Richard Tuohy

A short film by Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie.

A blinding beam of light. The piercing sound of ships. Everything—the land, plants, the sky—shouts for attention. Perceptions assail us with their demands to be noticed.

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 sounds!

The literal frame of a window overlooking a small garden becomes the scene through which Richard Tuohy’s film exploits the myriad plastic potentialities of the cinematic frame. Immersive and stroboscopic, In and Out a Window offers its own variations on cinema’s mechanical segmentations of space and time, opening up a portal to undiscovered dimensions and new phenomenologies.

​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.

A city of brick, tin and board, rent by internal tectonics and sliding into the sea.

A short film using the Pulfrich effect.

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 impermanence and transition, of two states somewhere between China and not China.

Screens and partitions; windows and shutters; grids, curves and arches. Three peoples, one country: Malaysia.

On Christmas eve in 1974, the city of Darwin was devastated by Cyclone Tracy. In this expanded cinema piece, a single film print, featuring only concentric circles, is bi-packed against itself in two 16mm projectors simultaneously. Through this approach, the quadrupled image of circles is transformed into troubled patterns of pulsating and swirling interference and wailing sounds of tropical violence.

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.

Film performance with three 16mm projectors. Lines change size and frequency as the camera zooms closer and pulls further away. From these lines, the machine generates sound: the voice of the machine. Into the field of lines emerge the hands of the operators making new patterns of lines.

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'

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, untold histories and inaccessible archives.

The Ginza of fable and memory. This is the first film I have finished using the “chromaflex” technique that we developed at Nanolab. This is a very much hands-on colour developing procedure that allows selected areas of the film to be colour positive, colour negative, or black and white.

The Ginza of fable and memory. This is the first film I have finished using the “chromaflex” technique that we developed at Nanolab. This is a very much hands-on colour developing procedure that allows selected areas of the film to be colour positive, colour negative, or black and white.

The Ginza of fable and memory. This is the first film I have finished using the “chromaflex” technique that we developed at Nanolab. This is a very much hands-on colour developing procedure that allows selected areas of the film to be colour positive, colour negative, or black and white.

Architectural distortions of the second city.

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.

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 as they pass the optical sound head of the 16mm projector. This is a camera-less and sound-recorder-less film.

A movement study of a restless hand. Made from one five second shot, with sound constructed from an old French folk tune played on a hand cranked music box. This film exploits the visual possibilities of the 16mm contact printer.

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.

Iron-wood is an abstract visual exploration of the deeply fissured 'cog-like' bark of the Australian tree Eucalyptus Sideroxylon (Red Ironbark).