Aleksi Vellis announced his arrival in the turmoil of early 90s Australian cinema with his debut feature 'Nirvana Street Murder' a restlessly energetic film with cavalier camera moves that are almost as swish as the director himself.
Blotting paper, alchemy or potent cocktail. When radical European film-makers in the 1950s with the Nagra sound recorder and noiseless, hand held camera, the Eclair, launched what they called Cinema Verite, they thought they had discovered a way to film truth on the move.
Independent cinema may have been diverse in form, but its practitioners had in common a position of difference and marginality, working outside the mainstream and in opposition to it.
Lesbians do not exist in mainstream Australian cinema. Apart from a brief sequence representing youthful lesbian desire in 'The Getting of Wisdom (1977)' and the undercurrent of adolescent homoeroticism in 'Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)' Australian cinema has remained mute - perhaps dumbstruck might be a more appropriate term - in relation to the issue of desire between women.
Tracey Moffatt offers her personal insights on the making of 'Bedevil' made in 1992 with Film Finance Corporation Trust funds. Due for release in 1993.
Exhibition review Crossings Mary Knott: Drawings and Sculptures 1988 - 1992
Curated by Tony Geddes
The Art Gallery of Western Australia
October 3 - December 13 1992
Geraldton Regional Gallery
December 18 -January 21 1993
Bunbury Art Galleries
January 30 - March 7 1993
Surely one of the powers of cinema is the aesthetic redemption of everyday reality, a poetics in motion that can distill and energise mundane objects, be they tiles on a kitchen wall, the fluorescent facade of an airport terminal, a luminously white T-shirt being twisted and tugged or the compact shapeliness of Y-fronts on a young body emerging from bed.
The emphasis in this collection has been on the films and videos themselves rather than the structures which support their production and circulation but they have not been overlooked....
In matters of technology, as in matters of sex, it is easy to assume one's own preferences are universal and normal, and to regard other's tastes as somehow debased or improper.
John Hughes independent documentary film on Walter Benjamin One Way Street was screened on ABC television in December 1992, the centenary year of Benjamin's birth. The film has been released to festival audiences in the US and Europe and will theatrical release in Sydney and Melbourne in 1993. Here John Hughe slips into pause and explores an opening on certain scenes.