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Nick Prescott

2018 Australian Book Review Film Survey

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June-July 2018, no. 402

We invited some writers, film critics, and film professionals to nominate their favourite film – not The Greatest Film Ever Sold, but one that matters to them personally.

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Terror and Joy: The Films of Dušan Makavejev by Lorraine Mortimer

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July-August 2009, no. 313
Nick Prescott reviews 'Terror and Joy: The films of Dušan Makavejev' by Lorraine Mortimer

The appearance of an idiosyncratic scholarly text addressing the work of a major European film-maker such as Dušan Makavejev is timely, given our increasingly fraught condition as subjects of a world that becomes more convolutedly politicised with every nanosecond. This is a highly political and indeed humanist analysis of a significant body of cinematic work.

Lorraine Mortimer’s introductory assertion that Makavejev’s 1960s and 1970s work is ‘an international touchstone of radical, transcultural and political cinema’ sets the bar high. Mortimer – an academic at La Trobe University – goes on, in this thoroughly researched and heartfelt study, to set an even more daunting goal for herself, stating that her aim is to examine Makavejev’s films ‘historically, locally, politically and aesthetically, highlighting [no less than] their implications for our understanding of the contemporary world’. This is quite a claim, yet, by and large, Mortimer’s text keeps to its word.

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Romulus, My Father

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July–August 2007, no. 293
Nick Prescott reviews 'Romulus, My Father'

When Raimond Gaita’s memoir Romulus, My Father was published in 1998, the acclaim with which it was greeted was ubiquitous. The book was significant not simply because it was a strikingly revealing personal narrative written by a renowned philosopher, but because it managed to present a story that contained large doses of personal tragedy without rendering the experience of reading it either falsely uplifting or overwhelmingly depressing. While offering vivid portraits of an inconstant, depressive wife and mother, and a self-possessed husband and father struggling with his own sense of self-worth, Romulus, My Father celebrated the power of love and friendship in the most subtle, telling and deeply humane ways.

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