Richard Tuohy

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.

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 couple, Steve and Louise, quit their respective office jobs, deciding to follow their inner desires and their aspirations to be artistic.

Barcelona, immediately after the independence referendum. Shot on black and white film stock using a re-invented colour separation technique. Dedicated to the spirit of independence everywhere!

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.

A personal, diary film, about love, the cinema, faith, desire, affirmation.

An abstract exploration of the curves and twists of the Australian alpine tree the ‘Snow Gum’ – Eucalyptus Pauciflora.

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...

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 personal film, a diary, an essay, of Bill Mousoulis in December 1989.

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.

Granite tors scattered over 20 square kilometers around Tooborac in central Victoria dance in energetic celebration of their own endurance.

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.

Architectural distortions of the second city.

​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.

“Tree ferns filmed and then re-filmed on black and white film are inter-cut to produce a collage of green tinted positive images and green toned negative images. As the ferns’ leaves are pale in dark surroundings, the tinted positive yields green leaves in a black background, and the toned negative green leaves in a white background. Excerpts from Schubert’s Schoene Muellerin lament and laud the colour green by turns.”

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.

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.

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