Massive Australian Film Series Opening Thursday at UCLA

You can probably remember the first movie you saw from Australia. It might have been “Walkabout” or “The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith” or “Picnic at Hanging Rock.” Perhaps it was “My Brilliant Career” or one of the breakneck “Mad Max” exercises in mayhem and style. The point is that no one really forgets his first Australian film--or hers. The country is so . . . other. Full of virtually incomprehensible amounts of space, it’s not even vaguely like American Westerns, where space marks the beginning or end of a frontier. In Australia, space is almost another character, one which hangs over the action, sometimes benign but not always--not at all. It’s hard to forget that something in “Picnic at Hanging Rock” simply swallowed up three of its colonial schoolgirls, virginal white dresses and all.

About a year ago, novelist Thomas Keneally wrote thoughtfully about his fellow Australians, wondering “Why Are Australian Movies So Sad?” Even Crocodile has his doubts, he found. Under the hearty bar mate was a bloke “likely to yield to a besetting melancholy” when he picked up a camera or a pen, “abetted by the grand aloofness and exquisite melancholy of much of Australia’s landscape.”

Then there was the matter of the Bunyip. “Aboriginals speak of a devouring mythic monster named the Bunyip, who lies behind Australia’s landscape. I believe,” Keneally went on, “you sense the Bunyip always there, a seductive presence as well as a horrifying one, in most Australian films.”

Welcome to deep Bunyip country. You can certainly feel its presence in “Back of Beyond: Discovering Australian Films and Television,” a massive and pretty inclusive round-up, most but not all of it produced over the last five years. This orgy of antipodean exploration, presented by UCLA’s Film and Television Archive and the Australian Film Commission in association with the Australian Bicentennial Authority, opens Thursday night at UCLA’s Melnitz Hall, continues there and at other locations for one month, and contains more than a few stunners.

It has been organized into seven major areas, from “Formative Landscapes,” which considers the way Australian film makers have used their environment (if not the other way around), through to “Women of the Wave,” which features the work of the well-known Gillian Armstrong and the far less well-known and certifiably wicked Jane Campion.

Calendar will be looking at the films week by week, but here is a brief tip sheet of not-to-be-missed films to start you off.

The primer for looking at the way Australia has been visualized in its cinema, and perhaps why, is “Camera Natura,” a half-hour film by Ross Gibson. Unfortunately, it doesn’t crop up until Nov. 3, midway through the proceedings, not the best place for a primer.

A must are the Jane Campion shorts, screening Oct. 28 at the Directors Guild. Beginning with her Cannes prize-winner, the exquisite “Peel,” in which aggression ricochets around a three-member family, and building to formidable heights with “Passionless Moments” and “A Girl’s Own Story,” Campion is probably the collection’s purest find. Coming after that, “Two Friends,” her first feature (from a Helen Garner screenplay), is dense with observation but not as razor-sharp as her shorts. Even so, to make films this way, to have this vision, obsessive and particular and dryly hilarious, seems exhilarating.

Absolutely not to be missed is “Feathers,” adapted from a story by American master Raymond Carver, whose tone is caught with supreme understanding by director John Ruane and especially by the remarkable Julie Forsyth, who plays the glowing Olla. (It will screen Oct. 30.)

If, after these, you begin to think that the short film is an Australian specialty, you may be exactly right. Mark Lewis’ “Cane Toads” was the deadpan hit of Toronto just last month. I see no reason why Los Angeles audiences should be immune to its blandishments (Nov. 5). Laurie McInnes’ “Palisade” is another of the short greats, crowned by a Cannes palm. Live action, it has been shot so that its movements look like clay animation, while clouds or the lights from cars streak by with comet-like speed. It heightens McInnes’ bleak and hauntingly special vision of a wasted urban life (Nov. 13).

Too few people saw Gillian Armstrong’s powerful “High Tide,” which looks hard at the ties of motherhood and is carried by an abrasive, beautiful performance by Judy Davis (Saturday).

From the recent Australian film past there is Philip Noyce’s bracing and panoramic “Newsfront,” the first great hit of its new cinema. Interesting to see how this one looks now carrying “classic” status (Nov. 6).

Under “Aboriginal Images,” there is the short, satiric “Baba Kiueria” (“Barbecue Area”) by Geoffrey Athendon, which is pleasant but more toothless than it might be. Far better to consider Bill Bennett’s exceptional feature “Backlash.” It’s a considerable twist on expectation as two police, a man and a woman, escort a young aborigine to a remote outback town to stand trial for the castration of her employer. The acting, largely improvisational, is first-class (Nov. 19).

A considerable portion of the collection is being devoted to a profile of the Kennedy Miller production company, a moving force in a huge body of film features, documentaries, television dramas and miniseries and shorts (including their bitterly satiric “Violence in the Cinema, Part I,” after which no Part II could ever emerge). The Kennedy Miller collection, including both “Mad Max’ films, will be dotted through the festival. The Australian version of “Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior),” undubbed and with its original prologue, will be screened Saturday at Wadsworth Theater.

Some of what sound like interesting features were withheld from press screening: Mary Callaghan’s “Tender Hooks” and the opening night’s “Grievous Bodily Harm” by director Mark Joffe.

Useless to mourn for the missing, for the presence of Nadia Tass and David Parker (“Malcolm,” “Rikky and Pete”), for the incomparable documentarian Dennis O’Rourke, for the irrepressible Stephen MacLean (represented only by his “Starstruck” screenplay), for more independent films such as Glenda Hamby’s “Fran,” which has stuck like a burr in the memory.

There is certainly enough here to busy ourselves with, and to take a sighting on an only-slightly-known body of work, focused in the “glass-clear light” into a burning lens. And perhaps you will be able to sense the presence of the Bunyip, looming in the purple twilight of “Feathers,” inciting a stubborn family to fury in “Peel.” It’s there; most certainly, it’s there.

For information, times and exact locations, call (213) 206-8013 or 206-FILM.