SOME FILM MUSEUMS I HAVE KNOWN
Hologram twin brothers, historical bywaters, a lonely lady toting a terrible screenplay and some Technicolor vomits are what lay in store for you with Some Film Museums I Have Known, from the team that brought you Wonka! and the Mad Max Remix. Writer Eddie Sharp and tech-wizard Will Mansfield tell us more.
What was the original idea that sparked all this off?
The original idea was to make a show using tiny models and cameras to create cinematic tracking shots live in the space. Then we thought it would be funny to set our show in one of those interactive educational museums that we used to visit on school trips, like Old Sydney Town or The Powerhouse Museum, only cheaper and stranger and historically inaccurate. There’s a Ned Kelly Museum in the small Victorian town of Glenrowan that became our main point of inspiration. It’s bizarre, full of broken homemade animatronics and holograms. Our museum, The Barumpool Film Museum, is so remote and broken that no one has actually visited it in 20 years and the woman who runs it (acted by Nat Randall) has gone a little odd from loneliness. She bickers and flirts with these twin holograms that she invented, both played by Nick Coyle.
With the twin brothers shadowing Lumière, the backdrop a film museum, the narrative framework that of a ‘terrible screenplay,’ how much of a major cinephile do you have to be for Some Film Museums …?
You don’t have to be a cinephile at all. The show is more about recreating the mood of cinema in general. Having said that, we feel that movies are an obsession for everyone. It’s the dominant artform of our time, so it’s a pretty rich theme to explore on stage.
How did you write to balance an evolving DIY-set and the live action?
That was the toughest task. It’s ridiculously fun to write things for holograms because anything can happen. They can chase cartoon butterflies, travel through time and vomit rainbows – these are all things that happen, by the way. Having said that, it was hard to make an actress and a pre-recorded hologram work together as a fluid narrative. The way we got around it is to have every single line of the holograms dialogue triggered through a video mixer. The hologram has now become a sort of video puppet that we manipulate in response to what Nat is doing. It was painstaking but it just wouldn’t have worked any other way. Nat also operates the camera feeds and the train, so all focus comes back to her. You could make the most visually arresting show in the world, but unless the focus is primarily on the actor on stage it just doesn’t work as a piece of theatre. We also did our darnedest to make it funny, which we hope helps.
What are you trying to say here about storytelling and image-making?
We both have Honours degrees in video art, which, as far as useless degrees go, is up there with a Masters in Philosophy. What comes with those degrees is a lot of chin stroking about film theorists like Laura Mulvey. It’s unavoidable. The way Laura Mulvey writes is quite poetic so her writing is an interesting starting point for making art. The main idea of Mulvey’s that was an inspiration for our show was that film is a lifeless, dead material and that filmmakers and projectionists are kind of like necromancers or those jerks from Weekend at Bernies. They are taking something that is dead, jiggling it in front of your face really fast, and saying, “Look, it’s alive! Really, we promise!” It’s a trick. There was something about that idea, of tricking people into believing in this thing that is actually dead, that seemed quite sinister and inspired a lot of what’s in the show.
What do nightmares in video look like?
You’ll have to come see. They look pretty scary, but not in that humdrum Silence of The Lambs way. More lurid and funny, like Evil Dead 2. Ok, being a cinephile wouldn’t hurt.
The internet says Barumpool doesn’t really exist. Can you explain it to me anyway?
Barumpool is a made-up town somewhere on the outskirts of NSW. The show is a comedy about the loneliness of living in a fantasy. So it made sense that it would be set in the kind of town that you would only visit if you were hurrying to get somewhere else.
Rhubarb Rhubarb shows, like Wonka! and the Mad Max Remix, are usually pretty funny. Are there jokes in there somewhere?
It’s a comedy so it’s full of jokes, but hopefully we also break the audience’s heart a little bit – which is something we haven’t tried before, so perhaps we are growing up. Our favourite joke ever might be: Q: What’s worse than finding half a worm in your apple? A: The Holocaust. It’s funny because it’s true. The Holocaust was terrible. By comparison, finding half a worm in your apple is merely an inconvenience.
Feb 22-Mar 12, Old Fitzroy Theatre, cnr Cathedral & Dowling Sts, Woolloomooloo, $25-40 (beer, laksa, show), rocksurfers.org
