Now You Can Plan Your Retroactive 1984 Sydney Film Festival Schedule In Case You Discover A Time Machine
Take a look at the surprisingly readable interactive e-book, Sydney Film Festival 1954 To Now: A Living Archive.
Earlier today, NSW’s Minister for the Arts, George Souris, unveiled a free online publication to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Sydney Film Festival. The 86-page interactive e-book is entitled Sydney Film Festival 1954 To Now: A Living Archive, and is basically an anthology of various tidbits, artifacts and stories relating to the Sydney Film Festival from 1954 to now (that title doesn’t lie). Surprisingly, for a government-sponsored document, it’s immensely readable! Besides the great photographs of 1954 audiences all dressed up in bow-ties and pearl necklaces, these are some of our highlights from the publication:
– ‘Thoughts Of A Former Festival Director’ by The Movie Show‘s David Stratton, describing his original 1966 stint taking charge of the festival from a tiny non-air-conditioned office, and the difficulties they had in choosing invites (they couldn’t see the films back then, so based their invitations on reading about them in magazines like Sight & Sound and Variety), finding willing theatres to screen the films, and interested press types to promote the event (sidenote: 1966 David Stratton looks exactly like 2013 David Stratton; he’s a vampiro!).
– Richard Kuipers’ enlightening anecdotes about the festival’s history of screening avant-garde and exploitation films, like Chilean surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Fando and Lis in ’69, Paul Morrissey’s pop-art piece Trash in ’73, and a much beloved documentary about the band Half Japanese in ’93.
– A chronological database of all 8580 films that have screened at the Sydney Film Festival over the past 60 years (that’s more movies than our local Civic Video).
– All original festival programs from 1954 to today (complete with olden day Dendy Cinemas ads and everything), so you can retroactively plan your 1984 film festival diary in case you discover a time machine. For example, we totally would have dressed like some ol’ school rude-boy and wandered down to Market Street to see Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, Mike Leigh’s Meantime, Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish, Jackie Raynal’s Hotel New York, Bettie Gordon’s Variety, and the Terence Davies short film retrospective. That would’ve been an enjoyably inspiring week.
– And finally, a “join the discussion” page where we can all share our fave festival memories. If we could be bothered, we’d login there and tell the story about the time an old guy seated a couple of rows from us jumped up and called the person behind him a “noisy cunt” and challenged him to a fight, right in the middle of a screening of Jacques Demy’s lovely, Lola. In the words of movie icon, Fred Astaire, “that’s entertainment!”.
Check out the full publication here and prepare to fall down a never-ending rabbit hole of national cinematic nostalgia.