Islands in the Stream Static Vision’s Remedy for Lockdown Loneliness

Australia’s cultural sector is on life support – but admirable attempts to take events online have proliferated, to varying degrees of success. Sadly, a combination of readily available machinery and the misguided promise that the digital space offers to non-native organisations has meant that these are regularly bland and sometimes awkward affairs – and very rarely a match for the infinite, actually edited content already available through streaming services. It’s rare to see anyone doing anything interesting with the medium into which they have been thrust (with notable exceptions being the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ ‘Together in Art’ online labyrinth and Prototype’s video-art ‘care packages’¹ ). Static Vision, a formerly Sydney-based film collective formed in 2018 and run by 28-year-olds Felix Hubble and Conor Bateman, has, however, nimbly stepped into this sparse canyon by broadcasting a series of interactive livestreams that have collectively ended up a much bigger and more ambitious project than their offline output.

Before COVID-19 hit, Static Vision ran monthly screenings focusing on new, formally exciting cinema that was not getting a Sydney release. Often, these films would come to the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) but be bypassed by the more mainstream Sydney Film Festival (SFF). Several sold-out screenings of Bi Gan’s astonishing Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018) and the Australian premiere of RaMell Ross’ Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) – the latter organised prior to its Oscar Best Documentary nomination – are good examples of the collective’s programming instincts. These monthly screenings formed the backbone of a schedule that would otherwise