Hand and Machine. Hand made 16mm films from Australia
Special screening by Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie
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 seven recent film works from Australian diy cine experimentalists Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie exploring the primitive apparatus of cinema and the relation between hand and machine.
Blending and Blindingby Richard Tuohy2018
Screens and partitions; windows and shutters; grids, curves and arches. Three peoples, one country: Malaysia. (...)
Crossingby Richard Tuohy2016
Across the sea. Across the street. Cross processed images of fraught neighbours Korea and Japan in a pointillist sea of grain. (...)
Etienne’s Handby Richard Tuohy2011
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. (...)
Flyscreenby Richard Tuohy2010
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. (...)
Last Trainby Richard Tuohy, Dianna Barrie2016
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. (...)
Pancoranby Richard Tuohy, Dianna Barrie2017
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 (...)
