SHORT FILM, VIDEO AND ANIMATION
“Curiously interactive, seductively simple, Janet Merewether’s..Cheap Blonde lures its audience into playing along with no hands-on and not a mouse in sight. This is a work so constructed that we laugh as sentences implode and explode like a poetry machine, as an image of a ‘cheap blonde’ who might have fallen out of some shampoo advertisement becomes a site of intimate reflection..This is every abstract gaze theory you’ve ever heard made wittily and powerfully palpable.”
Virginia Baxter, OnScreen/Realtime #26, 1998
“Cheap Blonde…ties in so neatly with what we do here at the Pacific Film Archive (PFA). When I saw Cheap Blonde I thought we could start each of our screenings with this commentary on cinema. Cheap Blonde before Bresson, or Shinoda, or Fassbinder, or Ford, or Wellman…”
Steve Seid, Video Curator, Berkeley Art Museum, Pacific Film Archive, 1998
“As usual the curtain raisers are a mixed bag. One exception is Australian filmmaker Janet Merewether’s Contemporary Case Studies (as Witnessed from Life)…a tartly funny take on sex and romance, couched as an old-fashioned training film and updated with various split-screens and irreverent observation. Merewether is the NYFF’s latest female discovery from downunder, following in the footsteps of Jane Campion and Alison MacLean.”
Amy Taubin, Village Voice New York, Review of Contemporary Case Studies in New York Film Festival program, 2001.
“As a visual artist, Merewether’s feminist perspective is unmistakable. But what…impresses me most is not her distinctive feminist standpoint, but her capacity in visually depicting all kinds of issues, be they societal, cultural, gender, environmental or linguistic in nature, from that perspective. Feminist, in her words, is no longer a gesture or a banner, but a perspective [from which] to view the world, to evaluate life or even a philosophy.”
Kuo Li-Hsin, Review of Janet Merewether retrospective, Women Make Waves Festival, Taipei, 2003
Janet Merewether has written, produced and directed numerous award winning short films, animations and video artworks including:
KNITFACE
(2004, Col, 30 sec, animation, Digital Betacam)
SBS TV, Aust. Centre for the Moving Image.
PALERMO – ‘HISTORY’ STANDING STILL
(2004, B/W, 11 mins, Digital Betacam & 16mm)
New York Film Festival, Tampere Short Film Festival
WINNER – Dendy Award (General Category) Sydney Film Festival 2004
SHORT BEFORE THE MOVIE
(2003, Col, 5.5 mins, 35mm, 1:1.85, Dolby SR)
New Directors, New Films Festival MoMA New York, Tampere Short Film Festival
CONTEMPORARY CASE STUDIES
(2001, Col, 14 mins, 35mm, 1:1.85, Dolby SR)
New York Film Festival 2001, Tampere Short Film Festival, Uppsala Short Film Festival, SFF
CHEAP BLONDE
(1998, Col, 5 mins 16mm & Betacam SP, Stereo, 4:3)
Screened at numerous international festivals.
TAKING HER FOR A SPIN
(1997, Col, 5 mins, Betacam SP, Stereo, 4:3)
MAKING OUT IN JAPAN
(1996, Col, 9 mins, Betacam SP, Stereo, 4:3)
TOURETTE’S TICS
(1994, Col, 6mins, 16mm & Betacam SP, 4:3)
SURPLUS GOVERNMENT ASSET
(1993, Col & B/W, 24mins, video, 4:3)
A SQUARE’S SAFARI
(1992, Col, 14 mins, 35mm, animation, Dolby, 1:1.85)
KNIT-FACE
Animation
30 seconds Digital Betacam
©2004 Go Girl Productions
Made for the ARTV Series commissioned by
SBS Independent & ACMI (Australian Centre
for the Moving Image)
crew:
Director, Producer, Animator, Designer – Janet Merewether
Lighting – Jackie Farkas
synopsis:
Knit-Face is a video which ‘toys’ with the idea of the portrait in a pluralist society. A variety of hand-crafted and well-loved knitted toys pose for a photographer. These characters are as diverse, imperfect and expressive as their human creators. Knit-Face plays with the idea of ‘craft’ as a low-tech, inexpensive and accessible form of art, and aims to document the skills and aesthetic qualities displayed in women’s knitting work – rare treasures in our consumer age.
exhibitions:
2004 – Australian Culture Now – National Gallery of Victoria
2005 – Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney. Exhibition – Video Portraiture from the Pacific
2005 – Museum of Brisbane – Queensland
2006 – Ideas festival, Brisbane
2006 – Hazelhurst Gallery Sydney
Still from ‘Knit-face’
PALERMO – ‘HISTORY’ STANDING STILL
Short film
11 mins B/W Digital Betacam 4:3 + 16:9 Anamorphic (pillarbox) and 16mm
© Go Girl Productions 2004
crew:
Direction, camera, edit, sound – Janet Merewether
synopsis:
“…then all will be the same though all will be changed…” – Lampedusa Palermo – anyone, anytime, anywhere. An exploration of the construction of ‘history’, ‘authenticity’ and the ‘period’ film.
Palermo – ‘History’ Standing Still was shot on Super 8 by the filmmaker on location in Palermo in 1999 and was completed in 2004. The film, an experimental form of documentary, plays with the idea of ‘authenticity’ in non-fiction films, and the ways in which the textural qualities of the image and soundtrack, as well as performance, contribute to, and complicate, these readings.
awards:
WINNER – DENDY AWARD (General) Sydney Film Festival 2004
AFI AWARD NOMINATION – Best Editing for Non-Feature 2004
ATOM AWARD NOMINATION (Australian Teachers of Media) Best Experimental Film 2004
FCCA NOMINATION (Film Critics Circle of Australia) Best Australian Short Film 2004
festivals:
Sydney Film Festival d>art04 program 2004
Dendy Awards, Sydney Film Festival 2004
Melbourne Int’l Film Festival 2004
Brisbane Int’l Film Festival 2004,
New York Film Festival Avant-Garde Program, USA 2004
FIPA Biarritz France 2005
Tampere Int’l Short Film Festival 2005
European Media Arts Festival, Germany 2005
Hong Kong Int’l Film Festival 2005
Still from ‘Palermo’
SHORT BEFORE THE MOVIE
Short film
5.5mins Colour
35mm Dolby Stereo 1:1.85 (1 reel / 550 ft)
Video Digital Betacam Stereo 16:9
© 2003 Go Girl Productions
crew:
Director, camera, edit, sound -Janet Merewether
synopsis:
Jonas Mekas wrote that 8mm home movies would be the folk art of the 20th century. SHORT BEFORE THE MOVIE takes us on a quick trip to the crossroads of cinema, where film as commodity, artform, home movie and cultural document meet.
cast:
Male voice – Brent Clough
Female voice – Valerie Marteau
awards:
Nominated for ATOM Award (Best Experimental) Australia 2003.
festivals:
New Directors/New Films, Lincoln Centre/MoMA New York 2003
Women’s Film Festival Seoul 2003
European Media Art Festival Germany 2003 Commonwealth Film Festival Manchester 2003
Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg Germany
Brisbane Film Festival 2003
Lancaster Film and New Media Festival UK Experimental film Conference, Preston, Univerisity of Central Lancashire
Women Make Waves Film Festival Taipei 2003
Uppsala Int’l Short Film Festival Sweden
Aarhus Festival of Festivals Denmark 2003
Festival Tous Courts France 2003
Madrid Experimental Film Week
Festival Traverse Vidéo de Toulouse
EUROPE – Included in touring programme of the European Media Arts Festival, Germany.
Still from ‘Short Before The Movie’
CONTEMPORARY CASE STUDIES
Short film
35mm Colour 1:1.85 14mins DolbySR
© 2001 Go Girl Productions
key crew:
writer/director/producer – Janet Merewether
associate producer – Jane Norris
dop – Jackie Farkas
production designer – Janet Merewether
editor – Janet Merewether
sound design – Liam Egan
mix – Phil Judd – Philmsound
poetry writer – Gig Ryan
review:
“As usual, the curtain raisers are a mixed bag. One exception is Janet Merewether’s Contemporary Case Studies…a tartly funny take on sex and romance, couched as an old fashioned training film and updated with split-screens and irreverent observation. Merewether is the NYFF’s latest female discovery from down under, following in the footsteps of Jane Campion and Alison Maclean.
Amy Taubin, Village Voice (review of NYFF)
synopsis:
A black comedy featuring an experimental, graphic style, Contemporary Case Studies takes a bleak look at the confused nature of heterosexual love and relationships in Sydney at the turn of the new century.
key cast:
Bronwyn Rennex
Lesley Power
Liz Hughes
Heather Winter
Maryella Hatfield
Jane Norris
awards:
Highly Commended (General) Dendy Awards – Sydney Film Festival 2001
Platinum Remi Award for Experimental Comedy WorldFest-Houston Texas 2002
Still from ‘Palermo’
CHEAP BLONDE
Short film
5mins 16mm/BetacamSP Colour
© 1998 Go Girl Productions
crew:
Director/Camera/Edit/Sound – Janet Merewether
Video to film transfer – Toula Anastas
Mix – Greg Fitzgerald
synopsis:
A short study of the relationship between words and meaning.
Twelve words, “A famous filmmaker said ‘Cinema is the history of men filming women’ ” are rearranged twenty two times, to alter and subvert the original meaning of the statement. An exploration of the notion of ‘truth’ as contained in both image and language, this work aims to highlight the contrived nature of every filmed image.
reviews:
‘Curiously interactive, seductively simple, Janet Merewether’s five minute video Cheap Blonde lures its audience into playing along with no hands-on and not a mouse in sight. We’re offered an apparently limited set of images, instructions and a computer generated voice which switches from male to female. This is a work so constucted that we laugh as sentences implode and explode like a poetry machine, as an image of a ‘cheap blonde’ who might have fallen out of some shampoo advertisement becomes a site of intimate reflection, as the twelve word sentence (” A famous filmmaker said ‘Cinema is the history of men filming women’ “) transforms radically into meaningful nonsense. This is every abstract gaze theory you’ve ever heard made wittily and powerfully palpable.’
Virginia Baxter(OnScreen/Realtime#26 Aug’98)
Review of dLux media arts’ digital video program
‘D.art’, Sydney Film Festival, June 1998.
‘..Cheap Blonde..ties in so neatly with what we do here at the Pacific Film Archive (PFA). When I saw Cheap Blonde I thought we could start each of our screenings with this commentary on cinema. Cheap Blonde before Bresson, or Shinoda, or Fassbinder, or Ford, or Wellman…..’
Steve Seid, Video Curator, Berkeley Art Museum, Pacific Film Archive, California
awards:
Honorable Mention – Ann Arbor Film Festival USA 1999
distribution:
Go Girl Productions
North America / International
V tape, Toronto, tel: 1 (416) 351 1317
Europe
Montevideo, Amsterdam,
Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst
Still from ‘Short Before The Movie’
TAKING HER FOR A SPIN
Short video
5 mins Col Betacam SP
© Go Girl Productions 1997
crew:
director, camera, edit and script – Janet Merewether
voice-over – Ross Gibson and Janet Merewether
music – ‘kilkeel’ by Peter Fenton and crow
synopsis:
The car, the lust, the road, the roadkill.
The expanse, the fear, the communion, the return. One journey by road and by foot.
Male (car) traverses female (land) and all that’s left are bodies (cold).
A meditation on the conquest of machine over landscape, of nature as incomprehensible ‘other’.
thanks to Alicia Slusarski / counterpoint for sounds
Jim Merewether for automotive advice and Greg Ferris at MSV
distribution:
North America / International
V tape, Toronto,
Still from ‘Taking Her For A Spin’
MAKING OUT IN JAPAN
Video art
9 mins Betacam SP
© 1996 Go Girl Productions
crew:
direction, camera, edit – Janet Merewether
concept – Yuji Sone and Janet Merewether
voices – Yuji Sone, Eric Dorfman and Janet Merewether
synopsis:
A collaboration between performance artist Yuji Sone and film/video maker Janet Merewether, this short video, based around a language lesson structure, intends to teach the language of Japanese intimacy in five easy steps. The subtleties of love are humorously regimented into dry language drills.
Open the heart for a video romance, and enter a world which is out of synch, as Japanese television and iconography are deconstructed to reveal an erotic subtext. Suppressed thoughts and desires are liberated as geishas and animated superheroes play out epic and banal tales of attraction. Women desire. The unspeakable is spoken. Taboos are broken.
The electronic landscapes of Tokyo’s television and neon signage contrast with the traditional, if not cliched images of the classical Japanese environment – carp, the Buddha, a paper house, fishmarkets. The oppositions continue. ‘Liberated’ Western sexual values sit uneasily, their ‘universality’ questionable when imposed on a culture known for its love hotels and eccentric sexual desires.
awards:
WINNER – BEST VIDEO – ST KILDA FILM FESTIVAL 1997
WINNER-BEST FILM – MELBOURNE FRINGE FESTIVAL 1996
HONOURABLE MENTION BY JURY – VIDEOBRASIL, SAO PAULO 1996
festivals:
EUROPEAN MEDIA ARTS FESTIVAL, OSNABRUECK, GERMANY 1997
SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL 1996
MATINAZE (SIN / ART GALLERY OF NSW) 1996
EXPERIMENTA ‘DOMESTIC DISTURBANCES’ TOURING PROGRAMME 1996
TECHNE – IMAGO’S TOURING DIGITAL ARTS PROGRAMME 1996-8
QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY – ASIA PACIFIC TRIENNIAL SCREENINGS 1999
BROADCAST-ALMANAC-ART ON TELEVISION, AMSTERDAM 1999
OTHER THAN ENGLISH: ELECTRONS OUTSIDE THE VACUUM – CENTRE FOR ART TAPES – NOVA SCOTIA 2002
BANKOK EXPERIMENTAL FESTIVAL 1999
FREUNDE DER DEUTSCHEN KINEMATHEK, ARSENAL CINEMA BERLIN 2002
WOMEN MAKE WAVES FESTIVAL, TAIPEI 2003
distribution:
Go Girl Productions
email go girl productions
North America / International
V tape, Toronto, tel: 1 (416) 351 1317
Europe
Montevideo, Amsterdam,
Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst
Still from ‘Making Out in Japan’
TOURETTE’S TICS
Short film
6mins 16mm/BetacamSP Colour
© 1994 Go Girl Productions
crew:
Writer/Director/Editor/Designer – Janet Merewether
Camera (live action) – Chantal Abouchar
Sound Recording – Deb Harris
Sound FX / Vibes – Nick Meyers
On-Line Editor – Peter Butterworth
synopsis:
What do Gilles de la Tourette’s disease, animal impersonators, Freud’s patients and the Ancient Greeks have in common?
TOURETTE’S TICS is a short experimental mock-documentary which explodes the myth of the ‘hysterical woman’, a myth perpetuated by Sigmund Freud, who has been described by some as ‘a reckless cocaine addict, guilty of mass plagiarism.’
TOURETTE’S TICS questions the authority of the ‘expert in the white coat’, and transforms hysteria into the hysterical.
cast:
Animal Impersonator – Achilles Lavidis
awards:
WINNER of AAV prize for BEST VIDEO
St Kilda Short Film Festival 1994
festivals:
St Kilda Film Festival
Auckland Int’l Short Film Festival 1994
Sydney Film Festival 1994
Brisbane Int’l Film Festival 1995
Women on Women (WOW) festival (Syd, Perth)
AFI Cinema/Sydney Intermedia Network’s ‘Animated Moments’ program 1993.
Ann Arbor Festival USA 2001
Boston Cinematheque 2001
Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, Arsenal Cinema, Berlin 2002
Women’s Film Festival in Seoul/
Women Make Waves Taipei 2003
Purchased by Griffith Artworks collection, 1996.
Screened in Amsterdam on ‘Almanac-Art on Television’ program, 1999
distribution:
Go Girl Productions
email go girl productions
North America / International
V tape, Toronto, tel: 1 (416) 351 1317
Europe
Montevideo, Amsterdam,
Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst
Still from ‘Tourette’s Tics’
SURPLUS GOVERNMENT ASSET
Documentary
24 minute video
© 1993 Janet Merewether
Made with the assistance of the AFTRS and Fuji Film.
crew:
Writer/director/producer/camera – Janet Merewether
Additional camera – Jonathan Ogilvie and Chantal Abouchar
Editor– Bob Burns
Sound design – Deb Harris and Alicia Slusarski
Music – The Happenin’ Thang, The Baylor Brothers and Brendan Gallagher
Narration – Virginia Baxter
synopsis:
A documentary about the cultural and architectural features of the former Sydney Showgrounds site at Moore Park, ‘Surplus Government Asset’ captures the atmosphere and traditions of the original Royal Easter Show, before its move to the current site at Homebush Bay. This visually innovative documentary questions the relevance and significance of one of Australia’s most iconic cultural and carnival events, whilst recording the architectural features, including livestock and produce pavilions, many of which have been demolished to make way for the Fox Film Studios. On a political level, the film analyses how common land and publicly owned buildings were ceded, offered by the then Liberal State Government to multi-national 20th Century Fox for peppercorn rent. A wry, resonant and lasting record of this most historic of sites, ‘Surplus Government Asset’ immerses the viewer into a phantasmagoria of collective cultural memory.
logline:
A film essay on the architecture and cultural resonance of the former Sydney Showgrounds site at Moore Park.
festivals:
AIDC Australian International Documentary Conference 1993
St Kilda Film Festival (opening night) 1993
Brisbane International Film Festival 1994
Still from ‘Surplus Government Asset’
Still from ‘Surplus Government Asset’
A SQUARE’S SAFARI
Animation
14 mins 35mm colour
© aftrs 1992
crew:
Writer, Director, Camera, Editor, Animation – Janet Merewether
Co-writer – Geoff Marsh
Producer – Sally Regan
Sound design – Alicia Slusarski
Composer – Scott Saunders
Country music – Brendan Gallagher/Cruel Sea
Live Action DOP – Jonathan Ogilvie
synopsis:
Leaving paper-pushing behind, Roy Wright picks up his spear and flourishes it, hurling himself into the New Age.
An experimental and vibrant colour animation which uses a combination of photographs, slides, and live action to map a man’s inner transformation from insurance assessor to a spear throwing New Age warrior.
cast:
‘Eva Strong’ – Bronwyn Eather
‘Roy Wright’ – Geoff Marsh
‘Stanley’ – George Eather
Barman – Frank Perrin
distribution:
Go Girl Productions
Australian Film Television and Radio School
Still from ‘A Square’s Safari’
