AFW + NFSA #77: Albie Thoms’ Marinetti (1969)

7:30PM Tuesday 26 May 2026
The Brunswick Green, 313/315 Sydney Rd, Brunswick
$10 on the door. 16mm projection

AFW Presents Marinetti (1969)
85 mins
Directed by: Albie Thoms
Cinematography and Editing by: David E. Perry
Sound by: John Sangster

Albie Thoms (1941-2012) was one of the founders of Ubu Films and Sydney Filmmakers Co-Op, organisations pivotal to the formation of avant-garde and experimental filmmaking in Australia. Thoms made three feature films and a handful of shorts, many in collaboration with fellow co-op members. Not only was he pivotal in the production of alternative films of the counter-cultural decades but he wrote extensively on art, cinema, cinema as art, and on the political contexts in which these forms exist, thus contributing extensively to Australia’s film history too. The only feature film to come out of Ubu’s founding members, Marinetti (1969) is in some sense the apotheosis of Ubu’s work, perhaps the first example of avant-garde cinema in Australia, and a point in which the possibilities of counter-cultural practice were first truly realised in cinematic form in this country. 

Marinetti may be seen to emerge from some of the ideals of Italian futurist Filippo Tomasso Marinetti. A fascist and Mussolini sympathiser, Marinetti wanted to detach art and Italian cultural life from the weight of its own history and sought to achieve a frenetic, technologically-driven, industrious and what he deemed ‘violent’ movement. Thoms’ film was made at a time where the desire for change in countercultural circles in Australia and around the world was embedded in liberatory and pluralistic ideals rather than the rigid notions synonymous with nationalism and what came to be an early 20th century marred by fascism. If there are parallels to the person Marinetti and Thoms’ Marinetti they exist in the desire for change in the world through artistic expression. Thoms’ Marinett is futurist in its embrace of film’s many potential forms. It explores multiple exposures, colour filters, alternate frame rates, scratches and diary filmmaking. The sound’s experimental jazz is an apt supplement to its sprawling aesthetic, bookended by a last murmur of narration that reminds us perhaps of Albie’s intention for his film and life at large: to ‘enjoy, enjoy, enjoy’. Marinetti is a reminder of what once was and still is possible in cinematic expression and experimentation.

“Has there ever been a more outrageous film than Marinetti (Albie Thoms, 1969) made in Australia?” Bill Mousoulis

Read more about Marinetti and Albie Thoms in the Senses of Cinema dossier: https://www.sensesofcinema.com/category/albie-thoms/

Screens with AFW member Lucinda Eva-May’s Irma’s Strawberries’ (2024)
8 mins
Beginning as a chance encounter of filming a friends first visit to his great-grandparents grave, developed into a fascination with a tapestry of strawberries his great-grandmother, Irma, made. This film explores the ways things from the past exist and become reinvented in the present.