Film curator Jack Sargeant watched over 500 films to select the 14 feature films, 17 documentaries and 36 short films that make up this year’s Revelation Film Festival. Commencing at the Astor Cinema on 2 July, it will run for 10 days until 12 July. As well as films that explore the rawer side of life (sex and violence), the Festival conference will run sessions at Edith Cowan University and Leederville TAFE on making no budget films and docudramas, and writing scripts from novels and Australian history. There will also be opportunities to meet filmmakers. See www.revelationfilmfest.org for details of times and cost and to book tickets.
Unfortunately the films that are advertised as being Queer Affirmations are more about heterosexual explorations and how the sexual revolution broadened their experiences. Xavier Hollander: The Happy Hooker is quite an interesting documentary about Xavier Hollander who wrote about her experiences as a sex worker in the 60s and 70s. American Swing tells the story of Plato’s Retreat in New York, a club for heterosexual couples who wanted to swap partners for sexual encounters. Both films recall sexual freedoms that now seem incredibly far away from today’s reality.
A highlight of the films I previewed was Flicker. Directed by Nik Sheenan, it tells the remarkable story of Brion Gysin who, although largely unknown, influenced counter culture for the last 50 years. Living in Tangier in the ’50s and Paris in the ’60s, he was friends with William Burroughs. Others such as Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithful and DJ Spooky discuss the Gysin’s influence on their lives. Gysin devised the Dream-machine, a device designed to create flickering light which, when used correctly, could stimulate the user’s alpha waves and transform their consciousness. It created a drug free high which Sonic Youth’s Lee Renaldo states is ‘like touching God’.
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