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Biennale Film Program

The Biennale of Sydney 2000 Film Program was screened entirely at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The film program featured artists of the Biennale as well as themes of the exhibition. All screenings were free, there was no reserved seating.

The Biennale of Sydney 2000 is also please to present Matthew Barney's film, CREMASTER 2, screened as part of the Sydney Film Festival. Sunday 11 June 9.20 pm and Thursday 15 June 9.10 pm at the Dendy Theatre, Circular Quay. Please confirm bookings with the Sydney Film Festival. Please email the Biennale for further information: info@biennaleofsydney.com.au

Saturday 3 June 1.00 pm

Bottoms

director Yoko Ono in collaboration with David Cox, 1966-70 16mm 7 min. Experimental short film

Fly

director Yoko Ono in collaboration with John Lennon, 1966-70 16mm 25 min. A naked woman sleeps undisturbed as a housefly descends upon her body. From the point of view of the insect, the body becomes monumental, transformed into a landscape of hills and ravines. Yoko Ono also provides the fly sounds

Nice coloured girls

director Tracey Moffatt, 1987 16 mm 17 min. Experimental narrative which departs from realist conventions in depicting the relationship and differences between Aboriginal women and European men in the early years of Sydney's settlement and the very particular culture of young urban Aboriginal women in contemporary Sydney.

Double Blind (No Sex Last Night)

director Sophie Calle in collaboration with Gregory Shepard, 1992 Video 76 min. Her premiere videotape. With America as a backdrop, Calle and her collaborator / partner Shepard, document an unconventional narrative of their travel from coast to coast in his Cadillac convertible. Armed with individual camcorders each records and narrates a personal visual diary. Juxtaposed in the editing a strikingly different interpretation of the events emerges.

Sunday 4 June 2.30pm

Repeat program of Saturday 3 June

Wednesday 7 June 1.00 pm

Tokyo-ga

director Wim Wenders, 1985 16mm 91 mins. Using a loose diary format and centering around a homage to Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu, Wenders reflects upon the impact of Western values on Japanese culture as well as his own attitudes and responses to that culture. He interviews Ozu's favourite actor Chisu Ryu and his regular cameraman, Yuhara Atsuta asking what Ozu makes of contemporary Japanese images.

Mexico

director Mike Hoolboom, Steve Sanguedolce, 1992 16mm 35 mins. This dystopic travelogue with a dead-pan voice over documents a trip from Toronto to Mexico and back again. The narration tells the story of a man trying to escape his past, his life in Toronto, but who ends up rendering a series of scenes from a car factory to a bull fight as sites of corporatisation and exploitation. Ultimately Mexico and Toronto dissolves into one another - the unseeing gaze of the tourist colonises the third world with its own history - making it impossible to ever arrive in Mexico.

Sunday 11 June 2.30 pm

Repeat of program Wednesday 7 June

Wednesday 14 June 1.00 pm

Hoop Dreams

director Steve James, 1994 16mm 175 mins. Depicts five years in the lives of two African American teenagers from poor inner-city Chicago who, as a result of their superior Basketball skills, are thrust into the predominantly white environment of a selective Catholic school. This documentary / real life drama centred around the pressure on the teenagers to succeed, explores privileged access, the politics of race and sport in American business, black street culture and the often vicious cycle of life of poor urban blacks in the US. A parallel to the biting, poignant statements about Australian culture and the complexities of racial definition by artist Gordon Bennett.

Wednesday 21 June, 1.00 pm

Entr'acte

director Rene Clair, 1924 16mm 11 min. Widely regarded as the most interesting of the Dadaist films, ENTR'ACTE was made to be shown during the intermission of Francis Picabia's Dadaist ballet Relache. This logically meaningless succession of images with a score by Eric Satie allowed Clair to explore the limits of the film medium. The grating humour of artist Martin Kippenberger (Biennale of Sydney 2000) is manifestly inspired by Dada.

Frame

director Richard Serra, 1971 16mm 21 mins. In this short experimental film artist Richard Serra demonstrates the disparity in perception between what is seen through the lens of a camera and what is seen by a person looking at the same space.

The man with the movie camera

Director Dziga Vertov, 1928 16mm 64 mins. Vertov rejected the contemporary fiction film in favour of recording unstaged reality or what he called "instants of life". With "The man with a movie camera" he progressed from documentarist to cine-poet, creating a kind of self reflexive cinema around the depiction of Moscow on a typical day from dawn to dusk. His concern with the cinematographic illusion and to reveal, within the film, the process of its own making: the film contains recurrent images of camera operators shooting it, Vertov editing it and people in a theatre watching it. His major work and hugely influential on subsequent cinema and art practice. A valuable adjunct to the work of Boris Michailov, represented in the Biennale of Sydney 2000 who portrays the "damaged Utopia" of 20th century post-Soviet society.

Sunday 25 June 2.30 pm

Repeat of Wednesday program

Wednesday 28 June 1pm

The sweet smell of success

director Alexander Mackendrick, 1957 16mm 94 mins. One of this decades most brilliant American films whose influence continued to reverberate through American cinema well into the 1980s. Not only did it sum up much of Film Noir with it's bleak urban "rat trap" story and setting and James Wong Howe's black and white cinematography shot on location, but it was also independently produced. This independence from a major studio allowed an unprecedented biting portrayal of corruption in which an unscrupulous small time press agent, intent on clawing his way to the top, debases himself for the favours of a monster of a newspaper columnist. "The sweet smell of success" saw the rise of independent production in Hollywood and the work of Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola,Terrence Malick, Arthur Penn and other influential directors of the next three decades are direct descendants of the artistic freedom this form of production established.

Sunday 2 July 2.30 pm

Repeat of Wednesday Program

Wednesday 5 July 1.00 pm

Rear Window

director Alfred Hitchcock, 1954 16mm 112 mins. Crystallising Hitchcock's obsessions and themes up to this point the scope of action of Rear Window is more restricted than the director had ever attempted previously. The entire film is shot from a camera confined within the apartment of a professional photographer who is recovering from a broken leg, and during most of the film the camera records what he sees through his rear window. To pass the time, the photographer begins to spy on his neighbours through his telescopic lens and gradually forms the conviction that one of them has murdered his wife. Rear Window's influence on cinema and art continues to this day - a disturbing and profoundly modern film - it's theme of the moral complicity of the voyeur (and by extension, the film spectator) anticipates much contemporary cinema.

Sunday 9 July 2.30 pm

Repeat of Wednesday program

Wednesday 12 July 1.00 pm

Judex

director Georges Franju, 1963 16mm 105 mins. "Forget fiction want to make a dream-like, purely formal film" said director Franju of his film. Full of archetypal characters lovingly immersed in the "surreal innocence" of an earlier time and filmed in the contrasty black and white of early cinema, it is both a homage to Louis Feuillade's cinema serial of the same name of 1916 and a foreshadow of postmodern pastiche.

Wednesday 19 July 1.00 pm

L'Argent

director Robert Bresson, 1963 16mm 90 mins. Robert Bresson's last film is the culmination of the highly personalised style refined in his earlier films. His painstakingly crafted works form an important part of cinema history with a realism predicated upon an absolute austerity of acting style, dialogue and mise-en-scene. L'Argent charts the inexorable moral degradation of a man condemned for a crime he didn't commit. Like all this great directors work, this is a film which requires attention, but rewards it with unforgettable images of overpowering emotional resonance.

Sunday 23 July 2.30 pm

Repeat of Wednesday program

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