‘twas Ava Gardener who famously, albeit apocryphally, stated that Melbourne was the ideal place to film the end of the world.

In 1959, it was something Barry Humphries might have said. Ironically, Barry appears in the marvellous documentary, THE LOST CITY OF MELBOURNE conducting an interview with Whelan the Wrecker, po faced in the demolisher’s dictum of laying waste to the past to make space for the future.

At the time, Melbourne was going through a cultural cringe, and there was a demolition derby going on with no sense of nostalgia.

1956 had brought television and with the onslaught of the TV set, the city saw the onset of the demise of cinema.

Magnificent picture palaces were levelled along with other achievements in architecture, the wrecker’s ball applied with reckless abandon. Another irony is that the demolition team became entertainers in their own right, putting on a show of aerobatic dismantling, no brash brick bashers here, rather brick slayers, dismantling mortar, concrete, timbers and glass with flair and some degree of care.

Melbourne was a brilliant vibrant city in the late 19th century, somewhat of a sleepy town in the mid 20th. Its awakening, unfortunately, was a rampant Godzilla-like path of destruction rather than a gentle regeneration.

Gus Berger’s film is fascinating, informative and outright fabulous, a phoenix of film archive rising from the ashes of cultural carnage, architectural vandalism and a final rally to preservation, a combined effort by a conservative government and a militant union movement.

There is a mournful sense of loss and yet THE LOST CITY OF MELBOURNE celebrates the missing while exulting the existing, an excavation of archival footage, an evocation of an age, an entertainment through and through.

THE LOST CITY OF MELBOURNE streams exclusively on DocPlay from 6th July 2023.

 

VIDEO – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGz5QX3muh0&

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGz5QX3muh0&