The Cremaster Cycle

3—21 September 2011
Free admission

American artist Matthew Barney is best known for The Cremaster Cycle 1995—2002, an extraordinary five–part film project. Created out of sequence over an eight–year period, together the films have a unique aesthetic universe of densely layered symbolism. Throughout the series Barney mixes anatomical and psychosexual allusions with prosthetic effects, drawing on a vast range of mythological and historical characters, locations and his own autobiography.
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The Savage Eye: Surrealism and Cinema

Until 2 October 2011
Free admission

The Savage Eye: Surrealism and Cinema continues its major survey of the surrealist sensibility in cinema. The program charts how developments in filmmaking have been used to represent the interior world of dreams and the subconscious via cinematic manipulation and montage. Read more

‘... Jeunet and Caro’s forays into the fantastique is the perfect introduction to what’s essentially a hugely inventive blend of dream, fairytale, and myth, and to a strange, sinister sea–girt world that functions according to its own crazy logic. After his infant brother is abducted by a gang of semi–robotic Cyclops, kindly strongman One sets off on a search that will unite him with feisty nine–year–old orphan Miette and lead him to the sea–rig laboratory inhabited by the evil Krank his six cloned brothers, their diminutive ‘mother’, and Uncle Irvin, a sardonic brain floating in a fish tank. Extraordinary.’ Pacific Film Archive Read more

‘An ex–clown takes a job as janitor in a crumbling apartment block. Unbeknown to him, this job has a history and previous incumbents have ended up on the neighbour’s dinner table via the butcher’s block. When he innocently falls for the butcher’s daughter, the knife is held back to spare her feelings. But as bellies begin to rumble, will love be enough to keep him out of le charcuterie?’ Matt Ford Read more

‘... Jeunet and Caro’s forays into the fantastique is the perfect introduction to what’s essentially a hugely inventive blend of dream, fairytale, and myth, and to a strange, sinister sea–girt world that functions according to its own crazy logic. After his infant brother is abducted by a gang of semi–robotic Cyclops, kindly strongman One sets off on a search that will unite him with feisty nine–year–old orphan Miette and lead him to the sea–rig laboratory inhabited by the evil Krank his six cloned brothers, their diminutive ‘mother’, and Uncle Irvin, a sardonic brain floating in a fish tank. Extraordinary.’ Pacific Film Archive Read more

Les Vampires is a 10–part silent film serial by Louis Feuillade and staring Musidora as Irma Vep, a femme fatale whose name is a suspicious anagram of vampire. The serial is set in Paris and follows the exploits of a gang of master criminals who call themselves ‘Les Vampires’. Read more

The Hour–Glass Sanatorium, based on the book by Polish writer Bruno Schulz, is a poetic dream–like reflection on memory, culture and death. A son takes a surreal train journey to visit his father in a sanatorium only to find the facilities in decay and run by an absent staff. Time and place behave unpredictably in this web–like film, which interweaves the past and present with surrealistic premonitions of future events. Read more

‘The Saragossa Manuscript, one of the great masterpieces of Eastern European cinema, follows the picaresque adventures of a young nobleman of the seventeenth century, who encounters phantoms, spirits, fiery Gypsies, and dreamlike maidens of all sorts. The film is a baroque fantasy based on a collection of bizarre stories under the same title by one Jan Potocki, a peripatetic nobleman whose life was as strange as his book.’ Pacific Film Archive Read more