This program brings together seven handcrafted film works by Australian analogue experimentalists Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie. Across five years of creative exploration, these films stand as individual experiments in form and structure, each imbued with its own poetic resonance. Rooted firmly in the tactile processes of handmade cinema, the works navigate diverse terrains—landscapes, bodies, urban streets, and the cinematic frame. Through a dialogue between materiality and image, these films investigate how the apparatus of cinema itself shapes perception and meaning. Viewers are invited to experience the constructive collisions between subject and medium, between object and frame, and between successive individual film frames at the heart of the cinema apparatus
Tooborac
9 min
2025
Granite tors scattered over 20 square kilometres around Tooborac in central Victoria dance in ecstatic celebration of their own endurance.
Nude, Descending
9 min
2025
A performer descends the stairs. Direct film mattes frame glimpses of the motion. Phase-looping duplicates the glimpses into a cascade of humanity. A game played with colour separations, motion following hand scratched and painted mattes and a perpetual descending figure.
Intersection
10 min
2022
A staccato study of street level action and inter-action. People and vehicles on everyday journeys are atomised into coursing fragments of light, shadow, angle and inertia, reiterating and disassembling the creation of motion out of still frames at the heart of cinema. Filmed in ten cities on four continents.
In and Out a Window
12 min
2021
Our front window, from inside and out. Made during a long covid lockdown. A product of the distraction and abstraction that resulted from a lot of staring at the same pieces of glass.
Self-portrait with Bag
6 min
2020
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.
China not China
14 min
2018
Hong Kong marked 20 years since its hand over; just under half way through the planned 50 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.
Boot-fall
7 min
2008/25
A kinetic study of rural Australian football rendered in mud, limbs, rhythm, and grain. Shot on Super 8, Boot-fall zooms in on the choreography of bodies in motion—feet pounding earth, knees churning, legs leaping—disassembling the game into fragments of exertion and elemental texture. This is football without spectacle: no scoreboard, no commentary, only the raw cadence of community sport as seen from the ground up. The camera stays close—almost too close—tracing a ritual of repetition, struggle, and sweat where gesture becomes pattern, and movement becomes meaning
