Message from Virginia Madsen / Edwin Brys
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Sharing this wonderful news for the Australian born radio artist, writer, producer (and formerly ABC producer) Kaye Mortley (* 1943), who has won a most prestigious award for her lifetime’s work in radio in France – Le Prix de l’oeuvre de la SCAM.
The award is from an organisation translated as the civil society of multimedia authors.
La Scam is the French equivalent to our Society of Authors comprising ‘directors, writers, translators, journalists, video and radio makers, photographers and illustrators.’ (ex their – English version – website).
In sharing this, I also am sharing one of Mortley’s early works for the ABC, deceptively simple but unlike anything that had gone before it.
It is a ‘studio work’ of documentary and of the imagination, but one in which windows and doors long shut were opened.‘In ‘Gulpilil’ Mortley invites the young actor, David Gulpilil, as he was in 1978, into an ABC radio drama studio.
Here he was invited to tell the stories he wanted to tell, using his own voice and words.
He is not being interviewed here but rather over time, comes to inhabit and command this space.Mortley works to create something rich but yet direct and spare in this piece.
But what exactly is it, as this collaborative and mysterious performance unfolds?
At a time when radio dramas and ‘features’ were most likely to be controlled affairs, built around detailed scripts read by professional radio actors, Gulpilil’s undirected, ‘free’ use of the studio was a most radical act.Listen still to this ‘documentary’ by Kaye Mortley and Gulpilil here: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/radioeye/gulpilil/3374810
IFC AudioDocs 