Tag: acmi
Philippe Parreno
Thursday, February 2nd, 2017 Sydney Morning Herald Column,There’s something fascinating about Philippe Parreno, but it’s not necessarily the art. It’s his mind. Having sat through two-and-a-half hours of short, oblique films at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, I came away feeling amazed by the kind of mind that could devise such a strange, obscure spectacle. Perhaps “spectacle” is the wrong […]
Scorsese
Thursday, August 18th, 2016 Sydney Morning Herald Column,In The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Martin Scorsese drew on a painting by Hieronymus Bosch showing the grotesque faces of spectators watching the carrying of the Cross. The image is a mild surprise in the Scorsese exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne. Most of the display feels rooted in […]
Manifesto
Thursday, February 25th, 2016 Sydney Morning Herald Column,If we accept its Latin origins, the word “manifesto” denotes something that is obvious or clearly seen. It is, therefore, an irony that most manifestos are poetic, elliptical, idealistic, and often downright absurd. The great age of the manifesto was the first half of the twentieth century, as Modernism overturned the stale conventions of western […]
David Bowie is
Saturday, September 12th, 2015 Sydney Morning Herald Column,David Bowie is one of those rare artists who have helped define a decade. That decade was the 1970s – an era when world economies were sent into a spin by an oil crisis, and fashion went AWOL. Those were the years that saw the downfall of Richard Nixon, the rise of Margaret Thatcher, the […]
Yang Fudong: Filmscapes
Saturday, January 17th, 2015 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Australian public galleries had to work hard to attract audiences last year, but in 2015 the degree of difficulty will crank up a few more notches. In such a climate institutions feel pressured to take a more populist approach – preferring shows that will appeal to a non-specialist audience over displays perceived as difficult or […]
A Touch of Sin
Saturday, February 8th, 2014 Film Reviews,For this week’s second film I’m going to depart from the mainstream and discuss Jia Zhang-ke’s A Touch of Sin, screening throughout February at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne. To give a first viewing to important movies that have yet to find a distributor in this country is one of ACMI’s […]