Australian Retrospective

Total Run Time: 76 min

Frames
Dirk de Bruyn, 16mm, 10 minutes, 1986
‘The film is a mixture of flickery, Letraset, light, scratching and hand-drawn
colours. So rapid is the movement that it makes you wonder at times if you are
looking at an image or its afterimage. Could a film like Frames be damaging to your
retina or neurological functions? If you sat in front of this type of film long
enough, would it send you on a trip? Could it awaken a patient out of a coma? After
a confronting seven minutes I felt exhausted and slightly frazzled, such is the
power of the film.’

Glen Hannah, Filmviews Number 130 p 28 1986.

Musical Four Letter Words
Marcus Bergner, 16mm, 5 minutes, 1989

Musical Four Letter Words  reworks bleached film footage from a 1940’s Mexican western musical as a modernist film language exercise. A list of four letter words related to sound and music was written directly onto the bleached film becoming an interior voice to the remaining film and a swansong for the drowned one.

Diction
Pete Spence, Super 8, 10 minutes, 1992

Diction was the first film Spence made using a super 8 re-copying technique he had developed.  The principal imagery is taken from less than 5 seconds of found footage upon which other found and original footage was overlaid.  Before re-copying, all the footage went through a bleaching process, selectively and randomly eliminating areas of image.  Spence dedicated this film to ‘The Shadow Project’ – an international multimedia event reflecting on the human shadows left after the bombing of Hiroshima.

Pale Black
Marie Craven, 16mm, 13 minutes, 1992

The haunting voice at the centre of Pale black belongs to an invisible woman. Her presence is seen only in her traces: a pair of jeans left on a chair; wilting roses in a vase; a pile of letters waiting to be sent. The film tracks this mystery woman through the dark, silent realms of her interior world – and draws the portrait of a phantom self.

The Dear Colour, the Dread Colour
Dianna Barrie, Super 8, 5 minutes, 2005

Tree ferns filmed and then re-filmed on black and white super 8 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.

Rough Geometry
Nick Ostrovskis, Super 8, 4 minutes, 1994

A legend of the Melbourne Super 8 Film Group, Ostrovskis here explores the possibilities of re-animating etched and coloured 35mm slides using his distinctive single frame shooting and zooming techniques.

Time Ball
Marcia Jane, digital video, 6 minutes, 2007

Time Ball is an intense, patterned construction. Images of a beach landscape in South Australia are refracted through a spinning, prismastic structure, reflecting parts and shards of the original. The Time Ball’s vanes rattle in the constant wind, my feet slip in the sand, I catch my breath.

daz07/02/012038
Sue K., digital video, 5 minutes, 2001

Sue K’s first work in the then new digital video medium and her first employing her concept of the digital ‘edit weave’ – a frame-by-frame editing technique where she weaves multiple image sequences together, collapsing the illusion of screen space.  Here she takes three images – one still, and two panning – taken from at the same location in the Western Australian wheat belt .

E.G. (Elephant Girl)
Virginia Hilyard, super 8 to 35mm, 5 minutes, 1990

“As the storm passes, the camera descends and moves over textured landscapes, the potential of which we can only guess. A complete understanding of the terrestrial forms is denied, yet the intimate exploration of the camera draws us closer. The camera caresses its subjects as they fade in and out of unconciousness. We enter the slow, seductive dreamworld of sensual and organic abstractions.” – Virginia Hilyard

Sydney Harbour Bridge
Paul Winkler, 16 mm, 13 minutes, 1977

A stunning array of intricate visual cross-rhythms depicting the Sydney Harbour Bridge.  In-camera matting is used to selectively re-expose the same pieces of film perhaps twenty or more times resulting in breathtaking visual collages.