Pere Portabella

15 – 31 August 2008
Pere Portabella is a veteran Catalan filmmaker whose narrative features—rich in interludes, plot diversions, atmosphere, and unexpected synchronies between sight and sound—limn the avant-garde and expand the expressive potential of cinema. Portabella, who began his cinematic career as a producer of fiction films implicitly critical of General Franco, had his passport revoked when Luis Buñuel's Viridiana 1961, which he helped to make, "embarrassed" Spain at the Cannes Film Festival in 1962. When democracy returned to Spain, Portabella served as a senator in the Catalan government. However, throughout his various careers, Portabella continued to make cinema, investigating meaning in the moving image and extending the notion of genre—particularly for horror films, fantasy films, and thrillers.

My Architect

13 August – 2 November 2008
Award-winning documentaries on the work of Carlo Scarpa, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, Alvaro Siza, Frank Gehry, Oscar Niemeyer, OMA/Rem Koolhaas, Charles and Ray Eames, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn and Santiago Calatrava. Selected screenings will be introduced by architects featured in the Place Makers exhibition.

Modern Ruin

12 July - 12 October 2008
A rich vein of contemporary artistic practice critically and visually revaluates the utopian dreams of the modern period within an exploration of the relationship between art, architecture and design.

Picasso and his collection

13 June - 13 September 2008
The Australian Cinémathèque presents an extensive program of films exploring Pablo Picasso’s relationship to cinema, including important films and documentaries capturing the artist’s working methods and films exploring the themes and historical events that shaped his life and practice. The program also features documentaries and films relating to the artists whose work Picasso collected and prominent figures from his circle of friends. Highlights include Le Mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso) 1955 by Henri-Georges Clouzot. For this extraordinary document of the artist's working method, Picasso created 20 original works ranging from sketches filmed in real time to oil paintings filmed using stop-motion animation. The film has been declared a national treasure by the French government. The program also features Jean Cocteau’s acclaimed ‘Orphic Trilogy’ and Salvador Dalì’s remarkable collaborations with director Luis Buñuel.