Garry Shead

“An ‘avant-garde’ film of the seventies. A man obssessed with Phantom comics fantasises himself as the contemporary Phantom. Shot on location in Sydney, various Sydney visual artists play characters in this short comic story intercut with images from Phantom comics. Gary Shead is a visual artist who utilised cartoon imagery in his work, hence the idea for this film.” (Screensound)

Live Between Evil is a departure from Shead's experimental style and aims at realistic recreation of bourgeois life on Sydney's Upper North Shore.

Live Between Evil is a departure from Shead's experimental style and aims at realistic recreation of bourgeois life on Sydney's Upper North Shore.

Artist/poet/novelist/singer Pip Proud was being feted in the media as an underground superstar at the time this experimental documentary was made. The film shows Pip’s reactions to automated, ritualised city life, using altered speed photography and, in some instances, incision and puncturing of the film stock.

“The film was made spontaneously one afternoon in 1966. When a few friends got together... We were all in love with the film medium...” (Garry Shead)

“Burlesqueing western conventions, this film has silent movie titles and music and a posse of shetland ponies. A gumnut satire of Westerns with a fine eye for the absurd.” (The Australian Filmmakers Co-operatives Catalogue of Independent Film)

Pilot for proposed Ned Kelly film. An avant-garde re-creation of the murder of the three police officers at Stringybark Creek.

Kath is seen in different environments.

Lovemaking in water has Antarctic repercussions.

This assembly of home-movie footage, shot between 1961 and 1966, was made by artist and filmmaker Shead. Homegrown pop artist Martin Sharp and writer Richard Neville appear in a sequence covering the birth of Oz magazine. The film’s impressionistic fragments capture the mood of the youth counterculture in early 1960s Sydney.