'Medieval to Metal: Rockumentary Film Series'

To celebrate the Art Gallery of Ballarat’s Medieval to Metal exhibition, the Ballaarat Mechanics’ Institute is screening three iconic rock films in our historic Minerva Theatre. Clear your palette of the recent serving of slick music documentaries with two quintessential films of the ‘direct cinema’ genre, and the mockumentary that parodies them!

In Dont Look Back (1967), D.A. Pennebaker documents Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England, which opens with Dylan flipping cards with the lyrics to Subterranean Homesick Blues, considered one of the first ‘music videos’.

We go to 11 with cult mockumentary This is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984), which parodies its direct cinema predecessors in a film Dave Grohl dubbed “the only rock movie worth watching.”

In Gimme Shelter (1970), the Maysles brothers are ‘flies on the wall’ to the Rolling Stones’ 1969 American tour, which culminates in murder at the Altamont Free Concert, an event which marked the spiritual end of the 1960’s.

To celebrate the Art Gallery of Ballarat’s Medieval to Metal exhibition, the Ballaarat Mechanics’ Institute is screening three iconic rock films in our historic Minerva Theatre.

The full schedule for this series can be found on the BMI website.

This event takes place on Wadawurrung Country. The Ballaarat Mechanics' Institute acknowledges the Wadawurrung People of the Kulin Nation as the first inhabitants and Traditional Custodians of the lands where we work, learn and create. Always Was, Always Will Be, Aboriginal Land.