About

French artist Pierre Bismuth is popularly known for his role as co-author of the screenplay for the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for which he earned an Academy Award in 2005. He has exhibited widely across Europe and the United States since the early 1990s and will have his first exhibition in Australia at GoMA. Renowned for his deft and often mischievous manipulation of cultural products such as cinema and the print media, Bismuth's show at GoMA will focus on a group of video works that humorously deconstruct the conventions of feature film. Complementing the exhibition in the Media Gallery will be screenings of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Passenger at the Australian Cinémathèque.

List of Works

• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 2004 | Director: Michel Gondry
• The Passenger 1975 | Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
• Exhibition programs
• Lecture: Walt Disney and Utopian Visions
• 2:00pm Saturday 17 May
• Cinema B GoMA
• Presented by Associate Professor Angela Ndalianis, Head of Screen Studies, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne
• Pierre Bismuth's desire to disturb expected reactions to works of art – as witnessed in The Jungle Book Project (2002) – becomes a starting point through which to explore Walt Disney's own approach to his art. With the opening of Disneyland in 1955, Disney transformed his animated worlds and characters into 3-dimensional spaces that individuals could walk into and interact with. In doing so, he created what he and many urban planners considered to be a utopian space. Disney's obsession with urban planning would culminate in his later vision of a utopian community – Project X – which remained unrealised due to his death but which was revised into the theme park EPCOT (Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow) and the town Celebration. This talk will explore Disney's work and his filmic understanding of urban planning, which came to influence contemporary architects such as Jon Jerde and the design of cities including Las Vegas.