Philippe Mora
Philippe Mora is a French-born Australian artist and film director.
Origin
Mora was born in Paris, France in 1949 to a Lithuanian-Jewish mother and a German-Jewish father. He is the eldest son of artist Mirka Mora and her husband, restaurateur and gallery owner Georges Mora, a French Resistance fighter during World War II. After a brief stint in New York, the family emigrated to Australia in July 1951 when Philippe was two, settling in Melbourne, where the Moras founded the Melbourne eateries Mirka Café and Café Balzac. Two younger brothers were born in Australia: William Mora and Tiriel Mora. In 1965 his parents opened the Tolarno Restaurant and Galleries in St Kilda.Mora began making films with an 8mm camera his father gave him while he was still a child, and won art prizes as a teenager.
Career
A self-confessed movie addict from childhood, Mora's cinema icons were the Marx Brothers, Jean Cocteau's surrealist films, Alfred Hitchcock, Buster Keaton and Ernst Lubitsch's early films, as reflected in his first home movies. Back Alley, now preserved at the National Film & Sound Archive, was made in 1964 when he was 15. This was a parody of West Side Story filmed in Flinders Lane, Melbourne just behind his mother's studio in Grosvenor Chambers at 9 Collins Street. The film features Mora, his brother William, and friends Peter Beilby and Sweeney Reed, son of Joy Hester. His next film, Dreams in a Grey Afternoon was made as a silent movie but was screened with music by artist Asher Bilu. Shot on 8 mm and printed on 16 mm, the film features stop-motion animation of sculptures by the Russian-Australian sculptor and painter Danila Vassilieff, and includes rare footage of Sunday and John Reed.Mora's next project, Man in a Film, was a pastiche of Federico Fellini's 8½ and was also influenced by his recent viewing of The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night. Like its predecessor, it was made as a silent film, shot on 8mm and blown up to 16mm, and again screened with music by Asher Bilu. Man in a Film starred Sweeney Reed and premiered at the Tolarno Galleries in early 1967.
Give It Up, shot in Fitzroy Street, Melbourne, again featured Reed, with Don Watson and Philippe's younger brother Tiriel. The film symbolised Australian response to the Vietnam War by depicting a woman being repeatedly kicked and beaten in the gutter of a busy street while onlookers do nothing.
Exhibitions
In late 1967, when he had finished school, Mora travelled to England. He was invited, with his partner Freya Matthews, by Australian artist Martin Sharp into "The Pheasantry", a historic building in King's Road, Chelsea, London which housed studios and a nightclub. This residence inspired the name of his production company, Pheasantry Films. As "Von Mora", during this time he contributed cartoons influenced by Dada, comic strip art, Francis Bacon, and Vincent Van Gogh to Oz magazine and assisted co-editor Martin Sharp with its landmark "Magic Theatre" edition. In 2007, along with others associated with Oz including Germaine Greer, he was critical of the sensationalist depiction of the era in the movie Hippie Hippie Shake, but recalled in 2008 that; "most of my creative roots are in London. This is where I took off, crashed and burned and took off again. Paraphrasing Brendan Behan, on occasion, like many artists, I was a drinker with a painting problem." He also made his next short film, Passion Play, shot in the Pheasantry ca. 1967-1968 and featuring Jenny Kee as Mary Magdalene, Michael Ramsden as Jesus, and Mora himself as the Devil.Mora began painting as soon as he arrived in London, and his first London exhibitions "Anti-Social Realism" and "Vomart," were held, at her invitation, in 1968 and 1969 at the Kings Road gallery of Clytie Jessop, and garnered excellent reviews., though the first, in the Daily Mail announcing that he used a special paint formula that kills flies, was evidently a satire written by the artist. Jessop was sister of Hermia Boyd, wife of noted ceramicist David Boyd and a well-known actress and director who played the sinister Miss Jessell in Jack Clayton's classic supernatural thriller The Innocents, and later directed the film Emma's War starring Lee Remick and a young Miranda Otto.
Mora also held a show at the Sigi Krauss Gallery where Martin Sharp also exhibited, featuring pictures painted in black and white. The show also included a grey male rat which he had bought from Harrods. When the rat turned out to be female and gave birth, he tried unsuccessfully to sell the babies as 'multiples' in a limited edition of eight. The rat show attracted the interest of German avant-garde artist Klaus Stacks, who commissioned Mora to produce an edition of a hundred screen prints of the mother rat. In February 1971, Joseph Beuys and Erwin Heerich invited him to sign a "Call to Action" manifesto demanding the freeing of the German art market.
His next show was in 1970 at the Sigi Krauss Gallery featuring a life-size sculpture of a sitting man, , a metaphor for the war in Vietnam. Mora's provocative and highly symbolic offal exhibit caused a stir. A brick was thrown through the gallery window, which led to it being featured on the cover of Time Out. Later, as the piece began to putrify, the police were called after Princess Margaret, dining at the restaurant across the street, complained about the stench. Detectives from Scotland Yard descended on the gallery and demanded that the sculpture be removed, but gallery owner Krauss refused. The police claimed it was a health hazard and forced him to move it into the garden, where it gradually rotted away. At later Krauss group exhibition Mora also screened his 8 mm 'film painting' Passion Play back-projected onto a screen framed in gold leaf.
Guy Brett compared his work in the Camden Arts Centre exhibition Narrative Painting in Britain in the Twentieth Century with that of David Hockney:
The paintings of the young Australian Philippe Mora … create the opposite atmosphere to Hockney's. They suggest networks of Fear, Threat and Violence. Yet it is not possible to compare them, because Mora uses an apparently dry and cool, economical graphic style rather than the florid impressionism one might expect… Where Hockney avoids any kind of moral judgement, Mora's pantings are thoroughly moralistic… He has an effective way of re-interpreting borrowed imagery… with his thin bleak line and his grasp of grotesque imagery. Mora does create a strong atmosphere.
Film
Trouble in Molopolis, Mora's first feature-length film, was financed by the partnership of Arthur Boyd and Eric Clapton. Shot in Robert Hughes' apartment and at the Pheasantry, the film features Germaine Greer as a cabaret singer, Jenny Kee as 'Shanghai Lil', Laurence Hope as a gangster, Martin Sharp as a mime and Richard Neville as a PR man. Tony Cahill from The Easybeats collaborated with Jamie Boyd for the score before the film premiered at the Paris Pullman Cinema in Chelsea, as an Oz benefit. Introduced by George Melly, star John Ivor Golding also made a memorable appearance at the premiere, defecating in the front row and then passing out in an alcoholic coma. Shown in May 1970 at the Festival of British independent Films in London, it was eventually screened in Australia at the Adelaide Film Festival in 1980.At age 23, Mora directed Swastika, a two-hour compilation selected from 250 hours of captured Nazi documentaries, anti-Semitic propaganda, the Berlin Olympics including an interview with a polite Jesse Owens, and sequences from home movies made by Eva Braun discovered in the United States Marine and Signal Corps files in Washington by German-born University of London academic and specialist in German film, Lutz Becker, who pointed out that it included the first piece of film ever to show Hitler, in Munich in 1919, and colour film of the Storm Troopers' victory parade in Berlin, 1933, remarking that "Even the Nazis didn't know about the 1919 piece of film with Hitler in it." In the same year Mora became editor and American correspondent of the newly launched Cinema Papers alongside Peter Beilby and Scott Murray.
In 1975 and newly married, Mora wrote and directed, Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?, a documentary about the 1930s Depression consisting of a series of film clips from newsreels and photographs, Hollywood films reflecting historical events, and those about making movies as well as outtakes, trailers, and home movies. It was screened at the Cannes Film Festival during 'Critics Week,' and at the 1975 Melbourne Film Festival, at which he announced that he had left Australia "because I wanted to get into films, and there was no industry here."
In 1976, after eight years working in London and New York, Mora's first feature film was Mad Dog Morgan, about the bushranger Daniel Morgan, which he also wrote and directed, explaining to Rita Erlich that while he was moving away from the documentary, in all films "one is telling a story, just using different means. Film is a narrative art." Starring Dennis Hopper, Jack Thompson, David Gulpilil, Bill Hunter and Frank Thring, produced by David Puttnam with A$175,666 investment and a A$8,500 loan from the Australian Film Corporation and private backers, Mad Dog Morgan was the first Australian movie to get a 40-cinema release in the United States and worldwide rights purchased for A$300,000. Though reviewer Michael Rowberry considered its "bid for realism has led the director to overdo the blood," and that the "simplistic morality of the film which ultimately robs it of depth," it went on to receive the John Ford Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976 as part of US Bicentennial celebrations, and in 1977 Mora was nominated by the Australian Film Institute for 'Best Director' for the film.
In early 1980, Mora and Ron Mallory took an option on Errol Flynn: The Untold Story by Charles Higham, raising hopes of an Australian film being produced in Hollywood, but abandoned after controversy over Higham's research; members of Flynn's family unsuccessfully sued the author and the book's publisher for libel. After making The Beast Within, his first film in America, Mora's next project on one of his periodic returns to Australia in 1981, was the parodic superhero musical, The Return of Captain Invincible, released in Hoyts cinemas for Christmas 1982 by Seven Keys, and starring Alan Arkin, Christopher Lee, Kate Fitzpatrick and an all-star Australian cast, with songs by The Rocky Horror Show creator Richard O'Brien. When Mora fell out with producer Andrew Gaty following Gaty re-cutting the film, the Department of Home Affairs pulled its certification as an Australian film asserting that it was then a different film, prompting a February 1983 court case, which was still not settled in July.
Mora's next productions were A Breed Apart with Rutger Hauer and Kathleen Turner, the werewolf horror films Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf and Howling III, the latter shown at the Melbourne Comedy Festival in 1991, and the political drama Death of a Soldier, starring James Coburn, which was based on the infamous Melbourne wartime Eddie Leonski murder case. While in Australia to make the latter, Mora conducted a seminar in June 1985 at the Australian Screen Directors Association. Mora's next film used the plot of the book Communion, by his old friend from his London days in the late 1960s, artist, author and broadcaster Whitley Strieber. Released in 1989, and to video, the film starred Christopher Walken and was based on Strieber's own alleged encounters with aliens.
Film credits as director as well as occasional writer and actor during the 1990s included the horror spoof Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills with Beverly D'Angelo, Barry Humphries, Moon Unit Zappa and Philippe's children Georges and Madeleine; Art Deco Detective ; and Precious Find, a sci-fi version of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. For television, Mora directed Mercenary II: Thick & Thin, and the films Back in Business, Snide and Prejudice and Burning Down the House.