Be warned , you could end up looking like a monkey's uncle if you tune your idiot box to Sky . Back in l976 , David Perry , Artist in Residence in Film and Video at Griffith University , Brisbane , presented this disturbing visage in an interview by John Tranter for the art and literature journal, Aspect .
At the time , Perry was mainly working in video , most shown on television screens . In a political sense, he said video was more democratic, more intimate than film . Cinema was a very formal medium , people sat in a darkened theatre their attention on the screen , an enormous image that hypnotised the audience .
Television was different...there was a little box in an ordinary room, people sat about it talking , drinking .
While people complained vociferously about the power of television , and there was justification for so saying, he felt it a much more friendly medium.
People did not feel constrained about talking to the television screen . Recently he had visited a house where a group was watching a political figure on the screen . Some disagreed with him , and they were just yelling at him .This would not happen in a cinema .Television allowed you to take what you want from it ; what you did not want , you could shout at , or ignore .
Tranter asked Perry what he felt about moving from Sydney to Brisbane to take up the Griffith University post. His reply : "Well...I was a bit nervous , because there's a mythology about Queensland , that it's a fascist state , that kind of thing . But I honestly don't think Brisbane or Queensland is any more fascist than the rest of Australia .
DAVID PERRY: Born Sydney 1933 , died 2015. Pioneering Australian experimental and underground filmmaker , founder of UBU Films (l965) , poster artist, stringer for Channel 9 and 10. Involved in more than 120 archival interviews with Australia's greatest painters, sculptors , dancers , actors , writers and filmmakers . Chief Australian cinematographer on Steven Spielberg's Survival of Shoah , a visual history project that recorded more than 400 interviews with survivors of the Holocaust.
DAVID PERRY: Born Sydney 1933 , died 2015. Pioneering Australian experimental and underground filmmaker , founder of UBU Films (l965) , poster artist, stringer for Channel 9 and 10. Involved in more than 120 archival interviews with Australia's greatest painters, sculptors , dancers , actors , writers and filmmakers . Chief Australian cinematographer on Steven Spielberg's Survival of Shoah , a visual history project that recorded more than 400 interviews with survivors of the Holocaust.
