Jack Ellitt bio - BFI GPO set, Vol 2

Jack Ellitt was the anglicised and vernacular name of Avrom Yitzhak Elitski, born to Lithuanian Orthodox Jews in Manchester, 1902. Moving to Australia 3 years later, Ellitt’s parents early determined on a legal career for their son. In response, he ran away at 15, supporting himself as a farm labourer and jackeroo. Upon return to Sydney, he won a scholarship place to the New South Wales State Conservatorium, studying piano and violin. Rather than compete with his peers for keyboard or string duties in the school’s new orchestra, Ellitt took up the bassoon for their first concert: the Australian premiere of Gustav Holst’s The Planets (a work Ellitt would later abbreviate for the score of Lye’s The Birth of the Robot).

Ellitt and Lye first met in the constrained bohemian circles of 1920s Sydney. Lye was stoking and shiphanding his way to the cultural epicentre of the old “Mother Country”; Ellitt, recently graduated, was gigging in orchestra pits for vaudeville. Libraries gave them a restless sense of what was happening beyond the diminished horizons of then-Australian culture. Both were avid for the cultural renovations of European modernism, and the provocative theories of Marx and Freud. Both were keen amateur anthropologists, stalking the tribal artefacts of the Australian Museum. The pair tested their roughhouse cerebrations at pubs in The Rocks, and between swims at Bondi.

Lye made his abrupt departure for the UK, and at his correspondence-urging Ellitt shortly followed; by 1928 the pair were domiciled in a wharf-bound barge loaned by the writer, A. P. Herbert. Lye and Ellitt maintained a regime of physical fitness by regular swimming in the Thames (suggesting they might previously have been members of Sydney’s “polar bear” club, of perennial all-weather surfers). Herbert also found them work as stagehands at the Lyric Theatre, with Ellitt performing in pubs and teahouses on the side. When Lye began work at animating Tusalava, he entrusted Ellitt with the composition of a live soundtrack...

(etc)

available February 2009 from the British Film Institute

(liner notes) Submariner Cinema 1: Jean Painleve

There exists an extravagant flotsam of international cinema; produced at a remove from the more lucrative entertainment industry, or even the prestige of purely aesthetic schools, what might be considered an "expedient cinema" has largely escaped the attention both of film audiences and of critics. Never intended for a mass-audience, and without the presage of a Big Noise publicity machine, most of these films have been viewed only unwillingly: by students in science or civic ethics classes, delegates at an industry convention, or trainees within vocational education. Sometimes these films represent the earliest experiments of filmmakers who've proceeded to respected careers in feature filmmaking (e.g. Dusan Makavejev's 31 shorts for Zagreb Film, or the astonishing sponsored works of the young Fred Schepisi in the late 1960s); more often, they represent the entire celluloid oeuvre of unsung auteurs. If many of these films are unremarkable, the brightest gems are among the most magical works of Twentieth Century cinema, and should be celebrated accordingly. More than this; because these films are typically produced without regard for the prevailing conventions of commercial filmmaking, they suggest the possibility of whole new criteria of cinema aesthetics...

Read the rest in the liner to the new BFI set, available here

(somewhat-revised version of an original article from senses of cinema)

Painleve on the D-L from Ubuweb