Alex Gibney Makes Documentaries
“If you want to stop the crimes, you have to know how the criminals work.”
Six years ago, Alex Gibney furiously burst onto the international filmmaking scene with Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Unlike other documentaries critical of corporate America, Gibney’s method is grander than simply enraging audiences or embarrassing interview subjects – he attempts to understand the forces which drive people with power to act with inexplicable corruption, and to understand what drives the reasonable mind to unreasonable action.
We also learn about: Human Behaviour Experiments, Ken Kesey and his merry pranksters and Luis Buñuel
Photo: Davi Russo
Paul Jennings is Unreal
“Stories do make you feel less alone in the world.”
If you grew up in Australia in the last twenty-six years, chances are part of your childhood was spent devouring a Paul Jennings book – or many books – as was the case for Josephine Rowe, who, as an eleven-year-old scoured the phone book and almost built up the courage to pick up the phone and give the author a call. Fifteen years later, that conversation finally takes place and Josephine and Paul sit in the kitchen of his home in Warrnambool and talk about dreams, Carl Jung, the importance of snails, and what it means to be a storyteller.
We also learn about: Red Books and magicians
Photo: Cory White
Carol Rittner is a Sister of Mercy
“I’m not the messiah, you’re not the messiah, we’re not going to save the world, but we do what we can.”
Over the years Dr Carol Rittner has dedicated her career to exploring the intersection of faith and genocide, teaching a generation of university students Holocaust and Genocide studies, as well as editing titles such as Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust and Will Genocide Ever End? One would suspect that the woman on the other end of this conversation would be a model of the stern, serious nun, thoroughly hardened by a lifetime spent writing margin notes in the annals of evil. As Patrick discovers, Carol Rittner is not that. Carol is the kind of nun that gets things done.
We also learn about: the Sisters of Mercy and subversive nuns
Photo: Steffan Hill
Greg and Lucy Malouf Love Food
“If Mum was around, and I knew she was making kibbineh, I’d probably take the night off and go and have some.”
While the recipes in the Maloufs’ cookbooks are the result of Greg’s inspired refashioning of traditional cuisine, it is Lucy Malouf who winds their shared stories through the books and makes them memorable – not just as how-to guides, but as travel memoirs. Greg and Lucy continue to travel together, collecting the world’s most delicious, inspiring and exotic tales. In Dumbo Feather 29, Jessica Friedmann speaks with Greg and Lucy Malouf about (among other things) foraging for spices by Melbourne’s railway lines and of travelling through Iran.
We also learn about: the music of the Ottoman-American Diaspora
Photo: James Braund
Lucy Guerin is a Choreographer
“You have to keep constantly stripping back all your ideas and preconceptions about what it is that you do.”
We’re pretty sure choreographer Lucy Guerin doesn’t think she’s stuck doing the worst job in the world. The dancers in her self-titled company definitely don’t stand around glaring at her impatiently, flicking cigarette ash into the floorboard cracks while they wait for Guerin’s muse to strike. Her approach to dance is more like a conscientious scientist doing laboratory experiments; questioning, active, exploratory. It’s a method that has led to the creation of the most interesting and thought-provoking contemporary dance works Australia has seen in the last decade. Despite battling with unreliable recording devices and a bad phone connection, Lorelei Vashti and Lucy Guerin contemplate steamy New York summers, waiting tables, collaboration, processes of deduction and dancing around the living room to Kate Bush.
We also learn about: How not to make it in New York
Photo: Toby Burrows
The Astor Theatre, DNA, Cows and so much more
Simon Schulz has a Dairy: Schulz Organic Farms
George Florence Watches Over the Astor Theatre
Laura Welcher Has a Disc Containing 1000 Human Languages: The Rosetta Project
Rosalind Franklin discovered the structure of DNA
A postcard from Aaron Blabey
Comments
Helen Arnold 22 Nov 12:04AM
Hi Danny and Berry
Congrats on the magazine. Have enjoyed reading the articles on line and look forward to gettting a hard copy one day