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'A child of 1968 and the Nouvelle Vague, with a particular admiration for Godard, Philippe Garrel's first films are underground works, hermetic visions of artistic alienation... These were Garrel's wild years of drug addiction, permissiveness and extreme alienation, which culminated in a traumatic experience of electroshock treatment.' -senses of Cinema
The Film Le Révélateur, Philippe Garrel's infamous family psycho-drama, is an internalisation of the events of May 1968. Involved in the Paris student barricades at the time, Garrel went to Munich later that year and filmed this silent, B&W re-enactment of primal scenes, biblical allegory and political subtext. Working closely with three actors and two camera personnel, he shaped a 'cine-tract' which complexly maps its dramatic arcs through a series of mesmerising moments and psychological schisms. The raw cinematography and the brutishly arcane lighting 'reveals' the palpable quality of the actors' facial nuances, their ragged clothes, the awkwardness of their bodies, the flat beauty of the landscape and interiors. Maybe less polemical and more poetic at this point in history, the disquieting overlapping between the skewed and flayed emotional states of the family resonate unnervingly well in today's dysfunctional climate.
The Score Rather than pretend that we are 'going back to '68' by experiencing Le Révélateur in 2004, Philip Brophy's Aurévélateur is a reconstructed/ reinvented score that disavows historical illusion and instead focuses on the emotional fissures of the film as forensic data: visible evidence that suggests motivation to the twists and turns of the film's cycles of embrace and rejection. Aurévélateur presents an intense aural explication of the psychological nodes that direct the film's momentum, providing a sensory synaptic read-out of the on-screen characters' interior states. Aurévélateur creates an appropriately dysfunctional sono-drama to match the disjointed beauty of the original film.
The Composer Filmmaker (Salt Saliva Sperm and Sweat, Body Melt) and composer/sound-designer (Mallboy, MIFF 2000), Philip Brophy's work is always aimed at the visceral audiovisual heart of cinema'where sound and image mutate, confound and vibrate. He has produced many works which explore how sound, noise and music have collapsed into one another. From his Beautiful Cyborg events'live music scored to Japanese anime (MIFF 2001)'Through his many Dolby-Surround CD releases on Sound Punch Records, to his recent Dolby 5.1 gallery installations Evaporated Music, Fluorescent and The Body Malleable, Brophy's audiovision celebrates the degradation of music into something beyond mood and mimicry: His aim is to turn the body inside-out so your ears sprout from your nose and your eyeballs are tucked into your anal ring. Or your nipples. Your choice. philipbrophy.com
D/S Philippe Garrel P Philippe Garrel, Claude Nedjar WS c/o ACMI Lending Collection L Silent TD 16mm/B&W/1968/50mins
Co-presented by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI).