Films

BIENNALE FILM PROGRAM
Curated by Jack Sargeant with Artistic Director David Elliott

The Biennale Film Program, Magickal Songs, Mythical Histories and Fictitious Truths, consists of weekly screenings of a selection of films that explore the exhibition. These films, from Australia and around the world, reflect on spirituality and indigeneity; and on the power of art and its place in traditional culutre and contemporary politics.

Jack Sargeant is the author of numerous books on film including Naked Lens: Beat Cinema (Soft Skull Press, 2009) and Deathtripping: The Extreme Underground (Soft Skull Press, 2007). He has edited and contributed to many books, magazines and journals on experimental and underground film. He is the film programmer for the Revelation Perth International Film Festival.

Event Information
Every Sunday, 3.00 pm
SuperDeluxe@Artspace
Bookings not required

Sunday, 16 May
3.00 pm
Early Abstractions | 1939–56
Mirror Animations | 1956
Heaven and Earth Magic | 1957–62

Harry Smith, USA, 22 mins, 10 mins and 60 mins respectively

Introduction to the Biennale Film Program by Curator Jack Sargeant.
Harry Smith’s Early Abstractions are masterpieces of experimental animation. They are characterised by their ever-transforming and dancing abstract (and abstracted) images, and by plays of movement created using numerous innovatory techniques including hand-painting each individual frame of film. Read More…

Sunday, 23 May
3.00 pm
Kings with Straw Mats | 1998
Ira Cohen, USA, 70 mins

Directed by legendary underground filmmaker, photographer, poet, beat affiliate and traveller Ira Cohen, this unique, personal documentary tells the story of Cohen’s journey to the Kumbh Mela. Read More…

Sunday, 30 May
3.00pm
Mock Up On Mu | 2008
Craig Baldwin, USA, 114 mins

Craig Baldwin’s previous movies include the plunderphonic documentary Sonic Outlaws and avant-garde conspiratorial science fiction epic Tribulation 99, both viewed as classics of the modern underground and true indie filmmaking. Read More…

Sunday, 6 June
3.00 pm
Spirit Stones | 2008
Allan Collins, Australia, 52 mins

Stone showers fell repeatedly in the 1940s and 1950s across a vast swathe of south-west Western Australia. Spirit Stones uses the first person voices of Nyoongar storytellers to recount these uncanny events. Read More…

Sunday, 13 June
3.00pm
War is Menstrual Envy | 1992
Nick Zedd, USA, 75 mins

A masterpiece of discordant post-punk psychedelic mayhem from Nick Zedd, infamous architect and chief polemicist of the notorious Cinema of Transgression and legend of the New York underground film scene. Read More…

Sunday, 20 June
3.00pm
Three Hams in a Can | 2009
Kenta McGrath, Australia/Japan, 80 mins

A documentary about the real Tokyo dérive, three musicians – Chris Cobilis, Predrag Delibasic and Stina Thomas travel to the floating world in order to perform their music crafted from laptops, guitars and keyboards. Read More…

Sunday, 27 June
3.00 pm
In the Realms of the Unreal | 2004
Jessica Yu, USA, 81 mins

Janitor Henry Darger had a reclusive, secret life, much of which only came to light after his death in Chicago in 1973. Friendless and with no close family, he devoted his spare time to working on an illustrated ‘novel’, the result of which was a 15,145 page book that detailed the perverse adventures of the Vivian girls. Read More…

Sunday, 4 July
3.00 pm
No More Smoke Signals | 2008
Fanny Brauning, Switzerland, 90 mins

Starting at the KILI community radio station – which serves as a focus for the Lakota community of South Dakota, one of the poorest reservations in the USA – Brauning’s documentary traces the lives of a number of locals and the history of their struggles. Read More…

Sunday, 11 July
3.00 pm
Dialogues| 2009
Owen Land, usa, 133 mins

As the first Jordanian audio-visual works begin to fall into the public domain, a constellation of interests are translating, drafting and revising copyrights laws, trade agreements and licences to control the flow of culture and build new markets. Read More…

Sunday, 18 July
3.00 pm
I’m Chinese | 2007
Shen Shaomin, China, 73 mins

This film, by 17th Biennale of Sydney artist Shen Shaomin, is set in Hongjiang village on the Russian border. Hongjiang became a sanctuary for many Russians during WW1, WW2 and the October Revolution. Read More…

Sunday, 25 July
3.00 pm
Struggle in Jerash | 2008
Eileen Simpson and Ben White, UK

Sunday 1 August
3.00 pm
Order 41 Conjuration of Beelzebub | 2009
noko, Australia, 2009, 60 mins

noko (Michael Strum, Scott Barnes and Barry Hale) operate at the very fringes of expanded cinema, live performance, music and magick. Their rare public appearances – the last of which took place at the Equinox Festival in London in 2009 – see them engaging in esoteric rituals through abstracted experimental sound and visuals. Read More…