the moving image delves into the written word
Barney Rosset
As part of this year's Melbourne Writer's Festival program, ACMI is screening three First Look features to complement the festival of talks, workshops and events.
Australian premiere Obscene (August 21 - 24) is a biographical documentary about 1960s publishing maverick Barney Rosset, the man behind the controversial Grove Press. Publishing Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch among other, now lauded, texts, Rosset found himself fighting his way through the US courts, arguing that this was literature, not pornography... He won, of course, and the rest is history.
"Was Grove controversial?" Rosset says in an essay for ACMI. "The word is too pale for the tempests at Grove. Say rather that Grove was a valve for pressurized cultural energies, a breach in the dam of American Puritanism - a whip-lashing live cable of zeitgeist..." Read the rest of Rosset's essay here
Dubbed "a film about people who think literature is worth devoting a lifetime to" (Robert Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times), Starting Out in the Evening is a subtle yet passionate film exploring writing, critique and the creative process. Frank Langella plays an insular author struggling to complete his fifth - and possibly last - novel (August 25 - 28).
Considered one of the greatest novel to screen adaptations of all time, The Grapes of Wrath will be screening on newly restored 35mm prints from August 29 - 31. Starring a young Henry Fonda, John Ford's 1940 film was given a resounding stamp of approval from John Steinbeck himself. It, the author, the director and the actor, are now all considered classics.
Creative inspiration to enhance 10 days of chat, banter and provocation at the 2008 Melbourne Writers Festival, hosted at ACMI. For the full details head here
Published Thursday, 31 July 2008
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