HAND AND MACHINE: Sunday 5th June

Hand and Machine: a screening of films by Richard Tuohy.

7.30pm  Sunday 5th June

BEEF at PRSC, 19 Hillgrove St, Stokes Croft, Bristol BS2 8JT

Cinema was the first inescapably mechanical art.  But in this post-mechanical age, the traditional apparatus of cinema has all to 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.

Crossing

2016, 21 minutes, 16mm, Richard Tuohy

Across the sea. Across the street.  Cross processed super 8 footage of fraught neighbours Korea and Japan in grain focussed enlargement.

Blue Line Chicago

2014, 10 minutes, 16mm, Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie

Architectural distortions of the second city.

Last Train

2016, 12 minutes, 16mm, Dianna Barrie and Richard Tuohy
Found in the (now lost) archive of Lab Laba Laba, footage from a trailer for the Indonesian film ‘Kereta Api Terakhir’ (The Last Train) melts into a soup of chemigrammed perforations.
A film made in seven cities, and none.

Etienne’s Hand 

2011, 13 minutes, 16mm, Richard Tuohy

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.

Ginza Strip

2014, 9 minutes, 16mm, Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie

The Ginza of fable and memory.  This is the first film I have finished using the ‘chromaflex’ technique that we developed.  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.

Dot Matrix

2013, 16 minutes, 2 x 16mm, Richard Tuohy

Dot Matrix is dual 16mm  film involving two almost completely overlapping projected images.  The ‘dots’ were produced by photogramming sheets of dotty paper (used for manga illustrations) directly onto raw 16mm film stock.  These dots were then contacted printed with ‘flicker’ (alternating black frames) creating strobing ‘interruptions’ to the dots.    The drama of the film emerges in the overlap of the two projected images of dots.  The product they make is greater than the parts. The sounds heard are those that the dots themselves produce as they pass the optical sound head of the 16mm projector.