by Anthony Mullins
When BAFTA-winning screenwriter Anthony Mullins tried to catch a screening of the 1973 surrealist classic, Holy Mountain, he was shocked to find the session was already sold out to a theatre full of young film geeks. Interviewing young audiences and film programmers, Mullins discovers that, since the pandemic, a new generation of hardcore cinephiles has emerged seeking connection and community via ultra-challenging arthouse classics.
“Sold out?” I ask. “But…but how?”
The teenage ticket seller shrugs wearily and hands me the Cherry Ripe I just purchased.
“You’re not the only ones to miss out tonight,” he says as he points to a group of young men and women, twenties, tasteful tats, hipster stylings. “They did too.”
The group are scanning the screening times trying to decide what to do with their night now — Furiosa? The Fall Guy? Inside Out 2? The Garfield Movie? None of the options seem to appeal and they wander out of the cinema onto Brunswick Street, presumably in search of a bar to drown their sorrows after failing to tick off another entry on their cinematic bucket list.
They, like myself, and my friend, Sue, and her teenage son, Noah, have journeyed here tonight, to New Farm Cinema in Brisbane, to embark on a pilgrimage that every devoted cinephile worthy of the title must eventually commit to — the 1973 surrealist masterpiece, The Holy Mountain by Chilean-French avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky.
His philosophical and deeply surreal boundary-pushing films, like El Topo and Santa Sangre, are the stuff of arthouse legend. Even a film Jodorowsky didn’t get to make, an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune, was worthy of an acclaimed 2013 documentary, Jodorowsky’s Dune, about the director’s failed attempt.
Unfortunately for myself, and Sue, and the young hipsters who just left, we didn’t book a ticket. I mean, why would we? Holy Mountain is about as hardcore as arthouse can get. How many people these days can drag themselves off the couch, away from the endless river of frictionless content on their home theatre screen, and drive to an out of the way cinema, purchase a relatively expensive ticket as well as overpriced confectionary and booze, and sit for up to three hours in a crowded theatre, all in an effort to take a chance on an obscure filmic oddity like this?
Apparently, a lot of people can.
The cinema on this weeknight has a capacity of one hundred and twenty and it sold out two days ago. Frankly, I should have known better. I’ve been coming to repertory screenings at New Farm for years and have seen the main five-hundred-seat cinema sell out numerous times for 35mm screenings of 2001, Pulp Fiction, Solaris, Beau Travail, La Haine, Suspiria, Paris Texas, The Elephant Man, Taste of Cherry, the list goes on. It seems that people still want to see these films. In a cinema. But that’s not the most remarkable part. The craziest thing about tonight’s screening of Holy Mountain, as well as every other retro screening I’ve been to at New Farm Cinema, is the average age of the audience.
“I’d say a lot of people are in their late teens, early twenties,” explains Sean Tayler, the twenty-four-year-old who programs New Farm’s retrospective screenings. “It does skew young.”
Sure enough, as I poke my head inside, the cinema is filled with twenty-somethings buzzing with excitement as the lights go down. One of them is Sue’s nineteen-year-old son Noah. He was smart enough to book while Sue and I will have to settle for Furiosa while we wait for his session to finish.
A few days later and I’m chatting with Sean in the retro-styled foyer of New Farm Cinema where he’s describing the young audiences that his program seems to attract. “A lot of kids coming in are interested in seeking out something that is different from the mainstream product of current studio releases, which are mostly franchise films, blockbusters. Good popcorn movies, but probably not good for anything else.”
Despite assumptions that younger people would rather die than look away from TikTok or (shudder) leave the house, Sean has been delighted to see a distinct uptick in interest for repertory cinema since the pandemic.
“I’ve been happy to see what has worked against all odds. I think it was September last year, I programmed Beau Travail, which is a favourite movie of mine. I programmed it on a Monday night and we had 120 people come out for that. I think people are just hungry for something of quality.”
So, is tropical Brisbane harbouring a new generation of young cinephiles in isolation? Not according to thirty-nine-year-old Ingrid Diekmann, programmer for Golden Age Cinema in Sydney’s Surry Hills and founder of Pink Flamingo warehouse cinema.
“We were doing a ‘nunsploitation’ season a couple of months ago and a matinee session of Diary of a Country Priest sold out. And going in there was some older people, but also, a lot of kids. I mean, like 18, 19, 20. That was wild to me. Like, you’re coming out to see this two and a bit hour, black and white, depressing French priest movie!”
Ingrid has some theories why younger audiences are showing up to these screenings and, like Sean, they think being stuck at home during the pandemic played a role.
“We were all forced to consume so much ‘content’. I wouldn’t even call it media. It’s moving wallpaper essentially and I think we all consumed about as much of that as we could stand. I think what these screenings are showing is that young people in particular are hungry for something that they haven’t seen before. And if you give them an opportunity to come out and see it and you don’t charge them an exorbitant amount of money, they will happily do that.”
Another factor that Ingrid suspects is playing a role for these new cinema pilgrims are online film lists like Letterboxd or FilmTok (a subgroup of TikTok) where users can subscribe to their friend’s list of must-see films or the lists of other taste-making influencers, including quality independent cinemas.
“There’s definitely places in the US like the Metrograph (Cinema) that trends on Letterboxd and can influence getting a restoration. That’s how you get something like a restoration of Millennium Mambo or Possession or something like that.”
Ingrid’s thoughts about the pandemic and the rise of repertory screenings are shared by Kristian Connelly, the programmer for Melbourne’s Cinema Nova in Carlton. After the world opened back up there was a shortage of new releases, so Kristian, partly influenced by the Letterboxd lists of his young marketing team (“I’m always impressed by what they’re choosing to watch”) started experimenting with a larger selection of repertory screenings.
“I went on a fact-finding mission to a lot of places throughout the United States where repertory is really coming alive. You know, the things that Tarantino does at the New Beverly Cinema but also there was a very strong repertory calendar at places like Alamo Drafthouse. And it kind of inspired me on how we would actually approach it differently and how we would draw an audience in a way that we weren’t already doing.”
Now repertory screenings have become an important mainstay of Cinema Nova’s program, supported by a passionate audience that strongly skews younger. And following the lead of his young audiences, Kristian has even started a Letterboxd newsletter for the cinema, focusing on the obscure and difficult to get films that can coax audiences out of the house and away from streamed content.
“Ultimately, what I’ve come to discover is that streaming kind of gives the illusion of having this huge amount of choice. But in fact, there isn’t a lot there. And a lot of it is crap.”
I wonder if that is what’s happening here for younger audiences. Are they watching these weird, challenging, unhinged, baffling but always memorable classics and thinking to themselves ‘Wow, movies used to be…good.’ But it would be too easy to write off all of modern filmmaking when thoughtful, impressive and difficult films, classics even, are released every year — Tár, La Chimea, Aftersun, The Plains, Titane, Flux Gourmet, Infinity Pool and even a Netflix release like Uncut Gems.
Ironically, with so much “content” being flooded into an already fragmented and easily distracted marketplace, could a resurgence in repertory cinema make the situation even harder for the current generation of boundary-pushing storytellers? When the fiftieth anniversary 70mm screening of Chinatown is advertised next to the strange and unsettling 2024 Venice Lion winner The Beast, which film will audiences choose to see?
But for Zak Hepburn, repertory programmer for Melbourne’s Astor Theatre and Palace Cinemas Australia-wide, it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game between the cinema of the past and the present.
“What’s so interesting is seeing what audiences are engaging with in new content, what they’re engaging in with older content, what films tap into different zeitgeists. It’s this sort of curated pathway. And cinema can do that like no other way of exhibiting a film. Particularly for younger generations who are so consumed by different screens on a daily basis, being able to watch the one screen and have a filmmaker take you on a journey, I think that’s something they’re really craving.”
For Zak, it is this experiential aspect of cinema-going, the actual effort (the friction) it takes to leave home and sit in focused silence with a group of strangers that younger audiences seem to be discovering.
“Younger audiences have that kind of light bulb moment when they’re in a packed theatre watching a film together, rather than being split down different algorithms and being fed different things. It’s an experience. I’ve always equated cinema experiences to concert-going experiences.”
Twenty-year-old Parker Constantine and twenty-two-year old Flynn Boffo know all about the visceral feeling that comes with watching an engrossing film with a community of curious minds. Studying at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, Parker and Flynn started booking the school’s theatre to show the sorts of challenging films they’d only heard mentioned in passing during lectures or bookmarked on their Letterboxd accounts.
“A key part of it for us was a personal connection,” Flynn explains. “So, getting someone up to introduce this film as their favourite film and having a point of connection with why we should be watching this film tonight.”
Parker is nodding in agreement and adds “There’s such a nice feeling of someone picking out a film and being like, this is my favourite, you’re gonna sit down, we’re gonna watch it, and we’re gonna go to the pub and talk about it afterwards.”
One of the first films they screened was Peter Greenaway’s 1989 arthouse classic The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.
“It was incredible,” Flynn remembers. “Because some people were shocked by it. Some people loved it. Someone felt sick. Someone said ‘I don’t know if this was my kind of film, but I definitely enjoyed watching it with everyone.’ And I think that’s the biggest thing for us is, you’re not always going to like the film, but you’re going to like the experience. And I think a lot of people have sort of clued-in to that. They’re happy to just take their expectations and leave them at the door.”
Parker had a particularly memorable experience when she volunteered to lead a discussion following a screening of David Lynch’s 1997 psychological horror, Lost Highway — a film she had never seen before the screening.
“I had just watched Lost Highway and that’s a lot to process. And I kind of stood up in front of this audience of about 100 people and just didn’t know what to say. I was just dumbfounded because I had just had this out-of-body experience with this film.”
Another aspect of the screenings that Parker and Constantine feel that their young audiences really connect to is the extremely physical and non-digital qualities of projected film — the scratches on the screen, the dust marks, the splices. As Flynn explains, “It’s a new thing to us. We’re somewhat mystified by it. And I think having these screenings on the original medium, on 35 and 70mm film, it’s our way of connecting back with these mediums and actually getting an understanding and learning the physical chemistry of what makes up a film. I think it’s a very exciting, even thrilling thing for a young student.”
Bless. And I mean it. I may be in my mid-fifties, but I know what Parker and Flynn and their young audiences are feeling when the lights go down. For all my life I have loved film, the brief out-of-body transcendence it offers and the longing to connect with others it inspires. I’ve also had the chance to live film as a professional. I’ve seen how the sausage is made and, believe me, making something even mediocre is incredibly hard work. I’ve always thought that it is some kind of miracle when, despite everything that stands in its way, a film works, when it’s good, even great, when it connects with an audience and endures in their minds long beyond the closing credits. It’s not just a miracle — it’s a series of miracles long enough to make you believe in some sort of cinematic god.
I always enjoy seeing new pilgrims embark on their own search for these miracles. In particular, I love this generation’s curiosity. They have the smarts to know they’re missing out on something and they’re not wrong (on so many levels). First, they re-discovered polaroids, then vinyl, then cassettes and now it’s film’s turn. Don’t get me wrong, I doubt their interest is going to stop the onward digitisation of everything and everyone, or hold back the tsunami of regurgitated digital vomit AI is about to unleash on us all. But, for this brief moment, the act of sitting with one another, in a dark space, seeing, hearing and feeling the same compelling story, seems like it’s worth every little bit of time and effort it requires.
Back in New Farm Cinema and Sue and I are shuffling out of Furiosa. There were four other people in the cinema with us. The guy in the front row was asleep and both Sue and I concur with his review of the film. Maybe he was, like us, actually there to see Holy Mountain which is also just coming out. People are smiling, giggling, some are shaking their heads while others look fragile, emotional.
We meet up with Sue’s son, Noah, who is sparking with baffled excitement as he tries to describe a sequence depicting the conquest of South America using toads and lizards as stand-ins for the Spanish and the indigenous population. Noah is normally a quiet and shy young guy but right now he needs to talk about what he’s just seen.
He’s been up one of cinema’s holy mountains and nothing will be the same again.
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About the Author:
Anthony Mullins is a BAFTA and AWGIE award-winning screenwriter, author and playwright. The projects Anthony has written and directed have won numerous international awards including a Primetime Emmy, an International Digital Emmy, two BAFTAs, five Australian Writers’ Guild Awards and a Cannes Film Festival nomination. His play The Norman Mailer Anecdote was a finalist in the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award and premiered at Queensland Theatre in 2024. Anthony’s award-winning book on screenwriting, Beyond the Hero’s Journey (2021), is published by NewSouth Publishing.
