Stephen Cummins film still resonates
Image: Rotterdam - Portrait Simon Hunt, Stephen Cummins. Image: supplied
The 30th Mardi Gras Film Festival and Queer Screen have programmed a season of shorts, animation and long form films over two weeks, with few films as anticipated as the late Stephen Cummins film Resonance.
At the time of its release in 1991, Cummins’ film was considered ground breaking, not only for its soundscape by Simon Hunt, dance sequences by Mathew Bergan and Brendan Young’s noir cinematography, but also Cummins no holds barred take on homophobia against the backdrop of AIDS and gay bashings that permeated the scene in Sydney.
With minimal dialogue but maximum expression, Resonance plays out across the backstreets of Sydney and the studio setting of the balletic fight climax.
Now fully restored and regraded in digital format by the National Film and Sound Archives, the new version of Resonance will have its first screening at Queer Screen on Tuesday February 21st.
Also on the program will be Cummins’ eight other films, which have also undergone restoration.
“It was a good opportunity for us to use the existing collection and material and to showcase it to a new audience, and to also work with Simon to bring the full suite of Stephen’s work back into public view,” Nick Henderson, curator, National Film and Sound Archives said.
‘It’s been a complicated process because of the different types of master material, including Super 8, 16mm, 35mm, Betacam SP and cassette audio tapes for sound.”
Simon Hunt first met Cummins in Berlin in the mid-eighties where the filmmaker was showing a collection of films and Hunt was living between band gigs and gay bars.
“Stephen was my first real gay friend and when I moved back to Australia I became a sound designer on a couple of his films,” Simon Hunt, co-director, Resonance said.
“Resonance was the film that we made together, and when he got bashed at the height of the anti-gay violence and the AIDS crisis, that changed the dynamic.”
From his early days as a member of Sydney Super Eight Film Group while studying sculpture at the Sydney College of the Arts, Cummins was used to working with little or no budgets.
“He was using bodies as a landscape,” Hunt said.
“There was still an undercurrent of gay issues and contained eroticism and over 10 years that became politicised, as we all did, by the appearance of AIDS and the backlash to the violence that was occurring.”
With Resonance, Cummins secured a working budget that he could have only dreamed of before, and was soon looking for an experienced director of photography.
“I became involved through Simon and when it came to the discussion about who was going to shoot the film they came up with Kriv Stenders(dir Red Dog),” Brendan Young, cinematographer said.
“He couldn’t do it and he suggested me.”
Resonance was shot on an old 35 mm Arriflex BL camera, which Young describes as a “warhorse of a camera.”
“This was a really big step up for them, and in the film you can see that we’re using camera Dollys and cranes, as I wanted to bring a level of sophistication to their vision and I knew that this was going to take this to another level and to give his more experimental ideas a more narrative base.”
Resonance went on to become one of the most successful short films of the early nineties, winning Best Short Film, 1991 Sydney Film Festival, and appearing at over 100 international festivals including Sundance, New York and Toronto festivals.
“The restored Resonance enables people to reflect on how we got here and how we now have this incredible diversity in both experimental and mainstream,” Hunt said.
“it is also a time when many artists and gay men died, and I think this is underwritten in history.”
The Queer Screen event will be followed by a Q&A session with Nick Henderson, Simon Hunt and Mathew Bergan.
