Cirrus@Austlit

'You have to adapt and remain the same. The Melbourne Cinémathèque is one of Australia’s longest-running film culture organisations, preceded by only a couple of years by the State Film Centre of Victoria (now ACMI) and the Hobart Film Society in Tasmania (now operating on a very diminished scale). It started operations as the Melbourne University Film Society (MUFS) in 1948, held its first screening, Sergei Eisenstein’s then recently unbanned Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925) in early March 1949, before becoming the Melbourne Cinémathèque in 1984. As Kirsten Stevens, Barrett Hodsdon and I have argued– mine a chapter on MUFS in the 1960s published in the book, Go! Melbourne in the Sixties – it was also central to the development of the Melbourne Film Festival, running its own festival from 1949 and integral to saving the wider organisation in 1954. At its mid-1960s peak, MUFS was the University of Melbourne’s largest club, boasting around 2000 members. It gave opportunities to figures who went on to have significant roles in the broader film and cultural industries such as Gil Brealey, Barry Humphries (who was “publicity agent” in 1952), Jack Hibberd, Robin Laurie, Brian Davies and Alan Finney – and many who didn’t. A key shift to trace across these subsequent decades might be that many of the key Cinémathèque figures now go onto curatorial careers (reflective of the broader compartmentalisation of screen culture). Like many such organisations, it has sometimes been taken for granted, marginalised and written out of broader histories of cinema in Australia. But it has also been a bellwether for film culture in Melbourne that can tell us much about the wider economy of cinema.' (Introduction)