Happy 40th (and 75th) Birthday, Dear Cinémathèque

The Melbourne Cinémathèque is a beacon, always has been. Not that I’d know. It was in early 1971 when I first met Robin Laurie, Sasha Trikojus and Bert Deling, all of whom had, in the late 1960s, been involved with MUFS (Melbourne University Film Society), later to evolve into the Melbourne Cinémathèque (1984); they were looking for a camera operator to shoot Dalmas (1973). I was an assistant cameraman in the ABC Melbourne’s cinematography department where, at the time, shooting on colour film was the major innovation, and the ENG (Electronic News Gathering) on video the major threat. The department reluctantly approved my ten weeks leave-without-pay to work on Dalmas. I began to learn about the “other world” of Australian film, of “cinema literacy” and the university-trained imagination, something of a mystery to me as a year 9 dropout from a brutal suburban all-male Tech school some years earlier. 

Dalmas (Bert Deling, 1973) (proof)

Adrian Danks writes of MUFS as a “relatively peripheral cultural formation” that he also describes as “probably the most significant film culture organisation in 1960s Melbourne.”¹ He remarks on MUFS’ tendency to a somewhat orthodox fascination with world cinema and, other than those 16mm films the MUFS folks made themselves, its reluctance to engage with Australian cinema.

But decades later, this was far from the case. There is now a well-established strand through the Cinémathèque’s programming alive to all manner of Australian film that has even, on occasion, generously enough, included some old films of mine. These retrospective screenings have been enormously encouraging. They have afforded the post “boomer” generations within the Melbourne Cinémathèque “community” – to my mind these audiences do constitute a genuinely varied, somewhat eccentric, but nonetheless coherent, community-of-interest – to encounter some of these strange “Melbourne” films. The delightful program of Bill Mousoulis’ films in May 2023 is a recent example of this attention to the local and the particular, alongside the world cinema greats, various national cinemas and specialist attention to both historical and contemporary world cinema auteurs. 

The Archive Project (John Hughes, 2006) ASIO TCP Bob Matthews 

The Archive Project (John Hughes, 2006) Elizabeth Coldicutt

The Melbourne Cinémathèque staged a screening of some of the films of the Melbourne Realist Film Unit around the time I was making The Archive Project (2006), a documentary dealing with the Realist film movement in Australia during the Cold War. We had the late Elizabeth Coldicutt (1924-2015) present to speak about the Unit, with John Flaus reading newspaper reviews over the silent sponsored films made by the Realists for the Brotherhood of St. Laurence. Footage of this screening, Independent Voice: Australian Political Documentary From the 1940s to the 1980s (held on July 13, 2005), made it into The Archive Project’s final scenes. So there is an available fragment of moving-image documentation of a Cinémathèque event at ACMI some 20 years ago.  

Characteristically, this particular program was very long and also included Beginnings (Rod Bishop, Gordon Glenn, Scott Murray, Andrew Pecze, 1971, 58 minutes); We Aim to Please (As If) (Robin Laurie and Margot Nash, 1977, 14 minutes); November Eleven (John Hughes, Peter Kennedy and Andrew Scollo, 1979, 18 minutes: U-Matic video, Sydney Biennale); and Exits (Paul Davies, Carolyn Howard and Pat Laughren, 1980, 47 minutes).

In 2015 and 2016 we – myself and the curators of the Cinémathèque – also put together several programs of films shown at the Melbourne and Sydney Filmmakers Co-operatives, and, in 2018, an important screening of Tom Zubrycki’s unfinished cause célèbre of the early 1990s, Amongst Equals (93 minutes). We’re also looking forward to the retrospective season of Tom’s oeuvre later this year. 

The Melbourne Cinémathèque rightly draws the admiring envy of cinephiles, film students, scholars and lovers of the velvet light trap from all around the country, and beyond. Dennis Altman remarked at some point that when we are young, we tend to regard anything that happened before our lived experience as simply not important. The Melbourne Cinémathèque is a marvellous antidote to this. Every season of its offerings is a thoughtfully constructed lesson in the chemistry of cultural difference and the art of the moving image. Above and beyond this, it is the community of the Cinémathèque and the valued friendships initiated within its milieu that remain the most rewarding.

Endnotes