A collective of filmmakers originating from various parts of Australia shot 16mm film at the Aquarius Festival in May 1973. They worked with a modest grant from the Interim Council which was the forerunner to the Experimental Film and Television Fund that was being established at the time.
The idea to band together to make a group film was initiated at the Aquarius Film School held at Lawson in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. During this inspirational film school in January and February 1973, the idea to make a collective film during the Festival at Nimbin was discussed and plans were set in motion. The filmmakers wanted to get away from the standard approach to filmmaking by not having a single director or specifically assigned crew. Rather, the idea was that the available film stock was divided among us and we would each shoot our view of the Festival and then later combine everything together to make a group or collective feature film. Due to lack of funds this never happened as intended but several of the individual sections have survived and are presented as part of this archive.
The film "collective" was comprised of Peter Gray (Brisbane), Bronywn Barwell (Brisbane), Sam Meredith (Brisbane), Brendon Stretch (Sydney), John Moyle (Sydney), Diana Kearns (Sydney) and Andy Trenouth (Adelaide).
This film stream is from film-collective member Sam Meredith. Its 7 minutes long and uses a split screen technique for about 60% of the film. The audio he captured at the Festival is especially interesting.....
The original 16mm film was scanned to a full-aperature 2K DPX sequence (Digital Picture eXchange) with a resolutoion 2048 x 1556 pixels as an Archival Master for its long-term preservation.