Morning of the Earth is a 1971 classic surf film by Alby Falzon and David Elfick.
The film's soundtrack was produced by G. Wayne Thomas and included music and songs by noted Australian music acts Tamam Shud, John J. Francis, Brian Cadd, Mike Rudd and G. Wayne Thomas. The record became the first Australian Gold soundtrack album. In October 2010, the soundtrack for Morning of the Earth (1971) was listed in the book, 100 Best Australian Albums.
The film portrays surfers living in spiritual harmony with nature, making their own boards (and homes) as they travelled in search of the perfect wave across Australia's north-east coast, Bali and Hawaii. The movie is regarded as one of the finest of its genre and noted as recording the first surfers to ride the waves at Uluwatu on the very southern tip of Bali and so bringing Bali to the attention of surfers around the world and so the beginnings of Bali as a major tourist destination.
Tony's out of jail. His mates think he's got the proceeds from the robbery and want it. Tony just wants to find Anna. He deals with one problem at a time. This is a road movie and a trip. Writer/director Esben Storm.
Music; John Martyn, Allan Stivell, AC/DC, Rose Tattoo.
Meet Rosaleen Norton, an artist and self-identified witch who the tabloids called “the witch of Kings Cross”. She was repeatedly arrested, had her artwork burned and was shunned and mocked by society.
Norton eked out a modest living selling her art, and putting spells and hexes on people. Norton, who lived in Kings Cross in the postwar years until her death in 1979, had been fascinated with the occult since she was a child.
Rosaleen Norton was an artist and self-identified witch who the tabloids called “the witch of Kings Cross”. She was repeatedly arrested, had her artwork burned and was shunned and mocked by society.
Norton eked out a modest living selling her art, and putting spells and hexes on people. Her story has been captured in a new documentary, released online on Tuesday.
Norton, who lived in Kings Cross in the postwar years until her death in 1979, had been fascinated with the occult since she was a child.
All her life, Norton combined her interest in the occult with art. Her paintings, some of which were seized by police and burned, could loosely be defined as esoteric: canvases often filled with hectic images of women embracing the Greek god Pan, snakes and horned demons.
Australia in the postwar years was almost 90% Christian, and Norton was made a target for her beliefs. Surveillance and raids from the vice squad, and seizure of her work, criminalised her, and turned her into a notorious and shocking tabloid figure. One of her sex magic partners, the celebrated Sydney Symphony Orchestra conductor Sir Eugene Goossens, was forced to flee Australia when his luggage at Sydney airport was found to contain pornography, masks and sex toys. The pair each suffered in their own way for transgressing the strict moral boundaries of the time.
Click on the image above for the 2020 biopic by Sonia Bible.
Dispute in Valladolid is a TV movie released in 1992 and directed by Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe, which is a fictionalized account of the real “Valladolid debate”.
The director was Jean-Danielle Veren, Jean-Pierre Marielle played Las Casas, and Jean-Louis Trintignant acted as Sepúlveda.
The Valladolid debate (1550–1551) was the first moral debate in European history to discuss the rights and treatment of an indigenous people by European colonizers. Held in the Colegio de San Gregorio, in the Spanish city of Valladolid, it was a moral and theological debate about the conquest of the Americas, its justification for the conversion to Catholicism, and more specifically about the relations between the European settlers and the natives of the New World. It consisted of a number of opposing views about the way natives were to be integrated into Spanish society, their conversion to Catholicism, and their rights.
Bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé de las Casas, argued that the Amerindians were free men in the natural order despite their practice of human sacrifices and other such customs, deserving the same consideration as the colonizers. Opposing this view were theologian Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who argued that the human sacrifice of innocents, cannibalism, and other such "crimes against nature" were unacceptable and should be suppressed by any means possible including war.
Delia Derbyshire: The Myths And Legendary Tapes is an experimental documentary about the composer, mathematician and Radiophonic Workshop pioneer. Directed by and starring Caroline Catz, the film traces Derbyshire's life and work through a combination of archive footage and dramatisation, interspersed with Cosey Fanni Tutti's new interpretations of Derbyshire's archive material (the 'Legendary Tapes' of the title).
This 10-part, 18-hour documentary series from directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick presents firsthand accounts of the Vietnam War from nearly 80 witnesses, including Americans who fought in the war and some who opposed it, as well as Vietnamese combatants and civilians from both sides. Digitally remastered archival footage, photographs, historic television broadcasts and home movies offer different perspectives on the conflict. Also providing insight are audio recordings from inside the administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon.
Under the 1954 Geneva peace accords, reunification elections were to be held in Vietnam within two years. Prime Minister Diem rejected the election promise and took excessive steps to repress any opponents. The strategic hamlets were not welcome by the peasant population and by 1964, supplies were flowing south along the Ho Chi Minh trail. Viet Cong guerrillas supported by the Army of North Vietnam attacked American installations in Saigon. The bombing of the North started in 1965 in reaction to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The Marines that began arriving in 1965 were not seen as liberators by the people. The North launched a major attack in 1965 on the airbase at Da Nang. It was eventually recognized that the bombing campaign, Operation Rolling Thunder, had failed.
The campaign in Vietnam by the US comes across as being vast, expensive (in every respect) and doomed to fail. This was a colonial war fought by people who believed they were in a virtuous struggle, Meanwhile enormous resources were being used to annihilate entire populations. Torture, sabotage, incompetence and corruption supplied the supporting cast for this disaster.
Anti-war protests began early in the Johnson administration though the vast majority of Americans at the time supported the administration. The initial protests were led by civil rights activists, the old left, women's groups and the clergy. Religious organizations had a difficult time as they were conservative by nature. As well, college students could avoid the draft if they remained in school. Blacks were joining the military but activists decried those who claimed they were trying to save people of color. Passive resistance and draft card burning were increasing. The October 1967 march on the Pentagon was denounced as anti-American as were most protests against the war. However, 55,000 participated and over 600 were arrested. The climate soon began to change. Johnson had to raise taxes and the economy was doing poorly and by December 1967 a poll showed that a majority of Americans now thought the war was a mistake. Senator Eugene McCarthy became popular by proposing an end to the war. He nearly defeated Johnson in the New Hampshire primary and his success led to Bobby Kennedy's entry into the Presidential race. Martin Luther King spoke out against the war and riots broke out across the US after his assassination. The Chicago protests at the Democratic convention and the police response led to bloodshed on all sides. During the election, Nixon attacked Humphrey based on his support of Johnson's war policies. Every Thursday, the number of Americans killed in Vietnam was released to the media. Nixon won the election by a slim margin and the Vice President Spiro Agnew began attacking the media as biased. Soon however, the public learned of the massacre at My Lai and even Vietnam Veterans began protesting the war.
Dispatches is a British current affairs documentary programme on Channel 4, first broadcast on 30 October 1987. The programme covers issues about British society, politics, health, religion, international current affairs and the environment, and often features a mole inside organisations under journalistic investigation.
On the evening of February 19th, 1992 Dispatches featured a special episode about Satanic ritual abuse. Days later, newspapers reported that the video was misrepresented. The clips of the alleged abuse were drawn from First Transmissions (1982), an experimental video produced by Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (T.O.P.Y.) a geographically disperse occult collective committed to subverting mainstream media.
Presented by journalist Andrew Boyd, the Dispatches show promised to present, for the first time, the programmed claimed unequivocal evidence of Satanic abuse and ritual murder having been carried out in Britain. The show featured the testimony of an alleged survivor of Satanic abuse, 'Jennifer', and had been trailed heavily with reports in the broadsheet newspapers in the days leading up to broadcast. In particular, the show was able to shockingly broadcast clips of a tape that the British police had seized a decade earlier which, the programme makers claimed, was a home-video recording of a Satanic ritual killing. Over a hundred people called a helpline number advertised after the show ended.
Far from being a Satanic snuff movie, the video was quickly determined after broadcast to be performance art video by TOPY, an offshoot of a group of musicians and performers including Genesis P. Orridge's Throbbing Gristle and Psychick TV. Most shockingly of all, First Transmission had itself been funded by Channel 4.
The show was denounced in the media over the following days and weeks as a grotesque lapse of journalistic integrity. The programme stands as a particular testament to a moment in British social, cultural and criminal history at the height of the so-called 'Satanic Panic' which swept the USA as well as the UK in the 1980s. There is an extensive interdisciplinary literature on the programme and its associated impacts and phenomena, from historians, art historians, criminologists, psychologists and others. The overwhelming majority of commentary on Beyond Belief is critical of the programme.
A transcript of the broadcast has been shared online and there is considerable information about the programme to be found. The show itself, though, has never been repeated, and has never been made available online in full. The show has also proven difficult to access by professional researchers in archive holdings at Channel 4, or at the production company, Looktwice.
In November 2020, YouTube user 'RileyELFuk' made a 37 minute version of the show available on their channel which runs to the final credits. About 8 minutes of the 45 minute broadcast time (10:30pm - 11:15pm) are thus still missing. Comparing this upload with the transcript suggests that much of this time would have been taken up by advertisements before the show started, as only one page of the transcript, featuring the programme's introduction, are clipped from the film.
The role of computerised media in this program is interesting. It came out right at the cusp between the earlier cultural networks of mail and radio, clubs and cellars (to reference the site of satanic abuse) and the rise of the internet, where much of this culture exists today. Terrorism is even named as a source for the satanic abuse, in how its 'survivors' manifest PTSD. Computers feature in many of the interviews, often as a backdrop to interviewees appearing as 'experts' (never for the 'victims'). At the same time the psychological explanations for how 'victims' are effected by the 'abuse' is spoken of in terms of 'imprint', 'programming', 'memory', 'information' and so on. The allegations never come to any concrete point, with names of perpetrators, or even victims, apart from the anonymous 'witnesses' speaking on camera (considering one of the few 'witnesses' Jennifer, states in the programme she murdered her own child in a ritual sacrifice, it would not have been so difficult to check up on this). The visual media depicting the 'abuse' is seen as both evidence and the corrupting material that causes the apparent abuse. However, no origin of the material is even really established. Since it was colaged performance art, mostly featuring actors, this is understandable.
This program and what it represents is important because it shows us a time when many of the present-day folk devils and moral panics were finding their form, if not their content. Attempts to police this sort of media are still underway.
(First Transmission was a collection of video tapes that were made available through Psychic TV's mail order system in the early 80s. Fans of the band had to own all of the albums in order to qualify to be given the videos as a gift. Psychic TV and TOPY were a kind of cultural and cult pyramid scheme).
Living abroad and being a teacher, I often talk to people about the history of Australia. Many people find it hard to believe that in many ways Australia resembles South Africa in it's history and ideology regarding the Indigenous people of the continent. At the same time many people in Australia want to see change, and to see the crimes of history addressed. But many people in Australia also see the colonisation of the landmass as a 'civilising project'. The distance between these points is the reason why collective Australia is so often concerned with what it is to be 'Australian' and so much time, effort and money is spent in projecting out into the world a sort of composite image of 'Australia'. As recently as the 2023 FIFA women's world cup there were advertisements run to attract tourists to Australia which featured the same image that were being promoted in the 1980s (outback landscapes, marsupials, the beach and the Great Barrier Reef, the Opera House) in the tedious 'Come and Say G'day campaign'. If Australia as a culture could only articulate some of the complexities of the national story and history, I believe there could be massive change in how the society as a whole develops and many of the issues that are dividing the nation today would be incorporated into a larger understanding of national identity. One of the most difficult and important issues that needs to be incorporated into the nation is the ongoing history of genocide that is the story of Aboriginal survival. This film takes a bleak look at this horror
The adaption of the 1959 novel by William Burroughs by David Cronenberg.
The film sits between the novel and Burroughs biography. It captures the sentiment of Burroughs' writing well, but it does not reproduce the dark, chaotic and humorous qualities of the novel. For the dedicated Burroughs fan or curious novice, the film should be accompanied by the novel (I have read it 5 times and did my MA thesis on it), along with Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs by Ted Morgan. Combined you will get a good image of not just an intense and intricate series of narratives, but a heightened literary experience concerning one of the greatest English language novels of the 20th century.
"The whole human position is no longer tenable," announces a character early in William S. Burroughs' Cities Of The Red Night. The story that Burroughs' biographer Ted Morgan - whose previous subjects include Winston S. Churchill, W. Somerset Maugham and Franklin D. Roosevelt - tells in Literary Outlaw is that of someone who has spent an entire literary life attempting to reconcile a belief that human existence is unendurable with the knowledge that it is also inescapable, and whose literary life itself derives from the event which confirmed him in that belief. On the afternoon of September 6, 1951, William Seward Burroughs - alienated scion of the Midwestern upper-middle class, grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine, demimondain mentor to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, junkie, gun fetishist - was attempting to demonstrate the virtuosity of his marksmanship by doing a 'William Tell act', which involved shooting a glass balanced on the head of Joan Vollmer, his common-law wife and the mother of his five-year-old son, Willam Burroughs Jr. Burroughs père, being both drunk and stoned at the time, allowed his aim to slip, drilling Joan Burroughs through the forehead and killing her instantly. "I am forced to the appalling conclusion," Burroughs wrote almost three and a half decades later in the introduction to Queer (an autobiographical novel written in the early '50s but not published until 1985; and one of the most affecting tales of unrequited love in the English language), "that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death [which] maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out."
In 1953, exterminator William Lee finds that his wife Joan is stealing his supply of insecticide to use as a recreational drug. Lee is arrested by the police, and he begins hallucinating due to being exposed to the insecticide. Lee comes to believe that he is a secret agent, and his boss, a giant talking beetle, assigns him the mission of killing Joan, who is allegedly an agent of an organization called Interzone Incorporated. Lee dismisses the beetle's instructions and kills it. Lee returns home to find Joan having sex with Hank, one of his writer friends. Shortly afterwards, he accidentally kills her while attempting to shoot a drinking glass off her head to emulate William Tell.
Having inadvertently accomplished his mission, Lee flees to Interzone, located in a city somewhere in North Africa. He spends his time writing reports concerning his mission; these documents, at the insistence of his visiting literary colleagues, are eventually compiled into the titular book. While Lee is addicted to assorted mind-altering substances, his replacement typewriter, a Clark Nova, becomes a talking insect which tells him to find Dr. Benway by seducing Joan Frost, a doppelgänger of his dead wife. There is a row at gunpoint with Joan's husband Tom, after Lee steals his typewriter, which is then destroyed by the Clark Nova insect. Lee also encounters Yves Cloquet, who is apparently an attractive young gay Swiss gentleman. However, Lee later discovers that Yves is merely disguised as a human, and that his true form is a huge monstrous shapeshifting centipede.
After concluding that Dr. Benway is actually secretly masterminding a narcotics operation for a drug called "black meat" which is supposedly derived from the guts of giant Brazilian centipedes, Lee encounters Tom's housekeeper Fadela, previously observed to be an agent of the narcotics operation. Fadela reveals herself as Dr. Benway in disguise. After being recruited as a double agent for the black meat operation, Lee completes his report and flees Interzone to Annexia with Joan Frost. Stopped by the Annexian border patrol and instructed to prove that he is a writer as he claims, Lee produces a pen. When this proves insufficient for passage, Lee, now having realized that accidentally murdering his wife has driven him to become a writer, demonstrates his William Tell routine using a glass atop Joan Frost's head. He again misses, and thus re-enacts the earlier killing of his wife. The border guards cheerfully bid him welcome to Annexia, and his new life as a writer. Lee is shown shedding a tear at this bittersweet accomplishment.
Now, repeat after me: "Homosexuality is the best all-round cover an agent ever had."
