(Jacques Demy, right, with his wife Agnès Varda. A Demy retrospective will screen at the Melbourne Cinémathèque in April. Varda’s film “Daguerreotypes” screens on March 24.)
This Wednesday, February 10, the Melbourne Cinémathèque will begin its 2010 season with a screening of two films by Max Ophüls, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image cinemas. The program for the year, which can be found at the Cinémathèque website and in paper form at ACMI and the other usual outlets, features a weekly program of international cinema running until December. As always, the Cinémathèque program will be a major fixture in Melbourne film culture for 2010. This week I spoke to Michael Koller, one of the Cinémathèque’s programmers, about the year ahead.
This year the Cinémathèque is running several retrospective programs on some familiar heavyweights of world cinema – Federico Fellini (in March), Jacques Demy (April), Akira Kurosawa (May) and Milos Forman (June) – alongside programs on experimental (“Figuring Landscapes,” in March-April) and documentary cinema (a retrospective on the films of Raymond Depardon, in October). I asked Michael about how this balance between different kinds of cinema is maintained across the year-long program. “We do try to achieve some sort of a balance,” he says, “between the more commercial or accessible portion of the program, [and] the new rising stars, as well as those forgotten in the race to go elsewhere. There is always a balance of the populist – Kurosawa, Fellini, Godard, Tarkovsky… But,” he is quick to point out, “one needs to remember that most people in Australia don’t even know who these people are.”
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There is, then, a real pedagogical edge to the Cinémathèque’s programming, an interest in educating viewers about the history and diversity of the cinema, in a way that can appeal both to those viewers encountering the likes of Fellini and Kurosawa for the first time, and those with particular interests in the seasons on documentary and experimental film, or the somewhat more specialized director retrospectives, such as the showcase of the early films of Ernst Lubitsch (in October-November). This pedagogical function – which is supplemented by the regular use at Cinémathèque screenings of written annotations, short critical texts about each of the films that can be picked up outside the cinema – is an especially valuable one in our film culture, where a knowledge of film history (particularly non-American film history) is deemed increasingly irrelevant by university curricula, film journalism and film festivals.
One can see this dual interest in accessibility and pedagogy stretching back to the beginnings of the Melbourne Cinémathèque in the late 1940s, when it started out as the Melbourne University Film Society. “In the 50s & 60s,” says Michael, “MUFS was huge. They were one of the three original partners in the success of The Melbourne Film Festival, along with the Australian Film Institute and the Federation of Victorian Film Societies. It shared in the profits of the Film Festival and used these to mount imported film seasons. It also had a film production arm that made the first film Barry Humphries appeared in.”
MUFS continued until 1984, when, “as we were no longer relevant to what the University of Melbourne did, and because we had outgrown the Undergraduate Lounge – where we used to have weekly screenings of 16mm films – we moved to RMIT and changed the name to The Melbourne Cinémathèque.” Following a move to the State Film Centre in the early nineties and an increased use of 35mm and imported prints, the Cinémathèque finally moved to ACMI in late 2002.
“We were the first organisation to screen there,” Michael continues. “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.” Through this growth, the program also started touring nationally from the early nineties, a trend which continues today, as much of this year’s program will be shared with the Adelaide, Canberra, Brisbane and Sydney Cinémathèques.
ACMI is now the Melbourne Cinémathèque’s familiar home, and the Wednesday night screenings in the larger ACMI cinema are regularly well attended. A big turnout should be expected for opening night on Wednesday, for what is a very exciting screening of Ophüls’ Lola Montès and La Ronde. I remember seeing Lola Montès, Ophüls’ final completed film, which the critic Andrew Sarris has called “the greatest film of all time,” at the Cinémathèque back in 2006; but this year’s screening will be something else altogether.
“Lola Montès IS special,” Michael enthuses, “as it will be the first time we have screened a print from La Cinémathèque Française – the organisation we named ourselves after. We chose Lola Montès as it is being released later in the year on DVD by Madman, and we thought it should be shown in all its restored glory before the DVD release. I think this is probably one of the great restorations, up there with The Red Shoes. The colour should astound. The film has never been screened properly in Australia. On its initial release it was a huge flop, and it disappeared from sight pretty much, occasionally reappearing in substandard copies. This will be the chance to properly assess a major film.”
An object of intense devotion for many theorists of auteur cinema, such as Sarris, Lola Montès inspired the young François Truffaut to declare, in its defence: “If we must fight, we will fight. If we must argue, we will argue!” The film screens alongside La Ronde, “another wonderful Ophüls film, again little seen. I have never seen this in a 35mm print and am really looking forward to the opening.” La Ronde is the earliest of several film versions of the famous fin-de-siècle Viennese play by Arthur Schnitzler.
Other highlights of the early part of the year include a double screening of films by Eric Rohmer, whose recent death greatly saddened cinephiles the world over. The Cinémathèque will screen two films from Rohmer’s “Comedies and Proverbs” series of the 1980s, Full Moon in Paris and My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, on February 17.
Then there is the screening of some fairly neglected films by Martin Scorsese, including a series of his early shorts, and his first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door? from 1968. “We have tried to get this film for several years, with the assistance of the Scorsese office,” Michael explains, “and were unsuccessful. Scorsese has a print but will only allow it to be screened if he is in attendance. Unfortunately, we couldn’t afford that. But then [we learnt] that the Amsterdam Film festival had screened it [on a print] that had come from Hamburg. Got onto the email right away and got a quick reply.” These early films will screen with Scorsese’s 1985 feature, After Hours, on February 24 – coinciding, interestingly, with the release of Scorsese’s new film, Shutter Island, on the 18th.
The 2010 Melbourne Cinémathèque program will introduce and re-introduce viewers to some of the finest pleasures of the cinema, starting with Ophüls’ sumptuous final masterpiece. With that opening screening coming up this Wednesday, this is an ideal time for people to sign up as members and (re)commence their cinephilic education.
Melbourne Cinémathèque memberships may be purchased from the ACMI ticket counter on the evening of each weekly screening. Annual memberships cost $105 or $90 concession, monthly memberships $23/$18. More info at www.melbournecinematheque.org
[Conall Cash is co-editor of Screen Machine. He has studied in the arts and humanities at universities in the United States, Australia and France, and also writes about film at Catabloguing.]
