Our programme this year also includes retrospectives of auteurs Robert Bresson, Francesco Rosi, Josef Von Sternberg, Lee-Chang Dong, Claire Denis, Boris Barnet, Raul Ruiz, Andrzej Munk & Wojciech Has and Patricio Guzman, as well as a selection of films from Nikkatsu to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the studio.

We also have nights dedicated to works by Wim Wenders, Michaelangelo Antonioni, actor Tony Leung, Helen Levitt & Sidney Meyers, Manoel De Oliviera and the seminal Australian director Solruun Hoaas, who passed away in 2009. In March we pay tribute to the work of three major experimental filmmakers who sadly passed away last year, George Kuchar, Jordan Belson and Robert Breer. See the relevant pages accessible from the screening section of our website for all the details.

2012 Calendars are currently available from ACMI and the usual distribution outlets. They can also be downloaded from our site via the screenings page.

We hope you enjoy our programme this year!

Kazan’s activities in the 1930s stretched from socially engaged leftist documentary to stints with the Group Theater. This background influenced his groundbreaking work on Broadway (directing the original productions of such iconic plays as All My Sons, A Streetcar Named Desire & Death of a Salesman), his co-founding of the Actors Studio, & his initial, often beautifully crafted films for Fox. Kazan’s lauded sense of place, atmosphere & character, & uncanny ability to coax revealing & emotionally intense performances from such iconic actors as Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, James Dean & Montgomery Clift (all featured here), fully emerges in the early 1950s with such key films as Panic in the Streets (1950), On the Waterfront (1954) & East of Eden. Despite Kazan’s now notorious testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952, his work of the following 10 or so years remains one of the most important & vital contributions to modern American cinema.

This season focuses on this key decade & stretches from the hothouse theatrics of A Streetcar Named Desire to the deeply personal, profoundly grounded & epic America America, the director’s account of his uncle’s dogged journey to the United States. It incorporates several of Kazan’s most extraordinary adaptations of theatrical & literary properties, & emphasises the emotional intensity & vulnerability that mark his greatest work. Highlighting several of Kazan’s most soulful & underrated works, such as the poetic & deeply revealing Wild River, this season also premieres Martin Scorsese & Kent Jones’ recent personal tribute A Letter to Elia.

Kent Jones & Martin Scorsese (2010) 60 mins

This collaborative portrait of the life & career of Elia Kazan takes the form of a cine-letter directly addressed from Scorsese to Kazan himself.

Extending upon the semi-biographical project begun with A Personal Journey… Through American Movies, Scorsese’s intimate, personal account invites us to re-evaluate the emotive formal prowess of Kazan’s film direction, whilst also bringing to light the filmmaker’s fraught personal & professional experiences, including his notorious testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952. Features illuminating & evocative accounts of such key Scorsese influences as East of Eden, Wild River & America America.

Excerpts @ Youtube.com

8:10 - AMERICA AMERICA

Elia Kazan (1963) 168 mins

Kazan’s monumental & intimate account of one immigrant’s journey to America in the late 19th century, is a passionate, sometimes brutal, poetic & deeply felt homage to the often fanciful dream of America. Full of fascinating insights into Greek-Turkish cultural life & breathtakingly shot on location by Haskell Wexler, it stands as Kazan’s crowning achievement, a gestalt masterpiece that draws together key elements of the director’s dramatic contribution to the cinema & his family biography. An often undervalued landmark of American cinema, it was a major influence on New Hollywood. Starring the remarkable Stathis Giallelis.

35mm preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Preservation funding provided by Warner Bros. in association with The Film Foundation & the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

Trailer @ Youtube

Montgomery Clift stars as a New Deal administrator sent by Washington to persuade a stubborn, elderly Tennessee woman (Jo Van Fleet) to sell her land before it is flooded for a hydroelectric project. Filmed in ’Scope, this careful period reconstruction was shot on location not far from where Kazan had worked as co-director on his 1st film, the pro-union short People of the Cumberland. Lee Remick reunites with the director to play the love interest, the old woman’s granddaughter. While the film was not initially a critical or box office success its stature has grown over time & it was added to the US National Film Registry in 2002.

9:00 – SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS
Elia Kazan (1961) 124 mins M

The relationship of 2 teenage lovers is ripped apart by the repressive mentality of their 1920s Kansas town in Kazan’s dramatic coming-of-age tale. Starring Natalie Wood, whose fragile & ultimately tragic portrayal of Wilma Dean Loomis earned her an Oscar nomination, & Warren Beatty (in his screen debut) as the handsome, well-to-do Bud Stamper. William Inge won an Oscar for his original screenplay. With Sandy Dennis, Barbara Loden & Phyllis Diller. Cinematography by Boris Kaufman. 35mm print courtesy of the National Film & Sound Archive of Australia.

Trailer @ Youtube

Kazan’s 7th feature is a brooding theatrical paean to poetic heroism & ruin in which Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh), a delusional, faded southern belle who has “fallen” in various ways, comes to live with her pregnant sister Stella (Kim Hunter) & brutish, working-class husband Stanley (Marlon Brando) in the roughest part of New Orleans. Blanche & Stanley instantly spark a toxic rapport, & begin a perverse fascination with one another in which fear & desire dangerously merge. The film was nominated for 12 Academy Awards in 1952, winning 4. Tennessee Williams adapted the script from his own groundbreaking play.

Trailer @ Youtube

9:15 – EAST OF EDEN
Elia Kazan (1955) 115 mins PG

Starring James Dean in his 1st major film role, Kazan’s landmark work helped to define the young actor as the indelible “hero of adolescence” (Edgar Morin). Concerns of youth, the resistance against conservative domesticity, & the poetic simplicity of love are all beautifully rendered in a screenplay sensitively adapted from John Steinbeck’s novel. With Kazan’s atmospheric mise en scène & Ted McCord’s masterful use of CinemaScope, this is one of the defining films of its decade. With Jo Van Fleet, Raymond Massey, Burl Ives, Julie Harris & Richard Davalos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdMjKq8xk-E

Trailer @ Youtube.com

Wenders’ evocative & playful adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game is a suspense-filled cult film providing an important transition between the director’s earlier, grounded European work & the increasingly internationalist preoccupations & sensibilities of his globetrotting cinema of the last 30 years. Shifting between Hamburg, Paris & New York, this melancholy examination of shifting identity displays a fascination with the Americanisation of Europe & betrays the core influence of two of its featured actors: Nicholas Ray & Sam Fuller. Starring Bruno Ganz, Dennis Hopper, Lisa Kreuzer, Gérard Blain, Daniel Schmid, David Blue & Jean Eustache.

35mm print courtesy of the Goethe-Institut.

Trailer @ Youtube.com

9:15 WINGS OF DESIRE
Wim Wenders (1987) 130 mins PG

An angel (Bruno Ganz) soulfully watching over the stranded citizens of West Berlin is tempted by the pleasures of the flesh when he falls in love with a trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin). Wenders’ profoundly moving & often magical modern fairytale is an extraordinary essay on the weight of history & memory. Shifting between black-&-white & colour it evokes both Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life & Powell & Pressburger’s A Matter of Life & Death. Now itself a significant artefact of a soon to be united Berlin, it is a fascinating time capsule featuring Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Crime & the City Solution, & Peter Falk. Co-written by Peter Handke & luiminously shot by Henri Alekan.

35mm print courtesy of the Goethe-Institut.

Trailer @ Youtube.com

Together with his twin brother Mike, George Kuchar was one of the key filmmakers of the New York camp underground of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Proudly no budget, his 8mm & 16mm shorts show a deep love of Hollywood melodrama as distilled through a distinctly lurid style. Included in this program are the semi-autobiographical classic, Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966), the searing, tragic Pagan Rhapsody (1970), & the quirkily atmospheric “weather diary” Wild Night in El Reno (1977).

Hold Me While I’m Naked (George Kuchar) 1966 15 mins
Eclipse of the Sun Virgin (George Kuchar) 1967 12 mins
Pagan Rhapsody (George Kuchar) 1970 24 mins
Wild Night in El Reno (George Kuchar) 1977 6 mins
The Mongreloid (George Kuchar) 1978 10 mins

8:20 – JORDAN BELSON (1926-2011)
(1961-75) 36 mins

Film historian William Moritz described Jordan Belson as one of the greatest artists of visual music: “[he] creates lush vibrant experiences of exquisite color & dynamic abstract phenomena evoking sacred celestial experiences”. Honouring the recent passing of the San Francisco-based experimental filmmaker, this program includes many of Belson’s most famous works. His painstakingly constructed films are both painterly & cosmological (Belson also provided the special effects for Kaufman’s The Right Stuff).

Allures (Jordan Belson) 1961 8 mins
Cosmos (Jordan Belson) 1969 6 mins
Meditation (Jordan Belson) 1971 6 mins
Chakra (Jordan Belson) 1972 6 mins
Cycles (Jordan Belson & Stephen Beck) 1975 10 mins 

9:10 – ROBERT BREER (1926-2011)
(1954-89) 81 mins

Robert Breer was a key figure of the postwar American avant-garde cinema. Although mostly celebrated as an animator his work utilises an extraordinary array of techniques & approaches ranging from single-frame photography & collage to spray painting & rotoscoping. Breer’s often abstract cinema is a riot of geometric forms & precise rhythm. This program features many of Breer’s most significant works including the remarkable autobiographical animation Fist Fight (1964), the breakthrough combination of live-action & animation Jamestown Baloos (1957), & such central later works as 69 (1968) & Fuji (1974).

A Miracle (Robert Breer) 1954 30 secs
Cats (Robert Breer) 1 min
Recreation (Robert Breer) 1956 2 mins
A Man and His Dog Out for Air (Robert Breer) 1957 2 mins
Jamestown Baloos (Robert Breer) 1957 5 mins
Hommage to Jean Tinguely’s “Hommage to New York” (Robert Breer) 1960 10 mins
Space (Robert Breer) 1960 5 mins
Blazes (Robert Breer) 1961 3 mins
Horse Over Tea Kettle (Robert Breer) 1962 7 mins
Breathing (Robert Breer) 1963 5 mins
Fist Fight (Robert Breer) 1964 9 mins
66 (Robert Breer) 1966 2 mins
69 (Robert Breer) 1968 5 mins
Fuji (Robert Breer) 1974 9 mins
Rubber Cement (Robert Breer) 1976 10 mins
A Frog on a Swing (Robert Breer) 1989 5 mins

All prints courtesy of the National Film & Sound Archive of Australia.

Hou’s beautiful adaptation of a late 19th century novel set in the “flower houses” of Shanghai’s European concession, is an extraordinarily hermetic & dreamlike portrait of the rituals defining the exterior & interior lives of its circumscribed characters. Hou’s slow dance-like film has a languid & almost elastic quality, drawing us into the lost & melancholy world of the brothels & positioning us alongside the characters as they make their way through their intimate, intricate interiors.

In this remarkable, atmospheric, almost somnambulistic film – shot entirely in Taiwan by the great Ping Bin Lee – the past is indeed another country. With Tony Leung Chiu-wai.

Trailer @ Youtube.com

9.=:20 – 2046
Wong Kar-wai (2004) 129 mins M

Something of a sequel to his earlier In the Mood for Love, Wong’s quixotic film is a slow, mesmerising work, a fragmented narrative that revisits the life of Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) & lovers from his past & future. Exquisitely photographed by Christopher Doyle and Pung-Leung Kwan, these labrynthine segments manifest into a mood of loneliness & desperation. Seeping with passion, tempestuousness, & an undeniable heartache, this is almost a palimpsest of Wong’s cinema.

Featuring Maggie Cheung, Zhang Ziyi, Faye Wong, Chen Chang & Gong Li. Music by Shigeru Umebayashi.

Trailer @ Youtube.com

Shot in Sydney, Newcastle & Tamworth the same year Toei filmed – in Australia – The Drifting Avenger, Nikkatsu’s Australian odyssey stars Tetsuya Watari (Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter) as a Tokyo artist – a drifter – who comes to Australia to see its wide-open spaces. A romance-drama, the film unites Watari’s character with a former Japanese lover – engaged to an Australian mining engineer – before a suitably tragic ending. While neither this film or The Drifting Avenger were released in Australia they are, according to Olivia Khoo, important markers of the internationalisation of Australian cinema, a narrative largely erased in the subsequent marketing of the 1970s “film renaissance”.

35mm print courtesy of the National Film & Sound Archive of Australia.

8:55 – THE MAN FROM HONG KONG
Brian Trenchard-Smith (1975) 103 mins MA

Hong Kong studio Golden Harvest and Australia’s leading action director Brian Trenchard-Smith bring the Kowloon Harbour police thriller’s ballet of violence & sex to the blue waters of Sydney Harbour &, in a now remarkable & troubling opening sequence, the summit & surrounds of Uluru. This energetic hybrid features action star Jimmy Wang Yu, a viciously outrageous performance from ex-Bond George Lazenby, that theme tune, & an energy Tony Rayns pronounced “hit[s] a note of throw-away excess which has eluded recent Bond Movies”. With Roger Ward, Rebecca Gilling, Sammo Hung Kam-bo, Bill Hunter & Frank Thring. Shot by Russell Boyd.

35mm print courtesy of the National Film & Sound Archive of Australia.

Antonioni’s definitive film is an uncompromising & moody exploration of alienation, ennui & the “atomic age” starring Alain Delon & Monica Vitti. An unflinching yet poetic examination of the spaces, places & temporalities of modernity, Antonioni’s actors & characters are ultimately abandoned as the vehicle for presenting his truly contemporary vision (epitomised by the remarkable depopulated final sequence).

Startling on first release even after the bold experimentation of L’avventura & La notte, this film occupies a crucial position in postwar European cinema. With Francisco Rabal.

35mm print courtesy of the British Film Institute.

Trailer @ Vimeo.com

9:15 – THE PASSENGER
Michelangelo Antonioni (1975) 126 mins M

Jack Nicholson stars as a disillusioned journalist who makes the strange decision to exchange identities with a colleague he has discovered dead in his hotel room. Antonioni’s 3rd English-language feature is an evocatively subdued thriller & road movie (taking in Barcelona, London & North Africa). Luciano Tovoli’s arrestingly scenic cinematography is harnessed to express psychological tension in pure & dynamic visual terms, diffusing conventional dependence on drama & dialogue.

The concluding sequence, a precisely executed 7-minute tracking shot, suspensefully delivers the film’s final, inexplicable shock. With Maria Schneider.

Trailer @ Youtube.com