Cinephiles, especially those of us who love disturbing surrealist film-noir, will be happy with Dr. Alexia Kannas’ screening of two surrealist noir films: Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s experimental avant-garde 14-minute film from 1943, Meshes of the Afternoon, and David Lynch’s 2001 surrealist neo-noir classic, Mulholland Drive.
Dr. Kannas is a specialist in horror film and an RMIT University lecturer in cinema studies. She has included these films after they were selected for the Greatest Films of All Time list by the British Film Institute (BFI) Sight and Sound magazine.
Lynch’s Mulholland Drive is a meld of surrealism and noir that immerses viewers in a hypnotic dreamscape. It veers into nightmare as reality and illusion intertwine through dreamlike sequences and unpredictable plot twists, leaving the audience in a perpetual state of uncertainty.
Kannas is brave to show Mulholland Drive to under 30s, given the focus on audiences’ ‘sensitivity’ which often treats audiences as pre-schoolers, and dulls creative expression.
“Lynch is not for everyone” says Kannas, “I always say, ‘you don’t have to love it, but it’s important to encounter and experience’.”
“There’s a trend towards being risk averse in what we watch, and I have noticed it when teaching.”
The film expert is an optimist and believes that things are changing.
“I noticed the students are a bit more open than they have been in like the last few years.”
She says that horror movies are “popular” with her students, and they are not “the same kind of horror” she watched when she was younger, or the stuff she saw when she wrote her PhD on.
“I wrote my PhD on Italian genre cinema and crime horror films, which I grew up watching on SBS.”
“I still show those to students, but there definitely has been a moment viewing contexts have changed,” says Kannas.
She says that care must be taken now, “in terms of how we frame material, but I don’t think it’s a reason to stop showing certain films.”
“I think there’s a way to be sensitive about it without censoring ourselves.”
I ask if this new and overt sensitivity, and the resulting self-censorship has allowed the right to get more muscular, given once that transgressive art was the preserve of the progressive camp.
“Absolutely! I notice that everyday censorship has increased anxiety in young people about what they’re allowed to say out loud, and what they were allowed to explore,” says Kannas.
“Cinema is a great way to kind of get into some of those questions.”
The Best Films You’ve Never Seen Series poll is according to the BFI, a “bellwether of critical opinion on cinema” and the largest poll with “1,639 participating critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics each submitting their top ten” films.
Kannas is aware of the absence of Greek cinema in the BFI list, “John Cassavetes makes an appearance every so often,” she says.
Of course, BFI are not the Alpha and Omega of film, given that Ulysses’ Gaze the 1995 Greek war drama by Theo Angelopoulos, nor Dogtooth the 2009 psychological drama by Yorgos Lanthimos make the list.
“I am a big fan of Greek ‘weird ways’ stuff, I liked Dogtooth, and there is a tradition in Greek cinema, particularly contemporary Greek cinema, which comes from a theatrical base,” says Kannas.
She is keen on how Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon influences Lynch’s neo-noir surreal Mulholland Drive.
“Meshes of the Afternoon is just an incredible film that was an inspiration to Lynch in making Mulholland Drive,” Kannas says.
“It is shot on 16mm in the couple’s [Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid] Los Angeles home and explores its central character’s interior experience through its formal repetition and variation.”
Mulholland Drive takes form Meshes of the Afternoon the menacing Los Angeles imaginary and applies Lynch’s brand of neo-noir surrealism.
Mulholland Drive was also Australian actor Naomi Watts’ defining career performance, in which it interrogates a Hollywood actress and femme fatale through a narrative that “twists back in on itself examining the duality of Hollywood as a place that is both dream and nightmare.”
Kanna’s father is born in Greece, in Kalamata and her mother is Anglo Australian.
“We still go back as often as we can, and I am very engaged with Hellenism” says Kannas.
When: 6.30pm Tuesday, July 18
Where: RMIT The Capitol, 113 Swanston Street, Melbourne
Tickets: $10 tickets
Book at thecapitol.tv/whats-on
