Carl Nilsson-Polias

The Band’s Visit begins with a gently absurd level of theatricality. Not the kind of camp histrionics that Baz Luhrmann starts his movies with, but rather the stylised simplicity of Akira Kurosawa or Roy Andersson. In the opening shots, cleaners at the airport walk across the frame from edge to edge, creating an implicit proscenium […]

Sometimes curation is nothing more than serendipity and sometimes serendipity bears all the hallmarks of curation. This month in Melbourne, the stars have aligned and the fortunate populous has the opportunity to see an exhibition (Intimacy) and a film (Hunger) that in their symbiosis would make a truly excellent day-night double bill.
The provenance of filmmakers […]

Purgatory is a temporal noun. There are no clocks in the Inferno or in Paradise—there is no time in eternity. But Purgatory is immanently ephemeral. At least, that’s how Dante would have it. Purgatory is also theatre. It is a morality play writ large, where the actors are sinners and the curtain call is the […]

Video artist Eve Sussman brings her latest work, The Rape of the Sabine Women, to the Melbourne International Arts Festival this month. Based on an eighteenth century painting by Jacques-Louis David, it is an example of the artist’s ongoing use of canonical paintings as sources of inspiration.
Sussman was born in London in 1961 to American […]

In Antony Hamilton’s debut full-length work, even the title, Blazeblue Oneline, has a cheekily obscure but rhythmically exact quality. The tone is vigorous and brash, masculine but childlike and when mysteriousness creeps in, it isn’t long before things pop back into multicoloured joy.
Hamilton’s concept for the piece began with a desire to meld dance with […]

The Deborah Hay Dance Company is coming to Melbourne for the Arts Festival in October. I caught up with her from her home in Austin, Texas to discuss her career and her new show If I Sing to You.
Click here to download the podcast (5MB)

You feed us. You dress us. You choose clothes for us. You bathe us. You lay down the law. You sing to us. You watch us sleep.

Tim Etchells came to the Melbourne Festival with his company Forced Entertainment and their glorious big-massive-party of a production, Bloody Mess, back in 2005. This year he returns with […]

Michael Haneke is not a facile filmmaker, so one has to wonder why he bothered remaking his fourth feature film some ten years later with nary a change in sight. As it turns out, the reason is facile. The original Funny Games was a disturbing Teutonic take on Hollywood-style violence. But apparently not enough Americans […]

Philippe Petit is a tightrope walker and juggler, a man of stunts and tricks. He is also a man imbued with a sense of the poetic that can be spellbinding. Man on Wire is a documentary film that traces how this impish French circus artist managed to walk across a cable strung between the twin […]

Georgia is in the news for all the wrong reasons this week, so this DVD release is something of a timely salve. It is by no means a jolly romp through the Caucuses, but its touching sense of humane irony lifts the spirits rather than crushing them underfoot. Writer/director Julie Bertuccelli worked with Krzysztof Kieslowski […]