MELBOURNE UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL 2001
MUFF THE STUFF OF REVOLUTION?
Is the 2nd MUFF the stuff of revolution – or a repository of
otherwise neglected films and marginal cinema, asks Jake Wilson.
Globally and locally, these are strange days for film culture.
Down at the multiplex, Hollywood movies seem caught between pure
seamless illusion and the all-too-palpable sliminess of the gross-out
(Moulin Rouge and Freddy Got Fingered). Meanwhile a thousand
young guerrilla filmmakers are tearing round town with their
cheap digital video cameras, hoping desperately to capture some
kind of raw truth. Here in Melbourne there have never been more
film screenings in pubs, video-art exhibitions, panel discussions
on multimedia, and high-priced workshops for aspiring industry
players. Everyone wants to be on the cutting edge but few can
agree where that is.
In this climate, the second Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF)
seems like a typically hybrid event. Last year's festival
attracted more publicity than it did viewers, not surprisingly
given that the official Melbourne Film Festival was running at
the same time. The organisers won't be making that mistake again,
but their iconoclasm remains intact. At least, if you log on to
the festival's website (at muff.com.au) you can read a lot of
rambling hype from Richard Wollstonecroft – festival
director, filmmaker, nightclub proprietor, and would-be
provocateur. In typically overheated style, he declares that MUFF
will be ‘a ten day cinematic insurrection ready to start a
revolution.'
“it's.. about
trying to get these films seen”
A revolution? This is not really the impression I got when I sat
down to discuss the upcoming festival with one of its other
organisers, Chris
Howard. He's a very mellow, enthusiastic guy with a particular
passion for Italian horror cinema. In fact, he tells me, one of
the main reasons MUFF
got started was that he and his friend Matt Boyle wanted to
screen some movies by the great Dario Argento. Having done their
homework, they figured
“it had to be feasible to run a festival,” maybe adding
some Australian content for good measure. Wollstencroft, who was
looking for somewhere to
show his recent feature Pearls Before Swine, had already had a
similar idea – and hence the first MUFF was born.
So how revolutionary is the festival really? According to Chris
Howard, “there is the political aspect of trying to raise
awareness of this
underground cinema. But beyond that, it's just really more about
trying to get these films seen.” And what exactly is an
underground film? For
Howard the term need not refer to a particular style or genre.
“The festival's brief,” he says, “is to represent
any forms of films that have
fallen through the cracks and been neglected.” So a film
might be “underground not necessarily through any agenda of
its creators, but more
just through the industry's and the public's neglect or lack of
awareness of its existence.”
“Apart from budget, what else
..defines a film as marginal?”
In other words, MUFF does not aim to promote a single militantly
oppositional mode of cinema, if such a thing still exists.
Instead, it
brings together a number of filmmaking practices that are deemed
to be marginal. I haven't been able to preview any of the
features screening in
competition, but I gather that many are genre exercises that have
underground status largely because they exist (as Howard puts it)
“at the
low-budget, do-it-yourself end” of feature filmmaking.
Overall there are relatively few films here outside the
parameters of fictional narrative.
Still, as Howard says, the festival ought to run for years, and
there's no reason it can't “embrace all of this stuff over
the years to come.”
Apart from budget, what else serves to define a film as marginal?
The line-up appears to be dominated less by deliberately campy
schlock than it
was last year. But there's still a fair helping of popular genres
like action, sci-fi and horror – which is no bad thing.
Dogma Day Afternoon
includes five films that follow the anti-art manifesto drawn up
six years ago by Danish prankster Lars von Trier, who could teach
Wollstencroft a few
things about overblown hype. In a related area, there's a
retrospective of freaky New Zealand films – including the
gory early works of Peter Jackson,
now shooting Lord Of The Rings – and of Australian cult
cinema.
“..beyond such simplistic definitions of the underground”
If the broadly libertarian ethos of the festival is evident in
its enthusiasm for extreme or transgressive subject-matter, the
organisers
plan to make a more directly political gesture by screening two
films currently banned in Australia. These are Pier Pablo
Pasolini's Salo (widely
considered a masterpiece) and the less well-known Cannibal
Holocaust. I'm unfamiliar with the latter, but Howard describes
it as “every bit as
extraordinary and passionate and powerful a film” as Salo:
it simultaneously comments on exploitation by the West and revels
in “the grossest and
grisliest scenes.” Is he confident MUFF will be able to show
these films without being prosecuted? “Well, we mean to.
Others mean us not to.
Perhaps now it may well prove to be a game of brinksmanship from
here on in as to what actually happens. It's as important as
anything that there is a
dialogue on this issue.”
I think it's worthwhile to defend and celebrate this kind of
extreme movie, and to challenge our current regressive censorship
regime (a forum
discussing censorship will take place around the screenings). Yet
it should be clear by now (especially after such woeful Aussie
attempts at
exploitation filmmaking as Cut and Sensitive New Age Killer),
that an exclusive devotion to trash or cult cinema can be as
limiting as a refusal
to consider anything outside so-called mainstream molds. With
this year's MUFF, happily, there are signs that the organisers
have started to look
beyond such simplistic definitions of the underground. In a
program note, the president of the festival jury, Mark Bakaitis,
rightly stresses that
“film festivals need not be exclusively the domain of film
buffs alone,” adding that this year's festival attempts
“to represent various sub-cultures
ranging from musical movements to street art to extreme sports.”
“authentically
underground”
This opens up a range of possibilities. For example, we'll get to
see several skateboarding videos made by the Australian-based
Whytehouse
Productions. Skate videos are have been around for ages, but the
genre is rarely mentioned in critical accounts of sports movies,
and circulates
mainly through specialised outlets. However, as equipment becomes
more accessible and film and video continue to intermingle, it
seems likely that
discussion of audiovisual media will have to take a much wider
range of film/videomaking into account – including much work made by and
for subcultural groups and barely linked with the kind of film
history traditionally discussed by journalists or academics. This
is one reason it
no longer seems worth worrying over what's authentically
underground and what isn't.
But this doesn't mean that we should stop making distinctions, or
forget about film history. In fact, perhaps the most potentially
interesting
component of MUFF is a retrospective of Australian Super-8 films,
curated by Shane Lyons of the Melbourne Super-8 Film Group. This
includes everything
from highly sophisticated recent work (e.g. the dance films of
Christos Linou) to early efforts by directors like Bill
Mousoulis, Mark Savage, and
Wolstencroft himself. As a glimpse of a genuinely underground and
sketchily documented film history (much of it probably dug out of
people's
garages) this retrospective should help illustrate just how
marginal no-budget practices of filmmaking have evolved locally
across the last
twenty years. In doing so, it hopefully might function not only
as an adjunct to the rest of MUFF, but as a reminder of
alternative styles and
approaches that are relatively dormant in today's film culture.
If we really want a revolution, we need a tradition to start from
first.
Published July 5, 2001
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Meet the Feebles
See our FEATURE on the Melbourne International Film Festival
Bad Actors
Cannibal Holocaust
Peter Jackson
(Pic, Jeff Vespa)
MUFF:
http://www.muff.au.com/
July 5 – 15, 2001
Cinemedia at Treasury Theatre
Lower Plaza, 1 Macarthur Street,
EAST MELBOURNE
(03) 9651 1515
Kaleide. RMIT Union Theatre
Building 8 Street Level, 360 Swanston Street,
MELBOURNE
p: 9925 3713
RMIT Storey Hall
a: 342-348 Swanston Street,
MELBOURNE
(03) 9925 1773
All tickets available at the door 30 mins prior to session.
Opening and Closing Night tickets and Festival Passes also
available at ticket outlets.
TICKET OUTLETS
Polyester Books
330 Brunswick Street,
FITZROY
(03) 9419 5223
Synaesthesia
1st Floor, 28 Block Place,
MELBOURNE
(03) 9663 3551
Pony
68-70 Little Collins Street,
MELBOURNE
(03) 9662 1026
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