Little films push cinematic form in big ways

MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

EXPERIMENTAL SHORTS
(111 minutes total)
ACMI 1, August 14, 9pm

This year's MIFF experimental film program offers a glimpse of how definitions of both “experimental” and “film” continue to evolve: there is more video than celluloid, and more deliberately messy assemblages than “pure” formalist works.

Two new works from Australian veterans in the field deserve singling out. Shot on 16-millimetre in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Richard Tuohy's China Not China is a layered cityscape that lures the eye like a 3D image, using superimposition to transmute an overwhelming flow of humanity into a spectacle of ghostly absence.

In total contrast is Paul Winkler's BEAN::QUEEN, the first fully digital work in a career spanning more than 50 years. While this is not the first time Winkler has taken a satirical approach to “found” material, it's a hilarious and radical departure from his usual systematic near-abstraction, an illustration of what happens after an existing system of filmmaking has broken down.