It is an experimental film in which the best of the structural film tradition merges with an urban symphony. A busy intersection is a plentiful source of the scenes that form a rhythmical unit with its own structure and meaning. The celebration of cinematography in its very own realm of images and...
Hong Kong marked twenty years since its hand over; halfway through the planned forty 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...
Found in the (now possibly lost) film archive at Lab Laba Laba in Jakarta, footage from a trailer of 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,...
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.
Half-tone dot "screens" intended for use as shadings and tones in Manga comic illustrations have here been "photogrammed" directly onto raw 16mm film stock. A flicker collage of these dots has then been created using a 16mm film printer. The sounds heard are those that the dots themselves produce...
Motorcycles and cars are lost in the sound of traffic and disappear in bands sliced into film footage of Jakarta’s roads. The horizontal and vertical lines or checkerboard patterns emphasizing the density and chaos of the crowded roads were made by optically printing 16mm film.
Experimental filmmaker Richard Tuohy provides a glimpse of the world defined by the mechanical art of film. On the Invention of the Wheel becomes a metaphor for the 'Homo mechanicus'
The evening seemed very disturbing to me, as if the approaching night was something to be feared. It was as if, when night fell, you couldn't escape and had to face unspecified consequences. Maybe the earth will remember and the night will reveal what we could have done...
Across the sea. Across the street. Cross processed and grain-enlarged images of fraught neighbours Korea and Japan who have difficulty making each other out.
A camera-less portrait of the artist. Super 8 cartridges placed inside a black cotton bag, the film advanced via a hand crank. The tiny gaps in the fabric weave make for dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of tiny pinholes.
In 2012, Richard Tuohy made "Screen Tone" using patterns of dots printed straight to 16mm film. By doubling this principle in "Dot Matrix", a third, dizzying moire pattern and a deafening noise develops in the flicker (alternating black and white frames) because the dots also pass by the sound head.
A North Asian metropolis. Electricity wires draped like thick webs adorn the streetscape. Expolsive sparks of colour electrify the frame. Filmed in Seoul in black and white. Colourised during processing using coloured torch light.
A restless hand, folding and folding onto itself. It makes no sound... and all the sound in the world. In the era of covid, we have become used to making contact only through digital intermediaries. Touching, making hand contact with each other, has taken on new meaning and new unexpected...