FILM BUFFS FORECAST : a personal ramblection

Three things came true about Melbourne. It was cold. There were trams. People cared about the life they led and those around them. That last one was important. I'd come from the Brisbane of the SEQEB dispute (Google it) and whatever sense of city there had been was pressed into gutter mud. We lived in our houses in a place. Melbourne was a city and felt like a community: hangover-bloating barkers at the Vic Market, genuinely funny tram conductors, pubs that roared with the living, bafflingly tribal sport fandom, and radio stations that made you feel part of everything. That was immediately noticeable: the talk.

I sampled all of them, the community-based stations, because they all felt like open windows. There had been an exciting tension to 4ZZZ's hot politics and exploratory pursuit of the life in the shadows of culture but the Melbourne stations, unburdened of the near totalitarian conditions of the deep north, could talk about so much more and did. Support of the constantly spiky and compelling local music scene was unquestioned and expected but the hours of comics, zines, theatre, literature and contemporary life not so much. There was even sport! (In the Brisbane of the early '80s you could be alternative or care about sport: binary. So it was never on 4ZZZ and to this day I can't tell you a damned thing about football.) And then there was film.

I was a recently graduated BA in a degree heavy with movies. I was a snob about it but that was draining from me the more I saw of film outside of a range of directors (which included Jean Luc Godard and .... well, just him, really). I learned to recall how much I loved the cinema outside of its intense political uses. Melbourne had a lot of cinemas. The arthouses alone seemed to number as many as indy rock venues and were as crowded. In my first month I saw Ray Lawrence's Bliss at the then new (now vanished) Russell and Orson Welles's version of The Trial at the old Valhalla. I was a Welles fan and knew the Kafka film from a few stills and a chapter of commentary at uni and considered it effectively lost. With both old and new so accessible the city seemed genuinely fabulous, paradisical.

Saturdays began late as we were always hungover. We'd make it to the markets after eleven, come back laden with goodness and bash together a big fried breakfast with a lot of coffee and the papers. The radio went on and Film Buffs Forecast came out. At that time the team was John Flaus and Paul Harris and they did something I hadn't heard before on any media show about cinema: they talked. I mean they talked like they were in the kitchen with us. It might have been something contemporary like Kiss of the Spider Woman or vintage like Night and Fog but the talk was gapless, often so enthusiastic that it felt like eavesdropping on the awkward conflict that only happens between friends.

Their interviews were similarly conversational, a literal exchange of views, and could draw out any guest (except director Ian Pringle whose responses were as sparse as his films' dialogue and allowed me to notice him audibly lighting a cigarette with a match and who was described while still in the room as not so much an expressionist interviewee as an impressionistic one). The conversation went for two hours on a Saturday afternoon and I left it with my head buzzing with references and notes to myself. Bugger the forging of prose fiction that day. I'd usually just go for a walk around Royal Park and digest everything.

The other thing was film music. They played music from the movies they were talking about or others they just liked or were somehow related. Flaus and Harris talked about that, too. It was the era of arthouse soundtracks in the record collection. Everyone had a copy of something like the Betty Blue or Paris Texas discs which became the dinner music of the time as we eased into our twenties and started affording things like dinner parties. But to have it on the radio along with talk of the movies themselves was bliss. It formed a kind of 3D cube from the speakers, a construction that included interviews with the filmmakers but also composers, editors, writers, cinematographers, stunt people and so on which constructed the world behind the screen and the scaffolding around the ideas and the practice. And inside, where the pictures rolled past and the music played and the voices spoke was a house with many mansions. That seems a lot to give a couple of hours of chat and tunes but all that's missing from the description is the purpose of the exercise, the source point and continued pursuit of quality. It's not the entertainment value (the show is frequently hilarious with off the cuff quipping) and it isn't the vast command of subject that Paul Harris and his varying cast of co-hosts have provided over the decades. It's not even the unflagging cinephilia. It's something more essential. It's community.

Film Buffs Forecast appears to have had its future pulled. And recent conversations and exchanges on social media have spoken up about this and many of them are quick to point out that thirty-six years of the show constitutes an inviolable tradition. Well, I guess so but I know that it needs only one administrative new broom to remind us that all things come to an end. However unjust it might seem that person will always say that secure that they come off as boldly forward thinking. It's too vulnerable an appeal for me. You can never argue against change. You can, however, argue for something that survives change, slowing like Ol' Man River beneath and beside the most brutalising change. So, to buggery with tradition, I want want I had and should still be able to claim: give me my community. Commitment to community is the thing that makes my annual re-subscription a no brainer. Community is what makes listening to 3RRR so engaging, after all this time I still feel a sense of belonging to something outside of my life of work, social circles and leisure; outside but also within. It's permanent but portable ... well it was permanent. Things must change? Sure, but ditching Film Buffs for a music show is like buying out a Fitzroy bookshop to put another cafe on Brunswick St. Well, I still live in Fitzroy but I make my coffee at home these days.