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‘Transcendence: A Cinema of Awe’, screening alongside GOMA’s winter exhibition ‘Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses’, brings together films that capture the sublime on the big screen.

These filmmakers ask some of the biggest questions we ponder: what makes us human, how do we transcend painful experiences, what does art move in us and what do we hold sacred. Featuring some of cinema’s most deep-thinking filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Carl Theodore Dreyer and Lars von Trier, their stories are often writ large through rapturous visuals inviting us to emerge from the cinema looking at the world anew.

Screenings will include Wim Wenders’s new film Perfect Days 2023 which dwells in the quiet profundity of cherishing daily living from the perspective of a Tokyo toilet cleaner, the arresting aesthetic language of Brimstone and Glory 2017 which begins as a documentary about a vibrant fireworks festival in Mexico and expands to encompass the importance of community connections and working together in pursuit of keeping cultural traditions alive, though to a silent film with live music - A Page of Madness 1926 - which boldly visualizes altered states and is recently restored by the National Film Archive of Japan.

Live Music & Film: A Page of Madness
11.00am, Sun 18 Aug | Event concluded

Teinsosuke Kinugasa's boldly experimental film follows an elderly man who has become a janitor at a psychiatric hospital to be near his mentally ailing wife. The film screens from a new 35mm restoration and features accompaniment by post-rock band hazards of swimming naked.

Live Music & Film: The Crowd
11.00am, Sun 29 Sep | Buy Tickets

A tale of the hopes and dreams of an ordinary couple struggling to stay together in an impersonal metropolis, The Crowd hints at the power of love and the possibility of redemption. Organist David Bailey provides live musical accompaniment the film on the Gallery’s 1929 Wurlitzer organ.

QAGOMA acknowledges the generous assistance of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Canberra; the Swedish Film Institute, Stockholm; the Danish Film Institute, Copenhagen; and the National Film Archive of Japan, Tokyo in providing materials for this program. Program curated by Rosie Hays, Australian Cinémathèque. Additional writing by Talor Marshall.