OF OBSESSION, RECOGNITION... AND SABOTAGE: THREE FILMS BY JOHN CUMMING

AFW @ ARENA 2 Kerr St, Fitzroy, Thursday 17 May, 8pm

"Each project is an experiment in the dynamics of realism and artifice: identity captured and identity performed." - JOHN CUMMING

Obsession (1981-85, 24 mins, b&w 16mm)

Recognition (1982-86, 21 mins, 16mm)

Sabotage (1983-87, 16 mins, b&w 16mm)

In Cumming's words "This trilogy of early 1980s short films can best be described as ‘experimental narrative’, in a thread of Melbourne independent filmmaking that plays with the personal, actuality, performance and montage and with themes of suburbia, identity, ethnicity and gender politics." What this description leaves out is the sheer shock and visceral awe of these three films - Obsession (1981-5), Recognition (1982-86) and Sabotage (1983-87) - works that play at the outer bounds of what is 'acceptable' in terms of linear structural progression, wending with abandon between the archetypal, the figural, the associational and the purely abstract - plays of light, movement, colour and form that distort and destruct the films' ostensible narratives.

This formal fascination with all that interrupts and complicates harks back to a period that was once disreputably, culturally vital - sexual fetishism and muscle car phantasy, death drives, the work of Roland Barthes and J.G. Ballard. The films atomise and reflect their source referents, working in kinks that are distinctly personal, political and playful. They are also intensely worked, with multiple passes at re-processing, visual degradation and re-photography, lending them a feeling of ruination that find their counterpoint in Cumming's obsessed and self-destructive protagonists.