Late Night Wonders And Gothic Nightmares

Film Synopsis

Late Night Wonders And Gothic Nightmares
 
Even amongst the underground Lisa Hammer’s films are utterly unique. Their underground sensibility echoes the no-budget grand visions of the  Kuchar brothers, Ed Wood’s masterpieces, pre-Polyester John Waters and Nick Zedd’s first features. Meanwhile their visual aesthetic embraces early cinema, part Clara Bow and part German Expressionism, with innocent big eyed femmes falling fowl of stark villains.  Cast with the likes of cult ‘old-timey’ musician, Meat Cake comic book artist and doll-maker Dame Darcy, alongside similar  underground and alternative-type NYC scenesters, watching these films feels, on occasion, like watching a particularly unruly group of girls playing dress-up in their evil grandmother’s attic.
 
But instead of pretending to be faeries (although they do that too) these young women – and occasional young men - pretend to be inmates of insane asylums, gangsters molls, scary obsessives, flapper-era icons, and Edwardian waifs. This wild celebration of imagination is all shot through with the kind of bleak and hilarious narratives of quasi-Edwardian ‘children’s’ author Edward Gorey. If these films are fairytales they are of the frightful variety, if they are romances then the lovers are thwarted, and if they are dreamlike you can be sure they are nightmares, and so it goes. Scored with a combination of avant-noise, goth, found choral music, and old time music hall songs, these films offer a glimpse into a very different world.
 
The selection of films presented includes (The Elaborate) Empire of Ache a masterpiece of nightmarish surrealism, Duchess and Doubleganger a journey into a psychotic fantasy, Beauty and the Beast, Period Piece, The Dance of Death and  Crawley. This is a rare chance to see Hammer’s work.
 
Australian premiere