PRESS RELEASE
Victorian independent filmmaker and video artist David King recently sold a 16mm film he made between 1975 and 1977 to the Deakin University.
The black and white 16-minute film, called The Student, was partly funded by the now defunct Experimental Film and Television Fund.
It was the first 16mm narrative film made by a student of the then-newly formed Deakin University at Waurn Ponds outside Geelong.
There were no film courses at the Deakin at this time. King was a Humanities student who taught himself filmmaking from books and from watching films at the Gordon Institute of Technology (now Gordon Institute of TAFE) and then at Deakin.
He became a member of the Melbourne Filmmakers’ Co-op when he made his first 16mm film, Daffy, in 1974.
The Student told of a naïve student who, each night, dreams he is chasing a mysterious girl. When he meets her in the flesh, he pursues her as the girl of his dreams…with tragic results.
King said he was influenced at the time by the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Carl Dreyer.
He was the first filmmaker in Geelong and district to receive a grant from the federal governmment, and possibly the only profoundly hearing-impaired filmmaker in Australia to receive such a grant.
The Student was lost shortly after completion in 1977 when the post production house liaising with the laboratory closed down.
It was not until 1991 that the sole answer print was accidentally found. Due to career demands, it was packed away and forgotten until 2011 when King rediscovered it and realised it had historic significance.
The film’s historic firsts gained the interest of Deakin film lecturer John Cumming and led to the the university acquiring three DVDs of the film.
King would not disclose the purchase price but said it was ‘a fair bit more’ than the Experimental Film and Television Fund grant which helped him make the film.
The Student – together with King’s 2002 short, The Job – has also been picked uop for international video-on-demand distribution by Kanopy Streaming of Perth.