No. 1  AFW + NFSA – Inaugural Screening

Thursday 29 May 2014, the screening begins 7.30pm at Goodtime Studios

Cost is $20 for three consecutive NFSA screenings

A collection of experimental documentary shorts that share a concern for broadening the terms of ethnographic cinema and the role of women in film. There is a marked focus on everyday life and its revolutionary potential. The second half of the program looks at the practice of filmmaking, documenting the story of the medium itself. 


Program

Effacement (1980) Solrun Hoaas (Australia) 14 mins. Solrun Hoaas' first film is a poetic tribute to Noh mask maker Taniguchi Akiko. The film emphasises the relationship between the mask maker and her mask. It experiments with the visual and dramatic potential in Noh and in the mask, moving toward abstraction as the mask appears and re-appears. 

Response de Femmes (1978) Agnes Varda (France) 8 mins. In 1975, Antenne 2 asked seven female filmmakers the question: “How does it feel to be a woman?” They had to answer with a film. Agnes Varda made the cine-leaflet “Response de femmes”, setting up a series of visual tableaux and engaging her participants in dialogues about issues raised by the women's movement. 

Reassemblage: from the Firelight to the Screen (1983) Trinh T. Minh-ha (USA) 39 mins. sound and image is somewhere between fiction and documentary. 

Endangered (1988) Barbara Hammer (USA) 18 mins. Building upon each other, slowly heightening the sense of urgency. Against this mood there is a reassuring image of a silhouetted woman working at the film projector. A strong, competent, fearless woman. Woman documenting, warning, saving. 

The Train Rolls On (1971) Chris Marker (France) 33 mins. Documentary by the French worker-film-maker group, SLON (led anonymously by Chris Marker), about the Russian film-maker Alexander Medvedkin and his followers who operated a 'film-train' in the early 1930s, travelling around the Russian countryside showing and making films about daily life. Forty years later, Marker and the SLON group brought Medvedkin to Paris and filmed him at a railway depot while he recounted his story.