Curated by Sam Fielder

Cinémathèque screenings are open to members and their guests. Membership is simple and available at the door. Admission 18+, unless the film has been rated in Australia. 

Mini Membership (4 screenings/ + bring 1 guest along to one screening) A$20
Quarterly Membership (12 screenings/ + bring one guest along to three different screenings) A$40
Annual Membership (52 screenings/ + bring one guest along to 12 different screenings) A$99

Sign up to the Cinémathèque: cinematheque@chauvelcinema.net.au

 

Monday 21 May 6.30pm
LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN
(USA/1948/B&W/87mins/16mm/NFVLS/18+)

Dir: Max Ophuls                                                                             

A woman's whole life is built around a man without him knowing it. Ophul's most emotionally affecting film is a study of obsession set in a richly textured and romantically stylised late 19th century Vienna. Ophuls perfectly captures the theme of spiritual immobility with an ironic use of camera movement and image repetition (movement up and down staircases, repeated farewells at the station). The often circling and tracking camera seems to trap the characters in a kind of stasis as time inexorably passes.

 

Monday 28 May 6.30pm
L'ARGENT
(FRANCE/1928/B & W/134mins/16mm/NFVLS / 18+)

Dir: Marcel L’Herbier    

Zola's novel about the 1868 crisis in Paris was updated to the present, the brink of the Great Depression. The story of conflict between two financiers parallels and intersects the story of an aviator-adventurer and his wife introducing the themes of the materiality of capital versus the power of heroism, life versus capital or love versus money of breaks with the existing conventions of narrative film. These breaks question both the mode of representation and what is being represented. It had been claimed by Noel Burch that it was the first film in which the formal problem of the relationship between the moving camera and shot changes was solved. Ironically, as a film about the corroding powers of money, it was perhaps the costliest French film to that time. This is most evident in the fantastic but stark sets and the employment of a multi-national cast.

 

Monday 4 June 6.30pm
THE GREAT DICTATOR
(USA/1940/B&W/129mins/16mm/NFVLS/18+)

Dir:Charles Chaplin

Chaplin plays dual roles in what was his first dialogue film: a burlesque of Hitler alias Adenoid Hynkel, and a Jewish barber who returns an amnesiac many years after an accident in World War I, unaware of the rise of Nazism. The delusions of the dictator contrasts with the earthy pragmatism of the barber (shades of the tramp). The parody of Hitler draws not only on Chaplin's genius for mime but also on his vocal resources. Chaplin's most experimental work was politically audacious at the time. At best it received a mixed reception in an America in the grip of isolationism but was enthusiastically received in blitzed London. The amalgam of hilarity and horror links two very dissimilar films - Modern Times and Monsieur Verdoux. The explicit and impassioned final speech carries a suggestion of unintended irony - while its sentiments are diametrically opposed, the rhetoric and manner of delivery are not far removed from Hitler's.

 

Monday 11 June 6.30pm
DOUBLE FEATURE: PAGAN RHAPSODY
(USA/1963/COLOUR/24mins/16mm/NFVLS/18+)

Dir: George Kuchar   

Lurid parody of 'B' grade melodramas, involving a web of starlets, sleazy producers, telephones, women and men, men and men and a range of melodramatic music which was, according to Kuchar, played loud in order to sweep the actors to stardom.

DOUBLE FEATURE: LENNY BRUCE: PERFORMANCE FILM
(USA/1967/B&W/60mins/16mm/NFVLS /18+)

Dir: John Magnuson   

A film record of Lenny Bruce's second-last nightclub performance (at San Francisco's Basin Street West), during which he discusses his many legal battles over obscenity charges. Bruce's show is less a comic performance than a bitter lecture on the subject of American law and morality. The camera records the show in long static takes, which are virtually unedited.

 

Monday 18 June 6.30pm
NASHVILLE
(USA/1975/160mins/COLOUR/16mm/NFVLS/18+)

Dir: Robert Altman    

During a weekend in Nashville the Grand Ole Opry celebration of country music is running parallel with a presidential election campaign. The film is meant to be a mosaic of contemporary American life. It moves from a barrage of simultaneous moments in the lives of more than 20 different characters to the presentation of multiple perspectives in a single unifying event. Although containing 27 songs and 13 on-stage performances, the film's explicit cultural indictment runs very much against the grain of the American musical. Multi-track sound-recording, multiple cameras and low-light sensitive film stock all facilitated the impressionistic, spontaneous feel of the film.

 

Monday 25 June 6.30pm
SOME LIKE IT HOT
(USA/1959/B&W/121mins/NFSA/18+)  

Dir: Billy Wilder  

Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, on the run after witnessing the St. Valentine's massacre, masquerade in drag as members of an all-girl band. A satiric mix of slapstick and screwball comedy, this film is a tribute to American naiveté and, for a mainstream film made in the fifties, exceptionally open in its treatment of androgyny. Curtis, with the image of a glamour drag queen, retains his heterosexual orientation but becomes more sympathetic, sincere and loving as a direct result of his experience. Lemmon, the campy transvestite, comes to totally identify with his role as a woman which produces one of the great final lines in screen comedy. Wilder's film shows the influence of Howard Hawks' comedies, most notably Scarface and I Was a Male War Bride with Curtis recalling Cary Grant in the screwball comedies. Wilder plays with the motif of the sexually aggressive female and shy male.

 

Monday 2 July 6.30pm
MONKEY BUSINESS
(USA/1952/B&W/96mins/NFSA/18+)

Dir:Howard Hawks

Cary Grant plays an absent-minded professor in an apparently successful and stable marriage. He is attempting to find a formula for a drug that will restore youth. The formula is accidentally discovered by an escaped chimpanzee. It allows the couple to revert to the irresponsibility of childhood and in so doing reveals the tepid nature of their relationship. An obvious companion piece to Bringing Up Baby, both described as 'comedies of youth and age' or (along with the Hawks' comedies, in general, including Scarface) as variations on the theme of 'the lure of irresponsibility'.

 

Monday 9 July 6.30pm
CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT a.k.a FALSTAFF
(SPAIN/1967/B&W/115mins/NFSA/18+)

Dir: Orson Welles 

Falstaff is at the centre of what is now regarded as Welles' most fully realised film after Citizen Kane. It is drawn largely from the two parts of Henry IV with Falstaff's death in Henry V used as a coda. Welles had initially developed the idea in a stage production in Ireland and his identification with Falstaff is complete. The comic side of Falstaff's character is overwhelmed by tragedy as he wages a struggle against the disappearance of the values of goodness that he represents. Prince Hal pays a heavy price in exchange for power. The battle of Shrewsbury with its ironic music, perhaps the most powerful sequence in all of Welles' cinema, sounds the death knell for all men in battle.

 

Monday 16 July 6.30pm
THE TRIAL
(USA/1962/B&W/118mins/NFSA/18+)

Dir: Orson Welles

Welles' apocalyptic nightmare is a transmutation of Kafka which defies most of the narrative conventions, remaining on an abstract level, blackly comic in the labyrinthine denial of cause and affect. While trapped in a mechanism of guilt and responsibility, unlike Kafka's Joseph K, Welles' K is anything but an innocent victim of totalitarianism. He has variously been interpreted as a positive hero and a self-righteous bureaucrat destructively asserting his own ego in a final ambiguous act of defiance. Although there is a narrator (Welles himself) the point-of-view is ambiguous, steadily dissolving the distinction between reality and individual or collective fantasy. For Kafka's self-effacing naturalism, Welles substitutes an egocentric visual style in turn bizarre, baroque and surreal, a schizophrenic vision of the world as an infinite asylum.

 

Monday 23 July 6.30pm
THE STRANGER
(USA/1946/B&W/94mins/NFSA/18+)

Dir: Orson Welles   

In this noir thriller, Welles' third and most conventional film in Hollywood terms, Wilson, an American delegate to the Allied War Crimes Commission, tracks down a notorious Nazi war criminal living under an assumed identity in a small Vermont town. An avowed clock enthusiast, 'Professor Kindler' (played by Welles) is about to marry the daughter of a Supreme Court Justice and believes his cover is complete. But after an old Nazi party colleague who has visited Kindler mysteriously disappears, Wilson's suspicions are aroused. The climax of the film, between Wilson, Kindler and Kindler's new wife, takes place in the village clock tower where Kindler is skewered by one of the lance wielding statues on the ornate clock. The film was delivered on time and under budget, and was perhaps Welles' biggest commercial success.

 

Monday 30 July 6.30pm
THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI
(US/1947/B&W/87mins/NFSA/18+)

Dir: Orson Welles 

An Irish sailor becomes enmeshed in a game of murder but the plot, like that of The Big Sleep, is short in coherence. Guilt seems pervasive but is ultimately focused on Hayworth whose image as "the ideal woman" is smashed to reveal the femme fatale. In seeking to bring a quality of freshness and strangeness to genre conventions, according to his biographer Barbara Leaming, Welles subtly applied Brecht, most notably his notion of the actor's distance from the role ("the alienation effect") and specifically to the scene in the Chinese theatre. Sardonic humour mingles with the tragic and the nightmarish. Studio head Harry Cohn interfered with the final cut and imposed Roemheld's music score against Welles's wishes.

Chauvel Cinematheque gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the National Film and Video Lending Service, the National Film & Sound Archive. Print Sources: NFVLS – National Film & Video Lending