MILESAGO - Film

KELLY COUNTRY

DATE: 1973
GENRE: documentary
FORMAT: color film
COUNTRY: UK

DIRECTOR, WRITER: Stuart Cooper
NARRATOR: Orson Welles

NOTES

Little is known of this film at present. Although British-made and directed by an American, it is believed that the film deals with the Ned Kelly story and/or Sidney Nolan's famous series of Kelly paintings and excerpts from Nolan's poems.

According to director Phillipe Mora, the narration includes excerpts from recordings made by Orson Welles in London. Welles met Australian artist Sidney Nolan, who showed him some of his "vitriolic, acerbic, poems about Heide" (the famous Melbourne artists' colony) and Welles agreed to read them for a tape-recording.

Philippe Mora: "I have heard the uncut tape of the actor-director's magic voice belting out Nolan's brilliant love-turns-to-hate poems. Some of them were used in the soundtrack of a documentary called Kelly Country made around that time [the early 1970s]."

Stuart Cooper subsequently directed the flm version of David Halliwell's famous stage play Little Malcolm and his Struggle Against The Eunuchs (1974), which stars John Hurt. Cooper has since worked extensively as a producer, director and writer in television in the USA and Germany.

REFERENCES / LINKS

Philippe Mora
"When Film Was Modern: Reflections and Notes on Film and Heide"
Art Monthly Australia
August 2002, No. 152

IMDb
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0239089/combined

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