The State Film Centre of Victoria has been renamed the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, elevating its status from a state to a national institution and extending its domain to incorporate the post-celluloid media of reproduction. It has also moved into an imposing new edifice on Federation Square, alongside the NGV’s new Gallery of Australian Art, in a tourist site generously endowed with chic restaurants and shops. The ACMI edifice houses two cinemas, offices, shops, restaurants and coffee shops, as well as a large gallery. For the opening exhibition in the new building, Ross Gibson, the inaugural Creative Director of ACMI and now Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at UTS, curated an exhibition of ACMI acquisitions, entitled “Remembrance and the Moving Image”, and edited a sumptuous catalogue. Comprised of 32 artworks, the exhibition was divided into two parts: Persistence of Vision, which ran from March 21^st to May 25^th; followed by Reverberation, from the end of June until the end of August.

The State Film Centre of Victoria has been renamed the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, elevating its status from a state to a national institution and extending its domain to incorporate the post-celluloid media of reproduction. It has also moved into an imposing new edifice on Federation Square, alongside the NGV’s new Gallery of Australian Art, in a tourist site generously endowed with chic restaurants and shops. The ACMI edifice houses two cinemas, offices, shops, restaurants and coffee shops, as well as a large gallery. For the opening exhibition in the new building, Ross Gibson, the inaugural Creative Director of ACMI and now Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at UTS, curated an exhibition of ACMI acquisitions, entitled “Remembrance and the Moving Image”, and edited a sumptuous catalogue. Comprised of 32 artworks, the exhibition was divided into two parts: Persistence of Vision, which ran from March 21^st to May 25^th; followed by Reverberation, from the end of June until the end of August.

The works embraced a variety of media and genres. Although most were displayed on DVD, the artists had originally employed Super-8 or 16mm film, VHS or digital video, pixelvision, computer animation, inter-active CD-ROM or  DVD. The range of genres included archival documentary, travel documentary, autobiographical memoir, art video, portraiture, staged performance, and re-configuration of pre-existing works. However, in most cases genre boundaries were crossed. In fact, one could categorise all the works as essays – experimental, contemplative, autobiographical and/or underground essays. Gibson has always been a fan of the essay film - especially of Chris Marker’s practice – and he is himself an accomplished essayist – on film and in print. This exciting inaugural ACMI exhibition enabled the general public to share Gibson’s passionate commitment to the art of the essay; to experience a rich range of contemporary practice in avant-garde film, video and new media; to encounter searching explorations of, and stimulating responses to, the world we live in.  

Before discussing the pleasures of the exhibition in more detail, I have a few niggling criticisms to make. Firstly, Gibson has taken liberties with the work of some of the artists that I doubt he would approve if his own work were at stake. He has fractured some films by displaying different parts of them simultaneously on split or multiple screens, thus taxing our powers of concentration and comprehension. Theoretically, this method of installation is more “democratic”, allowing the viewers to exercise their own judgement and freedom of choice, but in practice we are often left floundering and distracted by too many choices, like a shopper in an overstocked and understaffed department store. A simultaneous barrage of sights and sounds on three, four or five adjacent screens can be tiring and tiresome. Rather than provoking critical thought, it often produces a sense of disorientation, irritability and incoherence in me. Certainly it suits the shopping tourist, who is short of time and briskly traverses the exhibition space, sampling the sights en passant. But most of the works in the exhibition were not suited to this kind of sampling. Many of them were contemplative works that required considerable expenditure of time and attention. Though the annotations on the wall failed to specify their length, several lasted more than an hour. The lack of seating arrangements for some of these meant that visitors gave only passing glances at work designed for a sustained and studied gaze. Having a personal and professional interest in them, I sat down on the staircase or the floor to watch the works in full, but most visitors moved quickly on to the next exhibit, unaware of the rich experience they had missed..

The passers-by had their attention grabbed by one or two works that could be described as sensational in one way or another. Les LeVeque’s speeded-up and kaleidoscoped version of Hitchcock’s Vertigo on digital video was designed to induce literal vertigo in the viewer - and would certainly make the classic Hollywood maestro turn in his grave. Gina Czarnecki’s Versifier confronted us with a row of large-scale full-frontal painfully-naked anybodies who were digitally animated into jerky slo-mo movement, making us feel uncomfortable about their discomfort. Dennis del Favero’s Pentimento, an interactive video installation on four walls, which we were required to enter one-at-a-time, confronted us with images of nude women and men with knives, threatening and threatened in the darkness. Another arresting exhibit, Robert Arnold’s The Morphology of Desire, was more witty than confronting: it involved the sound and visual animation of covers of romantic fiction – producing heaving bosoms, rapturous sighs, heavy panting and delicious surrenders to passion.

Del Favoro’s installation was not just sensational. It also made us aware of our complicity in the threatening scenario of sexual violence and our voyeuristic fascination with the lurid. Other inter-active exhibits were cooler, less inclined or even uninclined to be sensational. At the entrance, on descending the staircase into the gallery, we saw ourselves reflected on the screen in front of us, among the shadowy images of a crowd milling about a railway station. Emily Weil’s installation, Platform 1, employed 100-year-old archival footage shot at  Brisbane’s old Roma Street Railway Station, and brought together on one screen old and new media of reproduction, old and new public spaces, and the dead among the living, triggering reflection about the ways in which the present is shadowed by the past and the past lives in the present. Another cool exhibit, Chris Marker’s CD-ROM, Immemory, invited us to share this wonderful essayist’s obsessions, explorations and reflections on travel, war, cinema and poetry. Unfortunately, however, it was difficult to access and prohibitively time-consuming. Debra Petrovitch’s CD-ROM, Uncle Bill, which explored the geographic, industrial and traumatic terrain of a Wollongong childhood, was similarly hard to operate.

The autobiographical essay - a favourite genre of experimental women filmmakers, especially in Australia - was strongly represented in this exhibition by three women of different nationalities. The work of Sadie Benning, an American  experimental filmmaker whose films have delighted patrons of   film festivals over the years, was represented by two early teenage works on pixelvision, If Every Girl had a Diary and Jollies, which have been acquired by ACMI. Engagingly intimate, playful and cheeky, they relate her personal experience of unsatisfying sex and her growing awareness of her lesbian identity. In these early works, she already displays her skills at witty juxtapositions of word and image and a flair for self-mockery – offering a refreshing departure from the excruciatingly earnest treatment of confessional material by many other practitioners.

Mona Hatoum’s video, Measures of Distance, is more serious in tone but equally engaging. The distance of the title is multivalent: it encompasses geographic separation, the generation gap, language and cultural differences, political exile and aesthetic detachment. Focusing on the relationship between the artist and her mother, principally conducted by mail, Hatoum artfully combines the written text of her mother’s letters in cursive Arabic script, photographic traces of her mother’s body and a voice-over by the artist, the daughter. Somewhat reminiscent of Chantal Akerman’s arresting experimental film, Letters from Home, made when the Belgian filmmaker was resident in New York, it is more imbued with pathos – because Hatoum is doubly exiled, a Palestinian long resident in London and separated from her family, who live in war-torn Lebanon. The delicate Arabic script of her mother’s letters, the longing mood of their contents read in voice-over by the daughter and the shadowy records of the daughter’s transgressive attempts to film her mother in the shower convey a strong sense of nostalgia and the pathos of separation, underlined by the multiple forms of distance between mother and daughter.

Canberra-raised Kate Murphy’s video installation, Prayers of a Mother, is also about mother-daughter relationships and the distance between them, but it includes her male and female siblings as well as herself in an exploration of the familial relationship, one not exacerbated by geographic separation, exile or cultural difference. If not nostalgic, it is nevertheless full of tenderness. Murphy shows us the faces of eight grown children silently, patiently and attentively listening to the voice of their devoutly religious mother intoning an interminable monologue. The video installation is cruciform in shape. In the centre we see only the mother’s hands, holding a rosary and bible; we do not see her face. The rotating faces of the children are placed around her, registering a range of responses – amusement, boredom, disbelief, earnestness, and tearfulness. But the overwhelming impression is of their gentle respect and tender affection for their mother.

The genre of art video was represented by the work of two Americans and one Dutchman. The Passing, a masterpiece by Bill Viola, the master of the genre, made the others look trivial. Regularly selected for international biennales of art and solo exhibitions in galleries of contemporary art, Viola’s work is contemplative but also sensational – in the philosophic rather than pejorative meaning of the word. This wonderful work in grainy video explores the existential borders of sleeping and wakefulness, light and darkness, movement and stillness, earth and sky, sand and sea, breathing and drowning, birth and death. In comparison, Mary Lucier’s Wintergarden, which juxtaposed beautiful details of Japanese gardens with the fine lines of modern urban architecture in an attractive arrangement, seemed merely decorative - a sort of formalistic exercise; and Frank Scheffer’s Music for Airports, an abstract expressionist piece, merely illustrative…

If Wintergarden could be deemed conservatively contemplative, so too could the two five-part Sokurov videos, Spiritual Voices (from the War Diaries) and Confession (from the Commander’s Diary). Both document the daily routine of an isolated group of young men in the armed forces (the army in the former, the navy in the latter) and ennoble the banal events with the use of classical music, and literary and philosophical reflections from the Great Western Tradition. However, in the case of Spiritual Voices, pathos was engendered through the use of close-ups of the faces of the youthful Soviet conscripts fighting the unwinnable war in Afghanistan. They look so young, innocent and vulnerable; we know they may not survive this war, may no longer be alive today.

A number of the exhibiting artists displayed a conservative tendency in their bows to Buddhism (Zen or Tibetan), but I was more impressed by the conservational zeal of Peter Forgacs and Gustav Deutsch and the uses they made of their carefully amassed material. Hungarian documentary filmmaker, Forgacs, has established an archive of old home movies and amateur films in Budapest and has painstakingly edited the found footage into fascinating historical records of pre-war, war-time and post-war Hungarian life. The juxtaposition of his two films, Bourgeois Dictionaries and Meanwhile Somewhere… 1940-1943, alongside each other, brought into sharp relief the contrast between the complacent hedonism of the Hungarian bourgeoisie and the contemporaneous tribulations of other Europeans under Nazi occupation. Austrian avant-garde filmmaker, Deutsch, has combed a vast archive of scientific films and edited his found footage into a poetic reflection on the nature of film. Film Ist is divided into 6 sections: the heading of each section provides one answer to the question, What is Film? The headings are: Movement and Time; Light and Darkness; An Instrument; Material; A Blink of an Eye; and A Mirror. Both Forgacs and Deutsch are brilliant editors, of sound and image, producing startling juxtapositions, unleashing a flood of sensations, emotions and perceptions, and leaving us reeling from the thoughts teeming in our heads. Here is true critical engagement with aesthetics, politics, history and media.   

To accompany the exhibition, ACMI ran two film programmes in their theatres. On Sunday afternoons, a programme of experimental shorts, avant-garde films and documentaries, by artists featured in the exhibition or on subjects close to their concerns, was screened free to the public. Visitors were able to view two noted films by Sokurov, Mother and Son and Father and Daughter; two of Forgacs’s episodes from his Private Hungary series; and Deutsch’s Film Ist;  in their original form, as well as a goodly number of experimental non-fiction shorts by Australian and American filmmakers. In addition, Claire Stewart curated a programme of feature film screenings for paying customers under the title, “Remembered By”. This series invited us to examine the ways in which recent filmmakers have paid homage to earlier film classics. The classic film and the film or films inspired by it were screened one after the other. Thus, among other cases of debt and homage, Chris Marker’s Sunless followed Hitchcock’s Vertigo; Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries followed Chauvel’s Jedda; Olivier Assayas’ Irma Rep and Franju’s Judex followed Feuillade’s Les Vampires; and Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven followed screenings of Douglas Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life. This series was not only of special appeal to cinephiles; it also pursued the exhibition’s theme of remembrance – the ways in which contemporary artists re-address and re-configure the past.

The inaugural exhibition and the screening programmes so far pursued by ACMI augur well for the future of the institution. It has given a higher profile to experimental and thoughtful media productions while simultaneously catering to the popular taste in classic and contemporary movies. Its theatres are now used to house the Melbourne Cinemateque, national and international   film festivals, as well as special seasons such as the recent tribute to the American documentary filmmakers, the Maysles brothers, and the forthcoming homage to Hong Kong star, Leslie Cheung, `Days of Being Wild’. The film programmes are accompanied by attractive and informative brochures, lectures and forums.  Unlike the commercial cinema, ACMI is actively encouraging an educated and critical interest in cinema, video and the newer media.

Freda Freiberg is a freelance film and photography critic based in Melbourne.