Film
This year, Cinema Reborn brings treasures to the big screen that include a work by Tarkovsky, some vampire eroticism and the largest Australian contingent yet. By Philippa Hawker.
Treasures unearthed for Cinema Reborn
Every year, Cinema Reborn brings a brief yet densely packed festival of recently restored movie treasures to Sydney and Melbourne. This year’s line-up is a customarily eclectic selection, in which works from some of the great names of Hollywood – Orson Welles, John Ford, George Cukor – screen alongside the final film from Andrei Tarkovsky (The Sacrifice), World War II-era Roberto Rossellini (Paisan), 1970s Robert Bresson (The Devil, Probably) and Lino Brocka’s 1980 tale of cinematic obsession (Bona). The earliest title in the program is Henry King’s 1925 silent, Stella Dallas; the most recent, Lee Whitmore’s 1997 Australian animated short, On a Full Moon.
The festival always casts the net wide, introducing unexpected, overlooked or rediscovered gems. A case in point is Tokyo Pop (1988), a vivid, disarming tale of musical ambitions and frustrations, cultural contradictions and appropriations. It is the first feature from Fran Rubel Kuzui, who went on to direct Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), the movie precursor of the legendary television series.
Tokyo Pop’s fabulously dressed heroine, Wendy (Carrie Hamilton), heads to Japan on impulse, tired of hanging around New York, where her boyfriend will allow her to be only a back-up singer in his band. She flounders at first in a city that intrigues and almost defeats her, before she meets Hiro (Diamond Yukai), who has dreams of rock stardom of his own. It’s not a romantic meet-cute but something more awkward, messy and, by the end, heartfelt.
It is some time until we hear Wendy sing, but it turns out Hamilton (daughter of actor and comedian Carol Burnett) has a rich alto growl. She essays a thrash version of “Home on the Range” with a punk band before she and Hiro finally join musical forces. There are compromises, inevitably, in their enterprise: “It’s not rock’n’roll, it’s just Tokyo pop,” Wendy tells Hiro, somewhat dismissively, about the situation they find themselves in. But there’s something engaging about the world the film evokes and the movie’s ebullient foray through elements of the city’s pop culture scene and its hybridities and cross-references, in which an infatuation with American imagery and rock’n’roll cliché exists alongside more adventurous experiments in performance.
The bright, saturated colours of Tokyo Pop are among its pleasures and there’s also a memorable hue to Daughters of Darkness (1971) – originally titled Les lèvres rouges, or “The Red Lips” – exemplified in the recurring use of a fade to arterial-blood red rather than black. It is a fitting colour for a tale of queer vampire desire.
When a newly married couple, Stefan and Valerie (John Karlen and Danielle Ouimet), check in to a deserted Belgian seaside hotel, it looks as if they have the place to themselves. Two new guests, the exquisite Countess Elizabeth Báthory (Delphine Seyrig) and her young companion, Ilona (Andrea Rau), take things in a very different direction. Director and co-writer Harry Kümel proceeds at a languorous pace, as the newly arrived pair undermine the couple’s already unstable bond. Stefan, who has a sadistic streak and an intense dependence on his absent mother, is fascinated by the countess and the stories of historical violence she invokes. But she has her gaze firmly set on Valerie.
Sexual ambiguity and fluidity has always been part of vampire lore, and Seyrig embraces this in effortlessly hypnotic fashion. There are unmistakeable references to Marlene Dietrich in Seyrig’s costume and styling, but she has her own elegant, consuming, manipulative qualities: a heady mixture of refinement and rapacity.
This year the festival has its largest representation of Australian films, among them What I Have Written (1996), the sole dramatic feature from director John Hughes. The screenplay is by John A. Scott, adapted from his novel of the same name that won the 1994 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. It is in part about words and their power, about authoring and authority, about how to read “what is written”, but it also asks its viewers to read different kinds of images and their implications. Cinematographer Dion Beebe plays with very different ways of depicting and representing.
The film begins in a way that conflates characters and their fictional versions. It introduces three central figures: Christopher (Martin Jacobs), a Melbourne poet and academic; Sorel (Angie Milliken), his wife of seven years; and their friend Jeremy (Jacek Koman), an art history lecturer. They have fictional counterparts, played by the same actors in what might be scenes from a novella that Christopher has written. As Sorel discovers the existence of this text and the secret correspondence between her husband and a woman he met in Paris, things start to unravel and she begins to unpick, to deconstruct, to re-read.
The Australian selection also includes the work of several women directors, among them the late Anna Kannava, who is represented by a moving and engaging double bill. Kannava came to Australia from Cyprus at the age of 15, when her mother brought her and her two brothers to Melbourne to start a new life.
Kannava is the narrator in both films and there is something inviting and generous about her approach. Ten Years After … Ten Years Older (1986), 30 minutes long, tells the story of Kannava’s return to Cyprus to visit her grandmother. It’s a quietly compelling portrait, in which personal reflections and revelations combine with small, telling visual details and the quotidian texture of her grandmother’s life.
The Butler (1997), twice the length, broadens the scope and reference points of the shared narrative. With deceptive simplicity, beginning with her beloved brother Nino, the would-be “butler” of the title, Kannava introduces us to her family, to their stories and hers, to dreams and memories, the imaginary and the documentary, creating layers and connections across time. She explores longing and belonging, identity and specificity, using home movies and photographs, staged interactions and archival footage that encompasses everything from short works that she made as a media studies student to footage from popular Greek films that were once shown at Melbourne’s Astor Cinema, where her mother worked at the box office.
Among the international features, Heiny Srour’s ambitious and engrossing Leila and the Wolves (1984) brings together past, present and future in exhilarating fashion. It is a political, personal and imaginative journey through a century of struggle, focusing on stories from Lebanon and Palestine and the under-explored role of women. She uses the figure of Leila (Nabila Zeitouni), who lives in 1980s London, as a conduit, interweaving archival footage, dramatic re-enactments and striking dreamlike imagery, to relate a history of resistance, action and contradiction. There is always an intimate, immediate, tactile dimension to the situations she depicts and the challenges she makes.
Cinema Reborn screens in Sydney at the Ritz Randwick from April 30 to May 6 and in Melbourne at the Lido, Hawthorn, from May 8 to 13.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 24, 2025 as "Gems from the past".
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