A large number of other films will be screened, about which no information is at present available These include :

Harold Lloyd in Safety Last

New Zealand films

Canadian experimental films

Silent comedy (Chaplin, Harold Lloyd's Safety Last', etc.)

Rock movies, Westerns ...

Check the publicity for details.

Norman MacLaren

Norman MacLaren is the man who has made famous Len Lye's invention of direct films. He "passed from drawing images direct onto celluloid to drawing sounds by a similar method. Installed since 1940 at the National Film Board of Canada, he has not only trained and inspired many individual cartoon film-makers, but has himself built up a corpus of work in which virtually no possibilities of the motion picture medium have remained unexplored. To my mind he is one of cinema's purest geniuses, and in much of his work the relationship between film-magic and dream-magic comes so close they virtually combine," (Basil Wright). The Festival is showing a number of his shorts in one screening.

Pure S

Pure S has been passed by the Censor and restricted to Card holders at this festival only. From the press blurb : "In spite of a stormy reception from film critics, social commentators and censors, 'Pure Shit' shared the prize for the most creative entry' in the 1976 Australian Film Awards".

Robert Bresson's Lancelot of the Lake

"I think drugs generally have been an extremely mixed blessing for this generation, and I think there's an excellent case to be made that drugs have channelled off a lot of energy, which under other circumstances might have been used very productively. Depending on how paranoid I am at any given moment, I think of that as either an historical accident or a brilliant example of social engineering.

"We wrote the script out of their own experiences. There is nothing in the film that they hadn't experienced themselves. The only kind of distortion is that instead of it being made up of all the stories about what happened in the Melbourne drug scene in the last two years, it was set in a 48 hour period." (Director Bert Deling).

Robert Bresson

Robert Bresson is generally acknowledged as the leading ascetic of the film world, using mainly non-professional actors, directing them to the minutest detail yet seldom explaining a shot, and keeping a tight rein on the formal qualities of his frame. Austere beauty is his trademark, characterised most often by blank faces which stress both privacy and the universal. "Although there is a matter-of-fact quality to his work, concentrated viewing brings out an extra-ordinary sense of passion. It is as if his characters are straight faced for fear of exploding. Their human feelings are in turmoil with spiritual imperatives, and the struggle is as great as that in Dostoyevsky — one of Bresson's models." (David Thomson).

Diary of a Country Priest (1950)

was the first of Bresson's films to bring the above traits properly to the fore. In it a young priest strives with his faith in God against the worldly evils around him. The priest fails for the man to succeed. The structure fully expresses conflicts of spiritual stability, and weakness and fear. "Bresson's camera lingers on faces, on eves, on the priest's hands, purposely taking the time not just to slow the pace but to allow the human details to register on our minds and feelings" (Gerald Mast). Because of its long absence and Bresson's place in cinematic history this will be the major re-release of the festival.

Lancelot of the Lake (1974)

demythifies and deromanticizes the Arthurian legend, taking ritual and dogmatic honour to the extreme and exposing their nollow core, The knights themselves symbolise this : seen always in their armour, concealed but not protected by it; unable to find God in their search for the Grail ("God isn't a trophy to bring home", says Guinevere) and similarly unable to accept naked, human interaction, they are revealed at once bound to the earth and out of touch with its grace. The narrative is fragmented, as are the frames (all we see of a pageant are the stomachs of horses and a bagpipe): psychology is irrelevant when an armoured foot is as much a man as his face, armoured or not. The intense visual beauty and unnerving power of this film have earned it the highest accolades from the critics.

Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray is India's best director, and one of the greatest humanist filmakers in the world. His films are marked by an exquisite sense of image by his definition of character in terms of relationship with others, and by their exploration of the environment's place in the subconscious.

The World of Apu (1959)

is the last film in the Apu trilogy which first brought Ray international acclaim. It covers Apu's lite as a young man ; his arranged marriage and the death of his wife in childbirth, his struggles to become a writer. Railroads, Calcutta, the countryside, have a dominant place in this, as in all Ray's films. Being the only part of the famous trilogy to screen here in recent years it is an important offering for film enthusiasts.

Days and Nights in the Forest (1969)

is the first part of another, looser trilogy which observes characters in relation to their work. Four executives out for a holiday in the country. Their page 11 attempts to find some sort of tranquility are constantly undercut by conflicts within the group, and the inability of each to discover himself outside the western-style values and habits they have adopted. The film's extraordinary visual beauty is counterpointed by a growing sense of foreboding the knowledge that behind the facade of pleasure-seeking an enormous crack in political and social consciousness is about to open up. Chekhovian strains are apparent in subject and treatment, and although it is strange to think of Ray's open spaces in these terms the comparison is extremely fitting.

Nicholas Roeg

Nicholas Roeg is an English cameraman (Far from the Madding Crowd, Lawerence of Arabia). turned director, who still shoots his own films, marking them with a superb sense of colour.

Walkabout (1971) concerns two white children taken into the Australian outback by their father and shot at. They escape, watch him set fire to the car and kill himself, and begin to walk out. An aboriginal boy finds and guides them. "When in this film Roeg brings us up against a brick wall, the result is not only abrasive, it is conclusive : because behind the wall, as we see, are two desolations, not one — the desolation of the city and the desolation of the desert", (Basil Wright).

The epilogue shows the girl, now grown up, remembering the events. She sees the group playing in naked primevil innocence", whereas we have been shown the Europeans always fully clothed. Is this a happy embellishment, or was the filmproper a distortion ? Or is the underlying truth something larger ? The same preoccupation is evident in Roeg's other films ('Performance', 'Don't Look Now', 'The Man Who Fell to Earth').

Nagisa Oshima

Oshima is the most provocative of Japan's younger directors, his films always ruthlessly dissecting the post-war consciousness of his country, exposing the latent hysteria seething behind conventional formality.

The Ceremony (1971)

takes as its metaphor a large bourgeois family, examining authoritatianism in the close and broader contexts. "It seems to me that during ceremonies Japanese are possessed of particularly delicate emotions, emotions often completely unrelated to their daily lives. One might easily reject, both intellectually and emotionally, militarism and xenophobic nationalism in daily life. But these forces, once beyond the realm of daily life, are not so easily denied". (Oshima).

"A brilliant and haunting insight into the tensions between the Old end the New in Japan. The Ceremony' it a truly modern film, but with classical echoes, and is not to be missed." (Andrew Sarris.).

From the director of 'Dairy of a Shinjuku Thief and Boy.

Andrej Wajda

For those who were disappointed with Wajda's The Shadowline' at the recent Film Festival, Ashes and Diamonds (1958) should set the score right. One of the director's best, it concerns a 1945 resistance member who is nominally fighting on for the communists. His aims are not ideological but romantic, doomed for this and his ability to act effectively. Called on to assassinate a local enemy loader, he bungles the job, bungles his attempts to win the barmaid fo the hotel on which the action is centred, and in a remarkable final scene, dies on a rubbish dump after being shot be accident. The film overcomes its occasional existential labouring with some fine imagery and an excellent performance from the lead actor. An East European classic.