Page 19 - 2015-09

, a Sydney-set feature from set feature film, , based on
1927, was rediscovered and then the still extant and popular Fatty Finn
screened by members of the Sydney Uni- comic strip.
versity Film Group in the early 1950s. The
Kid Stakes will be presented in its re- SUFG swung into starry-eyed action.
mastered digital format for members of Founded in 1947 as an offshoot of the
the Australian Academy of Cinema and Sydney University Visual Arts Society (in
Television Arts (the industry) and mem- effect, arts and architecture students), the
bers of the partner body, the Australian Group was as much about the mystique of
Film Institute (the cineasts) in Sydney on cinema art as the S.U. Film Society (mainly
the 10th of August this year. engineering students) was about coaxing
and tinkering with the projectors in the old
Union Hall. In its first few years Group
membership had been lifted by a series of
acquisitional coups with rare films like The
Queen of Spades, Riefenstahl’s Olympia
and Carne’s thought-lost Le Jour Se Leve.
The Group had spirit and energy in addi-
tion to organizing and promotional skills.

Taken from the program of the SUFG –
Third Term, 1954
A law student obtained old Mr Tayler’s
signature releasing the tea-boxes of film
lengths. Medical student John Jackson
Morris, also smitten by the film at that
News-Luxe show, took over the Rayco-
1953: it was an early morning session at phone projector in the kitchen of the
the News-Luxe on Pitt St in Sydney (1). treasurer of Sydney Scientific Film Society,
Jack Kennedy. They stuck the bits togeth-
The images in the two-reel comedy we’d er as seemed sensible, since nobody had
just seen had been stunning, as was the actually recorded how the excerpting had
realization that this old film mattered. been done.
Stumbling out into the foyer with me was
another member of Sydney University Film
Group (SUFG), Neil MacPhillamy. In that
moment, an implicit pact was formed.
The manager of that most lively of the
newsreel cinemas was Phil Jones, a
showman from a show business family.
One afternoon we went in a creaking lift
up to the rooftop of City Tattersall's Club
where Gerald D. Tayler had his bunker
of much ancient and some recent (but
obscure) nitrate celluloid. That two-reel-
er we’d seen had been lifted from the
best parts of a couple of prints that
revealed itself to us as the 1927 Sydney-

REEL DEALS September 2015 19