Transcript of an introductory talk to The Dark Side of the Rainbow 21/10/06

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the final screening in the first Chauvel Cinematheque program. My name is Brett Garten and I am the curator of the Cinematheque program, a projectionist here at the Chauvel, and your host for what I hope is a very enjoyable evening. Tonight we are to enter the mysterious world of “syncing” where classic movies and classic albums are played simultaneously to create a new hybrid work of art.

Before I go on I’d like to point out some of the distinguished members in the audience – Film historian, director and all round movie whiz Mr Barrie Pattison. Barrie has the honour of walking out of almost every cinematheque screening. The big question is - Will he make it through today’s screening? Also in the audience tonight ladies and gentlemen, one of Sydney’s leading film buffs, veteran Neighbours screenwriter and all round nice guy, Michael O’Rourke.

Also in the audience tonight Tina Kaufman, Eoghan Lewis of Sydney Architecture Walks, so local history buffs take note, Mr Lewis is in the colourful knitted sweater.

So we’ve come to an end to the first cinematheque program and I’ve saved the best till last. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have become members. I’d especially like to thank everyone who took out annual memberships. The faith and commitment you’ve shown in the programming delights me and your generous finacncial contribution has certainly helped keep this little project viable.

The membership system is unavoidable for two reasons. One, it is a requirement of the NFVLS, a vast library in Canberra from which the majority of the films in the last program were sourced. Secondly, and more importantly, it gives me the right to screen films unclassified by the OFLC, thus avoiding censorship, and the privilege of having to pay for said censorship. Not that I’m going to show anything too crazy... well, you never know.

Okay, before we get to today’s film, I’d like to say a few things about the new program. One, there are a few digital presentations on this new program. Yes, I know some, maybe many of you, are film purists. I’m the same, but I have included a few digital programs in this new calendar. Yes, I’d love to present only film at the cinematheque, and I promise, I will show a lot of film, but 1) good prints, especially 35mm prints are simply not available, unless I import them at great expense, and 2) the Lenard sound sytem installed at the Chauvel really shows up the limitations of 16mm sound, whereas DVDs and Betacam tapes sound great. Lastly, the Cineo video projector we have here in Cin. 1 is an excellent high definition video projector that offers picture quality comparable to 16mm. I have run 16mm and dvd of the same film side by side, and while you can tell the difference, the video does in many ways look and sound better; the image is sharper, the source material is generally free of the annoying scratches, dirt and colour shift found on most 16mm prints, and finally the sound is great. We have also just this week acquired a digital media server, which, while I’m still to get my head around it, will provide much opportunity in the future for both more diverse programming and excellent picture quality.

I did a short demonstration of the incredible Lenard sound system behind the screen here at the Chauvel a few weeks ago, and tonight, you will hear it in full force. You will also see the excellent Norwegian Cineo video projector in action for the first time in a cinematheque program tonight as tonights short tonight is off DVD. I have dumped the short film advertised in the program, the rather bland anti-drug educational film The Wizard of Yes, and replaced it with something called Jovian Echoes. Now Jovian Echoes is another example of this "syncing" phenomena- it's the trip sequence from the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey matched up with Pink Floyd’s epic psychedelic powerhouse, Echoes, off the Meddle album. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed by this last minute reshuffle. In fact, these two sync up as if they were made for each other. There is even a rumour floating around that the track was a demo made by Floyd and sent to Kubrick at the time he was cutting 2001, who used it as a temp track for the ending of the film. In an interview with Dave Gilmour, he states that his biggest regret was not doing the soundtrack for 2001, the implication being that he had sent off a demo track, or at least expressed some interest, to Kubrick for his consideration.

Before I go on about Dark Side of the Rainbow, I’d like to draw your attention to some of the highlights of the new program. The Satanic History of Hollywood, a program that includes two shorts by Kenneth Anger, Lucifer rising and Invocation of My Demon Brother, plus the 1942 Val Lewton production The Seventh victim, one of my favourte movies. I will also present an hour-long powerpoint presentation, the Satanic History of Hollywood, - consisting of five interlocking mini-biographies that document the shocking truth behind the satanic history of Hollywood - based on an essay I have been trying to write for the last ten years.

The second highlight is the films of Len Lye. Lye was a New Zealander who was a pioneer of direct cinema. By direct cinema, I mean making films without a camera, using painting, stenciling and scratching on the actual film stock itself. Lye invented the techniques used by Brakhage and Norman McLaren that we saw featured in the last program. He was also a pioneer of experimenting with colour processes. Not only that, he was also one of the pioneers of advertising films, or ads and his ads have to be seen to be believed. They are still to this day, far more sophisticated artistically than the ads of today.

Furthermore, he wasn’t just a filmmaker, he was also a painter, a kinetic sculptor (by kinetic I mean he scuplpted or rather engineered these giant moving sculptures) and a philosopher, whose philosphy was outlined in the book Individual Happiness Now, which I am still looking for if you find of a copy. Lye was arguably the greatest film artist to emerge from this part of the world and the program will consist of two hours,/twenty films by this amazing and eccentric genius. Not only that but I have also secured producer John Maynard, producer of Sweetie, The Boys, and many other of Australias’ greatest films, to give a talk on the night about Len Lye. Mr Maynard was a former director of the Len Lye Foundation in New Zealand and knew Len quite well.

The third promising program is the two hour compilation I have entitled rather blandly, Best and Worst Ads. This program consists of over a hundred ads - from the dawn of cinema to the present day - and promises to be for me , a major hassle – imagine selecting and splicing over a hundred separate films together. But hopefully, for you, it will be a bit of a treat.

But that’s in the future. Tonight it’s time for Dark Side of the Rainbow.

Early on in the cinematheque program, I think it was after the second program, Wax and the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, a member came up to me after the show and said, "Brett, do you have to be on psychedelic drugs to enjoy every film in the cinematheque program?" I said to him, "Well, no..." but I think today it would definitely help. I’m going to talk for another ten minutes or so, and our short today is about 25mins, so, in case you’re wondering ... there is still time.

The mother of all syncs, Dark Side of the Rainbow, was said to be discovered about twenty years ago by persons unknown, persons highly likely to be under the influence of psychedelic drugs. The idea is to sync up the 1939 MGM classic, The Wizard of Oz, with Pink Floyd’s 1973 art-rock classic, Dark Side of the Moon. Both film and album are among the most famous works of the twentieth century in their respective media and are familiar to almost everyone. Wizard... would have been the most popular movie of all time, had it not been gazumped the same year by Gone with the Wind, and Dark Side... was noted for it's prolonged presence in the Billboard charts - a phenomenal testament to its brilliance.

There is a lot of talk on the internet about this particular sync – some people swear it was planned by the band - that the mysterious coincidences are just too perfect, while others cite the psychologist Carl Jung’s term synchronicity as the explanation. Jung described synchronicity as a kind of meaningful coincidence, and used synchrocity to illustrate his idea of a collective unconscious – where all is connected, all is one.

Rather than go into the debate here, I will just cite a mysterious example. What is the name of the most famous song in Wizard of Oz?.. Over the Rainbow. And what is on the cover art of Dark Side of the Moon?.. A prism.

So note here that the front cover of Dark Side... goes from a black and white prism to a coloured rainbow, just like the movie goes from B&W to colour, and that on the back of the album, it goes from colour to B&W – again, just like in the movie.

Now you may think it’s all a load of bong-wash, but it is fun to speculate. The more you know about the movie, and the album, the more media literate you are, the more you will see. Personally, I think that the brain has an intrinsic drive to make order out of chaos, to see patterns and make connections. I think that is the real reason behind its significance. Your brain will get a real work-out today, far geater than a sudoku puzzle or a cryptic crossword. It will strive to see the connections and make out the patterns between the film and the album.

A film as famous as the Wizard of Oz has many stories about it. For one, conspiracy theorists claim, and I don’t fully understand this, that it is somehow used as a mind control weapon by the illuminati. The illuminati are said to be an occult group made up of powerful men who secretly control the world. The conspiracy was popularised by psychedelic era author Robert Anton Wilson. The man who wrote the book The Wizard of Oz, Frank L. Baum, was apparently a member of the Theosophical Society, an early precursor to the new age cults and new religious movements of today. The Theosophical Society was led by Madame Blavatsky, and its members included Rudolph Steiner and Krishnamurti. Baum was said to have created The Wizard of Oz book as a theosophical fairy tale, incorporating the ancient wisdom of the so-called mystery religions, or occult religions. The yellow brick road is said to signify gold, or money, which is the name of the most famous song on the album, and that to follow the yellow brick road is to follow the path of materialism, consumerism, capitalism, the Great Satan. The moral of ...Oz is that of individualism, of putting the yourself first, the first precept of the Satanic universe. paranoid critics claimed that Baum had dressed up Satan's original lie and were distributing it worldwide as popular American fairy tale.

One other interesting story about the Wizard of Oz is the myth of the hanged man - that a man hung himself on the set of the film and it was caught on-camera. In one version of the sory a munchkin extra hung himself on the set as a result of an unrequited love. You can see it in the background of the scene where the tinman is dancing on the yellow brick road and there is a large bird, a crane, walking around in the middle-ground. As Dorothy, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow walk up the yellow brick road at the end of the scene, look at the trees at the top of the screen just left of the middle and you’ll see the hanging man. The hanging man story was a hook reported in the news at the time of the Wizard of Oz's 50th anniversary in 1989, but has since proved to be fake. How could a man hang himself on a film set and none of the many cast and crew notice? It may be a myth, but it sure looks like a hanging man. Far-out conspiracists postulate that the hanging man is also a card in the tarot deck, but after watching it a few times, it is in fact the bill of a second bird - another crane.

But enough speculation. To wrap up, some of you may have twigged that the album is only half he length of the movie. Well there are several theories as to what to do next: 1. Repeat the album, or 2. Play animals, then meddle. After some late night experimentation I discovered that the second half of the films works beautifully with the first Pink Floyd album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The whimsical nature of the record, thanks largely to the recently departed original Pink Floyd frontman Syd Barret, is a great fit. It’s a much rawer, freakier album than Dark Side... and suits the second half of the movie. So Dark Side will play through, then repeat a bit, and then its off to Syd Barret land for the conclusion.

Anyway I hope you enjoy the show and hope to see you next week for a special Halloween zombie double. Thank You.