There will be a Giant Outdoor Cinema at the Fourteenth Meredith, in a magical grove of manna gums, with the natural canopy high overhead just sparse enough for the twinkling stars to shine through. Whats showing? That would be stuff that turned left at the lights, planted the foot and ripped the rear view mirror off, and then ate it.

It’s called the Outlands Ecoplex Cinema, and will be at the edge of Bush Camping, in the area known as ‘Africa’. It will consist of a giant 6m x 6m screen purpose built between two ancient eucalypts, a six-speaker Super-Sonorama surround audio experience (which when coupled with Ultravision 3D effects and glasses will REALLY put you in the picture), and the action will be projected by vintage 16mm gear out of a 1978 Jayco SuperTourer Caravan (with annex).

So! Peel yr peepers for the finest, freakiest cinema of these and other dimensions…the Lumpen Intelligentsia posse hauls its caravan of subterranean celluloid dreams to the Outlands Ecoplex Cinema at the 2004 Meredith Music Festival... Unspooling from lobe-enhancing 16mm film, this misremembered riot of wayback japery privileges the maverick margins of creative animation, and an indigenous insania of lysergic lensing! The Buzz Is In The Bush this December – Outlands Ecoplex is screening a gorgeous new print of 1974 monsterpiece The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in company of the unintentional horrorshow of ‘50s promotional shorts for sawmill safety and the logging industry! Plus: selected films in optically-enhanced extra-dimensional ULTRAVISION!!!

In addition to their regular ‘iSOSceles’ program of screenings around Melbourne, the Lumpen Intelligentsia Film Society have hosted the Melbourne screenings of Jaimie Leonarder’s (The Movie Show, SBS) Mu-Meson Archives, coordinated an Australian tour by US cartoonist/musician/animator Dame Darcy, and provided local audiences their introduction to the work of French surrealist natural history filmmaker Jean Painleve. The Pink Flamingo Bar was their screening venue for the 2001 Meredith Festival - this year they pioneer the sympathetic gumnut ambience of the Outlands Ecoplex Cinema!

OUTLANDS ECOPLEX CINEMA - PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS

OPTICALLY ENHANCED 3-D ULTRAVISION!!!
Only 3-D ULTRAVISION with SUPER-SONORAMA provides you that “you-are-in-the-middle-of-it-all” effect... Accept no substitutes! (not available in indoor hardtop -type cinemas - exclusive to the Outlands Ecoplex...)

ORSTRALIAN ANOMALIES:
- an episode of the Phoenix5 TV series (1969 Melbourne production conceived as “the Australian Star Trek”...) with the dodgiest robots ever broadcast at a unconvinced audience...

* Lynsey Martin’s Leading Ladies - pinnacle of underground experimentalism from the freak margins of then-time flower power, a rigorous and beautifully realised joke on the convention of ‘China Dolls’ that preface numbered film leader... Totally destroyed, & among the very best shorts ever produced in Australia, youbetcha!

* Hospitals Don’t Burn Down - Director Brian Trenchard-Smith is both celebrated & reviled as the evil genius behind the 1982 feature, Turkey Shoot (“I walked out when Linda Stoner got speared through the left norg...” - Philip Adams), but the most accomplished and notorious of his early shorts is this OH&S informational gone graphically, gruesomely wrong... Think The Towering Inferno in the style of Mad Max!

* Will The Great Barrier Reef Cure Claude Clough? - this 1967 short is to Qld tourism what Fred Schepisi’s One Hundred Odd Years From Now was to Mildura sultanas! Delirious & swinging, and part of a secret history of Australian cinema that demands to be enjoyed by contemporary audiences!

THE iSOSceles TV PARTY

* Plastic Man (animated), “Plastic Man meets the Disco Mummy”
Plas' nemesis is a re-animated fatal femme, with a dual passion for jewellery theft and booty shaking! And this shapely Aztec zombie has unwholesome designs on our elastic hero…

* The Beverly Hillbillies, “Cool School Is Out”
- Granny, Ellie-Mae & Jethro get hepped to the beatnik stylings of their new friends, till Jed decides to blow their scene…

* The Monkees, “Art For Monkee's Sake”
Among the pre-fab four's finest - ridiculous, hilarious - moments. Fruit of a lysergic imagination, episode 37 hails from the anarchic second (final!) series, and exploits the superabundant absurdity of 'modern art' for delightfully comic ends... Watch Mike collapse with helpless laughter during the Liberace bit!

EMBELLISHED WITH:

* pre-seasonal Yuletide festivations, by way of classic ‘50s short animations from Art Gumby Clokey and the Czech maestro, Karel Zeman!

* early shorts from Jim Henson - more inspired bread-work for his 1960s “IBM Coffee Break Series”...see: the anarchy unloosed by the Cookie Monster onna caffeine jag, plus then some!

* hip-shaking, sin-quaking bellydance and Bollywood routines!

* PLUS A WHOLE BUNCH ELSE! All on lobe-enhancing 16mm!!!