VALE – Michael Edols ACS – (June 1942 – July 2018)

It is with great sadness that I inform you all of the passing of one of natures gentlemen, Mike Edols ACS.

Mike was an Internationally respected cinematographer across many genres. He was a true storyteller, who through his evocative images and his use of film grammar
painted with light and choreographed through the lens.

He was a respected NSW member of the Society, Accredited in 1974 with Accreditation number 114.

Our thoughts are with Marion and the extended family at this sad time……RIP Mike.

Ron Johanson ACS
National President

 

Mike Edols’s collaborated with Esben Storm on feature films 27A and In Search of Anna, across Asia for the Commonwealth Film Unit, a trilogy of films about Aborigines called Lalai Dreamtime, Like Wind Blow’en About – This Time and When the Snake Bites the Sun. He was a cinematographer on Tidikawa and Friends, on The Man Who Couldn’t Stop, and Solzhenitsyn’s Children… are Making a Lot of Noise in Paris for Mike Rubbo, and Ballad of the Little Soldier for Werner Herzog. He shot for Paul Cox on his Greece film Island.

He worked for Beyond, made commercials, shot for ABC TV, and made Hear Is My Hand – An Aboriginal Memorial with the Ramingining Community and the Central Arnhem Land Council.

In 1998 he taught at the Vancouver Film School and worked on Indian-Canadian features Ordeals of Love and Stingers and a TV documentary The Irrepressible Life of Roy Kiyooka.

Mike’s own website, built nearly twenty years ago, provides a more intricate story, again with a lovely human touch.

Some peoples’ life experience transforms them, making it almost impossible to define links with the past. Michael Edols’ life hasn’t been like that. It’s been a series of stepping stones, beginning in Northern Borneo at age three.

He and his father (who was building an open-air cinema on the banks of the Segama River) lived in the Murut longhouses for seven years. Each day of those years, Michael was taught by the Dusan jungle hunters, learning to observe and tell stories as they do. Hundreds of images and sensations still flood his memory – perspectives on the natural environment and a way to live far beyond Western experience. At the age of ten, he was sent to a Melbourne boarding school, and his stories were not believed. He picked up a box Brownie with serious intentions, and began to record images.

Text courtesy of Mike Rubbo – SCREEN HUB who remembers a remarkable friend and filmmaker