The Film Programs unit was thrilled and delighted to welcome Tim Burton to ACMI’s (sold out) Cinema 1 on Friday June 25 to introduce a screening of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Burton’s feature film debut from 1985.
Pee Wee kicked off the Tim Burton Film Retrospective screening at ACMI in tandem with Tim Burton: the Exhibition.
Tim Burton Retrospective cinema slide. ACMI ♥ Tim Burton
One of the few consolations of having a vaguely obsessive-compulsive relationship to film is that keeping a film ‘log’ over some years – as I’m prepared to admit I still do – allows me to check my memory of cinematic encounters with particular films against a hard-and-fast list.
And so, a glance at said list reassuringly confirms that my imagination isn’t playing tricks on me and that I did, indeed, meet a rowdy group of friends to see Mars Attacks! in the very much missed Village Centre on Bourke Street in March 1997, kick off a new decade in January 2000 by seeing Sleepy Hollow at the ‘new’ Valhalla in Westgarth and, more recently, don 3D glasses to experience Alice in Wonderland in Xtremescreen surrounds on March 5 this year.
ACMI Film Programmer Roberta Ciabarra introduces Tim Burton. Who else recalls seeing Pee Wee’s Big Adventure for the first time in an age before Digital Versatile Discs?
My log only reaches back as far as 1996 and so there are no verifiable entries for my first encounters with Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice and Pee Wee’s Big Adventure: films that I nonetheless have extremely fond, reasonably well-defined memories of seeing in cinemas about town. (Was it Albert Einstein who said that imagination was more important than knowledge? He has a point…)
For example, I remember buying what must have been one of the very last tickets to a sold-out matinee of Batman at a city multiplex and being forced to crane my neck at an uncomfortably clumsy angle from my aisle seat (right hand side!) in the very front row. Sort of like having an extremely low-fi IMAX experience before the technology was perfected!
Tim becomes characteristically animated as he responds to questions from an enraptured audience.
But back to reassuring dates and places: a well-thumbed copy of the 1994 Melbourne International Film Festival program vouches for the fact that I did see The Nightmare Before Christmas for the first time at Melbourne’s grand ol’ Astor Theatre as part of a MIFF celebration of animation. (If memory serves, Burton was expected to attend the festival as a special guest…or was that in 1995, when Ed Wood had its local premiere as part of that year’s MIFF, on Johnny Depp’s 32nd birthday, no less?!)
Spying some of the talented teens selected as winning tour guides in ACMI’s nationwide search as they were excitedly milling about in anticipation of their meeting with Tim Burton a few weeks ago brought home to me that many of Burton’s most ardent and engaged fans are too young to have had many of the experiences that I’ve recounted.
It made me curious about their first encounters with Burton’s films and how their own connections with his cinematic universe were (literally) framed. One teen recounted in her audition tape that a favourite aunt had bought her a DVD of The Nightmare Before Christmas for her 3rd birthday. (Sparents rule!) Another entrant proudly explained that she had seen all of Burton’s films, except for Sleepy Hollow and Sweeney Todd which, her parents had promised her, she would be allowed to see once she reached her next birthday.
Tim shared - and illustrated! - anecdotes about woolly mammoths, shooting on the Warner Bros back-lot, bad tour guides, and a band called Oingo Bongo, among others.
The nature of spectatorship is a dynamic one in the face of ever-evolving technologies and viewing platforms but I have a fairly sure sense that those Burton fans born in or some time after 1994 carry their connections to and engagement with Burton’s films as deeply, as vividly and as affectionately as those of us who are ‘old enough’, and lucky enough perhaps, to have experienced his films in first release.
Roberta Ciabarra, Film Programmer, ACMI Film Programs
Photography: Rebecca Rocks
Well done Roberta. Enjoyed this piece and look forward to many more Roberta-driven curatorial moments.
Shame you didn’t keep you diary back in the 80s, Roberta! I don’t remember the first time I saw Beetlejuice, but I remember Mandy’s. She went to the Faraday cinema to see it alone when it first came out and she was the only person in the audience. She asked them if she should leave, and they said no, we were waiting for you! Don’t know why I remember that so vividly. Josh was born in 1996 and he’s a huge fan of Mr Burton’s – so far he’s seen them all except Beetlejuice. He thinks he’s incredibly lucky to be able to see so many films in so many different platforms. By the way, I’ve never felt the need to censor him – although Tim Burton’s films are about the least violent of the movies he watches.
Julia xx
I’m pretty sure I saw “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure” for the first time at the Village Centre in Burke Street. It was either at the Hoyts Cinema Centre or the Hoyts MidCity that I saw “Beetlejuice”. (Gee, they’re all gone now aren’t they) Can’t quite remember which. Digital Versatile Discs -have to put my hand up there. And laser discs!