Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie are very serious about film. Film itself, that is, and particularly the consumer-ready format of Super-8 that at one point gave millions across the globe the opportunity to make home movies affordably. They run Australia’s nanolab, where they’ve been processing, selling, and teaching about Super-8 since 2005. They also help run Melbourne’s Artist Film Workshop, which acts as a hub of resources and hands-on knowledge about shooting, processing, editing, and projecting film. Thankfully, these institutions double as resources for Tuohy and Barrie, allowing them to experiment with machinery involved in the stages of film processing in a way that hobbyist filmmakers might overlook.
The result is a vast filmography of structural, form-forward experiments from the two, ranging from the play between superimposition and movement of China Not China (2018) to the multi-projector-based performance of Inside the Machine (2017) to the structuralist-editing homage of In and Out a Window (2021). It’s rare that a “trick” is repeated in order to build a corpus or brand; instead, the duo stretch and play with all the possibilities that the apparatuses of film (and plenty of time in a processing lab) have to offer.
Their most recent film, The Land at Night, plays as an ode to the flash, the simplest and crudest light for a camera that provides a distinctively garish texture to amateur photography with a special penchant for making great food look like slop. Nobody lights their room with the equivalent of a flash, nor does a mere flashlight mimic its effects on the nighttime world — the flash gives the dark world an uncanny double in its resulting photograph, its over-white foregrounds leading to a penumbral background that could be hiding anything. The Land at Night repeats this impression over and over, suggesting movement through this hellish flash-world version of beaches, trees, trails, buildings, and hands. This effect alone creates a horror film, but Barrie’s subtle score leads it in a journey from discomfort to wonder and back again.
Though The Land at Night played at the 2024 edition of NYFF, I was glad to talk with Tuohy more generally about his work, the role of theory in filmmaking, the state of shooting on film, planned accidents during production, and, of course, the haunting nature of the flash.
Zach Lewis: I’ve noticed that plenty of your films are very location-specific, many in your native Australia, but also many others in different countries. When you’re making a film halfway around the globe and you’re not maybe that familiar with the place around you, what kind of images are you looking for to film in that place? Do you leave your hotel room and simply hope that something interesting happens, or is there a process beforehand?
Richard Tuohy: Yeah, it depends on the project, but by and large our preferred way of working would not be to make films when we travel. Our preferred way of working would involve a more investigative process-based approach where we would have a vague idea of something, shoot some material that we think might be working on those themes, process it, print it, have a look at it, and think, well, that didn’t work, that didn’t work, but that was good, and I didn’t expect that. And then we’d try to pursue that further. This would be the preferred way of making a film for us, where you go out there and try and find something that works well between the apparatus — it’s not just the camera, it’s also the printing and all of that — and the world; try and find something kind of genuine that way. Now, when we travel: on the one hand, it’s the time we’ve to do some filming when we’re not so busy running our lab. But you don’t normally have that opportunity to do this kind of back-and-forth with developing and looking at results. And so that’s where it becomes more difficult. Now, sometimes that means taking a chance on a technique or an approach. I mean, the first couple of days, at most, you kind of get a notion and think, “Ah, this I think will work.” And you try it, but it can be a heavy commitment.
You’ve got, say, six rolls of film. You’re going to make a film out of it, but you’re going to need to, as far as we’re concerned, do everything in a more or less similar way, right? For instance, if you take a film like China Not China (2018): it involved doing these pans and then rewinding and panning again and rewinding and panning again about 16 times. Now, if that idea didn’t work, then you’d have nothing. So there’s that chance aspect to it. And on occasion, we’ve done things and thought, “Ah, you know, we tried it, but it didn’t do what we would have hoped. It didn’t do what we needed it to.” But taking that example, China, Not China, what we did do is think, “Okay, we’re going to Taiwan and Hong Kong. I think this might work.” And so we went into Melbourne with some reversal film, some positive film, and tried a bunch of things at places that we felt were going to be similar. We tried four or five different things, and we said, ah, that’s going to work. Other times it’s quite curious the way the project emerges.
Recently, we were in China and we were in a city called Datong first. Beautiful city, interesting story on its own, but nothing happened up here [points to his head]. So we didn’t shoot the film. And then after about four days we moved to another city in inner Mongolia called Hohhot. As soon as we got out of the train station, there was the idea and it was to do with space. Sometimes that happens — it didn’t take many pullings of the trigger to think, “Ah, this approach, I think is going to work.”
To cut a long story short, usually we are not prepared. We try to turn our film-sniffing apparatus on full when we turn up and see what there is. But usually, you know, you’re hyperstimulated anyway because you’re in a visually new environment.
But take a film like Intersection (2023), which had a very long protracted genesis; it was filmed in so many different cities. We made a start on that film in Tijuana, but the camera had some problems, so only part of the film worked. So we thought, okay, if this is going to be made into a whole film, we’re going to have to shoot in other places, make a virtue of that. We knew exactly what we were looking for. And in fact, what we often did with that film is tack it on to some other project that we were filming at the time — we’d do, you know, a hundred feet of Intersection or whatever is stimulating at the time.
ZL: I’ve read that both of you have studied philosophy. I’m curious how far that went in terms of formal education, and if you’re still maybe keeping up with it today. Additionally, do you think that there’s a kind of pattern where people who are interested in philosophy gravitate toward more abstract cinema?
RT: So we did, I think Dianna did eight years, I did seven years of philosophy study. We both got three or four years through PhDs and then decided that there were other opportunities, that the opportunity wasn’t there in academia. We had the typical fantasy of being the academics that we’d studied under, but the world had changed, those opportunities were there, and we probably weren’t good enough. Have we kept it up? Not much. But that training is very life-changing.
Obviously, it changes the way you think, so I’m not going to go on about that. With regards filmmaking, I think there is a natural connection between philosophical study or work and abstract, more formal kinds of filmmaking. Philosophy engenders, on the one hand, a real respect for concepts, right? We don’t tend to throw them around. If we’re going to use one, we have to be ready to defend it to the hilt or test it out and test it out and test it out. But abstract work doesn’t involve much on a conceptual level. It’s much more on a perceptual level. I think people with a philosophical background say, look, if you want to deal with concepts, write a paper, read some Heidegger or something like that. Let’s compartmentalize that into a field that really pays respect to that stuff, and let’s do something that’s completely different.
On the other hand, there’s an aspect of formalism that comes from rigorous philosophical work that’s also there in abstract work. Though it doesn’t have to be: sometimes abstract film can be very erratic. But at least I often see and I feel in our own work that there’s an emphasis on rigor and detail and a kind of arduous unpacking, you know, which I think connects with a philosophical background.
ZL: I see some artists describe their work in terms of something akin to theory, right? Like, this particular work is my meditation on this particular text or idea that I read. Or perhaps artists might go the complete opposite direction and say: “What you’re seeing is just a series of dots and matrices.” Do you see that kind of categorization as well? Do you think that’s maybe like a conversation worth having if these works can be illustrations of parts of film theory?
RT: I mean, experimental cinema is extremely broad. Cinema is broad enough, but experimental cinema is huge and everybody has their own crutches that get them into making a work. You know what I mean? Their own tools and resources. And all of us say stuff about what we’re doing. But my personal attitude about this is we say these things, we formulate these hypotheses about the way we work and what our attitudes are, as a way to help get us organized to make the work. But the work is not typically a manifestation of those philosophical or attitudinal approaches.
So I always find it kind of just curious or interesting when I hear an artist tell me about their ideas. I don’t take it as gospel by any means. In fact, it’s far from gospel. I take it as, “Oh, that’s what motivated you to get out of bed and do this.” But what I see in it is this. And I don’t expect anyone to be the kind of authority on anyone else or on their work. The final word doesn’t belong to, you know, Hollis Frampton about Hollis Frampton’s work.
ZL: In much of your work, you do make direct reference to the films’ processing, highlighting what kind of sticks out and film itself after it’s gone through chemical and mechanical equipment, but sometimes it varies with your work.
A lot of just working with film in general is a very accidental process with all kinds of factors being driven into it, which I think artists are drawn to it. How much are you really leaving up to chance when you’re making a film like this? It seems like it’s a byproduct of it, but you probably also want to have somewhat of a meticulous plan such that you’re not wasting film.
RT: Yeah, look, chance is an interesting word: I prefer the word “discovery.” Because I think once you’ve tooled yourself up with some skills, like with a paint brush or with clay, you begin the process of being able to work with the thing, knowledgeably, and discover things that are kind of genuine and in the world. About materials, about light, whatever it happens to be. To me, this word “chance” is a little bit of a misnomer because it’s skilled activity that’s brought about these results.
Like if someone knows how to hold some silicon material in such a way that they’d go, “Oh, wow, if you do this, you get this result,” that wasn’t an uninformed activity even though they didn’t know it was going to happen. And this comes back to something I said earlier — that you’re more likely to have something interesting and genuine and authentic in your work if you discover it in the world through the interaction between you, your materials, and stuff out there, than you are sitting in your bedroom thinking about it.
And so, you know, there’s always the unknown, but the unknown relies on the artist to bring it about. You know what I mean? I don’t dislike the word chance, but I like to qualify it because there’s the appearance of chance in a lot of work.
You started by talking about other material and apparatus components that are evident in some of our films. This stuff is just the same as knowing the difference between watercolor and charcoal and whatever else it might be. I mean, it’s a material art form, but it’s a mechanical one. It’s an industrial one. And it’s natural that those things become evident in the games that we play when we dwell with this equipment.
ZL: Whenever I’m watching, let’s say, experimental films shot on film, it does feel like there’s at least like a preference to something like a nice accident happening, as opposed to maybe something shot on digital, where one might be drawn to digital because of the extremely precise detail that you can get in when changing a LUT or various individual pixels of the image or something. Does that dichotomy track for you?
RT: Film doesn’t take any prisoners, right? So if you want a precise result, you have to have tested everything. And it’s also the case that a lot of people aren’t in a position to do that. And so they find there are more chancey elements in their work that they happen to like. You know, the film gets exposed to light accidentally, through the eyepiece or whatever, and leaves this interesting swipe of light on the film. And that’s beautiful.
So it’s undeniably the case that you don’t have instant feedback. You don’t have a screen showing you what you just did. However, most people who work with digital don’t really do that anyway. The advantage they get is that, sitting in their caravan, they can plug in the drive at night and look at what they did. Whereas we have to be home and put it through the processing and printing.
It’s also the case that when you actually do digital editing work — I don’t do much, but sometimes we have to do it for documentations of performances and what have you — that you are also discovering things by chance, right? Chance, like, you know, the video editor sits there with a mouse, and they’re clicking around and they’re daydreaming and they’re drinking coffee and they put two things against each other and, “Oh, wow, that’s interesting.” And they have a similar kind of process-based attitude.
I don’t think in terms of chance is where you find the difference between film and digital. I think that difference really is that film is connected to a physical world much more so than digital. In terms of the mode of operation of the maker, I don’t feel that’s such a radical difference, but I think that the area over which you’re making your operations is different. And that is with film, you’re dealing with the physical world. I think that digital won’t tell us nearly as much about being a material being in the world compared to film. Film has this capacity to talk to us about our own physicality, our own physical existence and the physical existence of the world. Digital tends toward telling us about the world of pixels, the virtual world, which is a big realm. But to me, not so interesting.
ZL: My impression of The Land at Night made me think of these collections of point-and-shoot images that I might take in the woods behind my house late at night with my friends, where it’s completely black but then taking a picture and everything’s lit up, leading to a kind of a frightening element of suddenly having everything revealed quickly and seeing that over and over.
RT: Did you read me say that somewhere or is that how you feel?
ZL: No, no, that’s how I felt about it; I’ve done that with my friends many times.
RT: That’s exactly where I’m going with that.
ZL: Oh, great! I wanted to know what process you used in order to create this effect. I was thinking it could either be something like a strobe light or you have a big key light point at objects but you take out every other frame. But I don’t want to just guess; it kind of confounded me.
RT: No, it’s the same as what you’re doing in the backyard. It’s using a flash gun. You’re using it on a camera, but we’re using a hand-held flash gun. But exactly, the way the flash illuminates the nocturnal world is very particular and very interesting. The way the light falls off so rapidly and the way that it’s so brief, it captures this — I think it’s almost like a sense of catching people doing something they probably shouldn’t have been doing. There’s a kind of a guilt aspect to it you know because it just rips out the moment and presents it as evidence.
Now, a flash gun is a curious thing to use in cinema because it’s inherently working against the main kind of objective of the apparatus, which is to create the illusion of movement. A flash gun is so brief that it’s necessarily just one frame. And so it’s a difficult instrument to use. It’s an interesting one; I mean, it plays against that fundamental magic of cinema. But, of course, it does give you the opportunity for collisions and for clashes, for juxtapositions and for abstract patterning that occurs when you have a flash with objects in this direction and then in this direction. Contrasting angles and what have you.
There were actually a couple of different techniques. The one we used most commonly was that Dianna would run the flash on the lowest power setting so it recharges the quickest and flash as fast as her thumb could move. Now this would create a lot of pulses, but the camera’s shutter is shut at least half the time. With a Bolex, it’s a bit more than half the time. So the camera’s gonna miss half of those flashes. So that reduces the flash rate. So what we did is we rewound and did each shot four or five times.
Of course, this word chance comes back, right? But it’s very programmed. It’s very intentional. But we don’t know that a particular, you know, shot of the ceiling of the house is going to line up with the shot of the dishwashing liquid or whatever of the house. We don’t know whether those two are going to land next to each other, at least at the frame-by-frame level. And, to go back to what we’re talking about, look, this is fairly typical of the filmmakers’ experience. When you finally get the rushes or whatever they are, you are completely thrilled, hopefully, at the way things have come out. And there are typically moments of utter delight and moments of bitter disappointment.
So that was one technique: the rapid flashing and the four exposures. The other was using the Bolex’s time exposure option. You know, with the still camera, there’s a bulb option where you can hold the shutter down, right? And then the idea was, in the old days with an old flash gun, you know, it would just go off at some point. So you just hold the shutter down and the flash would just go poof, and then you take your finger off. Well, a Bolex has a similar time exposure function. And so we would do long exposures. Now, what this allowed is the ambient light, which was inherently dim, to nonetheless have a second or so to absorb into the film, but the camera will be moving.
So we sometimes get this beautiful glow or lovely last light of the day, light in the sky, but then also the flash being solid. This is actually a fairly established technique in still photography where you’d mix a time exposure and a flash gun. So, some we did that way where it was very much programmed, like we’re doing one frame now, okay, now we’re doing the next frame, you know, and so on, but with a flicker. So that film was entirely in camera.
ZL: It certainly has that effect to where, yeah, I even thought for a second that it was just a series of stills all lined up together. The contrast between the key light and the dark background, everything mixing around to where the subject might suddenly shift to a different part of the frame also makes it feel like it’s in conversation with the flicker films. Where what was once black on the screen is now white, and vice-versa, and in different areas. Was it your intention to produce something as aggressive as that?
RT: As aggressive as a flicker film? Well, there is a definite connection. Any time people are using still frames, it’s going to make a connection with flicker films. Flicker films are an essential component of experimental cinema, partly because they so directly point at and manipulate or engage with or disrupt that fundamental trick at the heart of the apparatus, which is the creation of the illusion of movement. And they also explain that trick by letting you dwell with your persistence of vision for a moment, and letting you compile images, contrasting images in your retina or what have you. Was it our intention to make something that felt kind of aggressive and jazzy? Yeah.
And I will admit that some people can’t watch such films. I think that points toward the fact that, like the flicker film, these things are inculturated. Like we start with watching The Flicker (1966) by [Arthur] Conrad or other homages to that. But then we become accustomed, and we learn how to look at flicker images, we learn how to look at this kind of aggressive image. Whereas some people find our films too aggressive — like for instance, In and Out a Window (2021), they find that alternating three-frame flicker too abrasive on their eyes and brains.
And that makes sense to me, and it also makes sense to me that other people don’t. And it’s either to do with the hardware [points to head], which is very possible, or alternatively, it’s to do with having learned how to see these things. In the same way that if you showed someone in 1860 a Mondrian or something, they would not know what they were seeing. There is this cultural aspect of it.
And in part with a flicker film, it’s just having learnt in what way you need to deal with your eyes — and I don’t know what that way is — but it’s something to do with not worrying about focusing on particular parts of the screen. Like, I’m not looking at the character’s eyes anymore, I’m doing something a bit more akin to what you do with one of those magic-eye 3D puzzles. So yes, I was aware that it was going to be engaging with, you know, flickery traditions, although it’s much more prosaic than a normal flicker film. It’s got much more content and movement and material-like objects as well as the culture of what the flash means to us.
ZL: Or almost a narrative, which leads me to question if this is one continuous trip that you’ve taken one particular night or is this the summation of several different trips around several different areas?
RT: The latter. It would be a big night if it was one night. It does take a long time to do the flash and the back-winding thing. And indeed we had been playing with this flash technique for some years and collecting material and wondering what to do with it and enjoying the results but not knowing what trajectory it would take as a project. It was only relatively recently that we finished the film; it was only relatively recently that we found a kind of key to it.
You mentioned the word narrative. Yeah, sure, there is a vague progression, a vague time. There are different kinds of material, and it does culminate. And humanness does increase through the course of it. It wasn’t there from the outset when playing with that technique. And I guess this is the nature of working experimental film that’s kind of process-driven as opposed to conceptually-driven. It’s typical of these process-based works that you experiment with something, you kind of dwell with the set of materials that you’ve chosen to use, and you take it in different directions and just see what is yielding something that is cohesive and is able to fit together. In an ideal world, all films should take a couple of years and have time for you to wander.
ZL: From your experience of running nanolab and The Artist Film Workshop, I’m curious if you have a unique connection with how the general public’s view of the use of film has been. As much of a terrifying all-digital landscape we live in, I do keep seeing some optimistic news here and there, like Ektachrome being brought back for Poor Things and younger people getting interested in film.
RT: Yeah, I think there was a period when RED came out that there was this sense of abandonment and not so much a kind of romance about something being on film. Film was at that time being thought of as more or less redundant; it would be more fun with the new camera. Since then, there’s been a significant return to appreciating what’s different about film, what’s particular about it. And it’s palpable in terms of our business, absolutely. Business has more than quadrupled in the last maybe five or ten years. Which is quite well, it’s encouraging, and it’s put the price of cameras up a lot [laughs]. But in terms of people having a sense that film has a quality of its own, and it has a purpose of its own, and a place of its own, I think there’s been a significant return to an appreciation of that.
But as far as the general public is concerned, well, that’s a different kettle of fish. I don’t really know about the general public. I only know about our customers and our scene, and that world is big enough. And the scene that’s interested in the moving image is aware that film is a kind of desirable option for kind of known reasons now as opposed to back in the early 2000s. Because the point of its difference, the clarification of its difference, hadn’t quite been made apparent.
In terms of experimental film, to put it back into Artist Film Workshop’s terms, we are inundated with people wanting to join and become part of it. So I think that in the general kind of artist and moving image, the cool kids community, people are in particular finding the idea of working with film — not necessarily the reality, but the idea of it — appealing. There’s a project we’re working on that has been too many years in the making that’s kind of about who is using Super-8 now. We used to develop film by hand in Lomo spirals. We did this commercially, hand-processing about 36 films at a time. There would be a tiny piece of film left from each customer’s roll where it was actually threaded in the spiral. We collected thousands and thousands of those tails and are working on a film made exclusively of two or three frame-tails from our customers’ films. It is actually a rather stunning portrait.
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