Cinenova: Now Showing

This new screening programme began in March 2015 and runs monthly. The series intends to materialise relationships between contemporary artist moving image practice and the feminist and organising legacies present in the Cinenova collection.

The format of the series is that an artist filmmaker is invited to select a film from the Cinenova collection which they would like to screen alongside a work of theirs. The June 2015 screening is selected by Lucy Clout.

The Extra’s Ever Moving Lips focuses on visualised instances of wittering and the codes of comfort, context and intimacy that they carry. In the piece, two forensic lip-readers try to interpret the speech of an extra who appears in the background of a twenty-year-old clip from the Australian soap opera Home and Away. This close reading of the background of a necessarily disposable medium is a way of examining the repercussions of speaking/acting/making in a time when technology allows the recording, replaying and storage of most everything. The work is interested in the oscillation between an instance of background noise that allows points of drama to be visible and the egoism/spectacle/desire that is expressed in the perpetual manufacture of chatter.

She Said explores the theme of women and work, using the formal properties of film to reflect on the overlap between work and free time. The film begins with a series of old and contemporary photographs, cut to a rhythm, which echoes the rhythm of monotony. A fragmented dialogue creating a feeling of alienation and lack of control often identified with the labour process interrupts further sequences of live action and images. 'Feeling strongly that women's work is continuous, I realised that the film work could only be seen after work or in moments of non-work which I hesitate to call leisure. With this in mind I tried to bring this contradiction to the surface within the film itself.' (Susan Stein).

Nice Coloured Girls is a stylised experimental drama exploring attitudes of Aboriginal women to white men and vice versa. By locating these attitudes in both an historical and contemporary context Nice Coloured Girls makes a strong statement about the oppression of Aboriginal women as well as celebrating their wit and ingenuity in the methods they employ for fleecing white 'captains' (sugar daddies) who vie for their favours.