Don Featherstone
Documentary on Australian actor Ernie Dingo. As an actor, Ernie Dingo has played many parts, but many people see his major achievement as being a role model for other Aborigines. This film traces the life of the WA actor from his birth in a corrugated iron shed on Bullado station to early childhood in Mullewa, and his high school years in Geraldton to the beginning of his acting career.
A profile of the Australian poet Les Murray. Shot on location in Northern New South Wales. Featuring dramatisations of his poems and evocative footage of the most unusual landscape. He talks illuminatingly about his life and work.
Explores the early life and work of Robert Helpmann. Protege of Pavlova and Fonteyn’s first partner, he had a dazzling career as an actor, choreographer, theatre director and film star.
The program starts with a look at Whiteley's studio — a Pandora's Box in which there are clues to his free-ranging talent. He talks of being "born with a gift" and the desire to test and abuse that gift, to enhance it with addiction but ultimately to share it. Whiteley is seen at a huge blank canvas as he makes the first strokes. During the film this work reaches completion. The artist talks of eroticism - the major driving force behind his painting and one of the themes of the film. The landscapes of Byron Bay, Sydney Harbour, Oberon, and Tuscany dissolve between reality and his paintings. The film-makers travel with him and his girlfriend to London where he makes a drawing in a London cab. He then visits the Chamber of Horrors at Madam Tussaud's and talks of his Christie series of paintings. Whiteley's greatest influence is Francis Bacon and in the film he embarks on a major portrait ultimately destined for the Archibald Prize competition.
Imagine what it would be like if black settlers arrived to settle a continent inhabited by white natives? In 1788, the first white settlers arrived in Botany Bay to begin the process of white colonisation of Australia. But in Babakiueria, the roles are reversed in a delightful and light-hearted look at colonisation of a different kind. This satirical examination of black-white relations in Australia first screened on ABC TV in 1986 to widespread acclaim with both critics and audiences alike. This is the story of the fictitious land of Babakiueria, where white people are the minority and must obey black laws. Aboriginal actors Michelle Torres and Bob Maza (Heartland) and supported by a number of familiar faces from the time, including Cecily Polson (E-Street) and Tony Barry, who starred in major ABC-TV hits such as I Can Jump Puddles and his Penguin award-winning Scales of Justice. Babakiueria was awarded the United Nations Media Peace Prize in 1987.
David Hockney is unquestionably one of the most passionate and versatile experimental artists on the contemporary scene. In the late 1970s the British artist developed a pioneering concept which also changed his perspective on painting – his “joiners”. In this film, the artist himself talks about this photographic approach, a kind of Cubism-inspired photocollage which explores the space-time continuum. Hockney allows the viewer to share in the creative “joiner” process and leads us step by step into the universe of his artistic creativity.
A series of surreal short scenes portraying a suburban family and their everyday rituals.
In this documentary from 1983, pianist and “enfant terrible” Ivo Pogorelich is seen in the intimacy of his home, learning and rehearsing Joseph-Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit (after a prose poem by Aloysius Bertrand), this piece being one of the most outstanding demonstrations of his virtuosity.
