Square One

(Robert Herbert, Australia, 1995)

Australian movies are often culturally inexact, but Robert Herbert’s Square One nails its chosen milieu – the Mod subculture of Sydney in the 1980s – deftly, vividly and with palpable authenticity.

This is a bold, ambitious drama that mixes an almost ethnographic feel for a particular time, place and style – its images, sounds, manners – with a haunting sense of the amoral, treacherous, dreamy, shifting sands of contemporary relationships between young people today (and in recent modern history).

Blessed with superb performances – especially from fiery newcomer Teo Gebert (later to shine in A Cold Summer [2003], which he co-devised in improvisation) – Square One is not to be missed, if you ever get a chance to see this mini-feature (55 minutes). First spotted in festivals during 1995, it re-emerged more publicly in 1997.

Robert Herbert

Director Robert Herbert died at age 56 in July 2017. In the two decades following Square One, he became well known and admired as curator-organiser of the film program at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

In collaboration with Sophie Jackson (producer of Square One), he made the TV series Home Made History in 2003, derived from the archives of amateur filmmaking in Australia.

A touching obituary tribute by Elisabeth Knight can be found here.

© Adrian Martin 1997 / September 2020