“A very open-ended canon”: The Many Histories of the Melbourne Cinémathèque

The special dossier is edited by Adrian Danks and Olympia Szilagyi, with editorial assistance from Digby Houghton. It draws on various accounts of the history of the Melbourne Cinémathèque as well as the ar...

2024. Just the other day, with continued reports in the media of migrations of people across state and national borders, I was asked where, if I had the chance, I would most want to live. Having been born in Me...

The Melbourne Cinémathèque had existed in my imagination well before I ever attended. Like many, I wasn’t sure if it was an actual place (a little piece of Paris’ Bercy in downtown Melbourne) or a night.  I ...

Dedicated to Michael Koller, without whom none of this would have been possible. You have to adapt and remain the same. The Melbourne Cinémathèque is one of Australia’s longest-running film culture organ...

In his account of the Melbourne University Film Society’s (MUFS) activities in the 1960s, Adrian Danks highlights the organisation’s facilitation of feature-film production. Through the help of the dedicated “U...

His name plagues me. Everywhere I go I can hear it. Whenever I ask somebody for information pertaining to the Melbourne Cinémathèque, it’s not long before his name pops up again. Although a dentist by trade, Mi...

Somewhere at home I’ve squirreled away Melbourne Cinémathèque calendars dating back to 1999 – though this was not my sporadic first year of attendance, which was, I think, in 1997. Rather, 1999 was the first ye...

Undergraduate years are full of the excitement and wonder of working out where you are in your life. In undertaking your course studies, you are planning for your future, but with other activities, such as belo...

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 ...

Some fragmentary notes towards a visual history of the Melbourne Cinémathèque’s calendars, flyers, publications (including CTEQ: Annotations on Film) and ephemera, with slightly less attention paid (for now) to...

MUFS In the early 1970s, major Hollywood films were generally released within a relatively short worldwide window, while many non-English language and arthouse films could take years to get to Australia. There...

A book I bought earlier this year at the Il Cinema Ritrovato Book Fair in Bologna – a haven for cinephiles accompanying an annual festival that celebrates film history and that is a place of inspiration for aca...

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 abl...