$7-$10
Cinema was the first inescapably mechanical art. But in this post-mechanical age, the traditional apparatus of cinema has all too rapidly been deemed obsolete and primitive. Yet the handing over of industrial machinery to anti-industrial users represents one of the prime creative opportunities for re-appraising and re-interpreting the nature of ourselves as transformed by the age of machines.
Post mechanical age, the humanness of the machine can be made evident. Post mechanical age, machine craft is the new hand craft. This program presents recent works from Australian diy cine experimentalists Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie exploring the primitive apparatus of cinema and the relation between hand and machine.
Flyscreen
16mm 2010. 8 min
Flyscreen is a camera-less ‘rayogram’ film, made by layering fly-screen material onto raw 16mm film stock and then exposing to light. The sound heard is the optical sound of the images passing the 16mm optical sound head.
Etienne’s Hand
2011, 13 minutes, 16mm, Richard Tuohy
A movement study of a restless hand. Made from one five second shot. Sound constructed from an old French folk tune played on a hand cranked music box.
Crossing
Richard Tuohy 2016 16mm 11 min
Across the sea. Across the street. Cross processed images of fraught neighbours Korea and Japan in a pointillist sea of grain.
On the Invention of the Wheel
Richard Tuohy, 14 minutes, 2015
On man and machine. On the wheel upon which man turns and is turned. On ‘homo mechanicus’ – ‘machine man’.
Pancoran
2017, 9 minutes, 16mm, Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie
Jakarta traffic moves with the harmonious chaos of complex self organising entities everywhere. Through contact printer matteing techniques this mass transport becomes denser and denser until only the fluid futility of motion/motionlessness remains.Jakarta traffic stands as proof of the paradox of motion
Last Train
2016, 12 minutes, 16mm, Dianna Barrie and Richard Tuohy
Found in the (now possibly lost) film archive at Lab Laba Laba, footage from a trailer for the 1981 Indonesian propaganda film ‘Kereta Api Terakhir’ (The Last Train) melts into a soup of chemigrammed perforations. A film about the silence that follows the unspeakable; about blurred visions, untold histories and inaccessible archives.
Blue Line Chicago
2014, 10 minutes, 16mm, Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie
Architectural abstractions from the second city.
China not China
Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie, 14 minutes, 16mm, 2018
Hong Kong marked 20 years since its hand over; half way through the planned 40 year ‘one country, two systems’ transition. Taiwan, once imperial China, once Formosa, now ROC on the edge of the PRC. Multiple exposures of street scenes distort space and place creating a fluid sense of impermanence and transition, of two states somewhere between China and not China.
