The Refracting glasses

Constant Malernik is an artist and filmmaker who is obsessed with modern art and revolutionary aesthetics. This amazing experimental film, interweaving documentary, rhapsodic naturalism and theatrical narrative, traces Constant’s attempts to liberate some hope from his disillusionment with the Communist experiment. We follow Constant and his camera to New York where he visits a touring Cubist exhibition, back to 1950’s Sydney where as a young man he confronts the ghost of Ern Malley (the fictional “surrealist” poet who was the product of a hoax which scandalised the Australian art community in the mid-century and resulted in a backlash against modernism which was to affect Australian culture for over two decades), and then finally to the Soviet Union where he is to witness the dismantling of the Communist empire he had believed in for so long. But parallel to Constant’s search for meaning there is the story of his partner Lydia, a Russian emigre, who returns to the Soviet Union with him to come to terms with her own place in her country’s tortured history. A study that encompasses politics, art, revolution and the meaning of what it is to be Australian this significant film is proof that the most daring and original Australian film is coming from outside the mainstream.