Philip Brophy Restorations

Purge your body of the foul present day and immerse yourself afresh in 1980s Melbourne with two seminal films from a legendary experimentalist.

Before 1977, dancing and the rock-music subculture were like Clifton Hill and St Kilda – separated by a river of noise. But as Melbourne took a punt on punk, new wave, new romanticism and electro, music/art/film/academic polymath Philip Brophy was mapping liminal spaces. In No Dance (MIFF 1987), he collects pocket ‘portraits’ of record buyers and listeners, breakdancers and pogo-stick jumpers, a radio DJ and a drum-machine programmer. Brophy’s fascination with bodies seeps through to his follow-up featurette Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat (MIFF 1988), where a yuppie writer and his co-workers spend four days tasting and digesting, spitting profanities, gratifying sexual urges, and indulging appetites for violence.

In 1982, Brophy made No Dance on super-8 in riposte to Gillian Armstrong’s Starstruck (MIFF 2017); it screened in nightclubs until it fell apart. Brophy’s 16mm 1985 remake won an AFI Award for Best Experimental Film, and both it and Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat won Best Australian Short awards at MIFF. Lovingly restored to 4K by their original cinematographer, Ray Argall (Return Home, MIFF 1990, 2019), these films capture not only what was transgressive and disturbing about 1980s alt-Melbourne but also its slick consumerism and touchingly sincere intellectualism.

“[Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat] is both intellectually intriguing as well as, dare I say, entertaining and fascinating in its weirdness. Without a doubt, this film has balls!” – Horror Homeroom