Mock On

Super 8 rises from the grave in the independent Brisbane epic A Grand Mockery.

This piece contains spoilers for A Grand Mockery.

Some time around the turn of the millennium, when I had almost but not quite given up on DIY filmmaking, I had a never-realised idea for one final short, to be titled Super 8: A Dying Medium. There would be no story, just a series of disjointed, ghostly images: telephone wires at dusk seen from the window of a moving car, interspersed with wide shots of a silhouetted figure digging a hole in a vacant block, in which some of the last ever rolls of Super 8 film would be buried.

Back then, the writing really did appear to be on the wall (Kodak stopped making sound Super 8 in 1997). But here we are in 2025, and here is A Grand Mockery, a compellingly peculiar Brisbane odyssey shot on Super 8 by the duo of Adam C. Briggs and Sam Dixon, which was awarded the top prize at Sydney’s SXSW film festival in late 2024 and at the time of writing is about to have its Melbourne premiere (along with Boogie Bobby, another recent microbudget feature from the prolific Briggs, this one shot digitally). And here’s Dixon himself, not a full-time actor but magnetic as the long-haired, weirdly-named artist-hero “Josie,” who inhabits a version of the present but could just as well be a 1990s slacker, or even a 1970s drop-out, and who is first seen shambling towards the camera in an out-of-focus long shot in a hillside cemetery, as if he himself had risen from the grave.

The idea of straddling the gap between eras is embedded in the form of A Grand Mockery, which retains its grainy, contrasty Super 8 look but was finished digitally and will screen that way, willed marginality nowadays being practical only to a point. This isn’t to say Super 8 as a stand-alone medium is as dead as I once assumed it was about to be, or even that it belongs intrinsically to the past. Still, aside from the increasing challenge of locating projectors or projectionists, the connotations of pastness and nostalgia attached to the medium remain hard to escape, as they already were in the 1990s, whether or not home movies were a significant part of your childhood (they weren’t in mine, though I knew in theory it was possible to screen them on a bedsheet draped over a clothesline in the backyard). Similarly inescapable is the association between Super 8 and amateurism—granting that some experimental filmmakers have exploited its possibilities with exquisite precision.

As for where A Grand Mockery sits on this latter spectrum, it would be foolhardy to think that Briggs, Dixon and their cinematographer Charlie Hillhouse are naïfs, or that the look they wound up with isn’t just what they were shooting for. Still, much of the film’s woozy quality stems from their flaunted indifference to polish even within the limits of the format, letting us understand the heavy shadows and blown-out highlights as indicative of the protagonist’s fragile state. An early shot shows Josie and a mate slumped with their beers before an offscreen TV in an otherwise darkened room; a blaring ad creates a strobing effect, shifting the image between three or four separate tonalities without visibly affecting the blankness of those looking on. On the other hand, the sound is clean and precise even where it seeks to disorient, setting the film apart from more truly amateurish local Super 8 epics of a previous era.

Within the fiction almost anything that smacks too much of the 2020s has been eliminated, in a manner too consistent not to be wilful (a stray reference to “Karens” is as contemporary as it gets). But the archetypes aren’t retro so much as timeless, starting with Josie’s all-Aussie blend of insolence and passivity, expressed through a croaky smoker’s voice, an intense gaze, and a broad-to-a-fault grin hinting at permanent distrust of himself and anyone else. Like his creators he’s something of an old soul, with his digital watch and his bent for writing handwritten letters in purple prose—though it’s his girlfriend Nelly, played by Brisbane rocker Kate “Babyshakes” Dillon, who seems to have assembled the household’s extensive vinyl collection. The letters are deposited at the cemetery to be retrieved by an unseen correspondent, supplying the pretext for Josie’s opening voiceover, delivered in a mordant tone that acknowledges his pretensions without apologising for them: “I marinate in the sunshine, and the salubrious secretions of the departed.”

The words “marinate” and “secretions” prefigure the kind of scatological imagery that proliferates in the later stages of A Grand Mockery, the kind of cultish object best-suited to a late-night audience primed for anything. But the phrasing also has the decorum employed throughout as a counterpoint to the lo-fi roughness and the gross-outs (another instance of this is the outstanding title, which would sit well alongside that of Cameron Worden’s still more abrasive The Idiot Faces Tomorrow on a double bill). Titlecards in the manner of silent cinema pop up semi-regularly, till the film forgets about this ploy in what appears to be a fit of stoned absent-mindedness: “AN ENTIRELY NEW AND MALEVOLENT ADDITION TO HIS FURNISHINGS,” runs one of these, accompanied by the very Brisbane hiss of cicadas. In bed with Nelly, Josie sentimentally reads to her from The Wind In The Willows, though she’s too tired to take much interest (their relationship, from everything we see, is more “wholesome” than outright passionate). Nelly’s musical tastes run to 19th-century salon music like Elgar’s mournful “Salut d’Amour,” which she plays on violin; their modest flat also has an upright piano and an open fireplace, where Josie insists on getting a roaring blaze going despite the heat.

Once upon a time, these two might have tried to squeak by on the dole, like the more clean-cut if also more openly rebellious and much hornier couple in Bill Mousoulis’ Lovesick, shot on 16-milimetre in early-2000s Melbourne. A generation on, that’s out of the question, so she teaches kindergarten while he works nights picking popcorn off the seats at the local arthouse (identifiable as part of the Palace chain). Whatever might be playing on a given night holds no great interest for him or for the filmmakers, although he has some off-colour stories about the things the punters get up to in the dark. We don’t see these for ourselves, but the groundwork has been laid for one or two comparably freaky sights later on; in the meantime, the setting is used to give us a sense of Josie’s distrust for the above-ground world, represented by his overly matey boss and by a patron determined to get a drink after the bar has closed. One of the film’s pull-quotes mentions Buñuel, but the balance of grotesquerie and realism is closer to the Polanski of Repulsion or The Tenant, leaving open the possibility that life truly is hell for anybody with the sensitivity to notice.

The balance is maintained for the film’s first half, where the emphasis is on portraiture more than narrative: what’s eating at Josie remains unclear, but we can sense his anxiety through his varied tics, including a habit of talking to himself and a near-constant need to steady his balance with a mug of cask wine or a cigarette. Dixon has acknowledged an autobiographical side to this, describing Josie as “a more extreme representation of my inner world” in an interview itself conducted via handwritten letters. While the film is no kind of documentary, in the early scenes especially the line between fiction and reality is frequently blurred (the supporting cast appears to be made up largely of non-professionals, with the painter Jim O’Leary playing a version of himself). By his own account, Dixon grew up on a farm in the Sunshine Coast region, a background that has informed his filmmaking since he started making shorts in the early 2010s—and while Josie may not share this exact biography, recognising his manner as that of a country kid in an urban context helps bring his outsider status into focus.

Part two is when the demons take over. For a period Josie drops out of the story, letting the agitated Nelly replace him in the foreground (all in all, it can’t be said that her character is hugely fleshed out). Subsequently he resurfaces in what I took at first to be a series of flashbacks dramatising the contents of a cache of documents passed on by his former penpal, in the manner of an epistolary novel (Briggs has mentioned Frankenstein and Dracula as influences). Characters and scenes recur from the first half of the film, but are cast in a more lurid psychosexual light, suggesting that Josie is reimagining his mundane life for the benefit of his correspondent. But this interpretation makes only limited sense of the range of elements included to ramp up the weirdness: the Cronenbergian growth Josie develops around his neck, the bursts of stuttering editing as if the film had jammed in an imagined projector, and the goofy American alter ego that takes over the narration, sounding like the Muppet version of Nicolas Cage.

Trying too hard to rationalise any of this would go against the spirit of a tale which isn’t told so much as spewed forth: the simple explanation is that Josie is in the throes of alcoholic delirium, and that nothing makes sense because it isn’t supposed to. Still, the irrationality remains carefully patterned, at best more in the manner of David Lynch than Ari Aster (there’s something especially Lynchian about how Josie’s favourite checkered mug from the early scenes reappears later on). The key may lie in the ramblings early on of one of Josie’s dubious male friends, as they nestle together after sharing a joint: “I could actually be sitting here by myself. You may not actually be here.” That ties in most directly with Josie’s visits to his nearly mute granddad, who really is only half there, forcing Josie to work doubly hard to keep up both ends of the conversation. But from there it’s only a short step to a wider range of existential riddles: did “Sal,” the recipient of Josie’s handwritten screeds, ever really exist? Are Josie and Nelly hallucinating each other?

The answers remain out of reach—which, as in most such cases, is for the best. Likewise unresolvable is the question of what Big Theme A Grand Mockery is centrally concerned with. The cultural cringe? Heterosexuality in crisis? A voyage through the afterlife? Perhaps it’s a little of all three, in which case we haven’t wandered as far as we might have supposed from the mainstream of Australian cinema since Wake in Fright. It’s the Super 8 of it all that keeps the movie in the margins, enacting a yearning to escape the confines of the present, while implying that a romance with the past might be equally a dead end. Lest we get carried away thinking of Josie as a ghost who walks, when he speaks late in the piece about wanting to “quit this paltry misery” he’s adamant he doesn’t mean suicide: he might mean getting out of the country, or away from masculinity as ordinarily conceived (the new lover he’s addressing is pointedly androgynous).

Still, his hero’s journey culminates in an apparently conclusive farewell, plunging headfirst into a remote stream and letting the waters close over him, his alter ego on the soundtrack having signed off with a gonzo final monologue involving masturbating trolls and golden showers from forest nymphs. The camera lingers till the ripples subside, as if reassuring us that no edition of him will resurface. Or is all this the fantasy of a passed-out drunk, destined to awaken next day in a pool of his own piss? Conservative in an honourable sense, A Grand Mockery prompts the suspicion that nothing is ever truly dead as long as it can be recycled, whether we take this as reassuring or the reverse.

A Grand Mockery will screen in Melbourne and Sydney in May 2025 as part of the Fantastic Film Festival Australia (see link for details). The Melbourne premiere of Boogie Bobby (with live score) will be at Miscellania on 7pm on Thursday May 1, presented by Dogmilk.