Australia | Strange Black Box

A Song of Ceylon, Sydney Film Festival #SydFilmFest Feminism & Film Sun 18 June 2017 @ 10.30am AGNSW http://bit.ly/SongOfCeylon_SFF Jayamanne, Laleen. (Director), Weary, Geoffrey (Film editor), Parr, Adrienne. (Producer), Finnane, Gabrielle. (Photographer), Australian Film Commission. Creative Development Branch – The narcissistic, masochistic, hysterical body in exquisite tableaux. A formally rigorous, visually lush study of gender and possession, referencing a classic British film. Australia | 1985 | 51 mins | In English and Sinhala with English subtitles.

“A formally rigorous, visually stunning study of colonialism, gender and the body. The title echoes the classic British documentary and evokes a country erased from the world map. The soundtrack enacts a Sri Lankan anthropological text observing a woman’s ritual exorcism. Visually, the film brings together theatrical conventions and recreations of classic film stills, presenting the body in striking tableaux. This remarkable film is a provocative treatise on hybridity, hysteria and performance.” WMM Women Make Movies

Film still: Juan Davila

Fim Poster: A Song of Ceylon

“The anthropological text is performed both like a musical score and a theatrical ritual….The film engages the viewer in the cinematic body as spectacle…”
Trinh T. Minh-ha

Interview with director Layleen Jayamanne in Senses of Cinema

Hysteria and the hybrid body in Laleen Jayamanne’s a song of Ceylon
Priyadarshini Vigneswaran, online: 18 May 2009

C. Berry, A. Nicholson & L. Jayamanne, The Filmmaker and the Prostitute: Dennis O’Rourke’s The Good Woman of Bangkok, Power Publications, Sydney, 1997

Barrett Hodsdon, Straight Roads And Crossed Line; The Quest For Film Culture In Australia, A Bernt Porridge Group Book: Western Australia, 2001C. Berry, A. Nicholson &

L. Jayamanne, The Filmmaker and the Prostitute: Dennis O’Rourke’s The Good Woman of Bangkok, Power Publications, Sydney, 1997

Barrett Hodsdon, Straight Roads And Crossed Line; The Quest For Film Culture In Australia, A Bernt Porridge Group Book: Western Australia, 2001

TIME WAS.... by Geoffrey Weary - part of PORTRAITS a three part film series... — TIME WAS…. by Geoffrey Weary – part of PORTRAITS a three part film series…

TIME WAS…….
Geoffrey Weary (digital prints)

Sydney College of the Arts
Opening Tuesday, 4 – 29 September

SCA Galleries Sydney College of the Arts
Crn Cecily & Darling St, Rozelle
Sydney, AUSTRALIA

PORTRAITS 2005 – 2014

Production Company: Strange Cities Productions
Director/Producer: Geoffrey Weary
email: Geoff.Weary@sydney.edu.au

Cast:Tatiana Pentes, Leakhena Sy, Rose Tang

PORTRAITS is an experimental digital work that explores three contrasting experiences of war and conflict in the middle and late 20th century. A woman living in Shanghai is expelled from China after the Communist Revolution in 1949. The ghosts of the Cold War appear and disappear in the crumbling ruins of the Berlin Wall in 1990. A young woman suffers a crisis of identity around the circumstances of her birth at the end of the war in Cambodia in 1978

SCENES FROM A SHANGHAI HOTEL (2007)

An experimental film by Geoffrey Weary

A Russian woman living in Shanghai is expelled from China after the Communist Revolution in 1948. Her story begins in a hotel room in Shanghai and ends on a suburban street in Sydney, Australia. Performative, fictional, and documentary elements are blended into a work that is suggestive and open to multiple readings. Extensive use of film leader and scratchy film surfaces add to the sense that what we are seeing resembles something that is illusive, dream-like, just beyond grasp…..or is it just a newsreel playing in someone’s head?

CAPTIVE

An experimental film by Geoffrey Weary

CAPTIVE explores the themes of repression, confinement and escape. These themes are expressed through the incorporation of grainy VHS footage shot in Berlin at the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, hand-held camera sequences shot in a maze-like forest and slices of footage composited out of archival Cold War films. As the real historical Wall crumbles under the blows of street hawkers and souvenir hunters, ghostly specters from the past appear then dissolve back into the scratchy surface of a long forgotten newsreel.

Captive by Geoffrey Weary from Strange Cities Productions on Vimeo.

My Mother Told Me (2007)

An experimental film by Geoffrey Weary

A young woman tells the story of her family’s destruction during the war in Cambodia, 1975-1978. Later as a refugee living with her mother in Sydney, Australia she suffers an identity crisis that is linked to the unexplained circumstances of her birth and the mystery of the father that she has never known.