This month’s selection centres on perception: films about how we choose to fit in to our community and how that in turn shapes it; how a rock band that considers itself political is received when it reaches for real power; how a largely forgotten artist’s obsessions changed the way we photograph each other; and what is the ideal that compels us to surgically change our bodies.
Blank City
In the late 1970s, downtown Manhattan was a ghetto of immigrants, artists, musicians and designers. Director Celine Danhier presents footage of art exhibitions, films and performances by underground artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jim Jarmusch, Lydia Lunch and Debbie Harry, and traces how the street art, hip-hop and punk pioneers shaped the borough and turned it into a place they could no longer call home.
Midnight Oil: 1984
Ray Argall’s account of one of Australia’s most important rock bands at the most vital point in their career is fascinating not only because of the music, but because it documents the political rise of singer Peter Garrett. With Midnight Oil’s album Red Sails in the Sunset atop the charts, Garrett’s run for the Senate both helped and hindered the band’s ambitions, with Argall there to capture the power and the passion.
Night Parrot Stories
“Audiences are warned that the creatures, trees and places appearing in this film may no longer exist at the time of your viewing,” says the voiceover of an Indigenous woman at the outset. The mysterious night parrot has not been sighted in more than a century, and Robert Nugent’s gathering of anecdotes, scientific artefacts and Indigenous lore about the bird is a timely consideration of ecology and extinction.
Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable
Sasha Waters Freyer’s documentary brings attention to the tireless worth ethic and keen eye of American street photographer Garry Winogrand, whose untimely death in 1984 left some 300,000 photographs undeveloped and unseen. These images are brought to light here, cementing his legacy as one of America’s most important visual artists.
Body a la Carte
Jean-Simon Chartier’s TV series about cosmetic surgery, once the province of the vain celebrity, looks at the growing obsession with changing our physical forms. The quest for youth and perfection draws together some of society’s most privileged and most vulnerable into the clinics of some of the sharpest physicians, as the concept of “beauty” undergoes cultural, and even moral, change.
