Who Commenced It: Starting Out at the Cinémathèque

I’ve never kept a viewing diary, as I know many cinephiles do. But to some extent the Melbourne Cinémathèque has kept one for me. Browsing through some of their old calendars recently, I found I was usually able to remember which screenings I was present at, even when I couldn’t remember much about the films themselves.

One thing I learned this way is that the Cinémathèque has been part of my life for even longer than I’d previously thought. Although I don’t have anything to verify this, I believe the first screening I attended was on February 17, 1993, when I went to see the Marx Brothers in Horse Feathers (Norman Z. McLeod, 1932) at the old State Film Centre off Spring St in Melbourne (now the Treasury Theatre, in the news most recently as the venue for Dan Andrews’ daily COVID press conferences). 

At the start of 1993 I was a young teenager, about to go into Year 9: looking back, quite a lonely period in my life. About a year earlier, my closest friend had moved overseas; around the same time my voice had broken, which thankfully meant the end of my tenure in the St Paul’s Cathedral choir, a six-day-a-week commitment up till then (I was an extremely mediocre choirboy, but that’s another story). So I was left with a lot of time on my hands, especially after school, much of which I spent drifting around Melbourne’s city centre, browsing in second-hand bookshops and going to movies on my own. 

State Film Centre “Kids Holiday Flicks for Free”  

State Film Centre “Free Kids Holiday Flicks” (1984) 

How I knew this particular movie was playing is something I can only speculate about. Perhaps I picked up a copy of the Cinémathèque calendar somewhere, or perhaps it was mentioned in the paper (the Buffs’ Choice column in the Age seems like a probable source). Either way, I wasn’t entirely venturing onto new terrain. I knew the State Film Centre, because years earlier I would sometimes be dropped off at the sessions of free children’s films they ran in the school holidays. And I knew the Marx brothers, because the Valhalla Cinema in Westgarth showed their films regularly at Saturday matinees where the tickets were $2 including free Jaffas (appealing, I can now see, to an earlier generation’s nostalgia – but my brothers and I weren’t the only kids who went along). I’m even confident I’d seen Horse Feathers before: probably the reason I was so bent on attending was to have another chance to see and hear Groucho, one of my heroes, sing “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It”. 

So I showed up for the movie, although I can’t pretend to recall the details of the occasion, which has fused in my mind with many similar occasions later on. I’m sure I laughed a lot. I’m sure too that I felt some anxiety, both because I had to lie about my age on the membership form, and because I was going to be home late without an excuse (not too impossibly late, I must have calculated – Horse Feathers runs only just over an hour). I don’t have any mental picture of the others in the audience: probably I kept my head down and scurried in and out of the building hoping not to be noticed. Still, I imagine I was a little puzzled about the nature of the event I’d gatecrashed, which had something faintly clandestine about it. I’d just joined a club, but what kind of club exactly? And what were all these other films listed on the calendar, screening in batches of two or three, week in and week out, under the nose of the general public? 

The next film on the bill was Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933), which I remember wishing I could stick around for (I’d seen that one before too). Still, I did manage to return on subsequent Wednesdays and see a few more films before my membership expired, which were chosen more or less at random but which in at least two cases turned out to be formative experiences. One was Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938), not so far from the Marx Brothers but electrifying on an entirely different level, instilling the hope that someday my own life might be smashed to pieces by a woman charging in (how that worked out is, again, another story). The other was Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the Road, Wim Wenders, 1976): a three-hour film about lonely guys waiting around for something to happen, which I immediately felt closely aligned with in spirit.

 Was this a road-to-Damascus experience, converting me instantly to full-blown cinephilia? Not exactly, it would seem. The record shows that the Cinémathèque program for the remainder of 1993 included features by Rohmer, Bresson, Sturges, Ozu, Renoir, Mizoguchi, Parajanov, Welles, Griffith, Warhol, Polanski, Lupino, Visconti, Murnau, Pabst, Kluge, Flaherty, Woo, Melville, Akerman, Syberberg and Wiseman, among others, as well as spotlights on recent Finnish video art, vintage Australian variety TV, and the local Super 8 work of Paul Fletcher. If I’d renewed my membership and kept diligently attending week by week, I would have received an education in film history all in one hit. In fact, I didn’t see any of them (in the majority of cases I’ve caught up since, although I’m still behind on Finnish video artists). As best I can tell, I didn’t make it back to the Cinémathèque till the following year, when I bought another mini-membership and saw, most memorably, Sam Fuller’s Park Row (1952). It would be nice to say that encouraged my interest in journalism, though since I’d already spent a lot of time working on the school newspaper, I’m not sure how far that was needed. 

Park Row

It may be a fool’s game trying to determine where anything really began. Still, I’ve deduced from the Cinémathèque calendars that 1996, the year I turned 18, was when I first signed up for an annual membership, which I made use of more weeks than not. Even then, I missed a lot of what was on offer – and my attendance ever since has been up and down depending on circumstances. In the long run, though, I’ve undoubtedly seen more great films for the first time in this context than anywhere else (that is, on the big screen, the only way to see a great film if you have the chance). These experiences have been a major part of my life: some of them changed me in ways far beyond anything I could have imagined. If I tried to list them all I would never finish. Thank you to the Melbourne Cinémathèque. 

Melbourne Cinémathèque Program Calendar (1996)