John Flaus Dossier

The John Flaus I Know

This is a story about a 40-year friendship. One I have always valued greatly. Others will write about John Flaus’ significant contribution to film and television culture in Australia in all its dimensions, and ...

For John Flaus

Image: Flaus as the priest in Newsfront (Phillip Noyce, 1978) I met John Flaus on 5 October 1963. I had been in Australia for only a little more than two months, having arrived from England as a £10 Pom. For f...

Flausy

John Flaus was a mentor and inspiration for a number of Swinburne Film School students in the ’70s, many of whom went on to have successful careers in the film and television industry. Because of “Flausy”, Elle...

Reminiscences of John Flaus

My first contact with John would be around 1962-63. I had joined the Workers’ Educational Association Film Study Group in Sydney. Not knowing much about cinema, but wanting to know everything, I thought this...

Happy Birthday, John

How fondly I remember those early days of excitement making movies. Gunslingers we felt like. Your house in Newtown with cardboard boxes filled with papers and writings and books scattered all over the floor...

Words for John Flaus

Back in the ’60s and early ’70s, our serious film-viewing landscape was the main campus cinema, Sydney University’s Union Theatre, later the Footbridge; then the fleapits, the adult education centres, and the f...

John Flaus: A Tribute

In the early 1970s when academic film study was beginning, most of us would wait for what John Flaus was going to come up with next. Those of us professionally teaching film were a very small community. Very fe...

A Face Out of Rembrandt

(Image: Flaus and Bruce Kerr in Waiting for Godot (La Mama Theatre, 2011)) The face is out of Rembrandt. In one of his YouTube clips my image appears and age is making us converge. I have known John Flau...

Hearing From John Flaus

An early influence In 1952, I had somehow scored a job as a research assistant in economic history at the NSW Institute of Technology, soon to become the University of New South Wales. My honours degree had ma...

Images of Flaus

John Flaus joined the La Trobe faculty in 1972, the second year of my three-year stint there. Thus he was a working colleague of mine for just two years. But he made a strong and lasting impression on me. I’...

Flaus

John Flaus looks like an animated Bert Tucker painting. The voice? It recalls the vocalising of a mallee root if, of course, a mallee root could speak. I’ve known John on and off for half a century and remember...

By Crikey!

I first saw John Flaus when I was at La Trobe University majoring in Latin American History. I thought he looked like he had just auditioned for Bad Santa. I was told he hadn’t shaved for 18 years. Wow! That’s ...

A Tribute to John Flaus

John Flaus Ah, the memories. I think back to first hearing of John in the early ’60s. He was a leading light in the Push, a vaguely lefty group of intellectuals who gathered around certain watering holes in...

Night People and The Wild One

These two articles were originally published in consecutive issues of Voice: The Australian Independent Monthly, vol. 3, no. 11 and 12, August and September 1954. Written when Flaus was 20, they represent what ...

The Western Myth

Originally published in Sydney University Film Group Bulletin vol. 4, no. 3, Second Term 1966, pp. 61-63. Republished with the permission of the author. The Searchers For most film commentators the only “resp...

The World of Satyajit Ray

Originally published in Masque vol. 1, no. 5, May-June 1968, pp. 14-17. This article appeared within a special film issue of this relatively short-lived but significant dramatic and performing arts magazine. Th...

The Killers

Originally published in Sydney University Film Group Bulletin no. 50, First Term 1970, pp. 6-7. Republished with the permission of the author. Audiences who try to “read” rather than “see” films, who are more ...

Melville: Le Samouraï

Originally published in Cinema Papers no. 1, January 1974, pp. 56-7. Republished with the permission of the author. “There is no greater solitude than that of the Samurai, unless it be that of the tiger in the...

There’s Always Tomorrow

Originally published in Annotations on Film, ed. Michael Koller, Melbourne Cinémathèque, Melbourne, 1990, p. 53. Republished with the permission of the author and the Melbourne Cinémathèque. The most penetrati...

In the Mind’s Eye

These articles were originally published in Paul Winkler: Films 1964-94 , Museum of Contemporary Art and Paul Winkler, Sydney, 1995, pp. 9-11 and 24. Republished with the permission of the author and the Museum...

The Big Heat

Originally published in CTEQ: Annotations on Film no. 2, 1996, pp. 7-9. It appears here with minor corrections. Republished with the permission of the author and the Melbourne Cinémathèque. When a police offic...