Dianna Barrie

Birth : , Melbourne, Australia

History

Dianna Barrie (Australia; b. 1972, Melbourne) found her way into filmmaking as a middle ground between the pursuit of abstract music and philosophy, both of which she has studied formally at the postgraduate level. Ever pushing the limits of the hand processing of Super-8mm led to the establishment of Nanolab with Richard Tuohy in 2006. Dianna's film work could perhaps be characterised as "direct chemical" filmmaking. In 2012, Dianna helped establish Artist Film Workshop, where celluloid is embraced and advocated by a community of practitioners in Melbourne. As a notable figure in the international artist-run film labs movement, she and her partner spend a significant amount of time each year touring their joint film programs and conducting workshops and masterclasses in hand-made film practice. Dianna was also a founding director of the Australian International Experimental Film Festival.

Movies

Fear of Floating

Director

A short film by Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie.

Like a Lighthouse

Director

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.

South Point

Director

The windswept southernmost point of the Australian mainland as captured with an improvised super 8 camera during a period of zero covid on a 5-day bushwalk in January 2021.

Self Portrait with Bag

Director

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.

Valpi

Director

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

China Not China

Director

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.

Blinding and Blending

Director

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

Cyclone Tracery

Director

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.

Inside the Machine

Director

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.

Pancoran

Director

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.

The Last Train

Director

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.

Blue Line Chicago

Director

Architectural distortions of the second city.