AFW

A night of films that reflect on death, sex, movement and cosmos.

7.30pm
The Brunswick Green
313/315 Sydney Rd, Brunswick VIC 3056
$10
All shown on 16mm film.
Note: the last two films of the evening contain explicit nudity/imagery.

Presented this month by Melody Woodnutt, AFW is screening a collection of films from the National Film and Sound Archive and some short films made by AFW local filmmakers (more TBA). Between these films, there may flow a loose atmosphere of the cosmic in the visceral, bodily, animate and abstract.


MOTHLIGHT | STAN BRAKHAGE
4 minutes, 1963, NFSA
”Mothlight was created by painstakingly collaging bits and pieces of organic matter—moth wings, most notably, as well as flowers, seeds, leaves, and blades of grass—and sandwiching them between two layers of clear 16-mm Mylar editing tape…. If cinema is primarily the art of animation—restoring or creating movement, conjuring ghosts, and bringing inert matter to life—then little Mothlight is pure cinema: life transmuted into light and motion.”(Artforum)

THE VERY EYE OF NIGHT | MAYA DEREN
15 minutes, 1959, NFSA
The Very Eye of Night is filmmaker Maya Deren's last completed film. It was made from 1952 to 1955 in collaboration with choreographer Antony Tudor, but it was not released until 1959 when the musical score by Teiji Ito was added. The entire film is projected as photographed in the negative. ~ David Lewis, All Movie Guide

GALAXY | ARTHUR AND CORRINE CANTRILL
4 minutes, 1964, NFSA
Abstracted images derived from fireworks with a sound-track inspired by musique concrete experiments.

MAYHEM | ABIGAIL CHILD
16 minutes, 1987, NFSA
In settings inspired by film noir and Mexican comic books, bodies and faces are arranged in a fragmentary montage of desire and the erotic that finishes with images from a historical pornographic film. The soundtrack guides the film, combining noirish soundtracks, Mexican music, snippets of voice and improvised pieces utilising turntables. The film-maker has said she 'was perversely and equally inspired by de Sade's Justine and Vertov's sentences about the satiric detective advertisement'. Censored in Tokyo for its use of Japanese lesbian erotica.


LOVE AND OTHER ECOLOGIES | MELODY WOODNUTT
15 minutes, 2019, AFW.
A 3 act pagan-western fever dream complimented by avant-rockabilly guitar and a soaring droning violin. The film utilises a collage of iconography, symbology, and b’n’w grunge to imagine the death of a lover and likewise the “principum individuationis”. Love and Other Ecologies was shot in Iceland, Canada, and Melbourne.