics of identity. The news is not good: being white and working class, Darryl Kerrigan might well nowadays be drawn to One Nation. If this sounds a bit too paranoid, Faruqi also acknowledges that the film's humanism shows more faith in the Kerrigans of this world.
The more formal, critical pieces make a good showing. Sarah Krasnostein on Ghosts ... of the Civil Dead weighs up the film's politics while also paying due attention to John Hillcoat's superlative visual sense.
Rebecca Harkins-Cross moves deftly between the images on the screen (and the voices on the soundtrack) and the life of the filmmaker in her essay about Corinne Cantrill's experimental, autobiographical film In This Life's Body. Tristen Harwood takes the scenic route in his essay on Mad Max, taking in settler violence and capitalism - and calls a section of his essay " Personal Narrative'' .
Isabella Trimboli writes about the Carlton Underground of the sixties, unhobbled by deference or nostalgia for the glorious bohemian past: all those movies with angsty male heroes. In the same vein, Mish Grigor points out that Death in Brunswick has not aged well: it actually seemed not unproblematic back then, even by the unenlightened standards of 1990. Not problematic is Barbara Creed's groundbreaking Homosexuality: A Film for Discussion, written about here by Kate Jinx, a film that can still move with its sense of openness and decency - the poignant reasonableness of the liberation movement.
John Safran provides background more than criticism in his piece about Oz, Chris Lofven's daggy, loveable 1976 version of The Wizard of Oz, with Dorothy off to see the last concert by the Wizard, a gender-bending rock and roller, accompanied by a brainless surfie , a cowardly member of the Lions bikie gang, and a heartless motor mechanic. The background is fun, film gossip: "' Bruce [Spence] was so peed off he refused to be involved in the marketing and promotion,' Chris says '... An a-hole from start to finish .'' '
Martin Flanagan also gives background to The Story of the Kelly Gang, filling us in on that obscure, 1906 historical episode to which not enough attention has been paid, and talks about Kelly's cultural afterlife, without even mentioning the Mick Jagger/Tony Richardson or Heath Ledger/Gregor Jordan movies.
Does a picture of Melbourne emerge from these essays and these movies? Up to a point: Melbourne in these films is a multicultural city, a bohemian city, a city - and a culture - not yet gentrified (here's my cine-memoir : rewatching the movies back to back, I found myself boggling at all that cheap innersuburban housing).
Nowadays, it seems that when Melbourne appears on film , it is mostly pretending to be somewhere else.
This review by OWEN RICHARDSON is from the September 16, 2022 issue of The Age Digital Edition. To subscribe, visit "https://www.theage.com.au".
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