How to Tell People About a Film Society

Some fragmentary notes towards a visual history of the Melbourne Cinémathèque’s calendars, flyers, publications (including CTEQ: Annotations on Film) and ephemera, with slightly less attention paid (for now) to its website, e-newsletters and social media posts. 

“It was like a VFL program”

The Melbourne Cinémathèque program (1984)

In the beginning was… a whole year’s program, baldly listed as film titles and screening dates, tightly laid out in three columns on an A5 card.

A box enclosed the words “The Melbourne Cinematheque” (no acute or grave accents on “Cinematheque” yet) and stated that this entity was “Incorporating the Melbourne University Film Society,” and that the films listed below comprised the programme (sic – eventually the Cinémathèque’s house style would shift towards the more Americanised “program,” but not yet) for 1984. 

Each of the three columns of films mentioned above listed the program for a term – three terms, a clear reference to the new host university, RMIT (no longer the University of Melbourne), and its academic calendar.

The venue for these screenings was the university’s Glass House Cinema (sic – the venue is properly known as the Glasshouse Cinema) on Wednesday nights. A full year’s membership – “Admission will be by membership only!” the card notes – cost $12 for the waged or $8 for students, the unemployed and pensioners. Annual members enjoyed the privilege of bringing a guest three times throughout the year. 

Each film was described solely by a title and its director’s surname. No descriptions of the films – not even the years they were made – or any information on who put them together. No explanation for why a one-hour selection of Chuck Jones animations – “Bugs, Daffy, Porky etc.” – would precede three films by Straub and Huillet on Wednesday 25 April.

Lifetime committee member and executive programmer Michael Koller recently compared the A5 program card to how the Victorian Football League (the precursor to the AFL) promoted each season’s games. “In the old days they used to have the VFL games on things like this. They were about that size, except they were folded into three,” he told me.¹

“Don’t take it on faith…”

Melbourne Cinémathèque programme notes (1984)

But the Cinémathèque’s archives reveal that even by this stage there was an accompanying booklet of programme (again, sic) notes. These were developed out of the more rudimentary approach of the later years of the Melbourne University Film Society (MUFS); one year’s notes during this time were headed “Jottings on Films.” Available at the start of Term 1 – in advance of the screenings, importantly – for $2, this was a mimeographed guide to the year’s films compiled from, and apparently quite meticulously attributed to, various critical sources. For example, the notes for 1984’s opening night’s screening, comprising Godard’s Une femme est un femme (1961) and Une femme mariée (1964), quote from James Roy MacBean’s Film and Revolution, Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation and Roy Armes’ French Cinema Since 1946. The 1984 program notes feature three black-and-white film stills on the cover and are stapled in the top lefthand corner.

As modest as they were – though arguably representing a wide-ranging and labour-intensive synthesis of film scholarship at the time – these notes form the prototype for CTEQ: Annotations on Film, the specially commissioned essays on the films screening each year that are now published by Senses of Cinema.

In short, the succinct A5 program calendar was not the whole story. Members weren’t obliged to take it on faith, based on their trust in the Cinémathèque. Though I’m sure many did exactly this. I know I’m far from being the only member who, today, turns up most weeks without bothering to remind myself precisely what’s screening. 

As well as the program notes, the Cinémathèque’s screening calendar was supported by a healthy and active culture of film criticism and journalism in The Age and specialist publications and outlets like community radio station 3RRR, notably through the Film Buffs Forecast program hosted by John Flaus and Paul Harris. This was another way that prospective attendees could learn enough about the films being screened and get interested enough to come along. 

“Where do I sign up?”

The Melbourne Cinémathèque program (2004)

As of October 2024, I’ve now been on the Melbourne Cinémathèque committee for 20 years; that’s half of our volunteer-led organisation’s lifespan. I joined as a member in late 2003, immediately upon moving to Melbourne from Aotearoa New Zealand. (Before I moved to Australia, I was attending the Auckland Film Society and had attained a copy of the 2003 Melbourne Cinémathèque calendar, which filled me with a desire to sample its program.) 

Turning up for a Cinémathèque screening in July 2004, I caught some of that year’s AGM. After the proceedings, including the annual election of the committee, had concluded, either the president (then and, again, now), Adrian Danks, or the treasurer (then and still), Michael Koller, announced that anyone else who was interested in joining the committee could speak to him in the lobby during intermission. I did so and attended the next meeting as an observer before being accepted as a committee member. Very soon after, I became the organisation’s secretary for a period, when that role was vacated and needed filling. This is a completely typical way for members to join the committee, and we still accept self-nominations up to our constitutionally mandated limit of 20 people.

“Yeah, sure, give it a go…”

Melbourne Cinémathèque program (2006)

More relevant to my qualification for writing these notes, I had attended the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, where I obtained my BFA. After moving to Melbourne, I completed part of a TAFE diploma in multimedia at RMIT University, which took in everything from video editing (my main interest in taking the course, though not one I would continue with), 3D modelling and animation (Maya, hated it) to the Adobe Creative Suite (including Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator). It was my fairly limited skills with the Adobe package that would soon come in handy. 

In 2006, the Melbourne Cinémathèque’s calendar was issued in two halves, covering the periods from February to May and June to December respectively. This two-part approach to programming was shaped by the Melbourne Cinémathèque’s role as curator of the National Cinémathèque circuit. But, by the second half of the year, that national coalition of like-minded organisations, which had endured for almost 15 years, was coming to an end and we needed to return to creating our own promotional calendar.

I volunteered. To continue the visual identity of the initial four-month calendar, we aimed to use the same typefaces for the headings on the banner area and film descriptions, and to continue with the floral border motif delineating the banner area. So that it stood out as a new program, we changed the dominant colour from green to blue. For whatever reasons, possibly in keeping with the breakdown of the national network, the floral border was supplied to us as a raster file (the kind you know from JPGs) rather than a vector file (an infinitely scalable format associated with graphic design, logos and illustrations). Or perhaps we even needed to copy and digitally extract the motif from a PDF of the February-May calendar – I don’t remember. Either way, because of this process, the second calendar, my calendar, includes ugly digital artefacts: jagged pixelation around the edges of the floral motif. Still, I was excited to commit to print my first bit of graphic design for the Cinémathèque. It’s just another example of the volunteer, DIY ethos we’re built on. If someone can do something then we’ll probably let them try.

I would go on to design the 2007, 2008 and 2009 calendars.

Limitations, Remits and Caveats

Melbourne Cinémathèque Program (1993)

The purpose of this essay is to not to describe, let alone analyse or critique, the historical program of the Melbourne Cinémathèque. Others have done or will do these things as part of this Senses of Cinema dossier and elsewhere. Readers can assume I believe in the programming we offer, otherwise I would not have remained a volunteer for as long as I have.

Instead, my main interest in writing this article is to understand how various cultural, technological and financial forces have shaped the way we communicate our program to those who might be interested in it. In other words, how have we told people about our film society? How have we tried to entice them to its screenings? How effective have we been? What worked and what hasn’t? (Honestly, I’m not sure how easy or possible it is to answer these last two questions.) Where are we at now?

I’m interested in how the materials we’ve produced, in print and digitally, look – and why. Again, what forces – however trivial – shaped these materials? I won’t be able to answer a fair amount of this. A lot of it was “before my time,” so to write these notes I have spoken with Adrian Danks and Michael Koller, as well as with Warren Taylor, a designer and lecturer at Monash University who, as we’ll explore soon, directs the student program that has provided our annual graphic identities and calendar designs for the past decade. 

Many other talented people have contributed to the Cinémathèque over the years, including various programmers (“curators” in their loftier designation), artists and graphic designers. Some of them have also been our longest-serving committee members such as Michael, Adrian and our public officer, Marg Irwin, who first attended in 1973. So far, I’ve only scratched the surface of who did what among this wider group, let alone begun to speak to these people about their contributions. The collective nature of the enterprise is always central.

For example, the 1993 Annotations on Film credit Andrew Rodda and Adrian Danks with the “desktop publishing and layout.” Rodda (now teaching architectural technology at RMIT) and Yanni Florence, an important figure in Australian photography, design and publishing who co-founded the Pataphysics magazine in 1989, are credited as doing the design for the National Cinémathèque that year. Also, for the 1993 National Cinémathèque, filmmaker David Cox is credited for a trailer. I would love to see that.

Many contributions went without a production credit. A good few people have since passed away.

Lastly, though I’m interested in the Cinémathèque’s visual history, I’m not a design historian or critic. My interest is more one of simple but informed wonder – how did a group of largely self-organised people with modest resources manage to create all this stuff?

1988: A Poster to Put on the Fridge

Melbourne Cinémathèque Program (1988)

Things evolved quickly from the Cinémathèque’s inauguration in 1984. In 1988, for the first time, the organisation produced a poster-format calendar of just larger than A2 size, folded into A4 quarters. While it was printed in black and white, it is inarguably the same calendar we still produce to this day. It features short film descriptions for each screening. Durations appear too, though there are still no production or release dates for the films.

Intriguingly, screenings for the first part of the year, until the end of Term Two at the end of July, feature repeat screenings on the same day. For example, in the second week of the first term’s program, on Wednesday 10 February, Sergei Eisenstein’s Stachka (Strike, 1925) screened at 3:30pm and 7:30pm; Brazilian director Roy Guerra’s Os Fuzis (The Guns, 1964) screened at 5:00pm and 9:00pm; and two shorts, Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet mécanique (1924) and Man Ray’s Les Mystères du château du Dé (1929), were scheduled for 7:00pm. Members could thus choose to see the complete program (or a portion of it) by beginning at 3:30pm, 5:00pm or 7:00pm – the order of films changing depending on which start time the audience member chose. For whatever reasons, this multiple-screening format doesn’t carry through to the third and fourth terms of the year.

The calendar is composed of a grid of hand-set rectangles – each one seems to be composed within its own bordered frame and occasionally these borders wander from the master grid. The rectangles include the occasional film still. According to Michael, these images, a uniform size of roughly 40mm x 35mm, were cut by hand with a scalpel from program brochures produced for the National Film Theatre (now BFI Southbank) in London. These were glued onto the Melbourne Cinémathèque poster before it was duplicated and printed. 

A Golden Age for Melbourne’s Film Culture?

The Other Cinémathèque Program (1997)

I’m generally suspicious of “Golden Age” narratives that suggest some time in the past was better than the present. They’re usually politically conservative and factually dubious. But looking at the Cinémathèque’s archival materials of the 1990s and early 2000s it’s amazing to see just how many different screening sessions and programming streams there were each week. 

A sample. There were programs with the VCA School of Film and Television and Modern Image Makers Association (MIMA), which later became Experimenta. The AllGauge stream of “open screenings of audio-visual and related media… an unfunded loose collective aiming to provide a stimulating context within which artists can exhibit their work, curated by Steven Ball [with] assistance from Dirk de Bruyn.” The Cinémathèque’s own spinoff, the Other Cinémathèque, which mounted months-long single-focus programs such as 1996’s “The Dawn of Cinema: Exposing the Movies’ Origins on Three Continents, 1894–1917” and 1997’s “Straight Shooter: A John Ford Season.” The Other Cinémathèque began at the Erwin Rado Theatrette in Fitzroy, showing films on Monday nights, and in later years also moved to the VCA’s Grant Street Cinema in South Melbourne on Thursday nights. The Cinémathèque also mounted special screenings and symposiums on weekends and whatever few nights remained free amid this hectic schedule. 

The result of all this is that there are multiple calendars, flyers and booklets covering all these activities for each year across this period. It’s impressive but also bewildering. It will require ongoing work to document these happenings, and this is currently being undertaken on the Melbourne Cinémathèque website after stalling for many years

Treasures from…

Melbourne Cinematheque Program (1998)

The National Cinémathèque ‘Treasures from the French Embassy’ poster (1998)

Whereas since 2009 we’ve published a single annual calendar with a full year’s programming outlined and described, in these earlier iterations there were gaps carved out for special programs still to be confirmed. Often these were organised with the cultural arms of the major European embassies; prints were drawn from the collections of the French Embassy, the Goethe-Institut, the Swedish Institute and others. These special seasons often included imported prints.

On the other hand, we could argue that this “Golden Age” narrative is false, as what the Cinémathèque of 2024 does is more or at least as ambitious than at any time in its past. As Adrian wrote in a recent email to the Cinémathèque committee, “[Historically] most of the films shown in the main program were from the NFVLS [the National Film and Video Lending Service in Canberra] – which was certainly easier to manage.”²

In recent years, we have imported a far greater proportion of the screening program, first as 35mm prints and increasingly as DCPs (digital cinema packages), often in restored versions. In a globally connected digital era, the Cinémathèque is also globally connected and screens a mixture of archival celluloid and digitised or digital films. The planning and costs (paying for screening rights as well as freight – and even electronically delivered DCPs still come with handling charges) that go into this – programming a full year’s film calendar in advance – are far more demanding than picking from a list of films available at the national archives and libraries in Canberra or Melbourne. Back in the day, the NFVLS would even pay for the shipping of its 16mm prints to accredited film societies such as the Melbourne Cinémathèque; we only had to pay the return postage.

As we’ll see, the way we communicate with our members has also evolved to keep pace. Our members are generally well informed, often aware of repertory and archival programming at major film festivals abroad, and this shapes not only what they expect from the Cinémathèque but also the kinds of conversations we have with them on our social media channels. 

2007 and 2008: After the National Cinémathèque 

Melbourne Cinémathèque Andrzej Wajda season flyer (2008)

Melbourne Cinémathèque Fritz Lang season flyer (2008)

I’ve said I’m interested in how various external factors have shaped the Cinémathèque’s printed and digital matter. So it’s surprising to me, in retrospect, that in 2007 and 2008 – two of the three years I was designing the Cinémathèque’s collateral – we printed numerous double-sided, full-colour A4 flyers promoting one three-week director or themed season on each side. There are a couple of things to note here.

The first is that this practice differed from that of earlier years when special seasons of imported prints curated in collaboration with foreign embassies or cultural organisations were left to be confirmed after the main calendar had been printed. By contrast, these extra flyers in 2007 and 2008 duplicated information already made available on the main calendar when it was published at the beginning of the year.

This, as Adrian and I recall, was because we received funding that was specifically earmarked for promotion.³ It couldn’t, in other words, be put towards the main programming and used to pay for rights or freight. I even remember creating a hand-lettered advertisement for the weekly street-press publication Beat to promote our Roman Polanski season.

I had a lot of fun creating these extra A4 season flyers. They were comparatively more spacious, with less information required on a larger sheet, and offered the chance to play around with larger images. I also felt unrestrained by the main calendar’s overall graphic identity for the year and attempted to come up with something relevant to each film season: a Fritz Lang retrospective inspired a “Germanic” Gothic typeface, while the “Cinema ’68: The Whole World is Watching” five-week season on the other side of the same flyer has a heading created in a bulbous typeface reminiscent of countercultural posters.  

The other thing to note is that, in 2024, it’s almost inconceivable that we’d have this kind of promotional budget. All of our funding – derived from memberships, government support and, for the first time this year, an Australian Cultural Fund donations drive – goes towards core operational costs. In 2024, we don’t even take on the updated, digital equivalent of these earlier printed endeavours to promote our programming on social media.

Our Beautiful Laundrettes

Melbourne Cinémathèque ‘Hazing the Hays Code: Hollywood’s Pre-code Era’ season flyer 

There is another important correlate to these extra printed materials: distribution. For many years, the Cinémathèque paid a distributor to deposit our calendars and brochures at various cafes, laundromats and whatever other locations comprised its network. It slowly sank in that we were only purchasing exposure for a strictly limited time – perhaps two weeks – before our precious calendars would be removed to make way for whatever promotions the distributor was being paid for delivering next. Thus, a good deal of our printed calendars (whose printing accounted for a considerable portion of our annual budget) would effectively disappear, going straight into the bin. Not to mention how scattershot this attempt to reach an interested audience seems in today’s era of precisely targeted social media advertising.

But at the time, printing extra season flyers offered a way of having something new to distribute and thereby reminding an imaginary customer, perhaps waiting around for their washing to finish its cycle, that the Melbourne Cinémathèque was about to mount an unmissable Jacques Rivette season. Crazy.

At some point – right now, I’m not entirely sure which year this was – we made the decision to cease sending a large portion of our printed calendars to the distributor. Instead, they would be made available solely at our partner venue the Australian Centre for Moving Image (ACMI) as well as at whatever ad-hoc network of cafes, cultural outlets, bookstores and universities our committee members volunteered to deposit them at. 

This shift was made possible, in part, because the printed calendar was slowly becoming less important. As we began to establish a stronger digital presence with a website, weekly electronic newsletter and, just a few years later, a Facebook page, it became possible to communicate in more ways with our members (see below).

One more advantage of ceasing distribution is that we no longer needed to print as many copies of the calendar, and there was a small saving that came with that. It’s marginal though. Most of the costs come with setting up the print project itself, rather than whether you intend to print 4,000 or 6,000 copies.

Getting Online

Melbourne Cinémathèque website (2006)

According to the Wayback Machine, the melbournecinematheque.org website was first captured by its online trawling in August 2006. This may or may not be the same month the website went live, but it seems likely to me. Just to note, while I think this 2006 date is correct, I don’t entirely trust the traces of the Cinémathèque website captured by the Wayback Machine. Its snapshots for 2007 are clearly wrong, as they feature the Cinémathèque “wordmark” (logo) that only came into existence in 2014 when it was designed by my friend and then housemate Stuart Geddes. Regardless, launching the website meant that for the first time our members and prospective members could view our program online. We’d joined the digital era.

We joined Twitter in November 2009. That’s only three years after it launched. Some of the committee – not me – must have been already comfortable with and using the platform.

According to Michael, he began sending a weekly e-newsletter in 2012, and its existence is first mentioned on the 2013 calendar. Michael wrote and compiled the newsletter each week and, at first, sent it from the Cinémathèque email address before, as the mailing list grew, needing to migrate it to the MailChimp platform.

It’s worth noting that if I was at all self-conscious about my sort-of-self-taught calendars for the Cinémathèque, Michael was entirely untroubled by the conventions of good graphic design in the newsletter he produced. His sui generis missives regularly featured 100-point typefaces, multiple exclamation points and lengthy chunks of ALLCAPS SHOUTING!!! If there was an important announcement, such as a change to a screening’s start time, you could be certain you would read it at least three times: in the subject line, in the newsletter introduction and then, in a dedicated announcement with its own heading and border.

We would eventually redesign the MailChimp newsletter in late 2021, reassigning it to other committee members, with Grace Quiason taking care of the new design and with man-of-many-hats Andréas Giannopoulos and me being responsible, at first, for penning the introduction each week, before we looked to other committee members to take over the writing. We wouldn’t launch a Facebook page until 11 January 2011, and we’ve only started using Instagram since March 2024, after an abortive earlier attempt. TikTok? Threads? Watch this space.

Calling in the Cavalry

Melbourne Cinémathèque program (2013)

I was happy enough with the calendar designs I’d created in 2007 and 2008, but after 2009 I began to feel like perhaps it was time to seek professional help. My concept for the 2009 calendar was meant to reflect the overlap of chromatic, projected light, with the colour spectrum combining to create white light. It’s an okay idea but the execution is a bit blocky.

In 2010 I approached Hannah Ngaei, a trained graphic designer who was a friend of my then girlfriend. Hannah created the 2010, 2011 and 2012 calendars and in doing so ushered in a new era.⁴ In 2013 I was sharing a house with my friend Stuart Geddes. Now a lecturer in the School of Design at RMIT, Stuart is a master of all forms of printing and publishing. At this point he and his friend Jeremy Wortsman had already won the 2006 Victorian Premier’s Communications Design Prize for their work on Is Not Magazine, a bimonthly periodical published as a large bill poster and pasted up on walls around Melbourne.

I prevailed upon Stuart to design the 2013 calendar, and he created a beautiful typographic tribute to the title sequences of some of Jean-Luc Godard’s classic 1960s films – we had a Godard season in the program that year.

The following year I convinced him to help us with the calendar again, and that’s when he created the Melbourne Cinémathèque wordmark (a logo in layperson’s terms, though there is a difference) that we still use. It’s not widely known that Stuart created five variations of the wordmark: the solid version we use in most applications and four textured variations. Eventually we applied a “wavy” version to our merchandise – t-shirts and tote bags – that ACMI agreed to stock in its gift shop. It’s a modest money spinner to this day because, since the wordmark includes the word “Melbourne” and ACMI’s does not, tourists visiting the city, Federation Square and its “film museum” at ACMI seem happy enough to buy our merchandise as a souvenir of their time in the city. We sell more merch that way than to our members. Consider it partial revenge for all the times the public at large mistakenly assumes that the Cinémathèque’s program is put on by ACMI.

The MADA Years

Melbourne Cinémathèque program (2015)

Stuart, finding himself too busy with his own design work, suggested another talented designer and mutual friend, Warren Taylor, might be able to take over the project for 2015. Warren was working on some projects with another designer, Carla McKee, who assisted him with the calendar that year.⁵

Towards the end of each screening year at the Cinémathèque, we have a committee meeting where programming ideas are solicited for the next year (though some would say it’s where ideas are politely ignored) and then the core programming subcommittee gets to work (or goes off and does what it was already planning to). For publishing the program, online and in print, this means that it’s usually not until November before the calendar editor, Adrian, has a reasonably concrete schedule of films that he can then ask some of us to write notes on. Allowing for editing once these have been submitted, it’s often mid-December before the copy can go into design.

Design takes place leading up to and through the Christmas and New Year holidays. It’s a huge task, especially when you’re talking about people outside the committee and who receive only a meagre honorarium in return. Almost all printers are closed anyway over the holidays, so there is no way to go to print until the second week of January.

It was some of these factors that led Warren to wonder if it could become a project for his students in the Monash Art, Design and Architecture (MADA) faculty. “When it [the 2015 calendar] was finished – it was probably the number of rounds of changes and I remember thinking that if you weren’t involved that would even be double or triple [the amount of work], – you softened the blow. And it was also awkward with the timing [over the holiday break],” Warren told me recently.⁶ “Then I thought, well, maybe I could start on the next one straight away. You know, like in January, February, start thinking about the concept for the next one. And that’s when I thought of it as a student project.”

It was from this notion that a relationship that is now almost a decade old was born. Beginning in 2015, graduating third-year MADA students would come up with calendar designs based on the actual films, images and descriptions we had published at the beginning of that year. The Cinémathèque would then be presented with a shortlist and choose one “winning” student’s submission to be printed in January the following year. The mock-up text they used from our previous year’s calendar would be replaced with new copy matching the program for the incoming year, all the images updated and, often, the design would be rigorously tightened up under Warren’s supervision.

Melbourne Cinémathèque program (2016)

The first student chosen, who worked on the assignment at Monash in 2015 and whose calendar we used for our 2016 program, was Zach Beltsos-Russo. Zach’s calendar – the result of his experimenting with screen-printing and his extensive research among copyright-free image archives – remains an absolute highlight of what we’ve achieved with MADA. Printed with a bright orange spot colour as well as the usual four for CMYK, it was – dare I say it – the hippest the Cinémathèque had ever looked. Zach, who in 2015 was awarded a Graduate of the Year commendation from the Australian Graphic Design Association, has gone on to a successful career in the industry. 

From a pedagogical perspective, the challenges of designing the calendar could become strengths. “At first it was part of the graphic design studio, which was looking at typography, publication design, and identity,” Warren said. “From a technical point of view, it was great because [the students] were able to deal with like 13,000 words of text… It was a great way to teach the software through typographic styling, grid systems, layout, but also make it interesting for them by connecting it to cultural identity. So a lot of the reference images were interesting precedents of museum identity or cinema, work that was more interesting than any kind of corporate or cultural branding work they might have done.” Warren also added, “it was a good way to also teach a bit of design history through poster design, particularly European film posters from the ’60s through to the ’80s.”

Lastly, while I’ve always hoped the project would give the selected emerging designers a professionally printed piece of work they could show in their portfolio, Warren also saw it in terms of the designers helping a deserving cultural organisation, namely the Cinémathèque: “Because it was a live project and it was supporting a not-for-profit organisation, it seemed to be a project where design could have some impact, becoming part of a support network for a volunteer organisation that doesn’t have much budget.”

Melbourne Cinémathèque program (2017)

The 2017 calendar was an exception in that Warren once again designed it himself. Fewer students doing the project that year had led to a weaker shortlist, so the teacher stepped in. He created a slightly contentious psychedelic treatment where colourful, high-contrast (the technical term is “posterised”) monochromatic images of actors and directors were overlaid in semi-opaque layers on a yellow background and over the film descriptions. There were complaints about its legibility, but – in my opinion, at least – it looked brilliant.

There were some technical reasons that shaped the posterisation of these images of Marcello Mastroianni and Isabelle Huppert, and they remain relevant to how the contemporary calendar is produced. I remember that in the 2006–2009 era we would still physically source and copy images from books and magazines (from Adrian and Michael’s personal collections, from the RMIT library, and occasionally from the AFI Research Collection). More recently, everything is found on the internet, and the images are usually low-resolution. “But the images themselves are these fantastic photographs of stylish actors or directors,” Warren said. “So, it always seems really interesting to use them large.” This dictates that they must be processed with techniques such as bitmapping or posterisation so that they can be blown up without blurriness or pixelation.

An alternative strategy – a prominent example of which can be seen in Rebekah Rose’s design for the 2019 calendar – is to keep the film stills small but complement them and unify the design with large illustrations. 

Melbourne Cinémathèque flyer (2019)

Melbourne Cinémathèque ‘Moral Crucibles: The Films of Robert Aldrich’ season flyer (2019)

In the years following Dominique Vine’s design in 2018, there has come to be a greater emphasis on cinema screens and other digital assets that would support the calendar and create a holistic approach to the year’s programming and our graphic identity. Dominique had crafted a comprehensive submission that included the calendar, poster treatments and an animation. This, and the fact that he was now attending the Cinémathèque semi-regularly himself, led Warren to realise that while they were putting most of the assignment’s effort and focus into the calendar and digital poster (shown on ACMI’s vertical lobby screens), the “main hero graphic,” in his words, is the cinema screen and the opportunity it presents for various all-year-round messages – to join the Friends of Cinémathèque, to sign up for the newsletter, to buy our merchandise, and so on – as well as information about upcoming film seasons. Warren and his colleagues reshaped the assignment brief accordingly, and we now receive a full package of digital assets.

Around the same time, as social media became more important to us, we also began to request that some of these same assets, the season screens in particular, be resized and reformatted for use on Facebook and Twitter (now X).

At this point, in 2024, we could probably dispense with the printed calendar entirely and still reach our audience. We’d save a few thousand dollars if we did. Whether we’d see memberships drop off by doing so is a real debate. We’ve talked about it. The relative importance of a physical calendar is even a question for the annual member surveys we conduct. Suffice to say, for now most of the committee (and hopefully the members) still feel that having a printed version “makes it real.” It’s a small, physical celebration of all the work that goes into mounting the annual program. 

The COVID-19 Pandemic and How We Responded 

Melbourne Cinémathèque ‘Wildflowers: Dancing, Desire, and Freedom in the Films of Gillian Armstrong’ season flyer (2021)

The 2020 calendar was basically pulped when, in late March, seven weeks into the program, and before the third night of our Marlene Dietrich season, what would be the first of Melbourne’s long series of pandemic lockdowns came into effect.

Melbourne Cinémathèque e-newsletter (2020)

We would finally return in April 2021, picking up where we left off with the same Dietrich season. More lockdowns caused further interruptions throughout 2021. Learning our lesson from the 2020 calendar being made obsolete overnight, we – with wise guidance from Warren – adapted MADA student Jessie Liu’s design into a full-colour “frame” on A4 (much smaller than our usual A1 12-month calendars). Blank on the front and containing only the ticketing information and our partners’ and sponsors’ promotional images on the reverse side, each single season, assuming we were open for business, could then be “nimbly” (this and “pivot” were the catchwords of the times) printed on a humble A4 laser printer in black only.

Melbourne Cinémathèque program (2022)

We stuck with this nimble approach to printing each season – as we were able to, once we were sure the screenings could go ahead – in 2022 also. Our DIY approach found form in Alina Neuberger’s punky collagist graphic treatment for that year, with single-colour A3 flyers printed on coloured paper purchased from Officeworks. Feeling a little more confident than the previous year, we moved from having a single three-week season on one side of an A4 sheet to covering two three-week seasons (or some combination of a typical three-week season and shorter single-night or two-week programs) on both sides of a larger A3 sheet. Warren printed these using the MADA Risograph and we had them folded to DL size at a local print shop. The occasional late design file meant some were commercially laser printed, and tight deadlines meant I ended up folding some of them by hand.

It was a good thing we stuck to the flexible A3 design in 2022 as disaster struck immediately when, just ahead of our scheduled opening night screening on Wednesday 2 February, we learnt that defects in an ongoing cinema renovation at ACMI – acoustic panels were assessed to be in danger of falling from the walls into the aisles and endangering the patrons – meant we couldn’t access our venue for some time. Somewhat ironically, this interruption had nothing to do with the COVID-19 lockdowns we operated in fear of at the time.

We would start later in the month, on Wednesday 23 February, back at the RMIT Capitol Theatre where we had taken up residency in June 2019 when the ACMI renovations had begun. The Abbas Kiarostami season we had scheduled (following on from an opening night Mitchell Leisen double feature) was postponed till June. The green version printed with the original dates was never distributed; the Kiarostami season eventually returned on a sand-coloured stock. 

2023: Business as Usual

Melbourne Cinémathèque program (2023)

We finally felt safe enough to return to a full-sized A1 calendar in 2023. We selected an elegant, almost classical design by Marissa Hor. Along with its neat, highly legible grid and clean mix of serif headings and sans-serif body type, we were attracted to its ability to mix colour and black-and white images.

For some years, from 2018 to 2022 in fact, the chosen MADA students had opted for monochromatic images. It’s a neat solution to unifying the calendar design so that it reads as a cohesive poster, but it’s something of a misrepresentation of the historical breadth and diversity of the Cinémathèque’s screening program, which runs from black and white to Technicolor and beyond, not to mention the variation in aspect ratios across cinema history. These different ratios remain hard to represent on a uniform design grid like the calendar. Another strength of Marissa’s design was that it accommodated different image sizes; while these present cropped details of the original film stills, and therefore don’t fully reproduce various historical film ratios, they go a long way to creating a visually dynamic poster.

Marissa also opted for a satin (or “silk”) paper stock which, according to Warren, she felt was a nod to our calendars of the early 2000s. This too was a change from the uncoated stock that Stuart Geddes had introduced in 2013 and which everyone else had stuck with since then. There’s something classy about the uncoated look – it feels more like a gallery program and less like junk mail – but Marissa managed to make the satin finish sing.

It’s worth noting, too, that we saw increased audience numbers in 2023. While this could be solely due to our members being glad to have Melbourne’s gruelling lockdowns behind them and to be able to come back to the cinema and its crowds, it also seems likely that they were responding to a full 12-month program being announced at the beginning of the year. The Cinémathèque’s ticketing model is to sell annual passes, which offer the best possible value to members, alongside three-week mini passes. As an organisation, we benefit most when we sell more annual passes. During the season-to-season programming of the pandemic, members were generally more hesitant to buy annual passes for a program they couldn’t consider in advance and weren’t sure would even take place.

2024: 40 Years of the Melbourne Cinémathèque

40 years of Melbourne Cinémathèque (2024)

For our 40th anniversary in 2024 we’ve chosen a design by Grace Robson that wears, on its sleeve, its debt to the title sequences Saul Bass created for films like Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959). Doorways and human figures – walking, climbing, falling – unify the poster, suggesting a temporal sequence and a narrative progression. Multidisciplinary designer Rochelle Oh then, more literally, animated Grace’s walking protagonist in an onscreen loop that greets early arrivals to the ACMI cinema every Wednesday. Robson’s figure emerges onscreen from bottom left and then disappears through a doorway set into a large, architectural “40.” This figure then reappears from another doorway and walks off the righthand-side of the screen, only to then reappear in its original position at bottom left so that the scene may repeat.

While not the first animation we’ve had from the MADA cohort, it’s a good illustration of how, 40 years after the Melbourne Cinémathèque was established, the calendar must now be viewed as only one part of a promotional strategy that includes onscreen cinema slides to be shown at ACMI as well as various social media assets. Then again, if we think back to the emergence of the earliest program notes or the trailers lost to history, even this isn’t such a radical change. The calendar is a cornerstone, but it’s never been the whole edifice.

Endnotes