y separately published work icon Senses of Cinema periodical issue   peer reviewed assertion
Issue Details: First known date: 2015... no. 75 June 2015 of Senses of Cinema est. 1999 Senses of Cinema
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Contents

* Contents derived from the 2015 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
We’re in Another Country – but David Gulpilil Is Here to Help, Dan Edwards , single work essay

Dan Edwards talks about the documentary Another Country, narrated and co-written by David Gulpilil.

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What Happened To Billy? : David Gulpilil on Mad Dog Morgan, Jake Wilson (interviewer), single work interview

'It’s December 2014, and I’m researching a book on the 1976 bushranger film Mad Dog Morgan – one of the best Australian films of the 1970s, a far-out antipodean Western directed by the much underrated pop surrealist Philippe Mora and starring Dennis Hopper in his glory days of alcoholic excess. For a few months, I’ve been trying to track down surviving members of the cast and crew; high on my wish list is David Gulpilil, who played the key role of Billy, Morgan’s young Aboriginal partner in crime. But the hope of reaching him seems a forlorn one: Gulpilil does not give many interviews, and even journalists in the Northern Territory, where he lives most of the time, have had trouble pinning him down.

'At the last moment, I hear that Gulpilil is coming down to Brisbane to attend the Asia Pacific Screen Awards, where he’s been nominated as Best Actor for his role in the acclaimed Charlie’s Country (2014), which he co-wrote with director Rolf de Heer. After some negotiation with his agent, he agrees to share his memories of the Mad Dog shoot. We meet at his hotel in the middle of the city, on a rainy afternoon a few hours before the APSA ceremony; at the suggestion of the astute publicist Cathy Gallagher, I bring along a DVD of Mad Dog for us to watch together.

'Talking to Gulpilil is not the usual kind of interview. His answers are often indirect and fragmentary, sometimes hard to follow. When a question doesn’t interest him, he’ll give a cursory “Yeah, yeah” and move onto a different train of thought. Yet it doesn’t take long to realise that the unfussed manner masks great alertness and intelligence: he’s constantly making surprising connections, and at any moment may say something startlingly lucid. Ironically, this is even the case when he talks about how he’s been affected by substance abuse: beer, he says, is like putting his brain in a freezer, marijuana like an early morning fog.

'In person as on film, Gulpilil communicates as much through intonation and gesture as through language: set down in print, his words inevitably lack much of their original meaning. For this reason, this piece combines direct quotes with my own efforts – inadequate as these may be – to sum up other parts of what was said.' (Author's introduction)

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An Authentic Dreamtime : David Gulpilil and The Last Wave (Peter Weir, 1977), Lisa French , single work essay
;Over more than thirty years, actor, dancer, musician and visual artist David Gulpilil has been deeply engaged in telling the “big, true” stories of his people. When Peter Weir made The Last Wave in 1977, the process of working with Gulpilil and other Indigenous actors opened a door to a new way of seeing the world. They created what Gulpilil himself has described as a film that was not only “very important for his people”, but also one which he said was “the first film to authentically describe Aboriginal ‘Dreamtime’ mythology”. '(Author's introduction)

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Last amended 7 Aug 2015 12:55:39
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