Southern Climes: Films from AFW Melbourne
Presented by San Francisco Cinematheque in association with Shapeshifters Cinema
Pictured above: Landing (2019) by Sabina Maselli
SUNDAY, MAY 1, 2022 — 7:30 PM
Shapeshifters Cinema 567 5th Street, Oakland, CA 94607
Admission: $10 General/$6 Cinematheque Members
Event tickets here
COVID-19 SAFETY REQUIREMENTS: Masks must be worn at all times while indoors.
Initiated by filmmakers Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie in 2009, Artist Film Workshop (AFW) is a film collective and not-for-profit organization which provides access to knowledge and resources for filmmakers and artists in Melbourne, Australia. AFW holds regular screenings and workshops for people interested in film or working with sound and vision.
Visiting as part of an epic west coast tour, AFW member Paddy Hay will present a selection of recent and brand-new 16mm film works produced by members of AFW. The program reflects the diversity of interests, methodologies and technologies investigated by AFW members, showcasing a wide variety of filmmaking styles across forms of abstraction, archival/ found footage, audio-vision and lo-fi documentary. Techniques including contact and optical printing, DIY cameras and traditional lens-based photography are among the methods and approaches explored. ALL FILMS TO BE PRESENTED ON 16MM.
SHAPESHIFTERS CINEMA FILMMAKING WORKSHOP: This screening will be preceded by an all-day filmmaking workshop—Reversing Reversal: A Filmmaking Workshop—also presented by Paddy Hay.
SCREENING: Valpi (2019) by Richard Tuohy; 16mm, color, sound, 9 minutes; Is Anybody Coming Over to Dinner (2022) by Audrey Lam; Self Portrait With Bag (2020) by Dianna Barrie; Southern Climes (2018) by Hanna Chetwin; 4000 Frames from Hobart to Queenstown (2020) by Ilona Schneider; Window (2020) by Rowena Crowe; Fade (2017) by Callum Ross-Thomson; Landing (2019) by Sabina Maselli; Sensor Lights in Flemington (2022) by Lucas Haynes; The Gardens (2022) by Paddy Hay & Giles Fielke.
TRT: 74 minutes
Valpi (2019) by Richard Tuohy
The Chilean city of Valparaíso is nestled among hills, overseeing the Pacific Ocean, in the vicinity of active volcanoes and perilously close to the boundary between two tectonic plates. Evoking this fault line, Valpi (Tectonics) is horizontally segmented, creating an immersive yet abstracted chronicle of both the multifaceted layers of human life in this place and the politico-cultural fractures hidden beneath the surface. (Richard Tuohy)
Is Anybody Coming Over to Dinner (2022) by Audrey Lam
The adventures of Yokitom around the home and across the seasons, with a supporting cast of family and friends. (Audrey Lam)
Self Portrait With Bag (2020) by Dianna Barrie
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. (Dianna Barrie)
Window (2020) by Rowena Crowe
…made in response to the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, Window is a record of light passing around my house, hand-processed in Cafenol (at home of course) in a “domestic” film developer made of coffee, washing powder and vitamin C. The physical labour of analogue film processes reminds one constantly of film as a corporeal image. I live alone and touch became a pronounced theme for me during this time. The hand candle, gently flickering, came to express my hope of future human touch with time opening and closing around me. (Rowena Crowe)
Fade (2017) by Callum Ross-Thomson
Found footage taken from a long forgotten, badly scratched and faded 16mm educational film print on volcanoes, superimposed atop recently shot 16mm macro footage of a human skull. The skull is a similarly neglected teaching aid, once used for anatomy classes many decades ago before the use of real human remains in schools became less common in favour of more durable, socially sustainable plastic models. (Callum Ross-Thomson)
4000 Frames from Hobart to Queenstown (2020) by Ilona Schneider
The idea was to make a film from Hobart (capital of Tasmania) to Queenstown (a remote mining town on the west coast of Tasmania) with one roll of 16mm film, contracting the distance (260 km) and driving time (4 hrs) to 100 feet of film and 3 minutes. I made the film by exposing frame by frame in sync with the pace of the road, triggering the shutter faster or slower, or making long time exposures, depending on the rhythm of the road. (Ilona Schneider)
Sensor Lights in Flemington (2022) by Lucas Haynes
Lights turn on and off in a building in the distance. (Lucas Haynes)
Southern Climes (2018) by Hanna Chetwin
Southern Climes documents and reimagines sedimentary rock forms and other geographical features found in the Tasmanian and Patagonian landscape. Featuring a soundtrack composed by Alexander Garsden and played by Outlier (Lizzy Welsh and Chloe Smith). (Hanna Chetwin)
Landing (2019) by Sabina Maselli
Landing is a ritual in film that performs the return of the celestial body to the terrestrial body, through the act of spinning, mirroring and altering time. Hand processed colour reversal film, accompanied by a soundtrack composed of a single fragment of a woman’s voice circling around the image at different speeds. Part of a series of works that are concerned with the nature of time, memory and magic. Through the act of repetition, an animist transformation can occur. A merging of the female and celestial body. (Sabina Maselli)
The Gardens (2022) by Giles Fielke & Paddy Hay; 16mm, color, sound, 7 minutes
The Collingwood Community Garden allotments have been tended by residents living in the area for over four decades on a 3/4 acre block of Crown Land Reserve along the Birrarung (Yarra) River in Naarm/Melbourne. In May 2021 the gardens were abruptly closed, citing safety concerns. In February 2022 the gardens were cleared for redevelopment, against the wishes of community gardeners. The images of the gardens were made during the lockout when no one had been in the gardens for six months. (Paddy Hay & Giles Fielke)
ARTIST BIOS:
Richard Tuohy began making works on super 8 in the late nineteen eighties. After a brief hiatus from cinema (including formal study in philosophy for seven years) he returned to film-making in 2004. In 2006 he, along with his partner Dianna Barrie, launched nanolab, a super 8 film processing laboratory based at their home in Daylesford, Victoria. Since 2009 he has been an active and vocal member of the international artist-run film lab scene. His films and film based performances have screened at venues including the Melbourne International Film Festival, EMAF (Osnabruck), International Film Festival Rotterdam, the New York Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Recontres Internationales (Louvre) and Media City Film Festival.
Audrey Lam studied screen production and photography at Queensland College of Art. Her films have been screened at many festivals and museums, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, BFI London Film Festival, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Visions du Réel, the Centre Pompidou and the Asia-Pacific Triennial. Lam has participated in arts workshops and residencies including Fondazione Antonio Ratti Advanced Course, Locarno Filmmakers Academy and Asialink Arts Residency. She has co-curated film seasons at the National Gallery of Victoria and Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
Dianna Barrie (b. 1972, Melbourne) found her way into filmmaking as a middle ground between the pursuit of abstract music and philosophy. Ever pushing the limits of the hand processing of Super-8mm led to the establishment of nanolab with Richard Tuohy, and into the intersection of hand making and industrial cinema technology. This exploration has spread beyond individual work to the establishment of Artist Film Workshop, where celluloid is embraced and advocated by a community of practitioners in Melbourne. Dianna is a well known figure in the international artist-run film labs scene.
Rowena Crowe is a time-based artist who works with animation and analogue processes to create films which often contain reflexive motives, juxtaposition of found objects and gestural movement. She is currently undertaking a Doctor of Creative Arts degree researching the embodied nature of analogue film making at the University of Wollongong. Her films have screened in competition internationally at film festivals including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival and DOK Liepzig.
Callum Ross-Thomson runs Memorylab, a motion picture film scanning facility in Melbourne, Australia and moonlights as an experimental filmmaker.
Ilona Schneider apprenticed as a photographer in Salzburg, Austria. She has been working throughout Europe and Australia as a commercial photographer for over twenty-five years. In that time Schneider’s photographic work has shifted from commercial to analogue photography and experimental 16mm film. Since moving to Tasmania, she has focused on the industrial landscape, about which she has had several exhibitions and a major solo show at the Queen Victorian Museum in Launceston in 2018. She has a studio in Hobart where she also holds workshops on analogue photography and 16mm experimental film.
As a small child Lucas Haynes used to collect chicken bones off plates at food courts. He would then take them home and order them in size before fitting them into Lego structures. Now he makes films about buildings and people.
Hanna Chetwin is an Australian filmmaker working primarily in experimental film. Her practice draws on photographic, camera-less imaging techniques alongside filmed footage of everyday and environmental minutiae to create rhythmic structural film works, often developed in collaboration with Australian exploratory musicians.
Sabina Maselli is an artist/filmmaker who makes visual works that materialise as films, installations and live performance. Grounded in the language and techniques of cinema, Maselli uses both analogue and digital processing, through a very physical engagement with her materials. Maselli is a core member of the film collective Artist Film Workshop, Melbourne. Her works have been shown at places Melbourne International Film Festival; Australian Centre for the Moving Image; Austrian Film Museum; Channels Festival; Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne; Sydney Contemporary; Mons European Capital of Culture festival, Belgium and Mona Foma Festival, Hobart.
Paddy Hay is a filmmaker whose work encompasses experimental, narrative and documentary styles. His approach to filmmaking is embedded in small gauge film, and underpinned by a DIY approach to storytelling and cinematic ideas. He has presented his films at major film festivals and film institutions including the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, The Austrian Film Museum, Melbourne International Film Festival, and The Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
Giles Fielke is a writer and researcher of film and media art histories. He makes films at the Artist Film Workshop and is currently lecturing on urbanism in the Arts Faculty of Monash University.