Richard Tuohy

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

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

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

Refraction can be very satisfying. Especially when working with camera original Ektachrome on 16mm. There is nothing not to love about camera original Ektachrome – except perhaps its vulnerability as a 'one off'. It is beautifully suited to optical experiments and for exploring what is going on in the lens. Here we play with the endless dance of specular reflections on water.

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!

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Bones of a dead Tasmanian forest colourfully ‘ re-animated’ in a film printer.

High country, high contrast. A collision of lines and patterns from the wood of burnt trees.

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 Mallee' is the name given to the arid north west corner of Victoria. Ironically, given it is the most arid part of the state, 'The Mallee' is also a major food bowl in Australia due to massive irrigation schemes, the dry climate and well draining sandy soil. It has long been an area of big government projects and schemes: it has a history of being environmentally stretched. There are also, however, a number of large national parks in the Mallee, mostly in areas of ancient sand dunes that wouldn't pay development. These arrid parks with there 'mallee-formed' multi trunked stunted Eucalypts, gnarled native cyprus tree and other scrub species have a beauty and fascination that is quite unique.

A chronicle filming the journey from the directors' accomodation in Seoul to the Space Cell labs and workshops.

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

“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.”

Slow motion abstractions and analyses of bodies in motion.

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.

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

Workers of the word, in yellow vests, building other people's dreams.

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.

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 'rover' lands on a red planet and explores its mysterious surroundings. This film was made at the time of the Huygens/Cassini probe to Titan. Really, its a film about a certain kind of fixed but loose mechanical camera movement.

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.

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!

A constant series of tiny collisions.