On Australian Film History - Rod Bishop reviews THE LAST DAYS OF ZANE GREY by Vicki Hastrich, Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2025

In the 1930s, Americans didn’t believe sharks ate people.

Hollywood celebrity novelist Zane Grey knew they did, and came to Australia to big game fish in 1935 and 1939. The great white shark rarely attacks humans, but it was Grey’s holy grail and he fished at Bermagui, Batemans Bay, Hayman Island, Lady Musgrave Island, Sydney Heads and Port Lincoln. 

He also acted as himself in White Death (1936), a feature film about catching a great white off Hayman Island.

Zane Grey wrote over 100 novels and short stories. His literary output contributed to 112 films and 3 television series. Starting with the publication of his first book Riders of the Purple Sage in 1912, he became regarded as a major force in establishing the underlying mythologies of the Western genre.

Grey had a clause in his Hollywood contracts insisting the films he wrote should be shot on locations where his novels were set. This opened up the startling landscapes of America’s south-west (such as Monument Valley) to many Americans who were seeing them for the first time.  

At his peak in the 1930s, Grey’s novels and his Hollywood assignments earned him $350,000 a year. In today’s terms, that’s millions a year. 

Enough for him to arrive on our shores with a retinue of helpers, including a business manager, three cameramen, several boats, tents, copious fishing gear (valued today at $AU1,350,000) and 166 suitcases, requiring a two-ton truck. His elaborate camps were set up with kitchens, sleeping tents, temporary wooden floors and even offices where he could continue writing and managing his business.

His arrival in Australia was very big news. Some have even suggested the mass hysteria over Grey’s swashbuckling fishing expeditions in Australia are only matched in this country by the arrival of The Beatles.

Author of The Last Days of Zane Grey, Vicki Hastrich writes: “We just went crazy for him. As far as I can tell there were something like nine of Grey’s films in circulation when he arrived in Australia in 1935.”

The media fiercely chased him for fishing tales, Western stories, photos, interviews and public appearances. Writing home to his wife Dolly in the USA, Grey said between 250 and 500 visitors came to his Bermagui camp each day hoping to see him. 

Hastrich writes: “The constant incursions on his privacy at the Bermagui camp were becoming intolerable. The stream of stickybeakers wandering through had never stopped, all of them wanting something…One woman walked through the camp on the morning after the Zane Grey birthday party: there were no people, she said, but she did see the remains of his birthday cake left out on a table. This qualified as news, as did many other petty invasions.”

Grey said of Australia: “This is the greatest country I have ever visited…the finest fishing in the world…You are developing an individual race, somewhat like the south-west Americans. The New Zealanders are more English than the English.”

Despite the patronizing attitude to First Nations people in the cast of White Death, Hastrich says: “Grey had seen Aboriginal people as intelligent, skillful and knowledgeable – qualities rarely ascribed to them by white Australia.”

This very readable account of Grey in Australia is exhaustively researched. It details all of his fishing expeditions, his prodigious spending, his precarious financial state, his numerous extramarital affairs (some scandalous), his plans for Australian novels and his literary legacy. But love affairs and letters back to Dolly apart, we don’t get too many insights into the man. One, however, is his reaction to reading John O’Hara’s ‘dirty’ BUtterfield 8. He burnt his copy in the camp fire, then argued with defenders of the book on his staff, who promptly quit and returned to the States in disgust.

Made on a budget of $AU2,700,000 and shot on Hayman Island in Queensland, White Death can be found on three YouTube  files, although sound drops out for 10 minutes. Grey, on screen for the first time in a feature film, plays himself, and it makes a lucid definition of near unwatchable, wooden acting. 

Grey’s business manager Edwin G. Bowen directed, produced and edited. It was his first, and his only, feature film and it plays like an embarrassing amateur production. The predominately English voices are just one of its cringe-worthy offerings. So too is the portrayal of First Nations people, the lame comedy and the atrocious acting.

Then there’s the shark. The best parts of White Death are the footage of Grey fishing for swordfish. But decent shark footage eluded him, and as for the great white, the crew had to paint one shark white and also construct a model for other shots. The fakery is hopeless, and the pathetic chase for the great white sucks whatever life was left out of the film. 

White Death bombed and there’s no evidence of it ever being released in the USA. 

In 1939, only months before his death in California, Grey caught several great white sharks off Port Lincoln, but the fish of his life, a 17-foot great white escaped.   

AT CINEMA REBORN - Barrie Pattison's introduction to THE WATCHMAKER OF ST PAUL (repeat screening on Thursday)

Philippe Noiret, The Watchmaker of St Paul

Editor's Note: THE WATCHMAKER OF ST PAUL  drew a very good crowd at its screening at Cinema Reborn in Sydney screens again in Sydney on Thursday 7 May at 4.15pm. It screens in Melbourne at the Hawthorn Lido on Saturday 9 May at 11.40 am, introduced by Andrew McGregor, and on Wednesday 13 May at 4.00pm.

Below is Barrie Pattison's introduction to the first screening in Sydney. The intro wont be repeated on Thursday at the repeat screening at the Randwick Ritz.  Barrie was a friend of director Bertrand Tavernier and his introduction recalls this friendship.

*********************

This is a slightly expanded version of the introduction I did to the 2026 Cinema Reborn screening.

I’m going to give you a little Film History, so here’s an apology to the people who know this already.

The first archival screenings we hear about, happened in the thirties in New York, London and Paris. The French activity was different, not conducted by institutions’ salaried officers  but by enthusiasts who gathered (and sometimes stole) copies which the Companies were discarding as no longer having any value. This appears to have been a boutique activity, with Henri Langlois and Georges Franju storing their prints in Langlois’ mother’s bathroom.

However (and this they don’t tell you) during The Occupation, a German Major put things on a more business-like basis, expanding the collection substantially from a couple of hundred titles (not a year’s programs for a serious Cinémathque). In the post war period, Paris became known as the only place in the world where you could see many important films. People like director Bob Swaim or writer Carlos Clarens came there, because that was where La Cinémathèque Française was.

A devoted core audience watched Langlois’ screenings at night and,  in the day time, wrote for magazines like Positif,  Cahiers de Cinéma, Présence de Cinéma, Cinéma Soixante dix, and the rest. They developed the celebrated Politique des Auteurs which said that movie directors were as much the authors of their work as composers, painters, sculptors and dramatists and they applied it to Hollywood professionals like Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, rather than heavyweights like Carl Dreyer or Robert Bresson.

… and they started making films, the celebrated La Nouvelle Vague.

After their phenomenal success with titles like Francois Truffaut’s Four Hundred Blows, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and Louis Malle’s Zazie in the Métro, near three hundred films were made by French directors in their twenties. This process was peaking when I arrived there in the early sixties. 

I encountered press agent and critic Bertrand Tavernier, who was already doing episodes for sketch movies. He drew on his enthusiast background, scooping Laetitia Roman’s resumé out of the pile on his table, exclaiming “Gold of the Seven Saints!” and reviving her wilting career giving her the part in  Les baisers.

Shortly after this,  the authorities took the Cinémathèque away from Langlois - and his indignant supporters staged a demonstration outside the Trocadéro auditorium, which turned into a riot when the gendarmes broke it up. Bertrand Tavernier was seen leaving the event with blood streaming down his face. It was the first of the succession of manifestations of May ‘68, reverberating round the world - Le joli mai! 

I can’t help noticing that that messing with La Cinématèque Française brought down the French government while wiping out the Australian National Film Theatre only stirred interest among the people who wanted to make off with its funding and real estate.

Meanwhile Bertrand Tavernier had interested Philippe Noiret in Tavernier’s proposed adaptation of L’Horloger d’Everton, a story by Georges Simenon,  creator of Inspector Maigret. Noiret become a star out of his Nouvelle Vague movies.  His participation ensured finance and the film that you are about to watch was made. Tavernier rejected the night and fog of preceding Simenon productions.  His  L’horloger de St. Paul/The Watchmaker of St. Paul was about May ‘68, most obviously in the motif of the burning car and in Noiret’s final affirmation. But it’s not just a propaganda exercise, also incorporating a study of the Lyons neighbourhood where the work of the plumber, the glazier, the neighbourhood cafe or even the Cathedral where Noiret maintains the steeple clock,  get mixed in with the action. It is also, centrally, a father and son relationship examined in serious detail.

The film was a notable success and Tavernier followed it with other message pieces. I wasn’t the first person to tell him he was repeating himself and he had already set in train his jazz film ‘Round Midnight, the one that emboldened Clint Eastwood into making Bird, and the the first of the productions that turned Tavernier into one of the major film makers of the late 20th Century - Dimanche  dans la Compagne/Sunday in the Country, La Vie et rien d’autre/Life and Nothing But, Laisser passer/Safe Conduct.

However, he remained an enthusiast. He fronted a season of Julien Duvivier’s thirties Harry Baur films. He toured a retrospective of French war movies to promote his Capitain Conan and he was instrumental in setting up a film museum in his Lyons home town, in the building which had housed the Lumière factory, where what is generally considered the first motion picture had been made. He staged a history of westerns there.

I’d watched Tavernier do the sound mix on a couple of reels of l’Horloger de Saint Paul - the railway scene. Tavernier’s wife is the passenger out of focus behind the actors.  (His daughter Tiffany also appears in the opening scene looking at the car burn from the moving carriage window).  Tavernier was actually singing, caught up in the euphoria of starting his dream career. I’d see this a couple of times more - Peter Fonda after Easy Rider came out  and Oliver Stone when Platoon took off. Being part of a community largely made up of wannabe movie directors, however one of the most interesting things I got to do was watching Bertrand Tavernier go the distance.

I’m placing a 1974 interview I did with Tavernier after the London Premier of Watchmaker, on my Sprocket Sources Blog

THE CINEMA REBORN 2026 CATALOGUE IS NOW ON SALE

Here’s the splendid cover of the Cinema Reborn 2026 catalogue. Editor Anne Rutherford and designer David McLaine have assembled 88 pages of superbly written commentary by 30 contributors ranging from highly esteemed international critics to a bunch of insightful young local writers, critics and scholars. 

In Sydney the catalogue is on sale ($15) at Radio Free Alice 136a Darlinghurst Road, Darlinghurst, Store Hours: Mon - Sat: 11am - 6pm. In Melbourne its on sale at Asphalt Books,Nicholas Building, Level 4, Room 23/37 Swanston St, Melbourne, Thursday, Friday & Saturday 12-6pm

It will be on sale at our foyer Information Desks at the Ritz Cinemas in Sydney and the Lido Cinemas Hawthorn throughout the festival.

For those out of town who would like a copy we can send it by post for $20. Send an email to cinemareborn2025@gmail.com and we’ll give you the bank details for direct deposit and post it off as soon as we receive payment.

The Current Cinema - another new Australian movie that might fall through the cracks - ALPHABET LANE (James Litchfield. Australia, 2025)

Anna (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), Alphabet Lane 

I'm warning you. Pay attention. Remember the first line of Alphabet Lane. Think about the last. It takes less than  an hour and a half to get from one to the other.

Dont think about the title. Unless I missed it, there's not even a road sign to indicate what it means. 

Alphabet Lane is set in the Monaro. High up. A young couple have left the big smoke for a quieter life, which proves to be a duller life. She's a doctor who works nights at the local hospital. He works on the Snowy Hydro. They start telling stories to each other to brighten up their humdrum existence. They invent things about their neighbours, indeed invent neighbours.

But you'll be asking questions. Why do the couple park their cars a hundred metres apart ...Why didn't Michelle just get in her car and drive away...and why dont they put stamps on the letters. Such mysteries... 

You might, if you wanted to be critical, ponder just what a master like Claude Chabrol might have made of this material. The Chabrol of the 60s and 70s, of La Femme Infidele and Juste Avant La Nuit might have produced a much more beefier movie, something with some serious consequences for role playing and games, something with some eros and more danger to make the stakes higher. But Chabrol had made maybe twenty movies before then and on more than a few was just marking time or perfecting his craft as they say. Nobody in Australia ever gets to have those options unless doing tv soaps counts.

Two starting points. Alphabet Lane and Le Beau Serge. Does James Litchfield have a career stretching out before him making interior melodramas and mysteries about the wayward middle classes. If his career trajectory is like everyone else in Australia we'll likely at best get a second look in about three or four or five years. Not at all satisfactory for someone who just might offer something a lot more thoughtful and subtle than the squalid horror derivatives that seem to be the lot of our commercial film-making.

Streaming on Netflix - Rod Bishop recommends - DETECTIVE HOLE aka Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole (Jo Nesbø, Norway, 2026)

Any Norwegian serial killer, police-procedural that uses the German philosopher Martin Heidegger as a running joke, has got to be worth a look.

Tobias Santelmann plays Detective Harry Hole (pronounced Hurl-ah) as a self-loathing, destructive introvert, almost completely lacking in social skills and occasionally suicidal. An alcoholic with a taste for prescription meds, he’s brilliant with forensics and highly skilled at serial killer profiling. It’s the booze that keeps getting him into trouble, causing an on-and-off relationship with his current partner Rakel (Pia Tjelta). It also means he’s constantly in danger of suspension from the police force.

He gradually bonds with Rakel’s 14-year-old son Oleg (Maxime Baune Bochud) and scores big time with the teen by introducing him to the Ramones. Despite the threats of suspension, Harry’s serial killer expertise means the Oslo cops can’t do without him.

Tobias Santelmann as Jo Nesbø’s troubled cop in Detective Hole

His adversary is Tom Waaler (Joel Kinnerman), a seriously corrupt, narcissistic police colleague with a sociopathic idea of social justice. Tom also blames Harry for being drunk and killing Tom’s friend (possibly his lover) in a police car chase. Forced to work together, Tom and Harry have nothing but contempt and suspicion for each other. All this - and more - is revealed in the first episode. Another eight follow. 

Adapted for television by Jo Nesbø from his fifth Detective Hole novel (The Devil’s Star), Nick Cave and Warren Ellis add a brooding original score to the copious collection of songs. The ‘needle drops’ include Iggy Pop, Ramones, Los Lobos, Sex Pistols, Warren Zevon, Donovan, The Doors, Slayer, PJ Harvey, Leonard Cohen, The Falls, Muddy Waters, Elvis Costello, Otis Brown, Tammy Wynette and others.

Jo Nesbø 

At times graphically violent, this crime thriller is set in an often gritty and grimy Oslo. Although many of the tropes are familiar, the psychological character studies are interestingly heightened, and Nesbø has loaded the series with enough Nordic pickled herring plot twists to keep most viewers guessing and absorbed. 

On Criterion 4K UHD and 2K Blu-ray - David Hare discovers "A perfect rescue of a perfect movie" - TROUBLE IN PARADISE (Ernst Lubitsch, USA, 1932)

 Criterion's new 4K disc of Trouble in Paradise is a giant step up from the screening of a "new" restoration from Universal which I saw back in 2017 at Bologna. It was good, certainly better than the older UK and US Blu-ray discs. But it had quite a few work-in-progress problems. All the opticals - and they are very many - tanked the grain and density. The new print (I recall it was screened on 35) had tramline emulsion scratches through 80% of the picture, and there were sundry other problems. But it was good enough to bring the very youthful house that day to its feet in what must have been for them the first discovery of a total, seamless masterpiece, a perfect movie, and for me, a joyous reunion after first seeing it in a lovely 16mm print at the Trinity Church Wall Street Sunday cine club Screening Nites way WAY back in December 1971.

When Criterion announced this I wondered how much further they might go with restoration. In the interim Universal did a superb 4K restoration of Leisen's 1939 Midnight (another perfect Paramount 30s film) which played to a knocked out full house at Sydney Cinema Reborn back in 2023. That superb 4K was curated from a previously wrongly identified dupe nitrate safety fine grain and other elements which had been lying around mislabelled as safety 35 copies at the Library of Congress until Universal dug it out and discovered to their surprise near-pristine material.

Unfortunately Criterion released a Blu-ray of Midnight only back last year which was hugely underwhelming displaying massive grain reduction to near zero grain, lowered black shadow detail, softer edges and overall a really shitty encode. I had hoped Criterion would release Midnight as a 4K but given such a mediocre master like this what was the point. Maybe someday another label will risk the budget and coax a reliable 4K master for disc encoding out of Universal.

The story for Trouble in Paradise is the total reverse of Midnight. Universal appears to have gone full hog on this and Criterion has stepped up to what looks like a perfect 4K encode with a flawless 4K disc AND Bluray/2K disc. Everything sings. It's unbelievable, especially for a pre-1935 slower-speed-neg-film and faster lenses era.

The softness now is totally supported without a hiccup through the grain which while always visible is a part of the images' "lifeblood." One of the biggest surprises is not a whisper of density bumps in the opticals all of which flow seamlessly. Grayscale is total, whites and deep black perfect, silver and reflective jewellery and glass shimmer with nitrate sparkle.

A perfect rescue of a perfect movie. Essential to life.

CINEMA REBORN and PERSIAN FILM FESTIVAL AUSTRALIA Present Tributes to Bahram Beyzaie Iranian Filmmaker (1938-2025)

 

CINEMA REBORN and PERSIAN FILM FESTIVAL AUSTRALIA Present Tributes to Bahram Beyzaie Iranian Filmmaker (1938-2025) Cinema Reborn and the Persian Film Festival are proud to pay joint tribute to the renowned Iranian filmmaker Bahram Beyzaie who died in December 2025. Our two festivals will each be presenting one of Beyzaie’s masterly films in a unique dual homage to one of the great figures of Iranian cinema. Beyzaie’s death was noted by The Guardian in an obituary by Ehsan Khoshbakht which can be accessed HERE THE STRANGER AND THE FOG (Iran, 1974, 140 minutes) screens at the Persian Film Festival on Saturday 18 April at 1.30 pm at Palace Moore Park Cinemas. (Click on the link for bookings.) In a remote Iranian village, a boat arrives with a wounded man, Ayat, who has amnesia. Widow Ra’na is interested in him, causing family tensions. Villagers ask Ayat to marry, but he chooses Ra’na, leading to trouble. Impossible to see for decades and presented in a new digital restoration from the original camera negative, The Stranger and the Fog is an endlessly symbolic tale in which uncontrollable forces of nature, superstition, ritual and violence disorient the viewer in exhilarating ways. In the film’s meticulously structured circular narrative, characters, times and spaces rhyme and mirror one another, turning filmmaking into an act of dreaming. Characters are the products of one another’s imaginations, and eventually all become myth. The film cedes the centre of both desire and control to a woman of will, breaking through the strictures of victimised women presented in many Iranian films of the 1970s. BASHU, THE LITTLE STRANGER (Iran, 1989, 121 minutes) screens at Cinema Reborn in Sydney at Randwick Ritz at 1:20 PM on Sunday 03 May and in Melbourne at Lido Hawthorn at 1:15 PM Sunday 10 May. Click through to extensive notes on the film and the director by Associate Professor Michelle Langford of the University of New South Wales. Bookings for Ritz or Bookings for Lido Fleeing his home in the Persian Gulf after an airstrike leaves him orphaned, ten-year-old Bashu (Adnan Afravian) arrives in a village in Iran’s verdant north. Stranded in this unfamiliar place with a different language, culture and skin colour, he meets Naii (Susan Taslimi), an impoverished mother of two who takes him in. Mature beyond his years, this little stranger soon becomes an essential member of her household; but overcoming the racial prejudices of his adopted community will prove a much harder task. Completed in 1986 and shelved by the Iranian authorities until 1989 for political reasons, this humanist parable was fittingly awarded the prize for Best Restored Film at Venice in 2025. The screenings at Palace Moore Park and at the Ritz will be introduced by Dr Amin Palangi, Director of the Persian Film Festival. The screening at the Lido will be introduced by Hamid Taheri, doctoral candidate in media studies at RMIT University. For further information Contact: Geoff Gardner, Cinema Reborn, 0416 912 567, cinemareborn2025@gmail.com Amin Palangi, Persian Film Festival Australia, 0422 942 494, amin@persianfilmfestival.com CHARITABLE DONATIONS TO CINEMA REBORN Since our inception supporters have continued to ensure that the annual season is able to present the very latest and very best international and Australian film restorations. Tax deductible charitable donations have enabled us to keep our admission charges to regular Ritz and Lido prices (with the lowest student concessions of any similar film-related event). We have once again set up a page via the Australian Cultural Fund to receive donations of any size, large or small. You can find it IF YOU CLICK ON THIS LINK More news soon…

On Blu-ray - David Hare finally comes round to appreciating TEA AND SYMPATHY (Vincente Minnelli, USA, 1956)

Below are four screen shots from the sublime "Shadowy glade" climax of Minnelli's 1956 adaptation of the Robert Anderson play, Tea and Sympathy. It's both this sequence and the extraordinary colour photography by John Alton, one of several pictures he shot for Vincente Minnelli during the fifties, that finally won me over, especially in this new 4K scan and Blu-ray from Warner Archive.

In fact it's taken me literally sixty years to finally come around to any sort of appreciation for the movie, so long has it has been a subject of disdain for me, perhaps thanks to skewed perspective.

Alton's single light source setups and Minnelli's Scope staging emphasize shadow, background and peripheral enclosure as much as they do the players. In this sequence it finally dawned on me that the subject of the movie is not only, as I always persisted in thinking, John Kerr's character Tom's "closeting and/or guilt resulting from the social constrictions of 50's America. In fact the substantially larger and ultimately more tragic core of the drama is Deborah Kerr's superb Laura, clad throughout the picture in shades of burnt orange, ginger and rustic warmth, a futile beacon of affirmative life against the grey and white suburban drudgery and conformity of 50s bourgeois America. Indeed the colour play in these Minnelli melodramas is easily the equal of Sirk's at Universal, although Sirk often extends the colour play to sets, decor and staging with coloured lights much as post expressionist painting.

If there's a real cry for acknowledgment and passion from a stranded soul buried in the daily inertia of suburban college town 50's America, it's not only John Kerr's Tom, with his affection for the classics and the piano and the light touch of his loafers. But also from the figure of Laura, left unsatisfied at the end. This penultimate sequence really delivers what must have been profoundly personal material for Minnelli himself, given his own bi- (or more majorly gay) sexuality and the trajectory of his professional life before and after Garland.

The new Warner Archive derived from a 4K scan and regrade is predictably a thing of staggering Eastman (via proprietorial "Metrocolor") beauty.

CINEMA REBORN – CLASSIC ASIAN FILM-MAKING - PEKING OPERA BLUES (Tsui Hark, Hong Kong, 1986) + THE WIFE OF SEISAKU (Yasuzo Masumura

 Two of the most renowned names in Asian filmmaking will be represented in Cinema Reborn’s 2026 programme.

PEKING OPERA BLUES (Tsui Hark, Hong Kong, 1986)

‘As a director and producer, [Tsui] Hark has emerged as the most influential figure of the [1980s], a virtuoso of high-speed narration and optical panache … at his best, as in the period comedy Peking Opera Blues, his interlocking machinery of cues and responses induces a euphoria in which one is happy to mistake the screen’s leaps and convolutions for a semblance of reality.’ – Geoffrey O’Brien, The New York Review of Books

Set in 1913, after the fall of China’s last imperial dynasty, Tsui Hark’s vibrant action-comedy follows three young women – a cross-dressing spy (Brigittte Lin), a musician and courtesan (Cherie Chung), and an aspiring actor (Sally Yeh) – who become entangled in a political conflict. Forming an alliance with a guerrilla fighter (Mark Cheng) and a disillusioned soldier (Cheung Kwok Keung), the group enacts a plan to protect the democracy of the fledgling Chinese Republic.

Showcasing Tsui at the exhilarating height of his powers, Peking Opera Blues is an enigmatic, richly layered and wildly entertaining opus that director Quentin Tarantino has declared ‘one of the greatest films ever made.’

Introduced by Dylan Cheung at Ritz Cinemas and Cecilia Tsan at Lido Cinemas.

Screens once only in each city. For links to each theatre’s

bookings and session times and to read superb programme notes by Rachel Ho Click here.

THE WIFE OF SEISAKU (Yasuzō Masumura, Japan, 1965) 

...And from Japan comes a film by the largely unknown director Yasuzo Masumura, a film which in critic Tony Rayns program notes advises us that, with the recent discovery of Masumura’s work and the restoration of his work being undertaken by his distributor Kadokawa The Wife of Seisaku (Seisaku no Tsuma) will soon be known as a 1960s’ classic.”

Set against the backdrop of the Russo-Japanese War and expressing a strong critique of militarism, Yasuzō Masumura’s piercing melodrama is a major work from a long-overlooked director. Wakao, who collaborated with Masumura on twenty films, is a particularly commanding presence, bringing a fierce intensity to the tightly controlled narrative.

Introduced by Jane Mills at Ritz Cinemas and Grant Watson at Lido Cinemas.

Co-presented by The Japan Foundation, Sydney.

Screens once only in each city. For links to each theatre’s bookings and session times and to read superb programme notes by eminent British critic and scholar of East Asian cinema, Tony Rayns Click here.

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CHARITABLE DONATIONS

Since our inception supporters have continued to ensure that the annual season is able to present the very latest and very best international and Australian film restorations.

Tax deductible charitable donations have enabled us to keep our admission charges to regular Ritz and Lido prices (with the lowest student concessions of any similar film-related event). We have once again set up a page via the Australian Cultural Fund to receive donations of any size, large or small. You can find it IF YOU CLICK ON THIS LINK

More news soon…

The Current Cinema - The Editor talks to Jim Jarmusch about his new film FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER

 This interview was recorded on 1st April 2026.

GG: Good to see you again.

JJ: We’ve met before?

GG: I suppose I could say I’m surprised you don’t remember, but it was maybe your first brush with European celebrity at the Mannheim Film Festival in 1980. You screened Permanent Vacation and I saw it and invited it to the Melbourne Film Festival.

JJ: Now I remember…. How did the screening go?

GG: You never sent the film. You gave it to the Australian Film Institute for a season of New York Independents they ran. Lindsay Smith put it all together.

JJ: Oh… now I remember. Lindsay, huh? He used to spell his name L-I-N-Z-E-E. 

GG: Right. I suppose the AFI must have offered you more money than the MFF which offered only honour and glory in those days.

JJ: I know you are joking. Nobody paid you anything to screen your film in those days. Festivals and everyone else thought, as you said, you should be grateful for their attention.

GG: Things have changed.

JJ: Not everything.

GG: That’s right. You have just done another ‘film a sketches’  as the French called them. Did you like all those films made by the French and the Italians in the 60s and 70s when people like Godard, Pasolini, Truffaut, Visconti, Fellini, Louis Malle, Roberto Rossellini, Polanski, Wajda and more made episodes?

JJ: Loved ‘em. Really smart. Did you see Rogopag? Rossellini, Godard, Pasolini and someone else. RO – GO – PA-G. Who was the final G? 

GG: Ugo Gregoretti. Never heard of again. I often wondered though whether Mystery Train started out as a movie where you were going to intercut the stories but instead just kept it as three separate ones.

JJ: I don’t remember.

GG: So why another film a sketches at this time.

JJ: Well I wanted to make a movie about just how complicated families can be in all their rich diversity and finally it came down to something about a dad with a secret, a daughter with a secret and a brother and sister who uncover a secret. There you are …and Bob’s your uncle.

GG: Very witty. The common element joke about the fake or not Rolex watches was rather good and in each there are also the skateboarders and some jokes about plumbing and the local water.

JJ: Hey you picked that up? Well done.

GG: Too easy. I did like the moment when Tom Waits as the apparently somewhat befuddled father in the New Jersey episode assures his two children that he’s not taking any drugs and then reels off  the names of about fifteen drugs he’s ‘not taking’. 

JJ: Yes. Tom enjoyed doing that scene.

GG: Waits was one of your early stalwarts, a go to for you? By that I mean do you write parts that you know he’ll fit like a glove. 

JJ: Well as I said once before, Tom and I have a kindred aesthetic… An interest in unambitious people, marginal people. 

GG: Except in Father, Mother Sister Brother there’s a trick ending…

JJ: Agree that was a bit odd ….but the ep lacked oomph until that moment…

GG: Yes you couldn’t really get why the two middle-aged kids had decided to pay a visit. It’s one of three stories about families set in three different parts of the world. The backblocks of New Jersey, a nondescript part of Ireland and Paris. You do get around. One other common trope is the overhead shot of the tables and the food and drink. It’s sort of an abstract image you use to denote time passing.

JJ: Yeah

GG: In the Irish story the food on the table doesn’t seem to disappear. Nobody seems to actually eat anything. Is that so that the mother can give them a doggy bag to take home..

JJ: That’s right…

GG: Was the Irish story located somewhere else when you first wrote it…

JJ: Not really. I think all three have a universal quality …but then reality intrudes and you have to follow the money and go where all those thirty or forty executive producers lead you.

GG: Like Ireland. You never filmed there before?

JJ: Never.

GG: So why this time?

JJ: Come on. Irish film money is excellent. They really want major filmmakers to go there. They were happy I was willing to go as well.

GG; Did they ask if you had an ‘Irish story’. Irish in quotation marks.

JJ: I said sure I’ve got this great story about a mother who sees her two daughters once a year. It’s very Irish. 

Vicki Krieps, Cate Blanchett, Charlotte Rampling
in the Mother story

GG: Was it cast before the Irish money came through?

JJ: I don’t quite recall the timing… but I know I always wanted Cate Blanchett… and Vicki Krieps has been in my sights since Phantom Thread…  and I always remember the way she responded when she was asked about the MeToo movement and said “Maybe it's very European, but I always see both sides. I feel very sorry for the people who have been harassed, but I also feel very sorry for the people who have lived a life where they have been harassing people.”

GG: Wow…an exact quote. You don’t think she should have had an Irish accent…or indeed any of the three women, including Charlotte Rampling, should have had Irish accents?

JJ: Didn’t worry me …and nobody in Ireland mentioned  it after the film won the Golden Lion at Venice. 

GG: The Paris episode is the most enigmatic. The others are about reunions but this one focuses on discovering something secret. 

JJ: Yes. It’s the one I most enjoyed making. What’s not to like about making a movie in Paris almost like the New Wave guys did way back. Shooting in the streets, natural dialogue, unknown actors…and you’re in Paris for a month or so.

GG: Good to catch up.

JJ: You too. Stay safe…