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.
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
What is the effect on film when the maker's background is utterly different from the culture in which he now works. Anna Epstein talked to a film-maker who brings fresh vision to the Australian film industry.
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.
In the incredible shrinking space between 1984 and 2001 the distinction between social-issue documentary and surreal fiction is collapsing - almost as fast as Australian capitalism or Soviet communism.
It is diversity, and the celebration of the marginal which makes Australian film innovative. Diversity provides the opportunity for people in Australia to enjoy and reflect on the cultural heterogeneity rather than on the alienating myth with which we are so familiar.
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.
Over 12 days in November 1992, the Melbourne based Modern Image Makers Association (MIMA) held the third Experimenta presenting nearly 200 works of film, video, installation and performance. It included work from Germany, Japan, England and the USA, thus providing an opportunity to assess the current state of 'avant garde' practice and discourse.
The title of Monical Pellizari's recently completed short film has a characteristically wry double edge. 'Just Desserts (1993)' tempers an unfortunates Australian maxim with distinctive humour. This film is a delight, a consolidation of the stylistic and thematic concerns of her previous 3 films in 13 witty and evocative minutes.