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The next big things in comedy, theatre, dance, art, film and music feature in a packed programme

Every September the Melbourne Fringe festival lurches over the horizon. Last year, 3400 independent artists mounted shows in more than 147 venues across Melbourne, ranging across visual arts, film, music and every kind of performance you could shake a stick at. And then there's the after-show parties at the Fringe Club and the Warren. Between now and 6 October, you need never go home.

The Fringe is proudly open access, so make it part of your schedule to see some artists you've never heard of before: they might be the next big thing. Choosing among hundreds of acts is tough, but I screwed up my courage, plunged into the programme and excavated some promising acts. Here, in no particular order, are my top 10 picks.

Yes Dance

Choreographer Rennie McDougall is one of the up-and-coming talents of the Melbourne dance scene.

Working on and scanning through Bad Lit’s Underground Film Timeline periodically, I am continually struck and impressed by the strong efforts of a certain, key few individuals who have both set down an official historical course and have charted a definitive future for avant-garde and experimental film. Without these individuals’ efforts, perhaps there would not be a history for me to attempt to chronicle on this website.

Typically, these individuals have worn multiple hats in their artistic careers, serving as filmmakers, curators, lecturers, journalists and such. While much of their work was about promoting underground film as a valid and to-be-respected art form, there is also a strong component — if not a guiding component — of self-preservation.

That is not to imply a disparagement on their accomplishments as being merely self-serving, but the survival of the one does lead to a survival of the many. That is, if one can...

A lot of hay has been made lately about the future of Netflix streaming movies over the Internet for its subscribers as opposed to their original business model of being a mail-order DVD rental service. A good recent article on the subject was written by Chuck Tryon, who waded through all the hype and arguments against to try to figure out what impact Internet streaming of movies has on the movie industry.

Well, forget about the industry for the moment. How is Netflix streaming affecting the underground filmmaker?

Personally, I’m not a Netflix subscriber, so wading through their offerings is a bit more difficult for me. However, I was still curious if the company was streaming any underground movies. To find out if they were, I ended up searching a website called Instant Watcher, which is a company independent of Netflix, but uses a Netflix developer Api to scan...

In the fall of 1946, Frank Stauffacher mounted a major, and very influential, retrospective of avant-garde film in the U.S. at the San Francisco Museum of Art. The series was called “Art in Cinema” and it featured ten different programs from filmmakers in the U.S., France, Germany and Canada.

By the mid-’40s, the avant-garde hadn’t taken a strong hold in the U.S. yet, so the majority of the films screened came from Europe, or by Europeans who relocated to the U.S. However, by that time also, the European avant-garde had pretty much completely petered out. Still, Stauffacher wanted to show that there was a continuity to avant-garde film history that, up until that point, had yet to be fully considered.

In conjunction with the series, the San Francisco Museum of Art published a catalog, pretty much like one would find with any major art exhibit.

First the history, then the list:

In 1969, Jerome Hill, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas decided to open the world’s first museum devoted to film. Of course, a typical museum hangs its collections of artwork on the wall for visitors to walk up to and study. However, a film museum needs special considerations on how — and what, of course — to present its collection to the public.

Thus, for this film museum, first a film selection committee was formed that included James Broughton, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney, plus, for a time, Stan Brakhage. This committee met over the course of several months to decide exactly what films would be collected and how they would be shown. The final selection of films would come to be called the The Essential Cinema Repertory.

The Essential Cinema Collection that the committee came up with consisted of about 330 films.