Brake Fluid (1970)MUFS and the Melbourne Cinémathèque: Some Reflections on Decades of Stimulating and Formative Filmgoing Michael Campi November 2024 “A very open-ended canon”: The Many Histories of the Melbourne Cinémathèque Issue 111 2024. Just the other day, with continued reports in the media of migrations of people across state and national borders, I was asked where, if I had the chance, I would most want to live. Having been born in Melbourne, not so very recently, my answer was very quick and with no sense of complacency. Nowhere but Melbourne, for reasons of family ties, long-term and more recent friendships, and with the knowledge that the film and music culture here satisfies me in a usually manageable and broadening way. Moreover, Melbourne has its unique, weekly Cinémathèque screenings, mostly of double bills curated into three-week seasons of the work of a celebrated filmmaker, charismatic screen personality or aspect of a national cinema. These remain very important to me, and a forthcoming, long overseas trip will be slightly curtailed so that a rare Lubitsch film won’t be missed. Many cities large and small have cinémathèques, buildings which house screening facilities and exhibition spaces that celebrate the history of film. Ours in Melbourne is more specific and unique, as for 40 years it has been organised and curated by passionate cinephiles on a voluntary basis, stimulated by a communal passion to bring to audiences and fellow members a wide range of the groundbreaking and the memorable from over more than a century of film, along with other types of moving image. Happily, the Cinémathèque has a relatively large and evolving organising committee. It’s important that younger people feel a passion to continue this tradition. To the essential, small group of exceptional organisers and curators, my words of thanks can never be adequate. However, this continuing stream of programming is more of a functioning concept than an architectural structure or space, as is the case in most other cases. Film lovers coming to Melbourne have sometimes been heard to ask where the Cinémathèque is, as if it had a constant, bricks-and-mortar home. It does have this, but only for four or so hours on a Wednesday night. But even this has shifted over time. The Cinémathèque’s regular location has changed a number of times over the course of its history before settling in its current home in late October 2002 – the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) – a purpose-built venue equipped for film and digital projection on various formats and seating nearly 400 people in its larger auditorium. Annotations on Film (Term 2, 1963) M.U.F.S. Movie Guide (Term 1, 1969) But let’s move back to 1963, when my own involvement in non-commercial film screening activities in Melbourne began with a local film society founded at the end of the previous year. At the same time, the tertiary course I was taking coincided with my attendance at some of the screenings of the Melbourne University Film Society (MUFS). Because of my full-time weekday study timetable, I only occasionally attended daytime sessions and my initial MUFS screenings were usually the Friday night classics shown on 16mm in a lecture theatre. The conditions were extremely cold on some winter nights as we watched, for the first time, enshrined classics or more recent works entering the canon by Rossellini and other filmmakers. One night I tried to keep warm by wrapping myself in the pages of an abandoned evening newspaper while the 16mm projector was failing, but for other reasons. The programming of my local film society (on 16mm) and that of MUFS (on 16 and 35mm) mostly relied on prints held in local distributors’ collections, national sources stored in Canberra or foreign embassies. The cinephile passion of the MUFS organisers meant that within a year or two, the organisation began importing seasons of films then unavailable in Australia. A selection of imported films by Jean Cocteau, Jean-Pierre Melville and Jean Vigo was pivotal to our growing knowledge of cinema, presenting tangible moving images, sounds and emotions that brought alive the words and still images of the many articles we had read about these works as well as their place in film history. But there was also a significant interest in Hollywood genre cinema and the directors who worked distinctively within those forms. It was probably the appearance in commercial cinemas of a series of intense and aggressive films by American directors Arthur Penn, Don Siegel, Sam Fuller and others that led to an important MUFS Night Season, “Violence in the Cinema”, contextualising various works in crime and other genres while mixing together popular and art cinema. A little later, MUFS presented another imported season of almost all of the extant features of Carl Dreyer, probably the first time such a thorough examination of a filmmaker’s career was shown in Melbourne. Violence in the Cinema (March 1963) Early French Cinema Classics (undated) My local film society activities – my voluntary involvement in other aspects of the movement included annual film weekends and being on the staff of the Melbourne Film Festival at the Palais Theatre – meant that I was a keen supporter of MUFS though never on their organising committee. But I did develop special friendships within MUFS, with one or two of those still remaining strong. Through the 1970s, some of us also became passionately involved with the newly founded National Film Theatre of Australia (NFTA), which had screening branches in several capital cities. While MUFS still screened regularly, and mostly from local prints, the NFTA often imported seasons of films on 35 and 16mm, interspersed with surveys from local sources celebrating specific directors, film stars and national filmmaking. Particularly in Victoria, the NFTA screenings sometimes drew large audiences but, ultimately, funding problems led to their demise. A huge regret. Looking back, it was probably not long after the NFTA screenings ceased over 40 years ago that the Melbourne Cinémathèque emerged from the ashes of MUFS. Although the personnel behind the NFTA and MUFS didn’t overlap, as far as I remember, the groundwork laid by these organisations demonstrated that curated seasons based on imported and local prints could be a feasible programming option and could realistically draw sizable audiences. After over 20 years of being on the committees of many film organisations, and with a full-time health professional workload alongside my family commitments, I was never part of the Melbourne Cinémathèque team but hoped that my enthusiasm, occasional suggestions and admiration offered some support. Due to my own involvement in presenting other screening programmes, and understanding the difficulties of maintaining audiences, battling technical problems and solving logistical challenges, my appreciation of the Melbourne Cinémathèque committee remains deeply felt, especially for those who have displayed so much passion and emotional energy for the cinema for 40 years or more. It’s a heartening sign that younger people make up a sizeable proportion of the audience for these and parallel festival screenings these days. The years of the pandemic – particularly in Melbourne – have seen the departure of many veterans from the annals of cinema-going, but the influx of younger enthusiasts is a vital sign of the continuity, ongoing viability and potential permanence of these activities. The activities of the Cinémathèque are also facing more surprising, stiffer competition from some commercial cinemas who are now offering much more repertory programming, perhaps due to the lack of variety of many new releases. In Melbourne, there still are a large number of national film events every year. The large Melbourne International Film Festival attracts growing numbers, again from a younger demographic, while a newcomer to Melbourne in 2024, the carefully curated festival of film restorations, Cinema Reborn, which originated in Sydney, augments and enhances our local film culture as well. It’s heartening to see that the popularity of any one of these series of screenings and events doesn’t appear to adversely affect the others. Film Journal (June 1959) The Melbourne Cinémathèque seasons that have been personal highlights include those devoted to Ernst Lubitsch, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Shimizu Hiroshi and Maurice Pialat. In the best of all possible cinema worlds, it would be wonderful to see more work from Central and South-East Asia, those independent films that slip through the net of national film events and other forms of programming. Many of these films do not find distribution here on disc or streaming in English-subtitled versions. It’s a reflection of extremes that sometimes the only place to experience such works is at Cinémathèques or on planes. Here’s to another 40 years and more of the Melbourne Cinémathèque.
