Howdy Customers! A friendly WARNING! -

THIS coming Monday night, Splodge! will start rolling at *7.30PM*,
- so DON'T go rollin' up at 8, ( - which, of course,
is our *regular* stating time!)





•BONJOUR BALWYN (1971), plus! •YAKETTY YAK (1974) <<< MADE IN
MELBOURNE!!!

TONIGHT: STRICTLY MEMBERS-ONLY
* MEMBERSHIPS STILL AVAILABLE AT THE DOOR ON THE NIGHT, 'THO *
DETAILS BELOW

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SPLODGE! NOTES: 1st. Mon. JUNE (07/06/04)
splodgeburger@...

ON THE FIRST MONDAY OF EVERY MONTH

"SPLODGE!"

a community FilmEdSoc project,
WE CONTROL THE CONTENT

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Unusual films of discernment, still presented in convivial
surroundings!

ALL PRESENTED ON GROOVY 16 MILLIMETRE FILM!

the back room
714 NICHOLSON (CNR. SCOTCHMER) STREET, NORTH FITZROY

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just give us a "hoy" here at splodgeburger!

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2nd. Quartile

JUNE
AD 2004

Monday, 07th.

Registration: 7.00 - 7.30 pm
Screening: >>>>> 7.300 (*SEVEN THIRTY*!!!!) pm <<<<<

TONIGHT: STRICTLY MEMBERS-ONLY
MEMBERSHIPS STILL AVAILABLE AT THE DOOR ON THE NIGHT
DETAILS BELOW


MADE IN MELBOURNE!!!

•BONJOUR BALWYN (1971),
Young middle-class Melbournite Kevin Agar (John Duigan) takes leave of
the outer suburbs ( - Balwyn - ), to live the fast student life in the
(yet-to-be-trendy) University precinct of Carlton, and pursue his
attempts to stave off the inevitable crash of his hip but
low-circulation magazine BOLO, as creditors close in and his personal
life goes awry.

On the way, the film reveals an affectionate portrait of Melbourne,
from the brittle middle-class home of Kevin’s parents in Balwyn to the
comfortable poverty of the Carlton terrace houses of his friends.
The film is rich in incident and benefits from a tight and witty script
written partly by the Melbourne playwright John Romeril (who appears as
one of Kevin's friends). Especially notable are Kevin's interview with
an elderly theatrical producer who is conducting auditions for a nude
show; a visit to the Saturday night trotting races where Kevin is
pestered by a surly thug to whom he owes money; and above all the
fast-paced sequence that closes the film, when Kevin nervously starts
to earn a living as a con-man, using subterfuge to repossess electrical
goods. John Duigan (who later directed his own features) plays Kevin as
a truculent "egomaniac in a jam", but it is Peter Cummings who steals
the film in the last few minutes as the seedy television repairman who
employs Kevin in his petty criminal activities.

More accessible than Brian Davies' 'Brake Fluid' (1970), to which it
bears comparison, this is a loosely-structured (episodic) comedy
dealing with the theme of the conflict between maintaining a bohemian
lifestyle and the need to fit into society and make a living. The film
maintains an amiably satirical edge, particularly in a scene with a
seedy theatrical producer, a Saturday night at the trots and the last
scenes where Kevin turns to repossessing television sets.

With the benefit of an irreverently witty script by JOHN ROMERIL, Nigel
Buesst and Duigan, BONJOUR BALWYN tops off its nonconformist narrative
approach with a spontaneous and hilarious final fifteen minutes as the
hero, on his last legs, is forced into conducting front-door surveys
while his employer (Peter Cummings) embarks on a series of back-door
thefts.

A product of an age of relative innocence, BONJOUR BALWYN takes a stern
look at alienation from the middle-class viewpoint. An attack on
bourgeois values, as well as anti-materialism, all the while indicating
the pitfalls of reaching for hazily-perceived "alternative" lifestyles.
The witty, downbeat conclusion, although the most engaging part of the
film, begs so many questions that the theme remains enigmatic.
Made cheaply on 16mm with assistance from the Experimental Film and
Television Fund, the film was screened at the Melbourne Co-op Cinema in
October 1971. Although occasional commercial screenings were successful
(for example, in Canberra on 29 April 1973), the film was not widely
seen outside Melbourne. The filmmaker, Nigel Buesst, was once charged
for showing this film in public without a license, when he hired the
Hawthorn Art Gallery, printed up some posters took along his own 16mm
projector, operating it himself, and showed his own film! Which reminds
us, one day, we gotta get one of them things!

Prod Co: Sunrise Pictures; Experimental Film Fund; Australian Council
for the Arts. Credits: Prod, Dir: Nigel Buesst. Wrs: John Romeril,
Nigel Buesst, John Duigan. DOP: Tom Cowan. Mus: Carrl Myriad, Janie
Myriad, Mike Deany. Eds: Peter Tammer, Nigel Buesst. Sd: Lloyd Carrick.
Cast: John Duigan (Kevin Agar), Peter Cummins (TV Repairman), John
Romeril (Alan), Barbara Stephens (Christine), Reg Newson, Jim Nocholls,
Camilla Rowntree (Rhonda), Marcel Cugola, Alan Finney, Peter Carmody,
Geoff Gardner. 60 mins. NFVLS

plus!

•YAKETTY YAK (1974),
Maurice [pron. Mor-eece] - (American academic Dave Jones) - a would-be
director (in fact YAKETTY YAK‘s actual writer-director-editor), is
trying to hold a rational discussion about film with his friends,
Steve, Zig and Caroline. They are helpless against his authoritarian
power as director, and any of their statements that displease him are
edited out of the discussion. The opinion is also sought of "the man in
the street" ( - played by an unsuspecting Jerzy Toeplitz, just before
his appointment as head of the Film and Television School!)

Maurice plans his own suicide, which he megalo-maniacly proposes as
comparable to those of Mishima, Socrates and Kirilov. He ultimately
also murders his way through his film crew by using the editing process
to remove evidence of their contributions, before forcing Steve and Zig
to assist in his suicide.

The film kicks off with Maurice and his crew, comprised of a couple of
intense colleagues (Peter Carmody and JOHN FLAUS
< http://www.takver.com/history/sydney/flaus_j.htm >, bickering over
what their film should be about. Maurice is an equally strong mixture
of positivity and negativity. He laughs at suicide, the need for god,
all academic enterprise, star-power, and critics. He states that the
intellectuals' efforts to communicate have dismal chances of success.
They sit around waffling about political statements. He blabs on about
his pure wish to erase the neurotic human condition and liberate egos
everywhere. However, in mid-stream, he throws this over in favour of
making a film about filmmakers making a film.

"Keep the cameras rolling" he commands as they bitterly argue the worth
of the idea, "I've got four hours of film-stock!" From this point, the
film proceeds with a lunatic logic all its own, dominated by the
presence of Jones in a beautifully-judged parody of the egocentric
filmmaker. He promises the others an open forum to debate the merit of
their undertaking and of his talent... but all the criticisms eagerly
offered by colleagues and crew are edited out ( - "Not visually
interesting"). He persuades his girlfriend Caroline to take all her
clothes off - excepting her black boots - for the sake of art, "but not
until your character is established, else we’d be accused of
motivationless exploitation".

Openly intended "to commit as many outrages as possible against
standard aesthetic criteria of film", YAKETTY YAK is an aggressive
intellectual comedy, peppered with Godardian political and theoretical
pronouncements, both by Maurice ( - in his verbal onslaught) and by the
film’s "real" director, Dave Jones ( - in messages flashed on the
screen to enlighten and insult the critics and the audience). By
playing the role of Maurice himself, Jones effectively blurs the
relationship between the film and "reality", since at times Maurice
appears more obviously in control of the film than Jones, instructing
the camera to "keep rolling" and threatening to edit out pieces he
doesn’t like ( - which he often does). Yet, despite it apparently
random surface, the film had been carefully rehearsed on video and was
fully scripted.

YAKKETY YAK uses conventional narrative forms to question exactly why
the film itself is being made, how the story is being told, and it’s
relationship with its audience. While a recognisable narrative is
certainly present, the telling is a process of "deconstruction", one
that goes against the normal rules of construction to examine the
filmmaking process as part of the narrative. Relatively few Australian
films have incorporated the avant-garde into feature-length
explorations of fiction and documentary forms as YAKKETY YAK does, and
none other so entertainingly. What the film succeeds in so happily is
its satirical digs at the underground cinema and anything else that
might happen to present itself as a target. "They won’t have Maurice to
kick around anymore" is a statement with a familiar ring when the he
decides to film his suicide.

A brilliant – phenomenal! - phenomenological satire on the theory and
practice of radical cinema, and a fantastically-inventive Australian
underground movie, drawing heavily on Jean Luc Godard's use of extreme
self-reflexivity, aggressively ambiguous inter-titles, and
(satirically) dense theoretical discussion. It's a valentine to
movie-making, only in this case, you seem to be seeing what ought to
have been left on the cutting-room floor. Oh, and it has more chooks
than a Sam Peckinpah movie. In its eccentric self-interrogation,
YAKETTY YAK bears comparison with DALMAS (1973), also made in Melbourne
at about the same time, which substitutes the private-eye film for mad
comedy as its starting point. It was made while Jones was on the
teaching staff of the Media Centre at La Trobe University in Melbourne.
An American with and M.A. in film from Stanford University, Jones had
made several short films in the USA, had written episodes for Warner
Brothers television series, and had come to Australia to lecture in
film at La Trobe in 1971. YAKETTY YAK was shot in the evenings over a
five week period in the film studio at the university, and was
completed by the end of 1972 with financial aid from the Experimental
Film and Television Fund.

Supporting Jones in the cast were Peggy Cole, a student in Jones”
classes, JOHN FLAUS, probably Australia's most articulate analyst of
American film genres, then lecturing with Jones at La Trobe, and Peter
Carmody, an important figure in Carlton theatre and himself an
occasional film director. Jones left Australia soon after, and the film
was placed with the Vincent Library for distribution. With an R
Certificate ( - because of the strong language and Caroline's
persistent nudity, which Maurice demanded for box-office reasons), it
opened at the Melbourne Co-op Cinema in mid-September 1974.

Prod. Co: Acme Film Co. Prod. Dir. Scr. Ed: Dave Jones. Asst Dir. Rod
Bishop. Prod/Snd. Assts: Ian Armet, Andrew Pecze. Phot. Gordon Glenn.
Snd: Peter Beilby, Lloyd Carrick. Props, Advertising: Ros & Keith
Robertson. Cast: Dave Jones (Maurice), JOHN FLAUS (Steve), Peter
Carmody (Zig), Peggy Cole (Caroline), John Cleary (Assistant Building
Manager), Jerzy Toeplitz (himself/man in the street), Rod Nicholls
(Krilov), Doug White (Socrates), Andy Miller (Mishima). 86 mins. NFVLS


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Minor programme changes may occur due to unforseen
circumstances.
Feature runs last; shorts order may vary from listing.

* Acknowledging ACMI Inc. ;) *

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ADMISSION IS RESTRICTED TO MEMBERS FOR THIS PROGRAMME

THIS IS A FILM SOCIETY SCREENING OPEN TO MEMBERS

BUT IF YOU WISH TO BECOME A MEMBER, THE JOINING FEE IS SO LOW,
IT *MIGHT AS WELL BE FREE*!

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MEMBERSHIP RATES:
Quarterly*:
Generally Socially-Advantaged: $7.00

Generally Socially-Oppressed: $6.00

*annual and half-yearly memberships available on request

If you wish to join on the night, we strongly advise you to
arrive well-prior to the time listed for the screening to
commence!

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