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| Unknown Pleasures: Australian independent cinema A series of regular screenings featuring the best of Australian independent cinema, both classic and contemporary, with discussions with the filmmakers. Curators/presenters: Chris Luscri, Bill Mousoulis Guest programmers: Dirk de Bruyn, Digby Houghton, Colin Hodson Assistant/videographer: Colin Hodson read more |
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Thank you to our supporters Unknown Pleasures is self-funded by Chris Luscri and Bill Mousoulis. It receives no government funding and it has no sponsors. |
INFO FOR SCREENINGS: Our main venue is the Thornbury Picture House, |
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Tuesday, Feb 13, 8:20 pm |
Content/Trigger warning: This program includes single frame animation that can induce a strobe-like effect.
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Nick Ostrovskis Flashback
Films in screening order:
Family Album (Super 8, 7 mins, 1983, Silent) Brain Surge (16mm, 16:30 mins, 1992, Music by Chris Knowles)
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Backyard |
City By A River
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Dirk
de Bruyn, guest programmer
Dirk de Bruyn and Bill Mousoulis Zoom video interview
Dirk de Bruyn radio interview
Dirk de Bruyn and Bill Mousoulis radio interview (from 25 minute mark) |
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City By A River |
Family Album
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“It's been exciting to see Nick Ostrovskis' silent films which are so daring and yet elegantly put together (using in Super-8 re-photographed slides). The success of these films is partly in the pace of changes and the intrepid use of saturated hues. Because there is no auditory experience, I for one tune into something which is not music but is a kind of meta-music when I see Nick's films...”
“Brain Surge by Nick Ostrovskis newly blown up to 16mm in San Francisco and now with a soundtrack by Chris Knowles is the best colour Super-8 blow up I've ever seen, colour saturation excellent, but my memory somehow misses those deep greens, blues and impenetrable blacks, or is it my memory that's missing?”
“On Lens Spasm: Frenetic, pulsating black-and-white reeling to spectrum-coloured configurations and animated scratched emulsion images.” |
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Lens Spasm |
Man in A Window
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Tuesday, March 12, 6:25 pm |
Richard Lowenstein is a Melbourne based filmmaker who first started off making music videos for the likes of INXS where he met Michael Hutchence. Hutchence would play a pivotal role in Lowenstein’s iconic 1986 post-punk homage to Richmond squalor Dogs in Space.
His debut feature film Strikebound (1983) explored the Wonthaggi miners’ strike and was based on his mother Wendy Lowenstein’s unpublished book Dead Men Don't Dig Coal.
Lowenstein has continued to mix the comical with the political in films like He Died with A Felafel in His Hand (2001) concerning a young man enduring a quarter life crisis as he backpacks across the east coast of Australia.
More recently, documentaries have concerned famous Australian musicians like Michael Hutchence (Mystify, 2019) and Rowland S. Howard (Autoluminescent, 2011).
Currently, Lowenstein is preparing a feature-length version of a film (Don’t Be Too Polite Girls) about his mother Wendy Lowenstein (1927-2006), an important member of the folk movement in Australia and author of oral histories like The Immigrants, and Shirley Andrews (1915-2001), a dance historian and pioneering Indigenous rights activist. We present a half-hour teaser for Don’t Be Too Polite Girls.
We will also screen his very first film, the short film Evictions (1979), newly restored to HD digital. Evictions is based on Lowenstein’s mother’s oral history from 1978 Weevils in the Flour. It is a doco-drama set in Melbourne during the Great Depression and looks at the organisation of the unemployed as they combat police enforcement.
Digby Houghton, guest programmer
Richard Lowenstein and Digby Houghton Zoom video interview
Richard Lowenstein radio interview (from 19 minute mark) |
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Evictions |
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Don't Be Too Polite Girls |
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Tuesday, April 16, 8:30 pm |
Peter Tammer's film Flausfilm is an extraordinary documentary of Flaus. Punctuated by a cryptic crossword devised by Flaus being filled in (Flaus was a lover of words, of literature), the film contains excerpts from films Flaus has acted in, films Flaus has loved and spoken about, and then all kinds of documentary footage of Flaus doing various things: on air at 3RRR with Paul Harris, at recording studios making his legendary voice-overs for ads, at home grappling with computers or relaxing with family and friends, at home trying to pack his things to move to his partner Natalie's house in Hampton (an extremely stressful time for both). It's not a conventional documentary of course, it's a vérité recording of Flaus the man, and none of the clips from the films have captions to identify them. Everything is raw here, the "primary source" on display, with no talking head commentary from anyone explaining the films or Flaus the person.
In a way, Flausfilm has captured Flaus in his prime, in his 50s, through the mid '80s to the early '90s. To say this film is a valuable document of Flaus the person is an extreme understatement. As a portrait, it's not pandering or hagiographical, it's real and unadorned, a quality Tammer has displayed in many of his other films, with his approach to his documentary subjects. Flausfilm also has razor-like editing by Kit Guyatt (in collaboration with Tammer, who created the film's structure in its first phase of editing in 1991-2), who was instrumental in helping Tammer complete the film from 2006 to 2009, after the initial post-production of it got stalled in the early-mid '90s. The film is clearly structured in sections, with seemingly disparate elements actually grouped together by theme or tone.
Seen now, in 2024, on the eve of Flaus' 90th birthday (and his failing health), Flausfilm is an incredibly moving portrait of a unique figure in Australia's film scene for the past 60 years now. If Flaus used to complain that film directors never cast him as himself, i.e. as a tortured intellectual, Flausfilm has now given him that honour, showing him in all his ragged glory.
— Bill Mousoulis, programmer.
“Flausfilm: the contracted title comes about because it is the answer to a cryptic crossword clue – a crossword devised by Flaus himself. This becomes a narrating, structuring device that organises the film, as words like Action, Average and Therapist introduce its sections. The montage, by Tammer and editor Kit Guyatt, then proceeds by Eisensteinian association: it juxtaposes clips from films and advertisements that Flaus has acted in; candid footage (shot by Tammer, mostly between 1987 and 1992) of Flaus doing voice-over jobs or packing up (a painful process!) one home in order to move into another with his partner, Natalie de Maccus ....
Peter Tammer and Bill Mousoulis Zoom video interview |
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Tuesday, May 14, 8:20 pm |
Carmen-Sibha Keiso is an experimental filmmaker, sound artist (DJ), writer and poet hailing from the fringes of inner-city Melbourne. Keiso’s practice aims to critique the banality of modern day living by showing the complexity of humans’ existence in the contemporary world. Keiso has prodded the peripheries of the internet as long as I can remember (since 2009), when she was a notorious Tumblr poster. Her fascination with isolation and the mundanity of life is shown in her solo show Me diations at artist run initiative ‘Meow’ – an art collective that Carmen has filmed extensively since 2018 – featuring a series of photographs from her time in hotel quarantine in 2021. In late 2019 Keiso ventured to New York City where she met the late great experimental composer and filmmaker Phill Niblock and worked as his archivist. Keiso is interested in collaborative practices like her expanded literary workshop Read the Room, in which participants spend a short period of time workshopping their writing together before presenting their work to the public. During her honours year at the Victorian College of the Arts, Keiso was gripped with a strong urge to make a feature film titled Love & Fascism in the 21st Century. It is a truly singular work that is self-consciously aware of the limitations of progress humans strive to achieve, and we are pleased to present this debut feature from her. Love & Fascism is the definitive Duchampian reaction to the ineptitude of progress in the modern world. It’s a sentimental essay-film about longing and love in the vein of Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma – not to be missed. Digby Houghton, guest programmer “In
Victorian College of the Arts graduate Carmen-Sibha Keiso’s Love
& Fascism in the 21st Century, a process of seeking
authenticity was realised through a feature-length, collaborative
essay-film, which dismantled rhetoric of methodology and modern
theatre with monologue and meta interrogations of performativity.” “[Meow TV] sits in an uneven space between documentation and the way in which documents function within the self-mythologising system of art. It records a small scene at a certain time, while parodying the possibility of a truthful document.” https://offsite.westspace.org.au/work/meowtv-episode-1-2-3-4/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8O9e6yMVB0&ab_channel=CalumLockey “[Love
& Fascism in the 21st Century] is literary in the sense
that it references '70s experimental cut-up praxis and the Theatre of
the Absurd. It is film-making (or writing) experiencing an identity
crisis, particularly in the sense that each ‘character,’ is
comprised of many disembodied voices narrating in (un)familiar euro
accents.” https://letterboxd.com/ubu_r/film/love-fascism-in-the-21st-century/
Separating the art from the artist
Carmen-Sibha Keiso and Digby Houghton and Bill Mousoulis Zoom video interview
Digby Houghton radio interview (at the beginning, of May 11 show) |
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Tuesday, July 9, 8:30 pm |
Celia is Ann Turner’s debut feature length movie from 1989 about
childhood showing the conservatism of Australian politics at the
height of the Red Scare. Set during 1958 in the quaint suburb of
Surrey Hills in Melbourne, the film retroactively uses the Cold War and the
paranoia of the Red Scare engulfing Australia. Turner uses this
conflict as a backdrop to explore wider issues of conflict between
neighbours, political allegiances and school peers. The brooding
film has recently become championed by horror fanatics because of the
recurring Hobyah story told throughout. A new family move in next door to Celia consisting of the father Steve (Alexander Hutchinson) and his wife Alice (Victoria Longley). Steve and Ray both work for the same company (the Postmaster-General's Department) but hardly see one another. Celia is curious about Steve and Alice’s Communist sentiments and begins spending more time at the Tanner’s house. Inspector Bourke (William Zappa), Ray’s brother, is iron-fisted and suspicious of the new neighbours. Celia takes sanctuary in her pet Rabbit called Murgatroyd. However, history overshadows the film as rabbits become outlawed by Victorian Premier Henry Bolte causing tension for Celia. Turner’s film blends recurring tropes of her films including characters who appear distressed, suspicious and distrustful when in their home. Ann Turner was a student at Swinburne University (which would become VCA) under the guidance of Peter Tammer. Her graduate film Flesh on Glass was made in 1981 before making Celia her debut feature film in 1989. This would lead to a career as a screenwriter (Turtle Beach for director Stephen Wallace in 1992) and as a director with the further feature films Hammers Over the Anvil (1993), Dallas Doll (1994) and more recently Irresistible (2006). Digby Houghton, guest programmer Ann Turner and Digby Houghton Zoom video interview
Ann Turner radio interview (from 16:13 on June 29 show)
“Celia’s eerie
atmosphere is situated in this new temporality for leftists, who
found themselves not as the inheritors of the future but relegated to
the domain of memory.” “The
arid Australian landscape is at once banal and mysterious; the
hideous creatures stalking Celia's favourite fiction are as real to
her as the taunts of an obnoxious cousin.” |
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Tuesday, September 24, 8:35 pm |
.ON. and The Kidnappers .ON. (2002, newly restored) and The Kidnappers (2008) are each made by two
Kiwi-originating filmmakers, Colin Hodson and Graham Osborne, now
both based in, and making films, in Australia: Melbourne and Sydney
respectively. Attempting
to exorcise or at least resolve the violence of their antipodean
upbringings by fleeing to New York to get a dose of the downtown
music and art scene of the '80s-'90s, Hodson and Osborne met in the
Lower East Side of New York City, became fast friends, and worked on
a few film projects as actors before losing touch for 10 years,
finally meeting in Melbourne after a period of 20 years. In
the gap, their developing aesthetic styles were remarkably akin, and
both had made movies peopled with the same characters they were
running around with in the NY period: Hodson's .ON. and the
Osborne-penned Ethan's Lawyer (2005),
directed by Nicola Tranquillino, explored the dynamics of the very
same people with both Hodson and Osborne located as the central
characters, although neither knew about the projects until after they
were completed. This positioning of the filmmakers as
the performers within the work takes a cue from the performance art
and theatre of the era, Karen Finlay, or Ron Vawter's Roy Cohen/Jack
Smith (1994),
for instance, whose lived experience provided the gist for his later
performances. The
similarities are also apparent in the stylistic deployment of the
films. Osborne's The Kidnappers verité-styled film uses some
of the same collaborators from the NY period (writer and director
Paul Fries, actress Billie Sola Fries and musicians), but is shot in
New South Wales. The same improv style and handheld shooting, centred
on the director as actor is also seen in .ON. , although in this
case, while the film is wholly based on the New York experience, it
is transposed to New Zealand, but with an almost unrecognisable,
airless, inner city feel. Colin
Hodson: Graham
Osborne: Both
filmmakers will be at this event for a Q&A. - Colin Hodson, guest programmer Colin Hodson and Graham Osborne Zoom video interview |
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.ON. |
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The Kidnappers |
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Tuesday, October 15, 8:30pm |
Darcy Gladwin is a free-spirited, nomadic artist who was born in New Zealand, but has spent many years in each of New Zealand, Australia, England, and India (where his next feature film is set). People in Melbourne would know him well from the alternative arts scene of Brunswick, where Gladwin thrived in the 2010s. It's an extraordinary film in that it's not really a film (satire or otherwise) about the cult leader Sachimo (played brilliantly by Shane Hollands, with his Bob Dylan-like gait and attitude), but a film about pychoses and distorted perpectives. Whilst the focus is on Sachimo and secondarily on the intense artist in his studio (Marko Maglaic), we get telling glimpses of hangers-on and journalists, each with their own mad perspectives. It's a swirling mix of people and moments, a scattershot form that never settles, and it is all enlivened by a punk-jazzy score. - Bill Mousoulis, programmer. “A visual storytelling style that is distinctly dense and complex. Recalling the avant-garde cinema of the 1980s and the free-spiritedness of 1960s counter-culture art, Godplex looks contemporary while evoking bohemian aesthetics and a Jack Kerouac/Timothy Leary-type personality all its own.” Darcy Gladwin and Bill Mousoulis Zoom video interview |
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