July 12 – Funeral Parade of Roses (薔薇の葬列 Bara no sôretsu, 1969, dir – Matsumoto Toshio, DOP – Suzuki Tatsuo)

Ficto-documentary hybrid exploring the countercultural queer scene in late 60s Shinjuku – following Eddie, a sex worker in a post-atomic bomb Japan. Eddie is a self-identified high femme “gay boy” embroiled in the battle for control of a Tokyo gay club. Funeral Parade of Roses is experimental in narrative and formal technique and did I mention it’s also a loose adaptation of Oedipus Rex?

Location: A private location in Preston, Melbourne!

Time: Doors at 7:30pm for an 8pm start, 12th July, 2019.

Admission is a set of 1960s false eyelashes.

July 26 – Eros + Massacre (エロス＋虐殺 Erosu purasu gyakusatsu 1969, dir – Yoshida Yoshishige, DOP – Motokichi Hasegawa)

Often considered one of the greatest Japanese films of all time, Eros + Massacre looks at the relationship between the past, present and future whilst contemplating how to change the world. Ostensibly a biography of Japanese anarchist Sakae Ōsugi, murdered by the Japanese state in 1923, Yoshida explains: “The fundamental theme is: how to change the world, and what is it that needs to be changed? Reflecting on the present situation through the medium of an era already past, I came to believe that Osugi’s problems continue to be ours… In making this film, I wanted to transform the legend of Osugi by means of the imaginary. Sure enough, Osugi was oppressed by the power of the state in his political activities. But most of all, he spoke of free love, which has the power to destroy the monogamous structure, then the family, and finally the state. And it was this very escalation that the state could not allow.” (Cahiers du Cinéma, 1970).

Eros + Massacre mixes the contemporary settings and aesthetic of its late-Sixties production with the historical and traditional 1920s formalism of its subjects, moving between Kabuki-inspired dialogue to psychedelic-tinged surrealism – often bringing the two together, such as to show Osugi’s lover (and notorious anarchist in her own right), Noe Itō travelling by shinkansen – in 1917.

We will be showing the director’s cut – 3.5 hours – but if millions of people can watch a fucking Avengers movie, I don’t see what you’re complaining about.

Location: A private location in Preston, Melbourne!

Time: Doors at 7:30pm for an 8pm start, 26th July, 2019.

Admission is a verbal commitment to smash the state.

May 10 – Southland Tales (2006, dir Richard Kelly, dop Steven Poster, English).

Richard Kelly made the surprise indie hit Donnie Darko, was called genius, given the keys to Hollywood, and with a twenty million dollar budget and penning the most ambitious sci-fi screenplay of the young 21^st Century assembled an ensemble cast built with fresh-out-of-TV-megastardom Sarah Michelle Gellar, action superstar Dwayne ‘Rock’ Johnson, box office dudebro stud Seann William Scott and pop-actor goldenboy Justin Timberlake… all to produce a film the box office, the critics and Hollywood itself loathed.

Those people are idiots. Southland Tales is one of the best films of the century. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense, and that’s because it’s a criticism of a time that was yet to happen – the world of ten years after the film was made, which is so neatly decorous for a film about time travel (sort of) you couldn’t script reality any neater. If, in fact, this film is not reality itself, and which we are not a pale reflection of.

Taking Philip K Dick’s irreverent, anarchic dystopian future creativity, a Frankfurt school academic post-Marxist intellectual sensibility, a Gilliam-esque overstuffed mise-en-scene, the anger and disgust of Pasolini and a shitload of chutzpah, Kelly delivered the most eyeball packed film that seemed ridiculous in 2006, but in 2019 seems right on the money.

It is impossible to summarise the plot of this wonderful piece of beauty, but suffice to say any film that features a Dennis Potter song-and-dance routine in a disused arcade parlour (performed by Justin Timberlake, miming someone else’s song), Marxist hair and nail salon worker-assassins, a soldier-reality-TV-star-drug-dealer hero, identical twins working as cop/journalists, a porn star talk show host with a partly vicious party vacuous feminist agenda and a billionaire’s blimp named the Jenny von Westphalen you can bet there is no greater representation of the brink-of-collapse, last days of capitalism contradictory socioeconomic clusterfuck in which we live today. This film is only insane in that it mirrors its future/our present with perfect, exact clarity.

Note: The trailer for this film was an attempt to rescue it by imposing a false narrative on the unbound genius script, so instead of playing that, we’ll just play a reprasentitve sequence from the middle of the film:

Weirding Cinema Returns!

March 15th – Wings of Desire (1987 – dir Wim Wenders, dop Henri Alekan, German and English)

In 1987 Wim Wenders wrote a love letter to West Berlin and named it Wings Of Desire. The film – ostensibly a story following two angels who can see but are unable to touch or be seen, living on the banks of the River Spree since the dawn of time – embraces the German cinematic tradition of Expressionism, the literary tradition of Existentialism and uses the divided Cold War Berlin and the conflict of the Twentieth century to express the division and atomisation of humanity, boredom, ennui, loneliness, isolation and despair. When an angel chooses to become human, giving away immortality for the chance at a life fully lived, Wenders humanises Heidegger’s Dasein by way of interior monologue, self-effacing cameos and the gorgeous cinematography of Henri Alekan.

Location: A private location in Preston, Melbourne!

Time: Doors at 7:30pm for an 8pm start, 15th March, 2019.

Admission is a suit of armour.

~

March 29th – The Documentaries of Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog is the maverick’s maverick, starting his career by stealing a movie camera from a film school and aggressively pursuing an “unspoilt, humane spot for man to exist, an area worthy of human beings where a dignified life can be led.” By which he means pursuing the dangerous, the insane, the marginalised, the frightening and the stupid to find the edges of what it means to be human.

His take on documentaries is relentlessly creative and unbounded, in which he sees the documentarian as not a reporter, but an agitator, provocateur and an artist. Herzog’s documentaries often contain scenes that he describes as ‘an estatic truth’ – something that captures the ecstasy or essence of the subject, not the literal or factual truth, which is to say some scenes never really happened, or if they did, were staged. When taken to task on this at a film festival, he said “I’m no fly on the wall. I am the hornet that stings.” and when the crowd turned hostile, he ended the night with a mic drop – shouting, “Happy New Year, losers!” and walking out. He’s our kind of filmmaker.

Program:
La Bohème (2009, 4 min)
Ten Thousand Years Older (2002 10 min)
Pilgrimage (2001, 18 min)
La Soufrière (1977, 30 min)
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980, 21 min)
( intermission )
Incident at Loch Ness (2004, 94 min)

Location: A private location in Preston, Melbourne!

Time: Doors at 7:30 for an 8pm start, 29th March 2019.

Admission is free for penguins who go inland.

Our end-of-year anti-war war movie subversive action-comedy caper!

Kelly’s Heroes (1970) dir Brian G Hutton, English language, 146min.

Screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin (creator of the blackly surreal anti-nuke drama Edge of Darkness) rewrites the Second World War as history’s greatest heist, making no pretense of nobility in the Allies ‘liberation’ of Europe in which proletarian soldiers lose their lives to fill the pockets of commanding officers and their governments.

The enterprising but lowly ranked Private Kelly (Clint Eastwood) has had enough of his commanding officer repeatedly “volunteering” his unit back to the front lines to “commandeer” yachts, chateaus, artwork and wine cellars for “the war effort” as the Nazis abandon the European front.

Kelly opts to create a self-managed retirement fund for himself and his platoon, a unit of burned-out swindlers and PTSD cases, and a leaderless tank platoon of proto-hippies (centered around a scene stealing Donald Sutherland) by racing behind enemy lines to steal several tons of untraceable gold bullion before their own officers find it, or before the Nazis get it to a Swiss bank.

Kelly’s Heroes is maybe the most fun, funny and action-packed indictment of the Allies’ looting of Europe at the end of World War 2. (Also, both M*A*S*H and Three Kings owe this film a royalty cheque.)

Location: Melbourne Anarchist Club, 62 St Georges Rd, Northcote.

Time: Doors at 7:30pm for an 8pm start, 7th December, 2017.

Admission is free, baby, and stop hitting me with those negative waves!

November 16 – Why did the K Foundation burn a million quid?

In the early nineties the KLF invented the massively popular genre of ‘stadium trance’, scored a string of clever, catchy and genre-blending number one hits featuring unlikely vocalists from hip-hop, hard rock and country music, all featuring an odd internal symbolic mythology based on the mysterious Mu, Daleks and ice cream.

In 1993, they were awarded “Best British Group” by the English music industry. They performed their only live gig as an anarcho-punk interpretation of their trance hit “3am Eternal” with Extreme Noise Terror and Napalm Death. They shot the audience with machine guns filled with blank rounds, dumped a dead sheep in the backstage area and announced the end of their career. They deleted their entire music catalog and sailed to a small island off the coast of Scotland and burned one million pounds they’d made from record sales and royalties.

This documentary tries to make sense of who the KLF really are, why they burned a million pounds, broke up at their peak of their power, and what everyone thought about it. Followed up by a screening of the mythological short film KLF 01 01 2017 WTF FOUND VHS which should confuse you even further.

Location: Melbourne Anarchist Club, 62 St Georges Rd, Northcote.

Time: Doors at 7pm for a 7:30 start, 16th November, 2017.

Admission is free. Sheep are welcome. Ice cream van parking available. Mu be with you.

~

November 2nd – Crass: There is no authority but yourself.

(2006) Directed by Alexander Oey, English language, 71 mins.

This documentary discusses inner and outer workings of Crass, the UK’s definitive anarcho-punk band centered around Dial House, an open community house on the outskirts of London. We see their rise, their fall, their struggles with Thatcher’s Britain and among themselves.

After the feature, we’ll screen the footage Crass showed at their gigs, and your host will tell the true story about the time he wound up having dinner with Penny Rimbaud while Gee Voucher was at the dentist.

Location: Melbourne Anarchist Club, 62 St Georges Rd, Northcote.

Time: Doors at 7pm for a 7:30 start, 2nd November, 2017.

Admission is free. In fact, we owe you a movie. (‘Course we do, ‘course we do.)

Various works of Stan Brakhage. Approx 60mins.

Stan Brakhage was a driving force behind American experimental and avant-garde, making hundreds of films over his career. Brakhage’s work eschewed narrative storytelling, and in fact often featured no story at all. Many of his films are the result of direct filmmaking – where paint, chemicals or objects are directly applied to the surface of the film.

We’ll be showing films from multiple phases of Brakhage’s career, including narrative works, abstraction and direct animation.

Location: Melbourne Anarchist Club, 62 St Georges Rd, Northcote.

Time: Doors at 7pm for a 7:30 start, 9th October, 2017.

Admission is free, please leave your dead moths at home.

Walker (1989) dir. Alex Cox, English language, 95min.

A rising star in Hollywood in the mid-eighties, director Alex Cox made the major studio “punkspoitation” films Repo Man and Sid & Nancy before going rogue with $5 million of Universal Studio’s money to make an anti-American, pro-revolutionary, anarchist critique of US imperialism in Central America.

Cox had just turned down the opportunity to direct The Three Amigos after declaring the script to be propaganda for the Monroe Doctrine, enlisted screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer (Two Lane Blacktop, Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid), emerging stars Ed Harris and Marlee Matlin, the Clash’s Joe Strummer as composer and made Hollywood’s most anarchic satire disguised as an historical biopic.

The film was disowned by the deeply disturbed Universal Pictures, it was buried on release with zero promotion, Cox was blacklisted by Hollywood for life, and it’s probably the greatest satire of the 80s, and one of the most subversive films ever made.

Location: Melbourne Anarchist Club, 62 St Georges Rd, Northcote.

Time: Doors at 7pm for a 7:30 start, 5th October, 2017.

Admission is free, bring vinyl copies of the soundtrack for me to drool over.

Spirits of the air, gremlins of the clouds (1989) dir. Alex Proyas, English language, 93min.

The first feature by Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City, Gods of Egypt) is strange in concept (a containment drama set in a wide-open desert), casting (three largely unknown friends of the director) and story (in the post-apocalypse world, human flight is considered a myth) – but breathtaking in execution. Largely unknown, distributed nowhere but in Japan on VHS (where our copy is from), it doesn’t even have a trailer (though, for some reason there is a music video, see below) this Australian obscurity is a lost classic of weird, weird film.

Location: Melbourne Anarchist Club, 62 St Georges Rd, Northcote.

Time: Doors at 7pm for a 7:30 start, 17th August 2017.

Admission is free, wheelchair access is available, crucifixes optional.

Wadjda (2012), dir. Haifaa al-Mansour, Arabic, English subtitles. 98 mins.

Saudi Arabia’s first ever feature film, written and directed by a woman, about a Saudi schoolgirl who wants to buy a bicycle, and decides compete in a Koran recital contest to do so. Controversy ensues, and Wadjda is a brilliant and nuanced exploration of the life of ordinary young women in Saudi society.

Location: Melbourne Anarchist Club, 62 St Georges Rd, Northcote.

Time: Doors at 7pm for a 7:30 start, 7th September 2017.

Admission is free, purple shoelaces accepted as donation.