A tale of two films.

Thanks to my own impetuosity I had to confront studying film as an academic subject. For me, this was like studying Australian politics without knowing who were the last ten prime ministers.

On the first day, a February dragon, I rode a tram, one of the old solid green ones that rumbled with dignity over the points instead of reverberating like an enormous tin can, down the long Mt Alexander Road hill towards the city and got off at Latrobe. I sat alone in a crowd of new students, probably equally alone in their first-day anxiety, and we watched a film by Sydney Pollack called They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? This was followed by a lecture in a room scattered with plastic chairs and rhomboid-topped tables in the old Building 6 in Bowen Lane. These lectures, discussions really, were to become journeys into dusty locations and long-abandoned sound stages and other cinematic archaeology, where the eyes of forgotten actors told flickering stories of sadness and love and tragedy. 

The sun was low but still burning when I re-emerged onto Bowen Lane. It was still summer, but it was fading fast.

One hot night a few weeks later friends invited me and my girlfriend to the Tullamarine Village drive-in theatre, which today is buried under a turn-off onto the Western Ring Road. The movie was a lame Graeme Blundell comedy*, meaning the film, not the actor. It might have been a double bill, I don’t remember. We left around midnight, and on Keilor Road the car slammed into a telegraph pole. No one was badly hurt, but I ended up in hospital with a face covered in blood, severe concussion, an undiagnosed nose break and various cuts and bruises. They sent me home. How do you not notice a broken nose? Maybe they were busy that night. 

I missed a few weeks of lectures and fell behind in the work. There's no greater student nightmare at four in the morning than essays piling up in your mind like unwanted guests.  

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*Alvin Rides Again. It was a shame film stock had moved to acetate, because in the days of flammable nitrate you could have put a match to the master of this 9,000 foot disaster and destroyed it forever. I worked with Graeme Blundell in the 1990s, by which time he was directing commercials. We didn’t talk about Alvin.