The newly-opened Federation Square in Melbourne houses a full complement of civic-pride art galleries and museums in the very latest trappings of comtemporary architecture: blocky edifices surfaced in a mixture of glass and polished sandstone, broken into a tesselation of hectic polygons.
I make straight for the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, apparently unaffiliated to the film archive ScreenSound, whose Memory Grid must surely be the envy of all those working on the BFI’s new south bank mediatheque. In a grand central space, five pods are scattered, each with three very comfortable seats, headphones, a large plasma screen and a touchscreen below it from which you can choose what you want to watch. The selection is not entirely inspiring: no features, only shorts, and with a heavy emphasis on student work, and also a lot of what they call ‘digital memories’: fragments of life-history composed around heavily-edited video and rostrum camera. Nevertheless, it’s no problem to spend two hours in there. Of the student work, I like Gordon Monro’s Dissonant Particles, a very scientific take on tone/image correspondence, Emma-Kate Groghan’s Desire, a terrorist noir, and Marieke Walsh’s Mary, with 50s early amateur colour film edited together with 16mm, then painted over and distressed.
In the archive section they have a selection of material from Frank and John Straford, amateur film makers of the 1950s, whose slightly inept cartoons and nano-scifi dramas are made up for with some later-narrated colour footage of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics (the limitations of 9.5mm kodachrome and telephoto lenses means pole-vaulting is all that gets shown in any detail) and a rambling but beautifully-hued travelogue of a holiday in the North.
