Rubies and Lemons

    Philippe Mora with Dennis Hopper on the set of ' Mad Dog Morgan (1974) Philippe Mora: Original Australian Auteur   Painter, writer, film director, Philippe Mora has forged an idiosyncratic path. His Mad Dog  Morgan (1976), starring Dennis Hopper, is now considered a classic of Australian cinema. Mora subsequently directed, amongst other films; The Return of Captain Invincible  (1983); A Breed Apart (1984); Howling ll (1985); Howling lll (1987); Communion (1989). Over his long career, he has worked with actors Frank Thring, David Gulpilil, Jack Thompson, Alan Arkin, Christopher Lee, Rutger Hauer, Kathleen Turner, Christopher  Walken, James Coburn. I spoke with the ebullient Mora from his home in L.A.     Philippe, thank you for agreeing to this interview. You were born in 1949, and you have described your childhood as ‘culturally privileged’. Your parents were iconic artist Mirka Mora and much-re...

Black Garden s creened at the Venice Production Bridge at the 76th Venice Film Festival and Marche du Film, 72nd Cannes Film Festival. It was also the official selection for the 2019 North Bellarine Film Festival and will feature in the 2020 Geelong International Film Festival. In Black Garden , Melbourne director/writer, Shaun Wilson and Tammy Honey, producer/editor , have fashioned a grim, black and white, apocalyptic nightmare, which possesses the shifting illogic of dreams. At points throughout the film, it suggests Dante’s ‘Inferno’, the first book of his The Divine Comedy – particularly the 9 th Circle of Hell, which deals with treachery. And there is plenty of treachery at play as the central protagonist, Kate (played stoically by Cara Culligan), wanders through a largely depopulated landscape and empty suburban environments on a quest for safety and understanding. As with ‘Inferno’, figures drift in and out of the tale, interrupting her voyage and bringing varying degrees o...

  The mysterious Amanda Lear has been a fashion model, actress, singer, author, TV presenter and a painter. During the late-‘70s, at the height of the disco-era, she sold over 15 million albums and 30 million singles.       Over the decades, Amanda Lear has frequently reinvented herself. She has been a keen propagator of false tales about her early life. She is indeed a riddle , wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma .   So, it is somewhat daunting to attempt to unravel the facts from the fictionalised accounts which she has enthusiastically woven. Lear has stated to the press that her father was, variously, Russian, French, or Indonesian: her mother, French, Mongolian, Russian or Chinese; her birthplace, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Hanoi, or, dramatically, Transylvania. Even her entry in Wikipedia provides several possible birthplaces.   In 1964, the young Amanda Lear relocated to London to study at Saint Martin's School of ...

  British artist James Rielly was born in Holyhead, North Wales, in 1956. He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. His work is held in major public and private collections. His extraordinary paintings, drawings and animations combine pathos and dark humour to expose the fragility of human interaction, and life’s absurdity. His imagery emerges from a combination of his imagination, newspaper clippings, and the recycling of pictures taken from old magazines and books. He currently has three exhibitions running concurrently: Galerie Wittenbrink, Munich (until 17 September, 2016); GE Galerie, Mexico (until 7th October, 2016); New Art Projects, London (until 13th November, 2016). I interviewed him from Paris, where he is Professor of Painting at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Your work first came to my attention when you were included in the landmark exhibition Sensation (1997) at the Royal Academy of Art, where you were shown in the company of Matt Coll...

  First of all, may I congratulate you on your new film Peterloo . It is a magnificent achievement. Thank you very much. The film was released on the 200 th anniversary of the horrific events of 1819. What was it that drew you to the subject, initially? There were various reasons, really. Most importantly, I felt that it was a major event that needed to be told. One scholar has described the event as “the most numerous meeting that ever took place in Great Britain”. There are estimates of 60,000 in the crowd. Well, there are some reports that it may have been 100,000 in the crowd. How did you manage to achieve the effect of such a colossal crowd? Presumably, you didn’t have 60,000 extras at your disposal. No, indeed we didn’t! We had 200 extras – and the rest was done with crowd simulation CGI. Had you used CGI much before? Yes, but only subtly. For instance, we used it in Mr. Turner , specifically, in the scene with The Fighting Temeraire. The CGI operators on ...

  Multi-media artist and writer, Slava Mogutin was born in Siberia. At 14 he ran away from his dysfunctional family and made his way to Moscow. There, he became the first openly gay journalist in the country. He was the first person to translate into Russian the works of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. He gained condemnation for his outspoken queer writings and activism, and for attempting to register the first same-sex marriage, with his then partner, American artist Robert Filippini. Two highly publicised criminal cases were mounted against him and he faced a seven-year jail sentence. In 1995, he fled to the US, where he was granted political asylum with the support of Amnesty International. His work has been exhibited internationally and he has published two books of photography – Lost Boys and NYC Go-Go . In 2000, he won the Andrei Belyi Prize for Literature. His poetry, fiction and essays have been published in six languages. I spoke with the ‘malicious hooligan’ from...

  Art schools have always been problematic for bureaucrats and bean-counters. They are quite expensive to run: for the most part they operate on a one-to-one teaching-ratio, rather than auditorium delivery. They take up a lot of room on campus: each student requires a personal studio space, which they inhabit for three years. They are often noisy, messy and fumy. They have traditionally been places which have fomented free-thinking and radicalism – true of both student and staff alike (although, tragically, this aspect has been largely written out of the equation over the last several decades).   Add to this the fact that after graduation students traditionally find employment in the hospitality industry rather than a specific ‘art job’ and the problem magnifies. Art schools simply cannot show that their graduands have become gainfully employed in what is rather fancifully called ‘the industry’ after their three-year courses. It just doesn’t happen that way. The cultural ‘pa...