Container #14 Mad God

Oh and our lineup for early 2023 and some thoughts on Berlinale...

Hello. Thank you once again for joining us.

Next Screening:
Mad God, Phil Tippett, 2021, 84m
7pm Tuesday 28 February at The Elizabeth Picture Theatre
A tall figure shrouded in a jacket and gas mask descends into a ruined, hellish world via a diving bell. Travelling with a seemingly unknowable purpose, the Traveller encounters a writhing world carefully carved from the primordial horrors of a distinct subconscious. The debut from visual legend Phil Tippett—the last of the great analog effects specialists and whose distinctive touch is seen in films ranging from the original Star Wars trilogy and Robocop to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids—Mad God is a labour of love with every set, creature, and effigy having been hand-crafted and painstakingly animated using stop-motion techniques informed equally by the Quay Brothers as much as Harryhausen.
Mad God is an obsessive film. The Traveller’s ever continued journey into the film’s monstrous microcosm, finds its analogue in the sustained thirty-year effort from Tippet that has finally reached the surface. Each wiggle of a worm or step taken by the Traveller matched by an act of labour from Tippett himself. Ready your eyes.

Unrated 15+
With thanks to Shudder, IFC Films, and in partnership with the ever great Netherworld and their Two Bit Movie Club.

As always, free to all members (with membership available online or at the venue box office.)

Upcoming Screenings:
We’re delighted to reveal our opening Container 2023 screenings! There are a couple of acclaimed speculative cult SF titles; a couple of Australian premieres; a couple of ‘city as playground/boardgame’ films, a couple of guest filmmakers and curators, and a title whose title we can’t disclose at this moment but that we approve of. (As always there may be some overlap between these categories.)

28 February: Phil Tippett’s Mad God
14 March: EXMPTL showcase (introduced by curator Benjamin Taylor)
27 March: Alena Lodkina’s Petrol (and introduced by the filmmaker in person)
11 April: Jonathan Davies’ Topology of Sirens
25 April: Secret Screening (with Static Vision and with the filmmaker in person)
9 May: Ben Rivers’ Urthworks (pictured above)

Berlinale:
Currently we’re picking through the screeners coming out of Berlinale (and pestering filmmakers and distributors while they try to hustle in person.) With the slow decline of IFFR and Sundance, and with the arrival of Carlo Chatrian as artistic director, Berlin has become the obvious key festival of the early year. No surprise last year’s Container kicked off with two titles from the 2022 Berlinale and likely we’ll be screening key 2023 Berlinale titles in June/July as well.
Last year’s Berlinale had a strong but ultimately uneven lineup of international directors, with premieres from Peter Strickland, Betrand Bonello, Claire Denis, Hong Sangsoo, and Alain Guiraudie amongst others. This year the titles we are most interested in are German (and Austrian):
1) Angela Schanelec’s Music (a loose contemporary reworking of Oedipus)
2) Patric Chiha’s The Beast in the Jungle (a loose reworking version of Henry James’ novella* as a “vertiginous story of a man and woman who, for twenty-five years, frequent a huge nightclub in anticipation of a mysterious event. From 1979 to 2004, from disco to techno”)
3) Christian Petzold’s Afire,
4) Christoph Hochhausler’s Till the End of Night
5) Margarethe von Trotta’s Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert.
Obviously we’re still interested in Ivan Sen’s Limbo (Australia), Philippe Garrel’s The Plough (France), Zhang Lu’s The Shadowless Tower (China), Hong Sangsoo’s In Water (South Korea), and Lois Patino’s Samsara (Spain.) We are greedy.

* Interestingly, Betrand Bonello also has a loose adaptation of The Beast in the Jungle due in 2023. Called The Beast, it’s expected at this year’s Cannes. It would be nice to pair them, but we suspect the French Film Festival will go after Bonello’s.

Thank you. We hope to catch you on Tuesday for our Queensland premiere of Phil Tippett’s stop-animation wonder Mad God and then the following fortnight for our showcase of 16mm Montreal works introduced by guest curator Benjamin Taylor.