Early, Shortly

Early films by Richard Tuohy, Dianna Barrie, and Malena Szlam.

7:30pm Tuesday 26 August 2025
The Brunswick Green, 313/315 Sydney Road, Brunswick.
8mm and 16mm projection.
$10 tix on the door.

AFW has the pleasure to present a selection of early-made film works that find formative expressions, threads, and genesis of ideas for three artists that have established exciting film practices. Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie present alongside visiting filmmaker, Malena Szlam in a night of warm Super8 and 16mm projection. These early works give insight into the craft and discipline of making film on film, likewise the hindsight from a future vantage point gives insight into the ideas and techniques developed over time.
Filmmakers will be in attendance.

Films:

Twisty
Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie
Super 8, colour, 12 mins, 2005.
Up in the 'high country' of eastern Australia above the 1000 meter 'snow line' grows a low but rugged Eucalypt – the Snow-Gum: sometimes ancient, always gnarly and dearly loved by Australians.


Red Rover   
Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie
Super 8, colour, 6 mins, 2005.
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, it's a film about a certain kind of fixed but loose mechanical camera movement.

Forbidden Fruit
Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie
Super 8, colour, 7 mins, 2006.
One of two 'weed' films I made on Super 8. In the 1950s, prickly pear was a major weed problem in Australia. This is one weed we managed to beat with biological control. I found a nice confined crop of what I thought was prickly pear and made this abstract film. The plant looks and is wrong in the Australian landscape. This film also flirts with borders and boundaries, with these little 'family groups' of cactuses perhaps as metaphors ...

Boot-fall
Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie
Super 8, bnw, 7 mins, 2008
A kinetic study of rural Australian football rendered in mud, limbs, rhythm, and grain. Shot on Super 8, Boot-fall zooms in on the choreography of bodies in motion—feet pounding earth, knees churning, legs leaping disassembling the game into fragments of exertion and elemental texture.

Bus, Turning
Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie
16mm, 7 mins, 2022
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!

Lunar Almanac
Malena Szlam
16mm, colour, 4mins, silent, 2013.
Lunar Almanac traces the observational points of the lunar cycle in a series of visual notations. Using single-frame and long-exposure photography, the unaltered, in-camera editing accumulates over 4000 layered field views of half-moons, new moons, and full moons. These lunar inscriptions flit across the screen with a frenetic energy, illuminating nocturnal reveries that pull at the tides as much as our dreams.

Morfología de un sueño (Morphology of a Dream)
Malena Szlam
16mm, colour, 5'30", silent, 2015.
A visual study of the rhythms of sleep cycles during the phase of rapid eye movement. Filmed in the forest in Colorado, Morphology of a Dream explores an oneiric world that expresses place and memory in a fleeting succession of colors and sensations hovering between the "real" and abstract worlds.