There is Nothing Like Experience

Like many films produced under the auspices of the Melbourne University Film Society (MUFS), Nothing Like Experience (Peter Carmody, 1970) draws heavily on its immediate geographic surroundings and cultural milieu. These include, most prominently, the vibrant, then somewhat down-at-heel suburb of Carlton and La Mama Theatre, an adventurous and influential not-for-profit theatrical venue that was established in small premises just off Lygon Street less than a couple of years before the film was shot and that quickly became central to the rise of an Australian “voice”.

Documenting the Second University Arts Festival held at the University of Melbourne in May 1969, Nothing Like Experience is a playful, often comic mixture of fiction and documentary. It combines the detailing of a particular event – a common approach taken in films of this kind during this era – with a more ramshackle and unruly series of fictional micro narratives, characters and incidents.

Although somewhat unwieldy in its structure – partly due to “everything” that it tries to cram in – Nothing Like Experience provides a set of fascinating and playful insights into student life, the cultural and political debates of the era, and the kinds of ultra-low-budget films starting to be made independently in Melbourne in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This group of films has sometimes been described as a “poor cinema”, a mode of filmmaking directly influenced by the experimentation opened up by the various cinematic new waves of the ’60s, the emerging forms and freedoms of observational documentary and the technological developments of the time. Funded to the tune of $2000 and shot very much on the fly by largely inexperienced filmmakers, Nothing Like Experience certainly fits within this description and mode of practice.

Like Monash ’66 (Chris Maudson, 1967), another MUFS production, it was a commissioned film made for the purposes of student “orientation” and received its funding from various university bodies. Although writer-director Peter Carmody was then in his early 30s – like many who made films during this time, he was a contributor to MUFS and would go onto a significant career, in his case, as an actor – this is still very much a “student” film, but one which sees campus life within a wider social and cultural context. Like all of the films produced by MUFS in this era it had a limited life on release, screening alongside Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967) at the Union Theatre (which itself features prominently in the film) on August 7th and 8th 1970, before moving onto a small number of campuses elsewhere around the country. Following this, it has lapsed into relative obscurity aside from occasional screenings, mostly at MUFS or the Melbourne Cinémathèque.

It needs to be remembered that Nothing Like Experience was produced at a moment when there was very little support for film production in Australia. It was shot a year or so prior to the introduction of the Experimental Film Fund and other bodies, lifelines that provided small amounts of money for precisely this kind of filmmaking. There had been some attempts to make short low-budget features in Melbourne around this time – for instance, Phillip Adams and Brian Robinson’s Jack and Jill: A Postscript (1970), fellow traveller Nigel Buesst’s The Rise and Fall of Squizzy Taylor (1969) and a previous MUFS film, the long in gestation Pudding Thieves (Brian Davies, 1967) – but these often barely released works hardly modelled a recipe for success or widespread exposure. Though I don’t think a widespread release was ever much of a consideration. This was a period of extremely limited film production in Australia, and this is a key reason why this group of largely non-professional, ultra-low budget, cinephilia-inflected and student-centred films remain significant, granting us images and insights and suggesting possibilities that are largely unavailable elsewhere. Like MUFS and the Cinémathèque, in a more holistic sense, the impact and historical significance of these films is much greater than their provenance and accumulated viewership might suggest.

Although I’m not sure how much information one might attain into the full-range and wider operations of the Arts Festival it aims to document, Nothing Like Experience does provide a series of evocative snapshots of a plethora of events and figures alongside its fictionalised narrative. Across its duration we can glimpse a range of individuals contributing to the festival including Brian Davies, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, a Hungarian String Quartet, John Flaus, Alan Finney, Tim Burstall and Nigel Buesst, as well as a series of performances of theatrical productions (including what appears to MUFS alumni and emerging playwright Jack Hibberd’s Brainrot), art installations, dances, talks (and there seemed to be an awful lot of that on display), screenings (including the “Batman Breakfast”) and indications of other events taking place. Unsurprisingly, Jean-Luc Godard is mentioned several times, once at the end of a talk by Davies that is interrupted by a couple of Nothing Like Experience’s fictional characters, and at another to suggest that a season of his films has “sold out”.

But there is very little that is systematic about Carmody’s film. This is reflective of its attempts to make something creative and playful in and around the events it also documents. Most of the people working on Nothing Life Experience actually had very little “experience” in making films beyond the small number of other works made under the auspices of MUFS and around Carlton by filmmakers like Buesst. But the film does communicate a committed exposure to cinema, theatre and cultural life along with an evocative portrait of its geographical surroundings. Along with Hey, Al Baby (David Minter, 1968), it provides a now fascinating document of cultural and social development as well as the evident limitations of this countercultural moment. For example, although women feature in the film, they largely take a backseat to the bumbling, even boorish male characters seen interacting with the various events and art works.

The opening of Nothing Like Experience shows various people arriving in Melbourne for the festival, playfully shifting between couples entering the city on motorbikes, planes landing and the unlikely prospect of attendees disembarking from boats. The film then takes time to establish the geography of Carlton, half-heartedly suggesting that it might actually be a documentary about the suburb. The film’s cinephilic inclinations and credentials are also quickly highlighted in a range of ways, including a tracking shot down Faraday Street that takes in the Carlton Movie House (an important venue for MUFS and a wider cinephilia in Melbourne) and is reminiscent of similar shots in nouvelle vague films like Godard’s À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960) and Vivre sa vie (1962). Although the movie screening at the cinema may initially appear inauspicious – the Dean Martin Matt Helm-vehicle, The Wrecking Crew (1968) – it was directed by an emerging auteurist favourite, Phil Karlson, and, in retrospect, provides a fascinating, pre-emptive echo of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019), where Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate attends a screening of the same film she co-stars in. There are subsequent references to various other films, including a somewhat laboured mention of Robert Rossen and The Hustler (1961) in a scene shot in a local pool hall, Johnny’s Green Room.

Nothing Like Experience takes its time to find its dramatic structure, only properly introducing us to its three “protagonists” over 18 minutes into its duration. After this point we generally see things as they are encountered or “experienced” by these characters, three student types embodied in the figures of the “Enthusiast” (Bill Garner), the “Cynic” (John Romeril) and the “Schizoid” (Martin Phelan, who combines the qualities of the first two). As with most of these MUFS films these parts are played by actors who had appeared at La Mama, further highlighting the connections between the experimental theatre staged there and the kinds of films being made, particularly in terms of their combination of local and international influences, the avant-garde with the colloquial and the everyday. The upfront self-consciousness of Nothing Like Experience speaks to its derivation and novelty, but also to the porous boundaries between the lives behind and in front of the camera. This is largely a collective film that emerges from the world it aims to document.

Looking back on Nothing Like Experience over half a century later, it provides a snapshot of an emerging culture and sensibility but also seems to very much belong to another era. It is testament to the continuities of the film society movement as well as the changing times.

Nothing Like Experience (1970 Australia 50 mins)

Prod Co: Melbourne University Film Society Dir, Scr: Peter Carmody Phot: Dug Hobbs, Gary Vaughn, Dave Downey, Kevin Anderson, Norton Bradshaw [Nigel Buesst] Sound: Lloyd Carrick

Cast: Bill Garner, John Romeril, Marty Phelan, Anna Raknes, Jane Washington, Peter Cummins, Brian Davies, Arnold Zable, Tim Burstall, Graeme Blundell