Melbourne Cinematheque
The Melbourne Cinémathèque is a non-profit film society screening programmes year-round, dedicated to presenting the history of world cinema on the big screen in carefully curated retrospectives. It started out as Melbourne University Film Society (MUFS) in 1948 and changed its name to Cinémathèque in 1984. It screens at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI).
The Melbourne Cinémathèque screens archival 35mm and 16mm film prints from organisations such as the British Film Institute, Library of Congress (Washington, USA), UCLA Film & TV Archive etc. The Melbourne Cinémathèque's mission is to present films in the medium they were created, and as closely as possible to screen them the way they would have originally screened, (i.e. big screen 16 & 35mm prints, not video or DVD). Programmes include a diverse selection of classic and contemporary films showcasing director retrospectives, special guest appearances and thematic series including archival material and many new prints. Seasons have included A Band of Outsiders: The Cinematic Underworld of Jean-Pierre Melville, 'All Art is One': The Visionary Cinema of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Life is Art: The World of Jean Renoir, Glacial Crossroads: The Cinema of Michael Haneke, Surviving Kane: Around the World with Orson Welles, and The Music of Time: The World of Max Ophüls, as well as programmes dedicated to German Noir, Yasujiro Ozu, Marco Bellocchio, Agnès Varda, Manoel de Oliveira and Barbara Stanwyck, amongst others. The Melbourne Cinémathèque is self-administered, non-profit, membership-driven and relies on support from individuals, foundations, corporations and government funding to maintain its high standard of excellence.
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The Melbourne Cinémathèque began in 1948, as the Melbourne University Film Society. In the 1950s and 1960s, MUFS was huge. They were one of the 3 original partners in the success of The Melbourne Film Festival, along with the AFI & the Federation of Victorian Film Societies. It shared in the profits of the Film Festival & used these to mount imported film Season - a Carl Dreyer season & a French package were 2 highlights. It also had a film production arm that made the first film that Barry Humphreys appeared in. Into the 1970s & 1980s membership numbers dwindled due to ex-Sydney Uni students copying the student film society model and then screen repertory programming to a general public (The Valhalla). However, MUFS continued, screening 16mm prints from local distributors, the French & German Embassies & the National Library film collection, and a number of other cultural film libraries sprinkled around. In 1984, as we were no longer relevant to what the University of Melbourne did, & because we had outgrown the Undergraduate Lounge, where we used to have weekly screenings of 16mm films, we moved to RMIT & changed the name to The Melbourne Cinémathèque. The cinema was larger but could only provide 16mm & video. At that time we wanted to move to The State Film Centre but were unable to do so as the venue ran its own screening program & excluded others from using the venue. However, after many years of unsuccessful programming they changed their structure & we were then able to screen good quality VHS & 35mm, & also variable speed 16mm for the silent films. This was in 1993. By this time our program was touring nationally, though the assistance of the AFI, and was screened in various forms in Adelaide, Perth, Hobart, Sydney, Brisbane & Canberra. This was administered originally by the AFI & later funded & administered by the AFC. At this stage our program was mainly repertory with only the occasional imported print. There were also occasional film seasons, but these ran as special events. The first imports we screened came from New Zealand and were a couple of Scorsese shorts & Errol Morris Gates of Heaven. Our first big imported season was Lubitsch in 1994. This was followed over subsequent years by further German programs - a Dietrich season, Fritz Lang, Douglas Sirk. Slowly the component of imported films increased & we also began to screen seasons at The Film Festival Theatrette. This slowly expanded to increase more & more screen partners. In late 2002 we moved to ACMI. We were the first organisation to screen there. That year we screened 5 seasons - Godard, King Hu, Tarkovsky's Heirs, German Noir & Kurosawa. More than half the program was still repertory. As the screen at ACMI is so large we decided that we needed to screen on 35mm as much as possible. This further advanced our need to use imported prints & as theme season were easier to sell & popular we increased the number of these. This year we are showing 11 themed seasons. Now, about 70% of our program is imported. Parts of this program will be shared with Canberra, Adelaide, Brisbane & Sydney.
Arrested Developments or From The Heroes are Tired to the Tomb of Liegia: Some notes on the Melbourne University Film Society in the 1960s - dedicated to Brian Davies, who arguably did most to introduce modernist cinema to Australia
Allan Finney (writing in 1999): “For me life in the 1960s life was so simple. There was nothing else except MUFS and MOVIES... and there was no distinction between the two... We saw at least 10 films a week and kept a detailed record of everyone. The Auteur Theory reigned supreme... OUR WEEK: Monday lunchtime committee meetings; Tuesday lunchtime short films; Wednesday and Friday lunchtime feature screenings where there was also regular screenings of Nick Ray & Raoul Walsh movies; Friday night classic screenings.... Everyone was the enemy... especially the Melbourne Film Society, the Melbourne Film Festival (of which MUFS was involved in at a committee level), Colin Bennett, Howard Palmer... and everyone in Sydney... We all wanted to make movies... and, of course this meant attacking the status quo... or more correctly... ignoring it... because we didn’t have a true local industry.”
Term 1, 1960, editorial by Christopher Bell from Annotations on Film: “Now unfortunately the film seems to be on the decline…. Even in this discouraging hour however we must not lose sight of the film’s importance as an artistic medium. There are still excellent films produced, and presumably always will be… If we can train ourselves to benefit to the full from these, the cinema may still retain its status as an art.”
Overhead: So why have I chosen to give a paper at a conference called “Go!: Melbourne in the 60s”, focusing on what might seem to be a relatively peripheral - from a contemporary perspective - cultural formation (a film society emanating from Melbourne University servicing mainly university students). On looking at the conference schedule I was not surprised to find myself as the only speaker on any aspect of film culture (many people pretty much think it didn’t exist in this period - which is quite counter to particular perceptions of popular music at the same time − or thought that it was predominantly a received or consumed phenomenon rather than an active or productive one) - I am also not surprised that few film examples have been used to illustrate particular points, developments or case studies in this conference or in any general accounts of the period (outside predominantly government funded, industrial, television based, or specifically amateur artifacts) – This is perhaps remarkable to the 60s in the Australian context (so different to many overseas countries with burgeoning film production & film culture movements in this decade); It is a decade which produces few truly cinematic images of Melbourne - unfortunately On the Beach was released in 1959 (which might make it still fair game considering that it is indeed set in the early 1960s & considering the stretching boundaries of the ‘idea’ we are discussing; in a sense it hangs over the early part of the decade in Melbourne & yet its view seems mired in stereotypes of 50s Melbourne). Like many of the histories unearthed, or that need to be unearthed, film culture in this decade & beyond is indeed ‘secret,’ largely forgotten, deliberately effaced in many accounts of the Australian feature film revival of the 1970s (effaced so as to suggest a clean slate, a blank or void or interval – all terms used by film historians on this period - from which to form, anew, an Australian Film Industry). If you look at any history of Australian cinema it will focus much attention on the lack of feature film production in the 1960s (& thus an absence, a lack of cultural expression) than it will on the vibrancy of film culture during the same decade (which was just opening up to new ideas about & approaches to film, as well as new types of film exhibition, etc. – each of which might, heaven forbid, be considered as exciting) In this respect Melbourne’s vibrant, if often quite insular and discontinuous, film culture in the 1960s is like most other cultural formations of its type: fragmentary, ephemeral, and extremely difficult to pin down (how does one actually go about gauging it?). It is even difficult to define what might constitute such a culture. Barrett Hodsdon, in his recent book Straight Roads and Crossed Lines: The Quest for Film Culture in Australia? (the only substantive attempt to trace this culture yet produced) states that “film culture is an all encompassing term for a variety of structures, processes, activities and discourses that comprise a film community in its broadest definition.” And yet, these activities often leave only incomplete records and traces (even, in the case of Australian cinema, in relation to film production itself – which may seem to leave more recognisable, concrete artefacts): so how does one get a sense of the actual significance of particular activities, modes of thought, and discursive trends from the pages of various irregular publications, screening lists, plot synopses, intermittent editorials, minutes of meetings and interviews? (this paper is an attempt to do all this and to start forming a map of an often unpopular - particularly from a government funding perspective - area of screen history. In so doing, it builds on the groundbreaking work done by Quentin Turnour and Windsor Fick to celebrate the 50th anniversary of MUFS in 1999). So the records are incomplete, the meaning & importance of certain events uncertain, and yet I think that the Melbourne University Film Society can be claimed as one of the most significant and consistent cultural formations in Melbourne during the 1960s (a view which, in terms of film, is inarguable – it does not have much competition). So how will I support this claim - first a little background and history.
The Melbourne University Film Society was formed in 1948 (its first screening, of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, was in March 1949) and can be positioned as an outcome of the burgeoning film society and film appreciation movements which emerged after WWII in Australia (& elsewhere in the world). Like many such organisations − and many such campus societies − its popularity waxed and waned during the 1950s. Nevertheless, it was instrumental in developing and presenting the Melbourne Film Festival (some people argue that MUFS’ own festivals from 1949-53 constitute a more adequate starting point for the broader festival). Its screenings during this period were predominantly devoted to a humanist view of film appreciation, depending largely on social realist, documentary and Left wing cinema (with a particular devotion to Russian montage filmmakers, Eisenstein in particular), along with screenings devoted to the small, but growing number of established film classics that had found their way into the country as part of public libraries (and which were being collected by, at the time, relatively new State bodies such as the State Film Centre, formed in 1946 & now known as ACMI, and the National Library of Australia). Typical of the history of MUFS, the success of activities from year to year was dependent on enthusiastic young freshers, some recent graduates (who would form satellite organisations) and the ability of specific individuals to maintain commitment in the face of general indifference. Another key aspect of MUFS during the first part of the 1950s was its film production activities (it had, & maintained for several decades, relatively rudimentary production facilities including a 16mm camera, lights and editing equipment – very rare in this period & a means of maintaining a certain level of membership). Now, in the context of the Film Co-Ops and film schools of the 70s and 80s this production might seem unremarkable, but in the first half of the 1950s it constituted one of the few attempts to develop the basis for independent, and explicitly artisinal, film production in Australia (and helped train such figures as Gil Brearley, Ian Jones and Barry Humphries (who was “publicity agent’ in 1952) through such productions as Ballade and Dial P for Plughole).
Overhead: So what were MUFS major contributions to Melbourne cultural life in the 1960s. If one looks at the screening schedules or the writing produced in the various journals published by or in association with MUFS (journals which are themselves remarkable for their time, if often a little gushingly over-enthusiastic) one senses that the key might be a kind of isolation (whether perceived or real); and it is this kind of individualism or separation (rather than a larger collectivism) that seems to be the basis of MUFS’ success in this period (the society relied upon 3 or 4 major figures at any one point). The broader success of the film society movement throughout Melbourne in this period is partly an outcome of the city’s suburbanisation (in this context MUFS could be seen as more of a Carlton phenomenon than a Melbourne one - and this is significant in terms of what is later called the Carlton school of filmmaking - which emerged predominantly from MUFS - and its relation to the La Mama theatre). Although formulated as part of a network through the Federation of Victorian Film Societies, MUFS routinely announced its distance from many other film culture organisations, suburban film societies in particular (this is mainly indicated by the various agendas that MUFS took on board, & the ways in which it attempted to contextualise programming – landmark seasons, for the time, devoted to significant directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford or movement such as the New Wave or a braoder New Cinema, in programme notes, in extended critical articles, & in the various attempts to expand outside of the Melbourne University campus). This sense of isolation and separation is one which informs many aspects of MUFS’ activities in the 1960s (which are characterised by the quote I opened this paper with). It is also an attitude typical of the history of Australian film culture (which routinely considers itself as outside of dominant cultural formations, as reacting against larger industry and institutional pressures – even if it does trace certain intellectual developments in America, France, & more reluctantly, Britain – for example, the British journal Sight and Sound was a key influence in terms of screening choices the 40s and 50s – but one must remember that this is a period before the development of University cinema studies courses and of very limited sources of information about films). Though similar and connected societies opened up at Monash and were already in place in Sydney (and later Brisbane), it is possible to suggest that MUFS constitutes an exceptional, even visionary chapter in the history of the film society movement in Australia (again, even if still often quite imitative of & reactive to selected trends overseas – in this sense the French New Wave seems to have had almost a decade long influence on production aspirations, tastes, and the overall range of activities – from screening to writing to filmmaking & back again). Throughout much of the 60s it was the largest society on Melbourne University’s campus with 1500 or so members in the early 60s, while at various stages it produced four different film journals (3 at once during the early 1960s – Annotations on Film, University Film Group Bulletin and the internationally recognised Film Journal) – during this decade it also reinvigorated its film production activities (taking them, arguably, to a higher level), and was instrumental in introducing and localising dominant critical paradigms from overseas: thus, from about 1962 onwards its programming and critical orthodoxy was bathed in auteurist film theory (an approach popularised and furthered by, at first, Cahiers du cinema in France in the 1950s, and then taken up by specific critics in America, Britain and Australia - and MUFS was at the vanguard of this – both reiterating overseas approaches & wisdoms & presenting unusual variations upon them – approaches that were predicated partly on the local circulation of films, peculiar to each city or even region – so some different filmmaker were highlighted & championed). This almost immediate embracing of auteurism (itself seen as a key ‘theoretical’ development in terms of cinema’s status as an art) is revealing in a number of respects. First, its focus on the singular, or heroic, often oppositional author, helps situate a preoccupation with individualism and isolation that runs throughout MUFS’ activities (evidenced by the ways in which individual figures could determine society policy or filmic preoccupations - for example, in the late 60s one of the journals, Melbourne Film Bulletin, was swamped by Allan Finney’s obsession with Jerry Lewis, while the organisation was almost made bankrupt through the obsessive Carl Dreyer season envisioned by one 18-year-old cinephile). Second, it points towards the connection between critical practice and film production that were reinvigorated by MUFS in the early 60s (taking their lead from the directors of the French New Wave such as Godard and Truffaut who emerged from the pages of Cahiers du cinema). Third, it also points in what might seem two quite contradictory directions. The model of the French New Wave and its attendant criticism suggests an immersion in the world of films − a cinephiliac obsession which might see the writer (and even filmmaker) retreat from the social, cultural and political realities which surround them (which is pretty much true in some respects − the immersion in cinema that is often discussed in the pages of MUFS’ journals points towards a cultural lack elsewhere – thus, instead of being a celebration of being in Melbourne it might be said to set another space or escape from it). At the same time, the model of the French New Wave shows the possibility of moving out into your surroundings − documenting and using them. Thus, in the films produced under the auspices of MUFS − and a production fund they set up called Unifed − can be glimpsed images of 1960s Melbourne, particularly Carlton, that are rarely available elsewhere (outside the work of a maverick migrant filmmaker like Giorgio Mangiamele or a singular figure like Nigel Buesst). A body of film work was also produced that has no real precedent until the 1970s in Australia (some may claim the slightly later, and more self-consciously avant-garde, Sydney-based Ubu movement as its only real comparison). From this intermittent production base also came two of only about a dozen feature films that were produced in Australia during the whole of the 1960s: Peter Carmody’s filmed record of the 1969 Melbourne University Arts Festival, Nothing Like Experience and The Pudding Thieves. Produced over a four-year period and directed by the key figure of MUFS during the 1960s: Brian Davies (a figure who scandalously doesn’t even get a mention in the recent Oxford Companion to Australian Film). So in many ways MUFS can be seen as both its own kind of model and ghetto of film culture - connecting only sporadically to the world immediately outside.
Overhead: So what was absent in MUFS during this period? Many things - many of which are not that surprising (for example, it does not seem to have embraced much political cinema outside of Godard). As I’ve suggested the activities of this society could be seen as somewhat insular (which is not unusual in such an organisation or the people it attracts). Many accounts of cinephilia, such as Adrian Martin’s largely sympathetic “No Flowers for the Cinephile,” lament both the masculinist predilections and the predominantly male gender of cinephiliac activity in this period (and period for that matter). On investigating the records of MUFS - and aside from the totally male roll call that is often attached to its activities in various historical accounts - it becomes apparent that a small number of women were intermittently involved in the organisation, particularly as editors of Annotations on Film (along with most people involved they are largely forgotten figures –such as Catherine Berry and Anne Barber) Nevertheless, if one looks at the screening schedules and articles published throughout the 1960s very few films by or articles about women filmmakers appear (unfortunately, women mostly appear in the guise of Deneuve, Bardot or Lollabrigida as cover girls from favoured films). This is somewhat reflective of the times, and yet the self-consciously progressive & even iconoclastic attitudes presented by MUFS elsewhere are often not supported by the actual content of activities. This aspect is compounded by the championing of often hyper-masculinist directors such as Don Siegel, Howard Hawks and Sam Fuller. Another key absence in the programs and writings of MUFS is Australian cinema (a truly avant-garde or oppositional cinema is also absent). This can be related again to the outsider status cultivated by the organisation - seeing little of value (historically or aspirationally) in Australian cinema other than the films they were themselves starting to produce (which were profiled). Admittedly, there was precious little feature or fiction film production in this period, but this disdain also extended to Australia’s film history. For example, on the death of iconic Australian actor Chips Rafferty in 1971, Annotations on Film presented the following dedication: “None of us liked his films - Few of us saw them - Yet we all knew his name.” This statement epitomises particular attitudes to Australian cinema (that are still widely held). Thus, although a seeming goal of MUFS was to uncover and discover film history - as well as recognise the links between films (a relatively uncommon practice at the time) - it seldom extended this to Australian cinema (beyond a few documentaries and its own productions). Thus, the narrative devised to support future Australian film production at the end of the decade is actually negated by the activities of organisations like MUFS in the same period (the idea, or one might say fiction, of a void or interval of production was much more useful to calls for government involvement in film production in the late 60s and early 70s). This narrative also has its roots in the attitudes towards Australian cinema that MUFS promoted (that it was not worth looking at, discussing, that, in essence, it didn’t exist). In this respect, it is arguable whether MUFS’ film productions in the 1960s perceived of themselves as being specifically or importantly Australian; or as part of an international movement of filmmaking instigated by the nouvelle vague (the films themselves are a curious hybrid: most definitely influenced by the style of the New Wave, its penchant for pastiche and quotation, but also very localised in their view of Melbourne). This combination of the intensely local (almost monocular) and the internationally distant, is a key characteristic of MUFS activities during this period.
Overhead: So what happened to MUFS? One of the main reasons that I have focused on this group in this period is that its key moment of activity pretty much spans the 1960s. The late 50s was a relatively moribund period for the society, but it is in 1960 that the society starts to further expand (with more screenings) and becomes more ambitious (and starts to more clearly see its role in terms of a broader dialogue in film culture, and nascent film production). This is spelt out in a variety of mission statements which appear in MUFS publications in 1960 and 1961. The 1960s also appears to be a dynamic period of critical debate (& MUFS is central in developing and disseminating particular critical responses to cinema in Australia) – it also sees the involvement of various figures who later went on to become important or interesting players in the broader Australian film industry and community: writers like Charles Higham and Jack Hibberd, distributors like Allan Finney, directors like Bert Deling, producers like Tony Ginnane, and actors like Graeme Blundell (though, perhaps due to their MUFS experiences, many of these people moved across various aspects of film culture). The early 1970s saw the gradual waning of interest in MUFS (and film societies more generally) as other factors arguably became more prominent in campus life. Now, before anyone makes claims about the patently nostalgic bent of this ostensibly heroic narrative of 60s Melbourne film culture (as a high moment of a kind of romantic cinephilia cut off by the cruel realities of social politics in the 1970s), I also want to claim MUFS as creating a rare example of continuity in Australian film culture (rare in almost any of its manifestations). After struggling through the 70s and early 80s MUFS moved from Melbourne University to RMIT and renamed itself the Melbourne Cinematheque. Thus, rather than disappearing, as many commentators have stated, it actually represents one of the oldest continuous film organisations in Australia. The publication it established in 1954 - Annotations on Film - has been reinvigorated and now appears as part of the internationally recognsied film publication, Senses of Cinema (and has a serious claim to being the oldest film publication in Australia). This is where I step in – as I am the President and co-curator of the Melbourne Cinematheque, and this paper has attempted to recognise some of the history that I have inherited; a history that most would see as virtually non-existent (and that I myself, programming films year in & year out, struggle to see, remember & just keep in mind). In essence, MUFS in the 1960s sets up a shared model for the combination of film production, film analysis and film consumption – all responding to local conditions and global trends - that is unprecedented in Australian film culture. It is, unfortunately, a path that has seldom been taken. MUFS may have been the most significant of film cultural organisations in Melbourne in the 1960s - along with the Film Festival - but its activities are still largely forgotten, its longevity seldom celebrated – all of this tells us that we need to start to fill in the large cracks in what accounts for Australian film history. ADRIAN DANKS