Let us not say, “If only the texts were richer, the witnesses more loquacious, the confessions more detailed!” Don’t we seem today to have everything we need in order to know our contemporaries: their revelations on recordings, their facial expressions in photographs? And yet… A rascal, say some; a saint, say others, speaking of the [...]
Paul Cox Dossier
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I believe the first film by Paul Cox I saw was Man of Flowers (1983), at the 1984 Chicago Film Festival. The next year, My First Wife (1984). I heard at once a distinctive voice, saw a special vision. Those films might not appear similar, but they are both deeply interested in their characters and [...]
Ardea cinerea is the scientific name of the Grey Heron found in Europe. In Human Touch (2004) a heron alights for a moment on a stone basin in the garden – an Australian species no doubt but when I observed the haunting effect to which it was put I thought of my childhood familiar. After [...]
“I find living itself quite difficult so you may as well make it more difficult by doing something crazy.” – Paul Cox (1) Paul Cox has been making films for over 40 years. His stories often reflect aspects of his own life experience or that of his close friends, a key factor leading to his [...]
My work with Paul Cox as Production Designer has been successful, I believe, because we have much in common. On the surface, our backgrounds are similar – we are of similar age, we both experienced the indoctrination of our different religions and discarded their dogmas as soon as possible, and we both migrated to Australia [...]
1. If I had to choose a motto for Paul Cox’s films, no motto would seem more appropriate to me than the phrase: “For people who like that sort of thing, that’s the sort of thing they like”. In other words, I believe that idiosyncrasy is very much the element of these films. For all [...]
“Paulus Henrikus Benidictus Cox”: the name triggers images of a character from some historical tale by Umberto Eco. From my experiences of collaborating with him for over a quarter of a century now, I can tell you that he has many of the values and characteristics of such a character. Working with Cox is not [...]
