Anarchic, absurdist and anti-authoritarian, the films of the Marx Brothers — wisecracking Groucho, crafty Chico, silent clown Harpo and straight-man Zeppo — remain eternally revolutionary and side-splittingly hilarious.

This program brings together their first six films, presenting their five screen appearances together (including such classics as Horse Feathers 1932 and Duck Soup 1933) and their first film as a Zeppo-less trio, the comic masterpiece A Night at the Opera 1935. These works showcase their comedy of chaos at its zenith, with the films combining the electricity of their stage performances with the freedom afforded by the infinite possibilities of cinema.

The Marx Brothers – Monkey Business
13 July – 21 September 2025
Australian Cinémathèque, GOMA, Brisbane
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

This program brings together the seven feature films that Rainer directed between 1972 and 1996. Her films blend archival footage, reconstructions, still photography and innovative audiovisual approaches to explore the personal and the political. They are spirited and vital works, brimming with droll humour and literary sophistication. Screening alongside these films is the impressionistic documentary Rainer Variations 2002, which explores Rainer’s life and work while playfully adopting her own stylistic techniques in its form.

Rainer’s films have recently been restored in 4K by the Museum of Modern Art and the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation. Her work has earned her a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and three Rockefeller Fellowships – establishing her as one of the key performance artists of the twentieth century.

Yvonne Rainer Everything is a Performance
18 – 27 October 2024
Gallery of Modern Art & Cinema A
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

This free cinema program presents beloved classics alongside contemporary retellings. Fairy tales have always been a means of speaking truth to power; challenging injustice and providing hope.

This program highlights how filmmakers have innovated on older stories to resonate in different times and contexts.

The program tells these tales across five thematic strands, each strand exploring how fairy tales inform ideas of transformation, identity, and wonder.

‘Maiden, Mother, Crone’ looks at how fairy tales are used to interrogate societal expectations about age and gender, particularly the way in which women progress through life stages; ‘Happy Endings’ considers ideas of the good life and how our desires are shaped by our community ideals and economic circumstances; ‘Off the Path’ celebrates the adventurous nature of fairy tales and how landscapes have been filmed to express the threshold between being lost and finding oneself; ‘Becoming Other’ looks at how archetypal tropes of transformation in fairy tales are used by filmmakers to connect with questions of identity; and finally ‘Storytellers’ explores how film, as a relatively new narrative medium, has engaged with older oral and literary forms, making the wondrous and impossible visible.

The program features over 40 films, including the mesmeric special event screenings of silent films.

Fairy Tales: Truth, Power and Enchantment
2 December 2023 – 28 April 2024
Australian Cinémathèque, GOMA, Brisbane
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

Following recent restorations of her films by the Hungarian National Film Fund, the Australian Cinémathèque presents Mészáros’s ambitious and deeply personal ‘Diary’ trilogy: Diary for My Children 1984, Diary for My Loves 1987, and Diary for My Father and Mother 1990.

Part historical drama, part künstlerroman – the ‘Diary’ series is a semi-autobiographical recreation of Mészáros’s upbringing amid the social tumult of the newly founded Eastern Bloc. Fusing poetic memory with historical detail, the ‘Diary’ series showcases Mészáros’s unmistakable flair for capturing the spirit of her subjects and the formidable social forces that seek to confine them. Captured with visually striking cinematography by Mészáros’s son Nyika Jancsó and featuring understated yet powerful performances from their casts, the films render a vision of the past both vibrant and mournful.

Born in Budapest in 1931, Mészáros endured a tumultuous childhood marked by the tragic loss of both parents. Her father, a renowned sculptor, fell victim to the Stalinist purges, while her mother tragically passed away during childbirth. As a teenager, Mészáros attended the prestigious State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow, the first Hungarian woman to do so. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, she worked extensively making documentaries for state television in Hungary and Romania before pivoting to narrative film with the release of her debut feature The Girl in 1968.

A stirring portrait of a spirited young woman raised in state care who yearns to connect with her birth mother, The Girl made history as the first Hungarian feature to be directed by a woman. It was followed by a phenomenal run of eight feature films directed by Mészáros between 1968 and 1979, including Adoption 1975 – the tale of an unlikely friendship between a middle-aged female factory worker who wishes to fall pregnant and a rebellious teenage girl – which took out the Golden Bear at the 1975 Berlin Film Festival, helping Mészáros achieve wider international recognition.

Continuing to make films until 2017, her career is among the most prolific and critically acclaimed in modern European cinema. The release of these director-approved digital restorations return her body of work to the spotlight, showcasing a visionary filmmaking voice that is best exemplified by this striking trilogy of films.

Program curated by Robert Hughes, Australian Cinémathèque. Writing by Rupert Levien.

QAGOMA acknowledges the generous assistance of the National Film Institute, Budapest in providing materials for this program.

The Film Diaries of Márta Mészáros
Australian Cinémathèque, GOMA, Brisbane
27 – 29 October 2023
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

The screwball comedy is one of the great treasures of American cinema. Emerging in the 1930s, these fast-talking farces subverted the conventions of romantic comedies with acid-tongued wit and slapstick silliness.

The genre rose to prominence amid the economic turmoil of the Great Depression, with audiences responding to the intermingling of metropolitan glamour and acerbic class commentary. Famously described by critic Andrew Sarris as ‘sex comedies without the sex’, screwball comedies had their would-be couples evading the censorious Hays Code with artful innuendo and risqué repartee.

The immense success of these films fostered the iconic status of many of their stars, including Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck. They also proved fertile behind the camera, propelling the careers of legendary writers and directors such as Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges.

After a decade of popularity, screwball comedies declined in prevalence, though their influence remains woven through many subsequent forms of screen comedy. Filmmakers raised on the golden age of the genre would also revisit its distinct characteristics in later decades, blending screwball sensibilities with modern cinematic stylings.

Hollywood Screwballs
Australian Cinémathèque, GOMA, Brisbane
26 July – 9 August 2023
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

Juliette Binoche is one of the most sought-after and celebrated actors of her generation building her career on the foundation of fearless, authentic, and sensitive performances. Crafting a screen persona that embodies meaning throughout her projects, Binoche is a unique actor bringing strong authorship not only to the role she plays but the whole film.

Boasting an extraordinary career of seventy feature films over five decades, Binoche has won a multitude of ‘Best Actress’ awards including two Academy Awards, Britain’s BAFTA, France’s César Award and is the first actress to hold the ‘triple crown’ winning Best Actress at the Berlin, Venice and Cannes Film Festivals.

Binoche has the unparalleled accomplishment of regularly working in her native France as well as across several other filmmaking regions from Hollywood to Japan to Iran. Her filmmaking collaborations are with some of the world’s most notable directors including Leos Carax (Bad Blood 1986), Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue 1993, Anthony Minghella (The English Patient 1996), Lasse Hallström’s romantic comedy Chocolat 2000, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami (Certified Copy 2010), Michael Haneke’s Hidden 2005 and Code Unknown 2000, French director Claire Denis (Let the Sunshine In 2017, High Life 2018 with Robert Pattinson) as well as Japanese filmmaker and Cannes Film Festival winner Hirokazu Kore-eda (The Truth 2019).

Juliette Binoche Retrospective
28 April – 18 June 2023
Australian Cinémathèque, GOMA, Brisbane
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

‘Melting into Air’ illustrates the possibilities – and impossibilities – of capturing air on screen. These films consider the environmental consequences of mass industrialisation and the sublime potential of natural phenomena, humanity’s dreams of taking to the skies and the exquisite mechanics of respiration, the hidden mysteries within deep fogs and the transformative power of the invisible world around us.

This cinema program brings together films from around the world and across the decades. It includes screenings of rare 16mm and 35mm prints, as well as new digital restorations and Live Music & Film events, in a major cinematic survey.

Melting into Air
26 November 2022 – 23 April 2023
The Australian Cinémathèque, GOMA, Brisbane
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

A former journalist, Haroun studied filmmaking in France and went back home to make the first feature documentary for the African country of Chad in 1999. This film, Bye, Bye Africa, launched Haroun’s compelling filmmaking career and went on to win Best Debut Film at Venice International Film Festival. This retrospective offers a chance to see the strength and breadth of his deeply humanist filmmaking.

Films include his short film The Second Wife 1994, which focuses on a young woman’s experience of arranged marriage alongside the beautifully shot Grigris 2013 – a story of a young man who wants to be a dancer despite his paralysed leg and lands in the world of petrol smuggling – to his recent Parisian story, which screened in BIFF 2018, A Season in France 2017.

It’s important [to make films in Chad] because we don’t have the opportunity to see our own images on the screen instead of American or European ones. Otherwise we have a colonisation by images. We have a passion to make films, but it’s almost impossible to do it. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun retrospective
Australian Cinémathèque – GOMA, Brisbane
6-22 September 2019
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

Jiří Trnka’s stop motion puppet animations rivalled Walt Disney in both output and international acclaim, earning him the title the ‘Disney of the East’. Karel Zeman took animation to new poetic heights, interweaving animation techniques with live-action filmmaking.

All three overcame the constraints of postwar politics to create extraordinary works which still inform the work of filmmakers like Jan Švankmajer, Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton and Wes Anderson.

Golden Age of Czech Animation
07 – 30 September 2018
GOMA, Brisbane
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

He has developed an epic idiom that engages with contemporary issues and cultural memories embedded in classical Indian art forms, texts and objects. His visual explorations of Indian music and dance, the classical Indian epic and contemporary literature mark his practice as unique in the history of Indian cinema.

Shahani also engages with European cinematic traditions and his oeuvre is considered alongside renowned directors — Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Paradyanov, Jacques Rivette and others — whose work is similarly entwined with the visual arts.

Between 2003 and 2006, the Australian Cinémathèque undertook a major restoration project to preserve four of Shahani’s films and bring them into the Queensland Art Gallery collection – The Khayal Saga 1988, Kasba 1990, Immanence 1991 and The Bamboo Flute 2000. This program offers an opportunity to see these collection highlights on 35mm and discover Shahani’s unique visual and narrative style.

Collection Highlight: Kumar Shahani
6 – 11 October 2017
GoMA, Cinima A – Brisbane
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au