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Clip description
The camera tracks across the wreckage of the previous night’s party, over debris and bodies, to arrive at Jane (Vera Plevnik) crying in the backyard. Karli (Tracy Mann) wakes up beside Shadow (Ian Gilmour) who is sick of hearing Vera crying every morning. Jackie (Julie Barry), a nurse, hocks her camera as Ellen (Moira MacLaine-Cross) looks for a job. Karli drives across town to see her dad. Night falls on the city.
Curator’s notes
This is the opening sequence, and it begins with a memorable single take that sets up the style – grungy comedy that can turn tragic very quickly. Keenan introduces his key characters in a few seconds of economical observation – Karli the compassionate one, Jackie the sardonic one, Jane the depressed one and Ellen the eccentric. The tunnel shot announces the end of daylight and introduces a sense of excitement, achieved by a subtle speeding up of the shot.
After Vera Plevnik was killed in a car accident in 1982, James Reyne, lead singer of Australian Crawl, contacted Keenan and asked if the band could see the rough cut of the movie. Reyne was a close friend of Plevnik. The band spent a day in a studio, recording two tracks for the movie, as a kind of memorial. They appear in the credits as The Park Rats, rather than Australian Crawl.
