Featuring: Bill Mousoulis (V/O)

An essay film about the failure of post-modernism.
Bill Mousoulis: Abba, Michael Hutak, Bruce Springsteen, Julianne Phillips,
David Parkin, Alan Johnson, John Coleman, Roland Barthes, Belinda Carlisle.

HD, from Super 8 original
HD Restoration 2020, transfer by NanoLab

Reviews: "The thrust of this film - that the reflexivity of postmodernism, forseeing no future and believing in nothing, is a dead-end - is assembled in the film's central shot: an oval mirror on a brick wall reflecting another brick wall facing it - one dead-end reflecting another....... a philosophy that can only 'reflect' its own language can only end up returning to itself - and the mirror gives us the circularity in which all such discourses are obliged to frame themselves ...... the film is a symmetrical construction, the mirror-shot dividing it in the middle, with magazine iconography on either side and shots of a brick house and trees bracketing that; it begins and ends with pop-media noise ..... The wave that Bill gives in the mirror engulfs and erases the circle drawn by Hutak on his desolate beach."
                          - Mark C. Zenner, Super Eight, Sep 1988.

"I admire Mousoulis' narrative fiction but it is his essay films which are the most interesting for me. Knowing Me, Knowing You is so contained within its rhetoric, those of us in the audience can only wonder what he's getting at. It seems to be a direct reply to a Michael Hutak article "Moral Fiction" that appeared in On The Beach. Is Sydney the centre of the postmodern universe? I don't know but Mousoulis seems to think that those of us in Emerald City imagine it is. Mousoulis quotes from a variety of sources, binding it together with references to the ABBA song of the title .... As much as Mousoulis might deny it, the distance between a Hutak and a Mousoulis film is not that great. I believe that sincerity does not preclude irony, and irony is not synonymous with nihilism. Perhaps Mousoulis knows this, maybe we're talking about the same things, perhaps the emphasis is the difference. I hope Mousoulis continues with this series of films, possibly the most philosophically contained and interesting of its kind in Super-8."                      - Andrew Frost, Filmnews, Feb 1989.

Voted 6th Best Super-8 Film of 1988, Super-8 Yearbook, Feb 1989 (on 4 Top Ten lists).

Screenings: 8, including: 3rd Melbourne Super-8 Film Festival, Aug 1988; 9th Sydney Super-8 Film Festival, Nov 1988; Metro TV broadcast, Nov 1988; "20 Years of Hits and Misses", Nov 2002.