'A late 20th century Beatrice (Anne Louise Lambert), mother of a young child, keeps a map ‘dredged from her dreams’ in a copy of Dante’s Inferno. Prompted by questions from her young daughter Maeve (Maeve Dermody), and feeling unease with her own historical present, Beatrice is compelled to make a journey to the underworld. Armed with her map, she and Maeve find a guide, a modern day Hermes-like taxi driver named Herman (Kristoffer Greaves), to take them below the city’s surface. Herman leads Beatrice and Maeve through the gates of Pluto’s Republic, to begin their subterranean journey.'
Source: Australian Screen.
'A chook enters the frame. A black cat evades the lens. An animated panther won’t be denied. In 2021, these are the figures that lurk on the outskirts of conscious thought in the days after I eject Ronin’s DVD of Breathing Under Water (Susan Murphy Dermody, 1991) from my laptop. 30 years have slipped by since I first viewed this film on a cinema screen with an audience of indie-filmgoers. The memory of being part of that audience — lulled by water and voices, darkness and whimsy, movement and pause — resonates with and is shadowed by the spectre of ‘last days’. In 1991 Dermody’s film evoked the destruction of life on earth by masculine technoculture, the eclipse of human time by the digital and a feminine quest (embodied by Beatrice, Maeve and Herman) to find another way. In 2021, despite the climate emergency, the digital eclipse of cinema and a global pandemic, what the film evokes most strongly, for this writer, is the passing of a milieu defined by an ethos of indie-filmmaking, film thinking, film activism. I take this special issue of Senses of Cinema, then, as a space in which to pause, remember and reflect on a moment of experiment in Australian feature filmmaking, and to revive interest in Breathing Under Water as a female quest, an essay film, an autofiction and a mode of self extraction. ' (Introduction)
'A chook enters the frame. A black cat evades the lens. An animated panther won’t be denied. In 2021, these are the figures that lurk on the outskirts of conscious thought in the days after I eject Ronin’s DVD of Breathing Under Water (Susan Murphy Dermody, 1991) from my laptop. 30 years have slipped by since I first viewed this film on a cinema screen with an audience of indie-filmgoers. The memory of being part of that audience — lulled by water and voices, darkness and whimsy, movement and pause — resonates with and is shadowed by the spectre of ‘last days’. In 1991 Dermody’s film evoked the destruction of life on earth by masculine technoculture, the eclipse of human time by the digital and a feminine quest (embodied by Beatrice, Maeve and Herman) to find another way. In 2021, despite the climate emergency, the digital eclipse of cinema and a global pandemic, what the film evokes most strongly, for this writer, is the passing of a milieu defined by an ethos of indie-filmmaking, film thinking, film activism. I take this special issue of Senses of Cinema, then, as a space in which to pause, remember and reflect on a moment of experiment in Australian feature filmmaking, and to revive interest in Breathing Under Water as a female quest, an essay film, an autofiction and a mode of self extraction. ' (Introduction)
