WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Abismos de Pasión, Mexico, 1953, 91 mins, 35mm, b&w, Spanish with Eng. subtitles (unclassified 18+)

Wuthering Heights seems at first to be firmly in Mexican cinema's 'ranchera' genre, like a south-of-the-border genre rebadge of Jezebel or Gone with the Wind. That is, until its darkly, sadistically handsome hero Alejandro whispers 'Catalina'. Thus, literature's most familiar codeword for romantic yearning suddenly unlocks the film's artistic derivations and Buñuel's intent. Like Robinson Crusoe (which Buñuel had previously brought to the screen in 1952) Emily Brontë's famously death and sex-infused Gothic novel was a favourite of the surrealist's artistic circle in the 1920s, and its adaptation a long held ambition of the director. Realised within the constraints of Mexican genre cinema, the film may not have been quite the symbolist romance that Buñuel apparently intended, the director later stating his disappointment with the actors' distracting touches of Mexican cinema star power. But in some ways, it is all the richer, and perhaps more fantastic, for having this Latinised, pop novella undercurrent — all that tabloid desire, sadism and machismo swelling below its historical costume drama surfaces.

IT'S RAINING PLEASURE

Dir: Steven Levett, Aust., 2008, 120 mins, video, col., Eng. (unclassified 18+)

The anniversary of singer-songwriter David McComb’s passing inspired a reunion concert for his iconic ARIA Hall of Fame inductee band The Triffids at the 2008 Sydney Festival, the first gathering of surviving band members and friends in 20 years. Filmmaker Steven Levett weaves interviews and concert footage with guest performances from the likes of Mick Harvey, Steve Kilbey (with his own version of Wide Open Road), Toby Martin from Youth Group and Rob Snarski, performing material he and McComb wrote for The Blackeyed Susans. Canberra Premiere. Steven Levett and musician Graham Lee will introduce the screening.

THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE

Cet obscur objet du désir, Dir: Luis Buñuel Fr./Spain 1977, 102 mins, 35mm, col., Spanish/French with Eng. subtitles (M)

Buñuel’s final masterpiece was a brilliant conceit: that no man is ever old enough to figure out what women want. To prove Buñuel’s point, Fernando Rey plays an aging Lothario, whose object of sexual obsession is literarily a split personality, the role being passed (tag-team like) between actresses Angela Molina and Carole Bouquet (cast after Last Tango in Paris star Maria Schneider fled from doing the part solo). Scripted by Buñuel’s perennial 1960s collaborator, Jean-Pierre Carrière, this is the director making a surrealist screwball comedy out of completely dark materials.

SUMMER PALACE

Yihe yuan Dir: Ye Lou, China, 2006, 140 mins, 35mm, col., Mandarin with Eng. subtitles (unclassified 18+)

Leading ‘Sixth Generation’ filmmaker Ye Lou’s controversial account of the generation of Chinese youth that lived in the whirlwind of 1989 and the Tiananmen Square protests – then reaped its anti-climactic aftermath. Built around the wayward romantic idealism of a young Beijing university student, it’s less focused on the protest movement itself (although Lou depicts the night of 4 June with an expressionist, frightened, turbulent energy reminiscent of Terrence Malick) than what came after, as its participants fled into exile or succumbed to the temptations of a new Free Market Chinese society. Banned and withdrawn from official competition at Cannes in 2006 (as much for it’s erotic as its political energies) Summer Palace is a cinema tone poem to modern China’s lost idealism. Canberra premiere.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

Dir: Sam Peckinpah, USA, 1974, 112 mins, 35mm, col., Eng. (R)

Warren Oates stars as a low-life Texas bar pianist, drawn into a mad dash to claim the cash offered by a Mexican Drug patriarch (another Peckinpah regular, iconic Mexican actor/director Emilio Fernández): to bring back his daughter’s lover, dead or dismembered. As the inevitable double-crosses throw everyone’s schemes off-course, the film’s pulpish, insane and amoral thrills show off Sam Peckinpah’s absurdist sense of humour - somewhere between Hemmingway and Graham Greene - and one of Oates’ great roles (reputedly modelled on Peckinpah himself). Outrageously titled and premised, Bring Me the Head… is slowly earning its place as a critical favourite and as the last of the director’s great ‘Border Westerns’. “Peckinpah had no rival in fashioning wasted trash who trusted no one but themselves and knew that worse times were coming. It’s not just the hero who is dying; it’s the prospect of more honest films. ” – David Thomson. New print.

PERFORMANCE

Dirs: Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg, UK, 1970, 105 mins, 35mm, col., Eng (R)

Donald Cammell’s masterpiece (probably only technically co-directing with then cinematographer Nicolas Roeg), tests the point at which the ‘60s power-fantasy had become a nightmare. Mick Jagger plays an alternative future-self to the aging jet-setter to come, burnt-out in faux-aristocratic squalor in a rambling West London terrace. Escaping one underworld of tabloid thuggery, for another of hedonism, spiv gangster James Fox falls into this Alistair Crowley-like phantasmagoric trap of the mind and body. Fusing these twin archetypes of ‘60s London celebrity moral panic. Performance shares with films like Gimme Shelter in a hypnotised fascination for the Faustian power of The Rolling Stones’ music. From the NFSA collection.

PINK FLAMINGOS

Dir: John Walters, USA, 1972, 106 mins, 35mm, col., Eng. (R)

The film that marked the high-water and high-camp mark of the low-brow, low-tech, old John Waters movie-making, pre-Hairspray and his present-day celebrity pundit status. The late, great Divine (the mother in the original Hairspray) plays the arch trailer trash and ‘notorious criminal beauty’, Babs Johnson, on the run from the law in rural Maryland with her imbecile son, senile mother and "travelling companion" Cotton. The plot’s loosely a gang war movie of sorts, as Divine battles with arch-rivals, blue-rinsed perverts and baby kidnappers Connie and Raymond Marble, for the title of "'Filthiest Person Alive". But the plot’s just an excuse for an escalating succession of very outrageous, and very funny sight, sound and smell gags about America’s celebrity obsession.

AUSTRALIAN SURREALISM

Dada and Surrealism – especially the work of Luis Buñuel, but also of filmmakers such as René Clair, Man Ray and Americans like Maya Deren – were key influences on the undeterred generation of Australian filmmakers who struggled to make films in the 1950s and ‘60s and build the foundations of the feature film revival in the 1970s. A selection of key Australian surrealist works from this era begins with Colin Munro’s 1954 Dadaist Dial P for Plughole (featuring then student Barry Humphries), and explores prize-winning short films by Ian Davidson, Czech-born artist Dusan Marek, Chris McCullough, and the early films of Peter Weir. From the collection of the NFSA. For more details, see www.nfsa.gov.au/arc

TONITE LETS ALL MAKE LOVE IN LONDON + REGGAE

(Both films unclassified 18+)

Two very different perspectives on London pop culture and its subcultures in the late ‘60s: Iconic British pop documentarian Peter Whitehead’s Tonite Let's All Make Love in London (1967, 60’, 16mm) is one of the most famous snapshots of Groovy Britannia at its zenith, with surprisingly candid interviews with Vanessa Redgrave, Mick Jagger, Julie Christie, Michael Caine and painter David Hockney, to the music of Punk Floyd. Reggae (1970, 60’ 16mm) is pioneering Afro-Caribbean filmmaker Horace Ové’s look at the formative sound of London music and the immigrant culture that brought it to the UK.

FROZEN RIVER

Dir: Courtney Hunt, USA, 2008, 97 mins, 35mm, col., Eng./Fr with Eng subtitles (MA 15+)

Ray Eddy is a sleep-deprived upstate New York single-trailer mom. Lila is also doing it tough on a Mohawk Indian reservation in Quebec. Broke after her gambling addicted husband takes off with the mortgage payments, Ray joins forces with Lila to build a lucrative sideline in casual smuggling, across the frozen border between the US and Canada. But then they realise they are being stalked by an ambitious State Trooper, and the danger escalates. Director Courtney Hunt’s film offers endless genre twists, working as a North-of-the-Border modern-day Western, a feminist thriller and a metaphor for Minimum-wage USA. It’s all made for the US indie sleeper hit of the past year, winning Sundance, Oscar nominations for actress Melissa Leo and its script, and a slew of critic’s awards. "Hunt's grip on the impulsive fumblings of real-life behaviour is so firm that you stay with her all the way, almost forgetting to breathe. It's a simple story but a primal one and it gives Leo the role she's long deserved" - Sandra Hall, Sydney Morning Herald. Canberra Premiere.

THE SERVANT

Dir: Joseph Losey, UK, 1964, 112 mins. 35mm, b&w, Eng (PG)

Dull minor artistocrat James Fox and “gentleman’s gentleman” Dirk Bogarde are penned up in an upscale London house, in a relationship that starts in the normal English upstairs-downstairs order of things but ends in a psychological and homoerotic power struggle. The barest and maybe most ‘Pinteresque’ of the collaborators between director Joseph Losey and Nobel prize-winner playright Harold Pinter endures as maybe their best work, the milieu attenuated by John Dankworth’s spare jazz score and Douglas Slocombe’s cinematography. Courtesy of the BFI.

POP MOVIES

Total running time 80 mins, video, col. (unclassified 18+)

Three episodes from director and rock clip maker Ray Argall's unique Pop Movie series of short films, extraordinary time capsules of the Australian pub band and recording scene at its peak in the early to mid-1980s. The Models and The Swingers: Staying Number One (both 1982, 25', video) looks at the precarious success of two of inner- Melbourne's most acclaimed bands of the early '80s. The Myth of Stardom (1986, 29', video) interviews three of highest-profile Australian music identities of the era: Kate Ceberano, 'Angry' Anderson and Peter Garrett.