John Flaus Dossier

This special tribute dossier is devoted to one of the true legends of Australian screen culture, the inimitable and mercurial John Flaus. It marks a little over 60 years since the start of John’s involvement in...

STANDARD GRAMMAR: CUT ON EYELINE Two glances meet – he looks down, to see Worlds emerging in a coffee cup. See: Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967) (1) John Flaus introduced me to the word ...

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 ...

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...

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...

Back in the early ’60s I often went to the screenings at Sydney University’s Union Theatre, where the Sydney University Film Group programmed an interesting repertory selection, together with the occasional imp...

I met John some time in 1960. He was a cinephile and an anarchist who had some sort of job on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I was a first year Arts student. Both of us were members of the Sydney University Film Gr...

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...

Encounters with numerous remarkable men in a lifetime spent in and around the cinema have not effaced the vision of John Flaus’ bare feet planted in the ten-to-two position over the clock buried in the marble f...

Image: Buchanan Rides Alone (Budd Boetticher, 1958) The following short piece should be read as an unreliable memoir. John Flaus (hereinafter referred to as JF) was not a capitalist or even a tyro businessman....

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...

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...