Aaliyah’s said that she can get me free tickets. It’s all I can to do keep myself from trying to take gross obnoxious advantage of this; instead of asking to go and see ALL of the Asia/Dario Argento series, for instance, and the Lee Marvin stuff and Wattstax and Australian Perspectives and the animated stuff…maybe just a little Irma Vep Friday after next. And Wattstax. And Yellow Submarine. Okay, so I’m going to see everything all the time. Shut up. Among the other things I’m planning to check out: Moonlight Cinema in the Botanical Gardens, Rooftop Cinema near Swanston St., and the Astor Theatre (which is pretty much the Castro Theater, except with more recent films than classic. And the name of the theatre rearranged. With a C). Noticing a trend here?
I’m doing more than just going to see films and visit different cinemas, though. There’s also a solo exhibition going on at the moment in the screen gallery at ACMI. It’s called REPLAY: Christian Marclay, and it. Is. Awesome.
The pieces are all video installations ranging from 30 seconds to 14 minutes, but there are two feature length things later on that I’m planning to see. In one of them, he’s removed the soundtrack to Antonioni’s Blow Up and replaced it with the soundtrack to De Palma’s Blow Out. Looking forward to seeing that (for the price of free! Though this one’s free to everyone, I don’t have to pester the housemates…yet.) There were a couple of the installation pieces that I liked, but in particular there’s one called Crossfire which is pretty much the best thing that’s happened to me since I’ve been here.
You walk into a small black room, walled in by projection screens on all four sides. I walked in in the middle of the video loop and then stayed for another full cycle, but let’s assume you’ve walked in at the beginning. In order to avoid casting shadows on any of the screens, you pretty much have to stand in the center of the room. On all sides, the different screens begin to show images of all the guns being pulled out from every film you’ve ever seen. Every drawer that gets pulled open to reveal a pearl-handled revolver; every hand reaching for a holster; every pant leg pulled up with a gun tucked neatly into a sock; every skirt hiked to get at a pistol secured in someone’s girdle. A moment of tension, and then you are BOMBARDED by a fuselage of gunfire coming at you from all sides. Every frame from every shootout sequence where the gun is pointed at the camera is in this room. Seagal’s shooting at you, Samuel L. Jackson is shooting at you, Al Pacino is shooting at you, the chick from Terminator is shooting at you, Arnold’s shooting at you, some guy from a John Woo film is there too…guess what he’s doing?
The crossfire goes on all around you, and at some point someone in one of the clips goes, “wait, wait!” A clip on a different screen calls out, “hold your fire!” There’s a pause in the bloodbath…tension builds…different screens catch their breath…
And then the explosions resume on all sides, two frames of a guy walking and shooting are cycled on all walls to create the feeling that he’s circling you and shooting. It’s the circling guy and van Damme, the circling guy and van Damme, then everybody else joins in again. This video loop lasts for an extraordinarily long time, and aside from having the fun of getting SHOT AT for fifteen minutes in a completely safe, movieland environment, you can’t help but laugh at the sheer length of this gorefest. It’s fantastic.
ACMI lives in Federation Square in the Melbourne town center, about 4km from Timmah’s house. I made the trek over on Friday afternoon, taking the scenic route following the Yarra river. I know, I’m going about this backwards talking about seeing the exhibit first and then going back to getting there, but I couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to disperse the pictures throughout the post rather than lump them all at the beginning or end. Also, I was eager to talk about Crossfire. Anyway, here’re your stupid pictures.
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