The ACMI Lowdown

Warning: This podcast contains coarse language and adult themes and is not suitable for children under 18 years of age.

Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures screens at ACMI from the 22nd September.

ACMI's Head of Film Programs, James Hewison shares his thoughts on the film and the man.

Is Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures a film you can take your mum to?

Our latest VR Commission, Ghosts, Toast and the Things Unsaid is an intimate virtual reality experience that invites audiences to become the ghosts of couple, Steve and Maude, and revisit the kitchen where they fell in love, grew old and apart. The work provokes a meditation on our propensity to keep secrets, the words that go unheard, and what this means for our relationships.

Ghosts, Toast and the Things Unsaid

Lauded by the Museum of Modern Art in New York as “one of the great modern masters of the cinema” Roman Polanski has over the course of five decades refined a formal film language and expressed a mordantly ironic worldview in genre-defining films that are provocative, compelling and inventive.

ROMAN: 10 x Polanski proposes ten key films drawn from Polanski’s filmography – from the director’s Polish New Wave debut, Knife in the Water to his 2010 political thriller, The Ghost Writer, by way of the director’s British films of the ‘60s, New Hollywood classics Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown and Paris-set thrillers The Tenant, Frantic and Bitter Moon.

In this podcast Roberta Ciabarra who curated the season talks to  Spiro Economopoulos about her reasons for picking these 10 films and how the extraordinary circumstances of Polanski's life are reflected in his work.

Roman: 10 X Polanski

Since 1988, when his first film Fleurs (1987) was presented as a background for a weather broadcast on French television, Philippe Parreno has sought to redefine the exhibition experience. Working with the exhibition itself as a medium, Parreno explores its possibilities beyond the presentation of individual works to create scripted spaces within which a series of events unfolds.

Parreno is a collaborative artist whose practice encompasses film, sculpture, drawing, and text. The dialogic nature of his work is evident in the films and exhibitions that have been produced through collaboration with artists, architects, musicians, composers and philosophers. Through work that draws on cinema, science fiction, architecture, the phantasmagorical, and the natural, Parreno merges reality and fiction to produce exhibitions that radically challenge our notions of reality, memory and the passage of time.

Philippe Parreno Thenabouts: Conversation with Amelia Barikin & Emma McRae

"He looks superbly rock-n-roll in every connotation of the word." Media Production Team Leader Richard Greenhalgh talks with Senior Film Programmer Kristy Matheson about the upcoming film season on Jim Jarmusch, his distinctive directorial approach and his fabulous cameo characters.

Jim Jarmusch: Rock and Roll

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Located at Fed Square. Open daily. #acmimelbourne www.acmi.net.au

The ACMI Lowdown

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