Philippe Mora

Philippe Mora (born 1949) is a French Australian film director.

Early life and career

Born in Paris in 1949, he grew up at the centre of the Australian arts scene of the 1950s and began making films with an 8mm camera his father gave him while he was still a child, and won art prizes as a teenager. He is the eldest son of artist Mirka Mora and her husband, restaurateur and gallery owner Georges Mora. He has two younger brothers: William Mora (b. 1953), an art dealer, and Tiriel Mora (b. 1958), an Australian actor.

From an early age, the Moras' family life placed Philippe at a focal point of the Australian arts scene. His mother Mirka Mora was a painter, and his father Georges Mora (a French Resistance fighter during WWII) was a leading art entrepreneur and restaurateur. After a brief stint in New York City, 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. In 1965 they opened the Tolarno Restaurant and Galleries in St Kilda.

Filmmaker

A self-confessed movie addict from childhood, Mora's cinema icons were the Marx Brothers, Jean Cocteau's Surrealist films, Alfred Hitchcock, Buster Keaton (as director) and Ernst Lubitsch's early flims, as reflected in his first home movies. Back Alley, now preserved in The National Film and Sound Archive, was made in 1964 when he was 15. This was a parody of West Side Story filmed in Flinders Lane, just behind his mother's studio at 9 Collins Street. The film features Mora, his brother William, and friends Peter Beilby and Sweeney Reed. His next film, Dreams in a Grey Afternoon (1965) 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.

His next project, Man in a Film (1966), 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 (1967), 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 (played by Zara Bowman) being repeatedly kicked and beaten in the gutter of a busy street while onlookers do nothing.

England

In 1967, when he had finished school, Mora travelled to England and moved into The Pheasantry, an historic building in King's Road, Chelsea in 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 to Oz magazine and assisted co-editor Martin Sharp with the landmark "Magic Theatre" edition. 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 one of his first London exhibitions was held at the gallery of Clytie Jessop, sister of Hermia Boyd (Hermia Lloyd-Jones), wife of noted ceramic artist David Boyd. Jessop was also a well-known actress and director who played the sinister Miss Jessell in Jack Clayton's classic supernatural thriller The Innocents (1961), and later directed the film Emma's War (1988) starring Lee Remick and a young Miranda Otto.

Jessop invited Mora to exhibit at her gallery in the Kings Road. The show garnered excellent reviews and generating numerous sales. More exhibitions at Clytie Jessop's gallery followed, with titles such as "Anti-Social Realism" and "Vomart".

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 an Easter Crucifixion exhibition at the Sigi Krauss gallery featuring a life-size sculpture of a sitting man made entirely of meat and offal, similar to Robert Whitaker's controversial "butcher" cover photos for the Beatles' 1966 Yesterday and Today album. At this exhibition Mora also screened his 8 mm 'film painting' Passion Play back-projected onto a screen framed in gold leaf. Although none of the exhibits were by Mora, Stanley Kubrick's art director purchased some of artist Herman Makkink's work for use in the film A Clockwork Orange, notably the giant white phallus and the chorus line of dancing Jesus sculptures.

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.

Trouble in Molopolis (1970), Mora's first feature-length film (the title a homage to Fritz Lang's Metropolis), was financed by the partnership of Arthur Boyd and Eric Clapton. It was filmed in Robert Hughes' apartment and at the Pheasantry. Germaine Greer played a cabaret singer, Jenny Kee was 'Shanghai Lil', Laurence Hope played a gangster, Martin Sharp featured as a mime and Richard Neville as a PR man. Tony Cahill from The Easybeats created the music with Jamie Boyd before the film premiered at the Paris Pullman Cinema in Chelsea, as an Oz benefit. Introduced by George Melly, the star of the film John Ivor Golding, also made a memorable appearance at the premiere, defecating in the front row and then passing out in an alcoholic coma. It was eventually shown in Australia at the Adelaide Film Festival in 1980.

America

At age 23 Mora directed Swastika (1973) 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 Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun discovered in the United States Marine and Signal Corps files in Washington by German-born English academic and specialist in German film, Lutz Becker. 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 Cannes 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, his 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 (worth nearly A$2 million in 2021). It went on to receive the John Ford Award in Cannes 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 controvery 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 Rocky Horror Show creator Richard O'Brien. When Mora fell out with producer Andrew Gaty who had re-cut 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 movies 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 (1994) with Beverly D'Angelo, Barry Humphries (in three roles), Moon Unit Zappa and Philippe's children Georges and Madeleine; Art Deco Detective (1994); Precious Find (1996) a sci-fi version of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which reunited two actors from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer and the late Brion James. For television, Mora directed Mercenary II: Thick & Thin (1997), and the films Back in Business (1997), Snide and Prejudice (1998), and Burning Down the House (1998).

When We Were Modern

In the early 2000s, with a A$25,000 'general development' fund from the Australian Film Commission, Mora began work on a still-unfinished film project titled When We Were Modern which in part touched on his own life and experience. The film's plot explores on the tangled relationships of the Heide inner circle – Sidney Nolan, Joy Hester, Albert Tucker and John and Sunday Reed. In the 1940s, after deserting from the army, Nolan took refuge at the Reed's famous house "Heide", and it was here that he made the first paintings in his now world-famous Ned Kelly series. During this time Nolan also conducted an open affair with Sunday Reed, but she refused to leave her husband and marry Nolan, so he subsequently married John's Reed's sister, Cynthia Hansen instead. The marriage eventually broke up, and when Cynthia committed suicide in 1976, her death sparked a bitter feud between Nolan and author Patrick White, which lasted until the end of their lives. White excoriated Nolan for abandoning his first wife Elizabeth (who was a close friend of his) and for remarrying (to Mary Perceval) so soon after Cynthia's death.

At the time the project was announced, Mora had cast Australian actor Clayton Watson (The Matrix) to play Nolan, with American actors Alec Baldwin as John Reed and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Sunday Reed. During pre-production, Mora discovered previously unseen home movies of the Heide circle, including the only films of Joy Hester and the Mirka Café. When We Were Modern was to have been dedicated to Sweeney Reed, who committed suicide in March 1979, aged 34. Sweeney was to have featured prominently as a character, and as a tribute to him, Mora reportedly planned to screen some of the footage from Back Alley under the closing credits.

Mora labored on the project for several years but it was rejected by Australian film funding bodies. Since that time Mora has worked on several other features and documentaries, but in May 2012 Deadline Hollywood reported that he is returning to the film, which he now intends to make as an animated feature, using a combination of hand puppets, stop motion and conventional animation, with the last act in 3D, supervised by 3D cinematographer Dave Gregory. The report also indicates that Clayton Watson will still portray Nolan, but will now perform the role as a voice actor. Interviewed for the report, Mora commented: "Personally I loved John and Sunday, and Sweeney Reed, their adopted son, was my best friend as a kid. My parents helped John and Sunday set up the Museum of Modern Art of Australia. This Nolan-Reed ménage is an important story that must be told honestly, no holds barred. It's a great Australian epic of love and modernism. We are using puppets done in the style of the painters involved."

Reception

In 1970, The Guardian's Derek Malcolm reviewing Trouble in Molopolis then being shown at The Other Cinema's 'festival of British independents,' describes it as "a Brechtian fable directed by Philippe Mora and set to on-off Weill-like music by Tony Cahill and others. Good colour belies its cost (£6,000) and a sense of humour enlivens its serious purpose, which is to present a story of greed, stupidity and avarice in easily recognisable Marxist terms ... rough and at times amateurish ... it is distinctly original without being pretentious." The Daily Telegraph picked up on Mora's statement that "it was a problem keeping the clichés yet trying to get a fresh reaction,' of which the journalist Eric Shorter concluded; "the problem was not solved."

Though it was the official British entry at Cannes, Australian critic Pamela Ruskin excoriated Swastika in her review as lacking context, and for 'whitewashing' Hitler. When Swastika was being shown afresh three years later in Village Theatres throughout Australia, Barbara Alysen in the Sydney Tribune was less reactive, acknowledging the controversy because "we are accustomed to having documentaries tell us what to think and [...] Hitler without comment is probably still a little too ambiguous," but pointing out that though it "shows Hitler, Goering, Goebbels et al. sunbathing, playing with children and dogs, and relaxing rather than orating and inciting," the film reveals Hitler as "a rather anaemic actor, shy and ill-at-ease in front of the camera," which makes "the ruling caste come out of Eva's films looking embarrassingly puny and unassertive, [...] unconscious inferiority [being] nazism's driving force."

Susie Eisenhuth in The Australian Women's Weekly hailed Brother. Can You Spare a Dime? as a film that "manages to romp through the difficult task of presenting this unhappy time and checks out finally as a thoroughly absorbing and entertaining affair. With a breezy blend of documentary footage, much of it rare and all of it fascinating –and gems from the movie classics of the period (like Gold Diggers of 1933). Mora has assembled a superb scrapbook of the lean, mean, laugh-or-you'll-cry '30s...Best of all, young writer-director Mora understands that the most interesting history is that which chronicles events both great and small." The un-named Tharunka reviewer considers that "It's a pity that Brother Can You Spare A Dime? has been given a glossy, nostalgic image when, in fact, it is a film of improtance in understanding the forces which manipulate societies without regard to any integrity of the individual." Sandra Hall in The Bulletin declared it "a documentary meticulously constructed to give the flavor of a country and a period through its ceremonies, its personalities, its news stories and its culture." More ambivilant about melodramatic moments in Mad Dog Morgan in which "Mora loses control," Hall found it overall "a film that works hard and for the most part, effectively as a reminder of what is remarkable in Australian history."

Though, according to Filmnews, it opened to "damaging" reviews in New York, Kay Keavney of The Australian Women's Weekly, in discussing Margaret Carnegie's research into the bushranger subject of Mad Dog Morgan, describes the film's creators as "arguably the world's most exciting young film-makers, Philippe Mora and Jeremy Thomas." While in Australia promoting the film, Mora gave a master class at Chiron College, which was an innovative senior secondary school in Sydney 1969–1976. Mad Dog Morgan won 'Best Direction' in the 1977 Australian Film Institute awards alongside other celebrated Australian features; Bruce Beresford's Don's Party and Henri Safran's Storm Boy.

Filmnews in 1976 offered the perspective that;

Philippe Mora's films have always been concerned with insanity...the individual insanity commonly referred to as madness, or the conditioned insanity which is that apparent state of normality termed civilized behaviour. In this context Mora's three major works, Swastika, Brother Can You Spare Dime and Mad Dog have defined three aspects of insanity so concisely that they may be regarded as testaments for the 70s.

Reviewing Mora's 1994 Art Deco Detective Cass Hampton declared unambiguously that "straightforward it definitely is not," but concluded that "there's a lot to chew on, and may be indigestible, but it has appeal: quirky dialogue, classy black comedy and dry, understated acting. It might be somebody's cup of tea.

Selected filmography

• 1969 – Trouble in Molopolis
• 1973 – Swastika
• 1975 – Brother Can You Spare a Dime?
• 1976 – Mad Dog Morgan
• 1982 – The Beast Within
• 1983 – The Return of Captain Invincible
• 1984 – A Breed Apart
• 1985 – Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf
• 1986 – Death of a Soldier
• 1987 – Howling III
• 1989 – Communion
• 1994 – Art Deco Detective
• 1996 – Precious Find
• 1997 – Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills
• 1997 – Snide and Prejudice
• 1997 – Back in Business
• 1998 – Joseph's Gift
• 1999 – According to Occam's Razor
• 1999 – Mercenary II: Thick & Thin
• 2001 – Burning Down the House
• 2009 – The Times They Ain't a Changin'
• 2009 – The Gertrude Stein Mystery or Some Like It Art
• 2011 – German Sons
• 2012 – Continuity

Exhibitions

• 1969, to 23 February: Paintings by Philippe Mora, Clytie Jessop Gallery, London
• 1971, August: Recent paintings by Philippe Mora, Tolarno Galeries, 42 Fitzroy Street. St. Kilda.

Collections

• National Gallery of Victoria

Awards

• 1977: 'Best Direction' for Mad Dog Morgan. Australian Film Awards , Australian Film Institute
• 1983: 'Best Special Effects' for The Return of Captain Invincible. 15th International Festival of Fantastic & Horror Cinema, Sitges, Spain

See also

• Not Quite Hollywood
• Adolf Hitler
• Cinema of Australia

External links

• Philippe Mora at IMDb
• Philippe Mora at AllMovie
• Trailer for Swastika