The Beauty Yet to Come and the Beauty Lost Forever

The 14th edition of MIASTOmovie, Poland’s only film festival dedicated to architecture, urban planning and urban issues, will focus on the wishes we make for our cities: how they might come true, but also what consequences their fulfilment may bring. The festival programme will comprise seven films, each associated with one of seven specific wishes: moderation, beauty, community, safety, greenery, health and “the fulfilment of all dreams”. Each film will offer a constructive proposal for how a particular wish for urban space might be fulfilled. Together, they will outline realistic scenarios for change while examining not only their potential benefits and successes, but also the costs and risks that must be considered when attempting to turn such dreams into reality.

The opening film of the 14th edition responds to the “wish for beauty”. It takes viewers to mid-20th-century Australia, where competing definitions of beauty were being negotiated through the physical transformation of cities. Melbourne became one of the most important arenas for this debate.

In The Lost City of Melbourne, Gus Berger draws on a rich archive of photographs, newsreels and home movies to recreate the capital of the Australian state of Victoria as it appeared in the mid-20th century. It was a metropolis filled with lavishly decorated hotels, sumptuous theatres, café and cinema palaces, monumental shopping arcades and picturesque cast-iron verandas. The archival material documents the final days of this cityscape. Shortly afterwards, its historic built environment was deemed outdated, and mass demolition became one of the primary tools of modernisation. It was not only individual buildings that vanished from the cityscape, but entire sections of the urban fabric – and, along with them, places of gathering, entertainment and shared cultural experience.

Decisions made in the name of progress led to the demolition of entire swathes of Melbourne, the loss of distinctive buildings and, along with them, further chapters of the city’s memory. By juxtaposing images of the metropolis as it once was with records of its subsequent transformation, the film confronts two visions of beauty: the one promised by modernisation and the one that, together with the demolished buildings, was lost forever.

The Lost City of Melbourne, however, is not merely a nostalgic catalogue of losses. It is also a story about the emergence of heritage conservation awareness and the residents who began to resist the further erasure of the city’s history. The film raises questions relevant far beyond the Antipodes: about the nature of urban identity, embedded in the buildings that shape the cityscape, and about the aesthetics of our shared environment. “Our built heritage cannot be taken for granted. Once it is gone, we cannot get it back,” warns Gus Berger.

Gus Berger is a Melbourne-based director, producer and owner of the independent Thornbury Picture House cinema, as well as the organiser of Blow Up Cinema screenings. He began working on the film during the pandemic lockdowns, when both ventures were forced to suspend their operations. The sight of a deserted Melbourne prompted him to look back at another period of crisis and transformation in the city’s history. Berger embarked on a research project lasting several months, delving into the collections of the State Library of Victoria and Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive, reviewing publications on Melbourne’s history and speaking with researchers specialising in the city. The result is a feature-length documentary that will open this year’s MIASTOmovie Festival.

The Lost City of Melbourne is just one of the seven films to be screened during the upcoming edition of MIASTOmovie. The full programme will be announced on 27 August, when tickets for the festival screenings will also go on sale.