Austin Lancaster
Austin Lancaster grew up on a sheep farm near a small, blink-and-you-miss-it town called Picola, and now lives in Melbourne, the world’s most decreasingly liveable city. Having enjoyed reading film and games criticism for a long time, he has recently started having a crack at it himself, and is thrilled to be part of Critics Campus. Most recently, he wrote on musical pioneer Ryuichi Sakamoto for the occasion of a tribute film series that played at ACMI a few months ago. He is keen to continue in this kind of perspective that’s willing to cross boundaries between different artforms – he gets impatient with writing if it’s too single-idea or insular.
Location: Moonee Ponds, Melbourne
Movie location I call home:
The cheap seats in the front row of the titular cinema in Luc Moullet’s Les sièges de l’Alcazar, surrounded by children “like John Wayne under attack”.
What was the film or experience that made you want to write about the screen?
It was a screening of Bertrand Mandico’s magical Conann at MIFF last year that really did it – here was a brilliant contemporary filmmaker connecting with esoteric, beautiful corners of film history that hadn’t been written to death yet. Sadly, it didn’t get a release! The other piece of the puzzle was having somewhere to write. I’d just stumbled upon KinoTopia, a weekly film newsletter founded here in Melbourne by Digby Houghton and Andrew Tabacco, who were happy to welcome an amateur like me. I saw that the writers were young, willing to experiment, and had a sense of humour, which was appealing.
Why do you think film criticism matters in 2024?
My hope is that criticism might encourage the reader to really look at an artwork with their eyes open, make interesting connections, and perhaps provide some tools for thinking about the world.
Who is a critic that inspires you?
I’ve recently been inspired by Manny Farber, a painter and critic who started writing in the 1940s, one of the few at the time who took film seriously as a visual medium. He has this dense, vivid prose which is a real thrill to read, and a penchant for puncturing phoney, inflated art-making.
In five words, the future of cinema is: Unimaginable, I hope.
What’s your favourite film that you’ve seen this year?
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s filmed opera The Tales of Hoffman. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The otherworldly colours, sets, and costumes are really something else.
My MIFF 2024 theme music is:
People Like Us, ‘Do You See What I Hear’. This track approximates the psychedelic state no doubt familiar to many MIFF-goers, where several half-remembered films are swimming around in your head, struggling for attention because you binged too many movies in a single day.