Tag Archives: Australian Centre for the Moving Image

Wonderland at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image

I had never pondered the influence of Lewis Carroll’s stories, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). This left me completely unprepared for Wonderland, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image’s latest Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition. The enormous influence of young Alice and her strange world of bizarre anthropomorphic creatures on the large and small screen documented in this exhibition is a revelation.

My review of Wonderland is live and can be read in full here on the Australian Book Review Arts Update site.Read more

‘Scorsese’ at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image

King of ComedySorsese, currently showing at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, is not exactly the exhibition that is advertised, and that is a very good thing. Martin Scorsese’s career has stretched over half a century and involves nearly sixty films. Yet anyone who has seen advance press and publicity forScorsese could be forgiven for thinking the focus is mainly on the early and more masculine examples of his oeuvre, Mean Streets(1973), Taxi Driver (1976), and Raging Bull (1980).

These movies are certainly compelling, both as individual examples of film craft and for the way they play into the myths and realities of 1970s American cinema, when Scorsese, along with fellow directors and friends Francis Ford Coppola, Stephen Spielberg, and Brian De Palma, tilted against the ailing Hollywood studio system and then become some of its leading lights. But these films in no way tell Scorsese’s whole story.

You can read my full review of ACMI’s Scorsese exhibition at the Australian Book Review Arts Update site here.Read more