A new exhibition celebrating Australian feminist cinema of the ’90s is set to open at the University of Sydney. The FemFlix exhibition at the University’s Visual Arts faculty, the Sydney College of the Arts, aims to shine some well-deserved light on women filmmakers who defined the decade on screen.
According to SBS, the exhibition “will showcase the cyberfeminists, queer culture, and the experimentation with digital technology that characterized the post-punk era.” Jane Schneider, filmmaker and co-curator, describes that era in a press release for the exhibition as “a time when queer aesthetics exploded onto the screen, an exciting new generation of Indigenous filmmakers hit the mainstream, and women were making edgy, experimental work as well as feature films that competed successfully at the Cannes International Film Festival.”
Filmmakers highlighted in the exhibition include Tracey Moffatt, whose striking short “Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy” caught the attention of Cannes’ programmers and was selected to compete at the 1990 edition of the fest. The film, shot against vividly painted sets, follows an Aboriginal woman caring for her dying white mother, and offers commentary on the government’s assimilation policy of the ’50s and ’60s, which saw generations of Indigenous children forcibly removed from their families and raised by white parents.
Other women filmmakers of the era also combined visual experiment and home-bred social commentary. Cate Shortland — whose debut feature-length film “Somersault” would screen in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 2004 — began her filmmaking career making such short films as “Strap on Olympia” (1995), a recreation of Manet’s infamous painting in an Australian setting.
Other landmark directors featured in the exhibition include Janet Merewether (“Jabe Babe: A Heightened Life”), Antoinette Starkiewicz (“High Fidelity”), and Samantha Lang who, with her film “The Well,” was the only female filmmaker in competition for the Palme d’Or in 1997.
As Dr. Jacqueline Millner of the Sydney College of Arts has explained, FemFlix has allowed the curators to make digital copies of some of the films featured for the first time, allowing “rarely-seen films by female voices” to be presented alongside “popular and significant films of ’90s feminism.”
The FemFlix exhibition runs at the University of Sydney August 10-September 3.
