Martyn Pedler

LIVE IN THE STUDIO

Discussing popular culture on screens big and small at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). Most recently: Loveable Murderers.

“It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.” So Clint Eastwood drawled in Unforgiven. So why do we open our hearts to Dexter Morgan as he butchers another victim and winks at the camera? Join writer and pop-culture critic Martyn Pedler for a look film and television’s loveable monsters, maniacs and killers. From Watchmen’s creepy Rorschach to gruff ol’ Tony Soprano and everyone’s favourite heroic torturer, 24′s Jack Bauer, Pedler asks how it is that the Dexters of popular culture make us overlook their obvious psychological deficiencies and love them – blood splatters and all.

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Earlier Live In The Studio group panels at ACMI include Dead Set: Zombie TV, Vampires Buffed and Fanged, and a Twin Peaks marathon. 

You can read an extended remix of my Twin Peaks talk, and ACMI have audio of some Live In The Studio sessions here.

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HALFWAY TO NEW YORK

Midair thoughts on Looney Tunes, Franz Kafka, Transformers, and Australia’s relationship with the end of the world as a catalogue essay for Simon O’Carrigan’s short film The Petrol Can Rider, 2009.

As I write this, I’m hanging improbably in the air. The map that appears when I press a button on the armrest says I’m almost exactly halfway between Australia and my destination on the other side of the world. Looking closer – the map is unreassuringly staticky – I see that the familiar outline of home has disappeared altogether from the margins of the map.

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Read the full text.

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MELBOURNE, AND OTHER MYTHS

“Melbourne.  Maybe it’s not where you think.” A multimedia exhibition combining text, photography, animation, and more at the City Museum at Old Treasury, 8 March – 25 May 2008.

Bear witness to the lives of three Melbourne eccentrics as they explain their unique visions of the city. Through the stories of these odd characters, illustrated with sounds, images and curious artefacts, the exhibition explores Melbourne’s urban myths and impossible secrets. Other surprises – some fact, some fiction – will leave unsuspecting visitors seeing familiar landmarks in peculiar new ways.

Melbourne, and Other Myths combines the work of acclaimed Melbourne writer Martyn Pedler and animations from screen collective TAPE Projects, pollinated with still photography from three of Melbourne’s leading photographers. These disparate ingredients coalesce in a bizarre, at times hallucinatory journey through the secret histories of Melbourne, where the authenticity of the museum – and perhaps the very fabric of the city itself – is thrown into question.

Concept Curator: Martyn Pedler
Exhibition curator: Simon Gregg
Animators: Lorraine Heller-Nicholas, Simon O’Carrigan, Jackie Felstead
Photographers: Saskia Pandji Satki, Justin Ridler, Tamara Watt
Sound design: Michael Prior

Download PDFs of the three texts that inspired the exhibition, in publications designed by Chase and Galley:

A Perfect Empty Street (90kb)

Be Famous and Die (75kb)

No Magicians (2.6mb)

And read The Age feature on the exhibition here.

This project is supported by the 2008 City of Melbourne Arts Grant Program and City Museum at Old Treasury.

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FW MURNAU’S NOSFERATU: A SYMPHONY OF HORROR

Commentary for Madman’s Directors Suite DVD of Murnau’s classic (with Saige Walton).

The blurb: “As unsettling as it is beautiful, FW Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror is one of the highlights of German expressionist cinema, and has remained one of the most influential horror films of all time. Directors Suite is proud to present this iconic 1922 horror film, painstakingly restored by Germany’s Wilhem-Friedrich-Murnau-Stiftung.”

Order the DVD here (if you dare).