Container #12: Pacifiction
And a few recommendations for GoMA's Melting into Air film program response to their Air exhibition.
Hello. Thank you once again for joining us.
Next Screening:
Pacifiction, Albert Serra, 2022, 164m
7pm Tuesday 6 December at The Elizabeth
On the island of Tahiti, the newly arrived High Commissioner and French government official De Roller is a calculating man with flawless and affable manners. His somewhat broad perception of his role brings him to navigate the high end ’establishment’ as well as shady venues where he mingles with the locals. Especially since a persistent rumour has been going around that he first denies before beginning to investigate: the sighting of a submarine whose ghostly presence could herald the return of French nuclear testing.
Humid and paranoid, Pacifiction skirts the central conspiracy to focus on interstitial moments. People dance and drink, conversations descend into bureaucracy and misdirection, while the general appearance, disappearance and relationship of people is hard to separate from island life. Saturated in red, green and blue, the island overwhelms its inhabitant and the film itself, becoming hypnotically suggestive of abstract menace and colonialist history. A narcotic ambient thriller grounded in torpor and one of the key films of 2022.
Unrated 15+
With thanks to Films Boutique
As always, free to all members (with membership available online or at the venue box office.)
Upcoming Screenings:
6 December: Albert Serra’s Pacifiction (pictured above)
13 December: Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum (pictured below)
p.s. Just a gentle reminder that Pacifiction screens tomorrow night rather than next week.
Melting into Air
The Australian Cinematheque at QAGoMA have put together a great film program in response to their Air exhibition. The lineup is full of key titles but we thought we’d single out a few less known works (so skipping Red Desert, Andrei Rublev or Videodrome.)
1) earthearthearth by Daïchi Saïto (pictured and as part of the experimental ‘To Draw Breath’ shorts session.) One of the best films of 2021. An intense psychedelic landscape work filmed in the Altiplano region of Chile and Argentina then manipulated through an all analog workflow process. Horizon lines flickering like the opening of a third eye. Only screened on 35mm.
2) The Turin Horse. The last film by Bela Tarr whose Satantango happily appeared as part of the 2022 Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll. GoMA are screening the only available 35mm print of the film. This Wednesday evening.
3) Diamantino (Gabriel Abrantes & Daniel Schmidt) Pushing tonally in the other direction is Diamantino. A thriller about a soccer player trying to recapture his mojo and also the last great romantic comedy. It also includes fluffy dogs playing amid candyfloss clouds.
4) The Shout. A rarely screened 1978 film from Jerzy Skolimowski whose most recent film EO—told from the perspective of a donkey, “eo” is onomatopoeic—was one of the standouts of this year’s Cannes. The Shout is a touch different, fusing British folk horror with—for better or for worse—the exploration of Australian Indigenous mythology of Walkabout and The Last Wave.
5) Death By Hanging. While Nagisa Ōshima’s later films like In the Realm of Senses and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence are reasonably easy to see (being produced by European companies helps), his earlier breakthrough works—informed by Brecht and Godard—are much harder to see properly Death By Hanging is the blackest of comedies concerning a felon who mysteriously cannot die, creating a series of absurdist bureaucratic problems that touch upon the role of the state and immigration.
Thank you. We hope to catch you on tomorrow night for our Queensland premiere of Albert Serra’s Pacifiction (did we mention it topped Cahier du Cinema’s best films of the year poll?) Then the week after we send off the year with Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum.